In 1949, Egas Moniz wins the Nobel Prize for popularizing the lobotomy. We further customize our homes. Ranch-style homes become popular for their open floor plans and larger windows, allowing in more light. The first U.S. local TV station opens in Pittsburgh.
In 1952, David Tudor performs the premiere of John Cage’s 4’33”. “There’s no such thing as silence,” Cage says. Sales of teddy bears increase. Bedtime stories are commonly cliff-hangers. People binge eat inside their sleep, not remembering why their refrigerators in the morning look so empty, why they want. Playboy unveils a kind of flesh upon the stands. Six years later, the Barbie doll follows with its own malformed body image, its representational sex organs removed.
In 1960, we get the laser. We get hypertext and the wristwatch. There are more and more machines each day counting the time, with mixed results. Watches not watched will die and stay stuck on one specific time. In the night, in rooms, the working rotating second hands can be heard to click. Small distractions often loom longest in the face of what seems nowhere, and yet is everywhere at once. We feel we need more information.
“What madness gained in precision through its scientific outline,” writes Michel Foucault, “it lost in the vigour of concrete perception; the asylum, where it was to rejoin its truth, was not a place from which it could be distinguished from that which was not its truth. The more objective it became, the less certain it was. The gesture that set it free in order to investigate it was also the operation that disseminated it, and hid it in all the concrete forms of reason.”123
In 1961, the Association for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep (APSS) is founded, initializing the first official institution of organized sleep medicine. A series of national sleep disorder centers opens across the country, all of them together brought together in 1976 by the Association of Sleep Disorder Centers (ASDC), one year after Ed Roberts coins the first personal computer. Soon, from that first node of centers, there are born even more sleep associations, such as the Sleep Research Society (SRS) and the Clinical Sleep Society (CSS), so many that in 1986 they all band together to form the Association of Professional Sleep Societies (APSS), which changes its name to the American Sleep Disorders Association (ASDA) in 1987 and again to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) in 1999. Quickly the federations of associations spread across the globe, each with its own abbreviation: the ESRS, the JSSR, the BASS, the SSRS, the LASS, the SSC, the BSS — all these organs in one massive body.
In 1962, Walmart is founded and opens for business — nearly fifty years later, one-third of America will shop in one of the chain’s 4,000-plus locations every week — among a strong unwinking white light, consumed with sound.
In 1965, we get the digital clock. Depression spreads, begetting ritualizing of regular visits to the shrink. A farmer in Kiev uncovers the oldest known constructed dwelling, dating to 10,000 BC, comprised of mammoth bones.124 We understand there could be older houses underneath our other houses, or maybe graves. More light sinks into our lymph. In 1966, locked-in syndrome is discovered, a condition in which a person is conscious and awake but cannot move his or her body beyond the eyes. The Air Force begins to train their men in target practice using simulation-based machines: programs in which the images of electronic men are murdered and, when reset, will live again. The Super Bowl begins. In 1968, regarding his near-death experience being shot by Valerie Solanas, Andy Warhol says, “It was just as if I was watching another movie.”125 The gold standard for U.S. currency is repealed.
“You must never sleep,” writes Anton LaVey in 1969, “never daydream, never be without a vital thought, and never have an open mind.” We define jet lag, conditioned insomnia, problem snorers, noise pollution. Charles Manson is on TV. The Death of God is now a popular theological movement, appearing on the face of Time. Years, for many, as they pass, feel less like years, shorter in spanning and longer in the minutes of the day. Parts of songs begin appearing inserted backwards in popular music, advertisements, infecting our idea of what we hear in what we hear.
In the 1970s, we get digital photography, videocassettes, pocket calculators, instant noodles, space stations, e-mail, and karaoke. For the first time, narcolepsy is diagnosed in a dog. Reverend Jim Jones installs speaker systems in his Peoples Temple commune in Guyana, broadcasting his ranting at all hours, through the night. “A lot of people are tired around here,” Jones says, “but I’m not sure they’re ready to lie down, stretch out, and fall asleep.” Kales associates insomnia with a state of “constant emotional arousal,” whose physiological effects include high heart rate, restricted veins, raised rectal temperatures, and an increase in body movement while trying to nod off — all, for him, by-products of internalizing one’s emotions and environments, absorbing them into the blood. We get microprocessors, Ethernet, the personal computer, the Happy Meal. We get stereo, the Walkman, the Rubik’s cube, DNA sequencing, the digital camera, Gore-Tex, Atari. Gary Gilmore, facing his own death, demands, “Let’s do it.” The world population passes four billion.
In the ’80s, we get CDs, flash memory, the artificial heart, hair metal, digital audio tape, the internet. A record number of people tune in to the soap opera Dallas, caught up in a conspiracy of who shot the central character — the programmed death of such manifestations, as well as who is fucking who in pretend on screen, will continue to be primary reasons for tuning in to anything for a lot of people. “The succession of the seasons and the superposition of the same season from different years dissolves forms and persons and gives rise to movements, speeds, delays, and affects,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “as if as the narrative progressed something were escaping from an impalpable matter.”126
In 1981, the sleep drug trazodone is approved by the FDA. It will come to be known by many other names, like a god: it will be Beneficat, Deprax, Desirel, Desyrel, Molipaxin, Thombran, Trazorel, Trialodine, Trittico. During the next thirty or so years, the presence of these pills will replicate in name and manner of effect, including: zolpidem (increases sleep time, and in some cases has been found to revive patients from a minimally conscious coma to a fully conscious state), zaleplon (reduces awakening), estazolam (maintains duration and quality of sleep), flurazepam (helps sleep induction), quazepam (to be avoided in elderly patients), temazepam (decreases awakenings but distorts normal sleep pattern), and triazolam (known to cause adverse effects on memory). Each of these agents as well, like trazodone, enjoys a sublist of other equally mythologically dreamlike names by which they are marketed to users: zolpidem is Adormix, Ambien, Ambien CR, Edluar, Damixan, Hypnogen, Ivedal, Lioran, Myslee, Nytamel, Sanval, Stilnoct, Stilnox, Stilnox CR, Sucedal, Zoldem, Zolnod, and Zolpihexal; zaleplon is Sonata and Starnoc; estazolam is Eurodin, ProSom; flurazepam is Dalmadorm and Dalmane; quazepam is Doral, Dormalin; temazepam is Euhypnos, Norkotral, Normison, Remestan, Restoril (found in the blood of Heath Ledger on his deathbed, along with the OTC pill Unisom), Temtabs, and Tenox; triazolam is Apo-Triazo, Halcion (Jeffrey Dahmer’s brand of choice for sedating victims), Hypam, and Trilam. Each pill as well might have many names saved for the street: “terms for temazepam include King Kong pills, jellies, jelly, Edinburgh eccies, tams, terms, mazzies, temazies, tammies, temmies, beans, eggs, green eggs, wobbly eggs, knockouts, hardball, norries, oranges, rugby balls, ruggers, terminators, red and blue, no-gos, blackout, green devils, drunk pills, brainwash, mind-erasers, tem-tems, mommy’s big helper, vitamin T, big T, TZ, and others.”127 This for each goes on and on, language bifurcating around the object. In each word lurk several dozen; from each pill spring more pills to observe, and more pills manufactured in competition, begging which is best to suit your head.