We held a panel discussion, in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature, addressing these questions and others on the enigmatic subject of sleep.
Featuring Jonathan Coe, writer of The House of Sleep and winner of the Prix Médicis; Professor Russell Foster FRS, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford; and Deborah Levy, playwright, novelist and poet with a particular interest in the subconscious.
The discussion was chaired by poet Lavinia Greenlaw, the first artist in residence at the Science Museum.