In this article, I examine historical representations of sleep found in both medical and fictional narratives of the second half of the nineteenth century. I draw primarily on medical cases constructed as narratives for specialist medical periodicals, on the one hand, and on utopian fictions (or utopian science fictions, as they might also be called), on the other. I place these narratives in dialogue with my own ethnographic writing of experiences within a contemporary sleep laboratory. The aim of this unusual conflation of past and present, and of employing different methodological approaches to the study of a specific subject, is to understand sleep better, in the first instance, but also ultimately to examine how an interrogation of science fiction might be repurposed as an interrogation of the methodology of science fiction. Science fiction is a genre that draws upon the past to imagine a future. My article considers how reimagining such temporal disjunctions as critical practice might allow for new insights, both for future methodologies bridging the sciences and the humanities, and for specific objects of study, such as pathologies of sleep, or any other that has social, cultural, and scientific purchase.

中文翻译：

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睡觉科幻：

在这篇文章中，我研究了 19 世纪下半叶的医学和虚构叙事中发现的睡眠的历史表征。我一方面主要利用为专业医学期刊而构建的医学案例，另一方面利用乌托邦小说（或乌托邦科幻小说，也可能被称为）。我将这些叙述与我自己在当代睡眠实验室中的民族志写作经历进行对话。这种将过去和现在不同寻常地混为一谈，并采用不同的方法论来研究特定主题的目的，首先是为了更好地理解睡眠，但最终也是为了研究如何重新利用对科幻小说的审问作为对科幻小说方法论的审问。科幻小说是一种借鉴过去来想象未来的类型。我的文章考虑了如何将这种时间分离重新想象为批判性实践可能会带来新的见解，既适用于连接科学和人文科学的未来方法论，也适用于特定的研究对象，例如睡眠病理学，或任何其他具有社会、文化、和科学采购。