by Tim Major
As a science fiction writer, I’m used to extrapolating from events and trends, to conjure a vision of the future – in other words, to dream. I remember that dreams – real dreams – were a means of making sense of one’s day, of reordering events and experiences, of extrapolating and inserting one’s fears and ambitions. Wasn’t that the case? I only wish there were somebody I could ask.
The apartment in which my young son and I live has always been noisy. The street outside and five storeys below is never silent; the traffic sighs and people come and go constantly, and light from the upgraded street lamps reflects from the pale paving to make it glow like the surface of the moon. Above us live a couple who entertain both men and women at all hours of day and night. They call themselves therapists but the noises suggest something more boisterous. On the other side of our living-room wall lives a woman who believes in the importance of overwhelming background noise as a means to rest. The thin wall reverberates with her recordings of crickets and café chatter. The apartment building on the other side of the street seems to bow towards ours as it rises. Even here, on the fifth floor of twelve, I sometimes feel that I might reach out and touch the fingertips of my opposite neighbours. On the seventh storey, residents of each building have strung a washing line across the street, tethering the apartment blocks. Yesterday as I was gazing out of the window I saw a clothes peg drop, followed by a fluttering sock.
My son is rarely silent, either. He is two years and nine months old and a chatterer. But he sleeps well, and that counts for a lot, doesn’t it? Parents need their downtime.
I sleep, too. I’m not so far gone that I’ve abandoned it entirely. I sleep for three hours each night. There are others suffering far worse.
How about you? I assume you accept your allocation and think no more of it. Most do, I suppose. I realise I never asked whether you lost your sleep in the first wave or later. I was among the first, which perhaps allows me to appreciate even a single hour nowadays, and perhaps even allows me to sustain myself on fewer hours than others might. However, I am alert enough to be self-aware; I know that my thoughts become muddled, sometimes.
When it began, I was in no state to extrapolate from my experience, to write. I was a science fiction writer only in the sense that my bibliography proved that I was once capable of it. I watched the news and read the reports and balked at the suggestion that it was my exposure to current affairs and online coverage that was responsible for my condition in the first place. And yet I gave up staring at the grey ceiling in my bedroom night after night and settled into the sofa, watching and reading, staring blankly at nothing and pawing at my stinging eyes.
Scientists were working on the problem, the reports said. The government was fully aware of the risk to the workforce. And always the subtext: it was our own fault and we had done this to ourselves.
Addled as I was, I could see the flaws in the logic. Our always-on lifestyles, our work ambitions, our levels of screen time, our anxieties, had all contributed to this inability to sleep. Fine. But there were no explanations – no plausible explanations – why there seemed no mechanism for switching back. Time away from work, at home or in subsidized relaxation and therapy camps, all achieved nothing. We could not sleep. We just could not go to sleep.
I’m certain you saw those same reports and rolled your eyes. Those metropolitan folks and their faddish anxieties, their mass hysterias. Fair enough.
Presumably you felt differently about it all only a month later, when those stories of hellish nights and dizzying days became a reality for you and for everyone else. None of us in that first wave of cases would have wished the same fate on others, but I swear I could hear the sigh of relief. Whether this was infectious as mass hysteria or viral outbreak, now that all of us were affected we were all in the same boat. Scientists were working on the problem, the reports said, more vociferously. The tone of the therapists changed abruptly from stern lecturers to despairing friends.
The joy we felt, when the answer was announced! The pride in our nation’s ingenuity!
We oughtn’t to have expected the government’s approved solution to be in our best interests. We oughtn’t to have expected a return to the status quo.
Perhaps you feel that things are very little changed. Six hours sleep per night is respectable enough, only twenty minutes shy of the national average before this cataclysm. And carrying a device in one’s pocket is no burden; we all had our phones already, and SOMs are scarcely bulkier and perform all the same functions as well as the crucial new one. Planning one’s day around a visit to a SOM station for a top-up is no more demanding than using cash machines a decade or so ago, and the operation of the device is child’s play: a click of a button, an immediate blissful void, curtailed precisely at six hours. The government reports are widely available and clearly worded. We have sufficient allocation of sleep; we are healthy; the workforce is intact. If anything, we are more efficient and therefore happier. All of this is evidenced in the data.
