Found in her collection, salt slow.

IDs: Queer, Sapphic, Chronic Illness

Author IDs: Queer

CWs: Pandemic

In "The Great Awake," people’s “Sleeps” begin appearing as embodied and individual entities separate from their human host. The Sleeps are alive in some capacity, and they have free will. They hover close to their human, but they don’t talk aloud; if they share space with another Sleep, they fight one another. In fact, they seem to act a bit like cats. The humans whose Sleep separates from them can no longer sleep at all. This becomes a widespread sensation, with more and more people getting Sleeps. Not everyone develops a Sleep, and they cannot determine who will or will not develop one. Our narrator has a Sleep, but her neighbor, a woman named Leonie, does not. Leonie desperately wants a Sleep, but our narrator is ambivalent towards hers. 

The story, told in tableaus, follows our narrator and Leonie’s relationship as they develop feelings for one another, as well as the larger social shifts that happen with the spread of Sleeps. Armfield’s choice to place us in the shoes of the narrator, a person with a Sleep, gives us a more embodied understanding of what living with a Sleep is like. In the world of the story, having a Sleep can be read as both a social privilege and a disability. Armfield states that the Sleeps are “described more commonly as a phenomenon than a disaster; one medical journal referred to it as an amputation of sorts, the removal of the sleep-state from the body” (Armfield 21). Characters throughout the story experience physical and psychological changes after developing a Sleep, as well as social shifts around access. Because of these social shifts, Leonie’s lack of a Sleep can also be read as disability. As more people develop Sleeps, the world begins to shift to accommodate people with Sleeps. At one point, our narrator goes to see a play with Leonie that begins at 2 am. Leonie’s need for sleep is now a disadvantage. People with Sleeps are socially privileged, even as they experience the embodied symptoms of having a Sleep. People without Sleeps are socially othered, and their need for sleep results in them missing social events, work hours, etc. Through the Sleeps, we see how much social structures impact our understanding of disability and access. Were the people who sleep in charge, there likely wouldn’t be plays at 2 am, and people with Sleeps would be othered. Yet even in a Sleep-majority culture, there are still disabling factors about having a Sleep, such as “the now-persistant wakefulness” (Armfield 22). Armfield’s text utilizes the speculative form and defamiliarization to explore the desirability and undesirability of disability based on social influences and factors, as well as the fluidness of disability and access in their own right. 

Discussion Questions

1. How does having a “Sleep” function as a disability? What about not having one?

2. How does the cultural and societal shift around “Sleeps” demonstrate the mutability of disability? 

3. What does the narrator's ability to sleep at the end of the story mean? What has changed? Is her ability to sleep now a disability or not?