Bram Stoker’s Sleep Work

Abstract

This paper traces sleep, labor, and attention through the novels of Bram Stoker. Stoker’s sleep reflects a turn-of-the-century fascination with networks of communication and nocturnal productivity. Dracula’s mesmeric sleep—alongside Freud’s near-contemporaneous turning of dreams into “work”—becomes a conduit of information exchange and production, functioning as the web that holds the novel’s eclecticism of genre and voice together and even taking the place of an otherwise absent omniscient narrator.