We are all fine.
I know you have always lived straightforwardly. You are a pillar of the community and you are content. I’m happy for you. I’m positive that you have little experience of life outside of the norms, and I envy you.
And six hours sleep is enough.
But my son is unwell and these days I overthink things, I know I do.
When he was younger we worried a great deal, my wife and I. We watched our son in his cot and from the start, long before the plague, we recognised that his sleep was strange, his patterns irregular. We took him to specialists and they explained his condition, but no amount of knowledge gave us confidence during his periods of apnoea, during which time his breathing would become shallower and shallower until it halted for ten, twenty, even forty seconds at a time. It was unbearable to watch, but we watched all the same. We barely slept.
At the age of two, only months before the plague, my son’s night-time spasms edged into daylight hours. The specialists told me that he was unharmed by his tics, that he will learn to overcome them or at least ignore them, but already I can see that he is conscious of his discomfort and already he is capable of swallowing it down, of putting on a brave face, and in the act of pushing away the pain he pushes it across to me.
This is a terrible admission: I’m grateful that my wife is dead. If my responsibilities extended to anyone in addition to my son, I wouldn’t have the hours to spare.
I wonder if you even heard rumblings of a means to alter the provision of sleep. If you are happy with your six hours, and your husband is happy with his, then what could be the issue? Your skin is free of blemishes. Your days are free of that bleary, dazed sensation, that half-memory of sleep with all of the sense of disassociation and none of the sense of rest.
But the SOMs can be hacked. The provision can be altered.
This fact may come as a shock to you, but never fear. Nobody will rob you of sleep. Neither can you purchase additional credits at whim. Daily visits to a SOM station are as necessary as ever. Credits can be transferred, but only in one direction, from owner to recipient.
So.
When I finish work each evening my route takes me to the SOM station embedded in the ancient walls at Micklegate Bar. I join the queue and I receive my credits on both my SOM and my son’s. But then shortly afterwards I join another queue that trails out of the open glass doors of the southernmost apartment block situated on what was once the Knavesmire racecourse. This apartment block has never been popular with the wealthy; each autumn and winter the plain floods and those queueing are forced to wear rubber boots or wade home with sodden feet. When I reach the head of the queue I hand over both devices and I answer the question, “How many?”
To begin with, I transferred only a single hour. Anyone can manage on five hours of sleep, particularly those of us who have had to survive on less. I found a great deal of pleasure in my donation. Waking an hour earlier allowed me to observe my son’s continued sleep. It was only then, once our patterns were no longer synchronised, that I understood that the blank dreamlessness induced by the SOM permitted a type of sleep that my son must never have experienced before. He was more still and more calm than he ever could be in his waking hours. I saw no sign of sleep apnoea, or jerks, or rapid eye movements. Some critics of government policy have described this as a theft; sleep now being only a necessary oblivion – a temporary death – rather than any kind of pleasurable experience. In my son’s case it is a gift. And by granting him part of my allocation, I increase the gift and in return he grants me the delight of seeing him at peace.
Surely you can’t blame me for having increased the number of hours I give.
As a science fiction writer lacking the ability to truly dream, I have other means of reordering the events and experiences of each day, of extrapolating and inserting my fears and ambitions: I write stories. I am at the beginning stages of writing a story about sleep.
The story will be set in the near future and it will tell the tale of two brothers. In childhood, they are similar, but a series of accidents and achievements results in one brother becoming very wealthy in adulthood and the other very poor. In my vision of the future, the system of sleep provision has become commercialised. Sleep credits are a commodity – the most valuable commodity, above money and time. The government stipend is an equal number of hours for each member of society, but the allocation for each citizen has dwindled, as the economy is not what it once was. Fortunately, competitive market forces have resulted in sleep credits being readily affordable. The rich and well-off are able to buy additional credits at will; top-ups are available at any shop counter and are transferred direct to devices worn under the skin. Correspondingly, the poor are able to sell their credits at will, at any shop counter, any drinking establishment, any hostel. The economy relies upon the flow of a finite number of credits; no more can be created and government ministers playact at having no means to do so.
