On 11 January 1890 William Morris had let his protagonist named William Guest first fall asleep and then woke him up in a dream, a metaverse, a socialist world that appeared to be peaceful and functional. It’s an old tale and you can now listen to 96 new protagonists (or is it just one?) bringing the story back alive, reading it to you in each their ways and intonations and dialects and slurs. They are reading from each their very personal space while we all were in pandemic-mode, during Covid-19 lockdowns. Listening to the audio then is like experiencing aspects of past and future, intimate and distant simultaneously – and the years of 1890 and 2020 find together as through a sci-fi time tunnel. We hear an ancient ‘speak’ or language, read by readers of today. We hear stories of past realities and hopes of future utopias. And we are hovering forth and back, between realism and hopefulness, between reactionism and romantic utopia.

But then, the subtitle is: ‘An epoch of rest…’ Wouldn’t you want to try that? Right now? Take a rest amidst the global turmoil and urgently needed re-calibration of political, cultural and economical values? And then respond to the reactionary realism with a strengthened and well-rested visionary plan.

So, let’s hear the stories of sleep and rest. And if 1890 is a century too far for your taste, you may try E. C. Large’s Asleep in the Afternoon of 1939 and its sympathetic protagonist Pry who sleeps in the afternoon – or follow the protagonist Paul in Christian Kracht’s novel Air in which Paul disappears in a futurist data-centre in Norway and awakes in a dream-like world that’s nothing like the future, but very much like our ancient, pre-industrial past – since maybe by now, we entered a certain near-future and are again romantic of the past – but first, we see about a decade to rest.