Dreamscapes for the sleepless: Remedying stress induced insomnia through architecture

Abstract

Sleep plays a vital role in our health and well-being. Our bodies regulate sleep in much the same way as they regulate eating, drinking and breathing, signifying sleep’s similar critical role.1 Anxiety and stress are two of the main causes of sleep deprivation, often advancing into chronic insomnia.2 Fortunately, stress-induced insomnia can be alleviated once the stress has been relieved.3 Chronic stress, as opposed to acute stress, is the unhealthy response to emotional pressures repeatedly suffered in our daily schedule for a prolonged period of time.4 Our current climate of architecture symbolises and exhibits these daily mundane stressors, hindering human nature’s ability to leave reality to aspire to dream. This thesis draws on the 1920s surrealist movement.5 The surrealists believed once the boundaries between the dream world and reality were exterminated, thoughts and passions became liberated and the subconscious mind could be explored.6 The subconscious mind does not correspond to the space and time frames of the conscious world, instead space shifts and mutates, while time proceeds in an incomprehensible manner.7 The strands of the setting of the subconscious mind was believed to be found in the conscious, allowing access and a passage between these two realms.8 Once access into the subconscious mind is attained our current surroundings can then be assessed through a different perspective offering inspiration for dreaming through a process of relaxation, alleviating stress to allow for sleep. Throughout history societies have used bathing as a form of relaxation and ritual healing to induce better quality sleep allowing the mind to reinvigorate.9 The architecture is to be located in the heart of the CBD, proposing the typology of a spa manifested through surrealist notions, in conjunction with a sleep clinic to monitor both stress and sleep, creating an architecture that may relieve stress, induce sleep and allow for dreams.