A project conceived in response to the pandemic, “We Imitate Sleep to Dream of Dissent” led nine dreamer-participants through five themed performance prompts (Refuse, Rest, Wander, Attend, Extend), commencing with a collective action of rest in Toronto’s Queen’s Park, a historic site of protest and strikes.

Responding to Jonathan Crary’s book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, which outlines how the conditions of living in a neoliberal, technocratic society have led to the contemporary cult of productivity and the eventual erosion of sleep, the project highlights that when permitted to pause, we assess, organize, and mobilize (as seen with the many demonstrations from the Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and Free Palestine movements, to name a few).

Crary proposes that “the imaginings of a future without capitalism begin as dreams of sleep [or] intimations of sleep as radical interruption, as a refusal of the unsparing weight of our global present.” An “imitation of sleep” points to activities such as dreaming, meditative thinking, and imaginative world-making, functioning as conscious interventions into 24/7 globalized time. When reframed this way, these gestures serve as radical acts of resistance.

By enacting slowness as a temporal imaginary, we can imagine alternatives to our current position. In uncertainty, we dream of possibility.