Benzene Dreams

Description

The relationship between sleep and storytelling is an ancient one. For centuries, sleep has provided writers with a magical ingredient – a passage of time during which great changes miraculously occur, an Orpheus-like voyage through the subconscious daubed with the fantastic. But over the last ten years, our scientific understanding of sleep has been revolutionised. No longer is sleep viewed as a time of simple rest and recuperation. Instead, it is proving to be an intensely dynamic period of brain activity: a vital stage in the re-wiring of memories, the learning of new skills, and the processing of problems and emotions.How will storytelling respond to this new and emerging science of sleep? In this story, taken from our Spindles anthology, Schofield worked with scientist Robert Stickgold to produce this story, about an employee at a company creating sleep technology that uses our thoughts to fuel targeted advertising...