Perfect Sleep investigates sleep and dreaming as a potential climate engineering technology. By inviting participants to experiment with their own sleep cycles, the work explores how lack of sleep and climate change are both products of the same extractivist capitalist system where regeneration, rest, and natural limits are dismissed and go unvalued. 

The work is realized in two parts: as a smart phone app and an installation. The Perfect Sleep App allows users to adjust their sleep schedule, slowly increasing their sleep time over the course of three years until they achieve a state of “total sleep.” To assist users in falling asleep, the artists commissioned a series of dream incubation texts from Simone Browne, Johanna Hedva, Holly Jean Buck, and Sophie Lewis that invite sleepers to dedicate their dreamspace to envisaging a world beyond our own. These texts have been transformed into dreamscapes by composer Luisa Pereira and are best encountered in the moments between waking and sleeping. In the installation, titled Sleep Study, audiences can experience the dreamscapes from custom daybeds. The design of this reclining furniture takes inspiration from the deck chairs of Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic Mountain, where tubercular patients doze awaiting a cure, as well as from the sleeping pods of Silicon Valley, where sleep is seen as another parameter to be optimized in the unending pursuit of excessive wealth and power. The work also includes an attempt to model the climate effects of a user’s changing sleep schedule, drawing on research that correlates average sleep time and GDP, and GDP and carbon emissions. Emission reduction scenarios are presented for a population following different sleep schedules.