The Manifesto of Post-Phlegmatism

I want to sleep all the time.
Not the soft, flirtatious kind of sleep,
not the polite doze, not the nap where you wake up feeling like you’ve been
dipped in lavender and gently tickled by cloud-hands
No, I want the deep sleep that feels like rebellion.
The one where your body sinks so far into the mattress that you become a fossil,
buried in the strata of memory foam, suffocated but free.

Rest is a political statement.
To lie down is to declare war on hustle culture,
that digital colosseum where the grind is worshipped
and we pretend the emperor’s clothes are somehow not sweatpants.
I am wild in my slumber.

I want to rest, not to recharge, but to refuse.
Capitalism wants me on my feet, plugged in, running in place,
always moving but never arriving.
It doesn’t want me horizontal, drooling into a pillow,
my consciousness wandering through the surrealist labyrinth
of dream logic where things don’t have to make sense.

What if my job is to be unconscious?
A paid sleeper. A professional avoider.
What if my résumé says:
Expert in staring at the ceiling,
imagining distant lands where nobody asks for invoices?

I want to nap until they forget I exist.
I want to dream through deadlines like an anarchist ghost,
disconnected from the Wi-Fi of ambition,
untethered from the inbox of obligation.
I want to glitch out of the program entirely.
I want economy not being able to get me.

Freedom is the privilege to forget about your body [in whispering]
I spread myself out on the bed like a surrendering dog,
hoping sleep would bite me in the throat.
My sleeping position is the protector of the softest truths.

I’m a starfish, sprawling across the boxspring with reckless abandon.
This position isn’t subtle. It’s a declaration.
I am chaos incarnated,
legs wide, arms splayed like I’m trying to hug the whole mattress and failing
gloriously.

The starfish sleeper is for those who demand space but also hate confrontation.
I have become a giant X, marking the spot where my subconscious says
„This is where you lose yourself“
It is a power move,

a form of subconscious domination over the bed,
the sheets, over gravity itself.
It screams, „I am sprawling into this abyss“, and I refuse to apologize.
It’s not sleep; it’s a statement.

My human body made into a cosmic splatter,
a messy constellation of limbs reaching for infinity.
It is like trying to convince your body you’re dead already.
I’m now the boldest of souls, trusting gravity to make it all okay.
It is just a game of contortion,
the body morphing, twisting, adjusting in an unconscious dance I never really
control.
Maybe there’s no right way.
Maybe sleep is just one long rehearsal for a role I don’t understand.

//

The alarm goes off like a slap, an insult to your existence.
Who made that sound?
Even the demons are long gone.
They checked out when they realized there was no way to twist this world any
more.

Time slows down in the most obnoxious way, like it’s mocking you.
You hear elevator music, but there’s no elevator.
You are trying to remember if you’re out of milk.
You know what it costs to have the inbox at zero.

You fail to gracefully complete a spinning class in your local gym.
You are allergic to avocados and the eggplant emojis in your Hinge chats.
You hear Taylor Swift singing, but the lyrics have been replaced with
cryptocurrency advice.
You are always almost late, but you never arrive.
You watch CEOs chase their immortality in Silicon Valley cryo-pods.
You try to dodge office politics, TikTok dance battles and social media food
trends.
Did you reply to that email or was that part of the unresolved nightmare where
you found that talking otter who was telling you something about freezing your
eggs? You probably need to go back and talk to him.
Your adblocker can’t shield you anymore from all the infomercials for business
success.
You see the sun glaring down like it’s personally offended you haven’t gone for
a run yet, or folded your laundry.

Mark Zuckerberg appears in scuba gear, hands you a Meta VR headset and tells you
that reality is overrated.

Ever want to ride a unicorn across a glittering field while Keanu Reeves tells
you everything is going to be okay??

//

What if I told you, there is a Church of Perpetual Slumber? We meet not in
cathedrals, but in master bedrooms. Our holy attire? The softest, fluffiest
robes imaginable. Custom made slippers that feel like walking on baby clouds
dipped in serotonin.

The outside is a lie.

//

There’s the dreamscape, where I wander like a deity,
tripping over clouds and half-finished to-do lists that dissolve the moment I
try to read them.
My dream-self eats air for breakfast and never fills out paperwork.
You can’t tax a dream.

„Why so lazy?“ they ask, as if the universe wasn’t clearly designed for
hibernation.
I’ll dream until I lose track of which version of me is supposed to be awake.
I nap through the apocalypse.
Let the hedge funds crumble. Let the stock markets panic.
I am part of the lavender lobby.

I’ll just keep drifting, a lucid dreamer in a world on fire,
laughing because I’m not awake to pay the bills,
laughing because the headhunters on LinkedIn can’t touch me here.

If anyone asks, tell them I’m on strike.

I want to be someone who sleeps like it’s my birthright.
While the rest drags themselves out of bed, I am the one who refuses.
I demand more. Not eight hours. But nine. Ten. Twelve. And naps.
I wake up once to pee and briefly forget what century it is.
I am unknown and unburdened.
I’m a militant slumbering pacifist.

I want to ask why. Why does the sun insist on rising when I'm finally getting to
the good part of my dream where women have absolute autonomy over their bodies.
The world is exhausting, and I don’t mean went to a spinning class and forgot my
water bottle exhausting. I mean the deep, cosmic exhaustion of living on a
planet that’s run by billionaires who shoot themselves into space for fun while
we’re over here doing sleep math.

I want to sleep like I am on a lifelong hunger strike against the very concept
of morning walks and morning meetings.
I snooze through all the nonsense.
I am a resistance fighter wrapped in a gravity blanket,

sending a clear messages to the universe:
I will not hustle.
I will not grind.
I will not start three new endeavors before 8 am.
I won’t comply to the very same system that gave us the food pyramid and told us
breakfast was the most important meal of the day.

I am the dreamer who dreams past the deadlines.

I want that the war on our souls will be won with naps.
I want that rest is not a weakness, but a weapon.
I want to be the legend, a sleep saint, who is knocking back fourteen hours like
it’s goddamn nothing, like they’re clocking in for a full day’s work in
dreamland.
I want to hold hands with the sleep paralysis.

There’s nothing soft about needing more than eight hours of sleep.

I’m gonna lay down like it’s a silent protest
I’m gonna close my eyes like I’m evading taxes.
I’m gonna stay in bed so long they’ll have to wake me up just to tell me Cher
died
and I’ll be like, sad, thanks for the note.
I am the real one – the sleep vampire, the night dweller.
I look at daylight with the kind of resentment
normally reserved for taxes and family group chats.
I need to curl myself into that seductive coffin of covers
and disappear from existence for an obscene amount of time,
maybe forever, honestly,
because who needs daylight when the world is a flaming hellscape of anxiety and
too much cell phone reception?

I negotiate the minimum wage of unconsciousness.
I want to treat sleep like it’s my full-time job
I am quiet quitting.
I am rage-napping.

I am making unconsciousness a lifestyle.
I am ignoring the slaps of sunlight on the window like some kind of corporate
morning assassin trying to drag us into the vortex of pitch decks and news
cycles that make your brain melt.

You want to get up and grind?
Don’t come for me.
I am opting out of the game.
I missed brunch.

I am not hiding.
I am transcending.

I am a dark princess of the couch.