Sleepio

Last Friday night the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London was taken over for an all-night programme of sleep culture and science. Sleepio went along to check it out.

As darkness fell, a mob descended on the big red tent with a simple aim: to explore what sleep – and the lack of it – means to all of us. The Sleepover, a collaboration between the V&A and the Serpentine, and sponsored by Whole Foods and Harvey Nicks, attracted a thoroughly diverse crowd of art students and people who looked like their parents.

Handed a sleeping bag at the entrance we all settled in for a long night, fuelled by little else than coffee, the Review section of last week’s Observer (I imagine) and, as it turned out, big bowls of jelly trifle. The frisson sparked by outdoor sleeping was palpable; within moments every inch of the floor was claimed by sleeping bags and blue mats.

I settled in next to a friendly middle-aged couple, sat bolt upright in seats, determined to stay awake the whole night. Like queuing Wimbledon fans, their stoic acceptance of the painful wait ahead had given them an odd cheeriness. “It’s like a big performance. We’re all viewers but we’re also all performers. I can’t wait to see how I feel in the morning!”

The programme for the evening ran from 10pm right through to 7am, kicking off with a talk by psychoanalyst Darian Leader. Aside from revealing the plot of Inception in detail (I tried to cover my ears) his Freudian assertions about dreams left me shaking my head – pseudo-science presented in a weighty tone of empirical respectability, but shot through with wild leaps of logic and a glaring lack of evidence beyond the anecdotal. But then again his dislike for evidence-based therapies that actually work is well documented.

Marginally more empirical (and much more fun) was Dr Angelica Ronald’s collaboration with her artist brother, Lewis. Based on a survey of the audience’s sleeping habits they presented an analysis of the assembled. Turns out that artists report substantially less sleep deprivation than non-artists, and the sleep deprived get less ‘rompy pompy’.

A high point was the boiler-suited parade of trifle by les artistes du dessert, Bompas and Parr. They presented two delicious options: soporific or stimulating. Starving, I wolfed down several plates of each in an attempt to fill myself up whilst balancing the effects of each drug. But being a smartarse doesn’t pay; the one effect I hadn’t controlled for in my experimental gluttony was extreme nausea.

By 2am, full of trifle, I was starting to fade. I rifled through my Whole Foods snack pack, trying to find anything non-organic to give me a sugar hit, but to no avail. Pretty soon the minutes speeded up, hours ran together, sound installations merged with analysts’ talks. Eventually my self-imposed insomnia succumbed, I curled up in a free space beneath a spotlight amongst the rubbish-strewn floor and tried, fitfully, to grab some sleep.

I woke to the grey dawn over Hyde Park. Peter Brook’s 1963 version of Lord of the Flies was playing, lending a sinister air to the slow preparation of breakfast in front of the screen. Then the reference became clear, as middle class politeness strained to control the animal urges for fresh organic bread spreading through the crowd. Not quite a mutiny of sleepless savages but a fair amount of undignified dashing and some quite blatant queue-shuffling.

The middle-aged couple were still sat, wide-eyed, in exactly the position I’d left them in. “I’m really looking forward to getting into bed” said the man. He stared into my eyes with manic intensity. “That feeling of extending your legs under the duvet. Oh my God. Simply bliss!”

Breaking his gaze, I gathered myself to face the day ahead. Handed a pillowcase embroidered with my initials, containing a freshly-printed book of the night’s events (when did they manage to do that?) and grasping my Harvey Nicks Beauty Pack I wandered out, bleary eyed, into the drizzle.

What a weird and wonderful night.