Yuletide Celebration

This event followed a different format than previous ones, we collaborated with the Reading Rhythms Club, an experimental reading group in Rotterdam.

Before the event, participants were invited to pick up a zine on sleep, dreams, and rest at the Research Station. We met online to do a collective translation exercise facilitated by Michelle Teran, read some of the texts, and discussed our relationship to sleep.

The pagan festivity Yuletide takes place during the longest night of the year – the Winter Solstice – a good moment to reflect on our relationship to sleep. The small publication we prepared speculated about sleep as resistance of the 24/7 imperative to produce and consume, featuring poetic reflections on dreams, and raised questions about who gets to sleep and how rest can be reclaimed.

See the full report below.

Yuletide is traditionally celebrated during the Winter Solstice on the 21st of December. This time is often associated with the Wild Hunt, a horde of dead souls or ghosts chasing through the lands. Many Yuletide traditions, such as decorating the house with evergreen plants, gift making, and burning logs, were later integrated into Christmas. We took the occasion of the longest night of the year to talk about sleep, rest, and dreams, the role they play in everyday life, and their emancipatory potential. To this end we compiled a zine with different texts, some emphasising the political, others speculating about the kind of consciousness dreams allow for. This zine was cradled in a sleeping bag made of soft fabric and decorated with lace. Participants were invited to pick up the bags the week before the event. Next to the zine the bags contained a pine twig, a candle, and a cinnamon stick, all items associated with Yuletide and bringing warmth and light into the winter.

On the 21st of December we met on Jitsi and were joined by Michelle Teran, Research Lecturer in Social Practices, and fellow sleep-enthusiast whose practice is concerned with collective, experimental reading exercises. We began with an excerpt of the chapter Honour Your Boundaries from the book Undrowned, Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Everybody was invited to read the text at the same time, whispering, until our voices merged into a strange and somewhat eerie choir. At first, everybody was trying to stay in tune, but gradually we gave up on it. In the end, when most people had finished reading, one voice, reading slower than the others, lasted, and suddenly the words became clear and comprehensible. Many participants said they found it difficult to focus on the text during this exercise, reading whisperingly is an unusual experience. The text talked about how river dolphins in captivity die of sleep deprivation because they are lacking the benches of the river to rest on and invited for reflection on the boundaries we need to sleep well.

Afterwards we read the text Sleep as Resistance by Siobhan Phillips paragraph by paragraph, this time with our cameras off, so we could focus on the textures of each other’s voices and the content. During the reflection moments that interspersed our reading we talked about our experience of time in dreams, the way they compress whole storylines into a few seconds, and the rhythm of sleep. Phillips suggests that dreams can be read as a criticism of our waking life, which some participants found interesting because criticism is often associated with the rational analysis so alien to the dream world. On the other hand the criticism of dreams can be understood as the process of filtering information and memories. The text also sparked conversations about the pervasive glorification of neglecting sleep and over-working.

After a short break Michelle guided a translation exercise with an excerpt from the text La historia de los sueños by the Zapatistas. One person would read a sentence in the original Spanish, the next person would translate it to English, another person into the language or sentence structure of their choice, until the sentence had passed through all the bodies. Like this, we spent half an hour reading a short paragraph. This slow, collective digestion process enabled us to deeply engage with the sentences. They told the story of the gods who all live in a dream as equals. In the human world we pretend that there is not enough space for us to stand next to each other, some are forced to be at the bottom while others are on top. This is an unjust and inaccurate reflection of the dream in which the gods live.

By this point, everybody was getting tired, and we proposed to end the evening with a dream-writing exercise. We turned our cameras off again and wrote dreams that stuck with us on a shared etherpad. Everybody was absorbed in the exercise and reading the anonymous dreams on the etherpad felt very precious and intimate.

After this exercise people gradually left the call and we wished each other good night.