The rich sleep well. Enjoying a surplus of sleep is the ultimate demonstration of wealth and the aspiration of everyone. Ten, twelve, fifteen hours of peaceful rest, then wake to address one’s correspondence and investments. And this world of the future is a utopia. Where now there may be squalor and decay, in this future there are vast green parks, trees taller than most buildings, city-wide pedestrianised areas filled with quaint eateries and stalls. The weather is always fine. As in all these sorts of stories, it is the poor who provide this daily miracle, supplying and serving, scrubbing and suffering. And the economy is not what it once was, so while their payment is generous considering the simplicity of their tasks, it is barely sufficient for what they require to live. It is a mercy that there are always those hours of sleep, that state provision, at their disposal. They will never starve because they will always be able to sell their sleep.
And the story is a fable, of course. The poor brother and the rich brother, having not encountered one another during the entirety of their adult lives, will meet. I have yet to determine the circumstances of this meeting. Perhaps the poor brother will be serving at a function attended by the rich brother. Perhaps he will lug provisions to the manor house owned by the rich brother, not suspecting whose paved driveway he is walking upon. Perhaps the rich brother will accept a bet in which he is tasked with living among the poor for a single day, or perhaps he is doing so because he considers himself an observer of the downtrodden. But they will meet, and the brothers will recognise one another and will recognise the sequence of chances and coincidences that have carried them to their respective positions in society. And the poor brother will demand nothing but he will recognise a potential buyer, and he will offer the rich brother an hour of his sleep. And the rich brother will refuse and instead he will insist that the poor brother instead accept sleep credits himself – though the gift will still result in the rich brother having a far more substantial allocation of sleep for the night – and even a bed in which to enjoy them.
They will both settle down to sleep in adjoining rooms. In the moments before triggering sleep, the rich brother will feel at peace because of his good deed. The poor brother will feel nothing but an anticipation of relief.
The poor brother has been without sleep for so long – perhaps an hour here or there, a couple of times a week, each month two consecutive hours tainted with the guilty sense of having stolen from his children – that only the first three hours represent genuine rest. After that point he begins to dream. Dreams have long been impossible – there is no extrapolation involved in that detail – and so perhaps this is a mania, a malfunction, something other than a dream. And yet the poor brother sees in vivid detail a world, long ago disappeared, in which everybody sleeps, everybody rests, everybody has control over their degree of oblivion, everybody dreams. The poor brother dreams that he is dreaming, way back then in that long-gone world, and this dream is of happiness; if there is any element tinged with ambivalence it is that he dreams of a brother who may be wealthier than he is, but no more happy and no less.
When the rich brother wakes, rested and content despite his mere eleven hours of sleep, he finds that his perceptions of the tasteful décor, the encouraging headlines, his smooth reflection, are no less detailed than when he would ordinarily allow himself eighteen hours of rest. He strolls happily to the door of the adjoining bedroom, knocks, but hears no reply. And for an awful moment he considers that the poor brother might be sleeping still, and that in order to do so he may have robbed the rich brother in the night. The rich brother roars with anger and forces open the door. Then he feels only a momentary stab of shame amidst his relief when he discovers the poor brother still tucked up in bed, eyes closed and not resting but dead.
These are the bare bones of the story. I will add in flourishes as I go; I still must entertain readers, the story must sell.
I will draft the story in full later tonight, and if you like I will send it to you when it is finished. I have already bathed my son and he has spent the last half an hour listening to a story on a portable speaker that he hugs to himself in his bed. Just a moment ago he pushed open the door of my study to tell me that his story has ended, and that he never wants to hear it again because it made him afraid, and he was blinking more than usual and I could see his fear was real. He held out his hand for his SOM and, after checking the allocation display, I smiled and passed it over and I found myself saying, “Get your rest, son. Everything will seem better in the morning.”
Tim Major‘s books include Snakeskins and Hope Island, three Sherlock Holmes novels, the short story collection And the House Lights Dim and a monograph about the 1915 silent crime film Les Vampires. His new novel Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives was published in 2024. Tim’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and has been selected for Best of British Science Fiction, Best of British Fantasy and The Best Horror of the Year. Find out more at www.timjmajor.com