One night in the 4th century B.C.E., the ancient Chinese thinker Zhuangzi dozed off. While he slept, he dreamed he was a butterfly. Far from the worries and desires of his human self and even more from any realization that he was Zhuangzi, he spent the day flitting about, doing as he liked. Like all nice dreams, this one finally ended. When he woke, he discovered that he was once more a renowned scholar. Yet one thing disturbed him: Was it Zhuangzi who dreamed of being a butterfly, or was it a butterfly dreaming it was Zhuangzi?
Change was in the air in the evening Zhuangzi dreamed. Rulers competing for power in the dying years of the Kingdom of Zhou upset the foundations that had once structured the realm as they fought for control, creating a vacuum of power. An intellectual revolution at the same time mirrored the political one. A plethora of intellectual movements emerged, each attempting to understand a society in flux, as the Chinese literature historian Achim Mittag has noted, as people tried to negotiate “a world in turmoil and a fundamental crisis that shattered the norms and values as linked with Zhou kingship.” So important was this event that it became known as “baijia,” or the Hundred Schools.
Zhuangzi thought about the essence of transformation itself while sleeping in a world struggling with the unparalleled change, where the future was terrifyingly unknown and the road toward it indeterminate. Instead of dismissing it as a trivial dream, Zhuangzi employed it to comprehend his environment, to grasp the sameness that spans diversity and the distinctions sliced into sameness. Guiding others in their quest for harmony when they experienced sharp shifts, he developed the dream into a metaphysical insight at the core of philosophical Daoism.
Though it’s always been stasis more than change that concerns us, many ways those of us in the modern West find themselves in a comparable time of uncertainty. We awaken to a world filled with apparently intractable structures operating at scales we can barely grasp: climate change, global flows of information and capital, corporate power consolidation, oceans of trash and nanoplastics in the air, and the rising poverty of natural life.
All things considered, we live in a really dreamless world today. Nightly sleep for many people in numerous nations has fallen 1-2 hours below that of those who lived a century ago. On average, Americans sleep only about 6.5 hours each night. For the powers of modern capitalism, that’s still too much—too many hours spent without desire, without the capacity to labor or spend or consume.
Art critic and social theorist Jonathan Crary has dubbed this insomniatic time the age of “24/7 capitalism.” He contends that the enormous late 20th century deregulations across the United States and Europe produced a system whereby there “ceased to be any internal necessity for having rest and recuperation as components of economic growth and profitability.” Unlike the factory time’s rigid on/off binary, our progressively networked, digitized economy produced a kind of always-on capitalism “defined by a principle of continuous functioning” where money is constantly flowing, labor is always operating and profit is always possible. Software firms boast that employee monitoring software like Controlio at home can monitor employees in the same environment where bankers die from 100-hour workweeks.
Crary said in an economy sustained by continual circulation, “the enormous part of our lives that we spend asleep freed from a morass of simulated needs subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of modern capitalism.” Unlike the other “irreducible needs of human life,” sleep has shown infamously challenging to commercialize. Techno-capitalists have begun looking at our dreams as a road to profit in order to enter the inner sanctum of slumber.
