Sweet Dreams

By Clemency Burton-Hill

Night-time. A city. A space, filled with identical narrow beds. Two hundred of them, arranged barracks-like, row upon row. Laid out with slippers and snacks and eye-masks; the trappings of a first-class flight. Except we are in a nightclub in Berlin or an opera house in Sydney or a scientific hub in London, and if we are to be transported somewhere over the next eight hours it is not in an aeronautical sense but in a sonic one.

Soon it will be midnight, and a classical concert will begin. Here among the audience is a pregnant woman; a young black couple; a cancer sufferer; a guy wearing a tiger onesie. And there, on a stage at the centre of it all, is a man in jeans and black Converse. He doesn’t look like a classical composer. He possibly isn’t a classical composer. It is difficult to define the piece that he and his group will perform continuously while 200 strangers submit to varying stages of slumber between now and sunrise.