Sleeping soldiers - Franny Nudelman

On
April 21, 1971, hundreds of Vietnam veterans fell asleep on the National
Mall, wondering whether they would be arrested by daybreak. Veterans
had fought the courts for the right to sleep in public while
demonstrating against the war. When the Supreme Court denied their
petition, they decided to break the law and turned sleep into a form of
direct action.

During and after the Second World War, military
psychiatrists used sleep therapies to treat an epidemic of "combat
fatigue." Inducing deep and twilight sleep in clinical settings, they
studied the effects of war violence on the mind and developed the
techniques of brainwashing that would weaponize both memory and sleep.
In the Vietnam War era, radical veterans reclaimed the authority to
interpret their own traumatic symptoms-nightmares, flashbacks,
insomnia-and pioneered new methods of protest.

In Fighting Sleep,
Franny Nudelman recounts the struggle over sleep in the postwar world,
revealing that sleep was instrumental to the development of military
science, professional psychiatry, and antiwar activism. Traversing the
fields of military and mainstream psychiatry, popular and institutional
film, documentary sound technology, brain warfare, and postwar social
movements, she demonstrates that sleep-far from being passive, empty, or
null-is a site of contention and a source of political agency.