"The real final frontier just might be what happens in our brains when we're asleep. From prose to TV to film, the genre of science fiction has always tackled speculative tales about sleep with bold ideas and strange results. Is sleep something to master? Can we use sleep to save our lives? To destroy our way of life? What is the purpose of sleep in the future?"
"Written by stalwart and co-creator Mart Gatiss, "Sleep No More" has been, for the past decade, the black sheep of Who 's beloved 9th Season. Presented as found footage, the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and Clara (Jenna Coleman) discover a far-future status quo in which technology called Morpheus has been created to give human beings sleep in smaller doses. The idea is that sleep has now been shortened by employers, giving workers a simulation of a full night's sleep in just five minutes."
"Can your dreams harm you in real life? This 1988 story from Sci-Fi legend, Harlan Ellison, deals with a man who, while processing his grief fights off a massive mouth with huge teeth in his dreams. For those familiar with the work of Ellison, this story is, in many ways, a quintessential Ellison piece, full of dark imagery and a blur between fantasy and science fiction. But, also with all good"
Science fiction frames sleep and dreaming as a frontier for speculative inquiry, asking whether sleep can be mastered, weaponized, commodified, or used to travel in time. Ten iconic stories across prose, television, and film probe altered sleep states, simulated rest, and the societal consequences of sleep manipulation. One narrative presents a Morpheus technology that compresses a full night's rest into five minutes and depicts sleep colonized by employer demands. Another story portrays dreams that inflict real-world harm, blending dark imagery with blurred boundaries between fantasy and science fiction. These works treat sleep as technological, social, and existential terrain.
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