Nikolaus Lehner

Much has been written about dreaming, but deep, dreamless sleep still seems to receive little attention within cultural studies and social science. This article analyses Georges Perec's A Man Who Sleeps and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation in terms of the phantasm of metamorphosis enabled by sleep. These two novels show that the polarity of waking and dreaming can be relativized and shifted to the polarity between waking-dreaming/sleeping: This shift becomes particularly productive when it comes to the question of losing and finding ones identity, but also when we try to shed light on the relationship between (ideological or biographical) subjectification and self-overcoming. At the centre of this article is the notion of the sovereignty of sleep, which could allow both day life and dream life to be lifted out of joint.