Psychasthenia 4: Insomnia (2022) is an artist's game that explores hacking the unconscious world of
sleep and dreams. The interactor takes a techno-mediated heroic journey towards the elusive goal of a
good night's sleep. The pursuit of self-care in an age of social, ecological, and political anxiety
becomes an instrumented quest for agency, lucidity, and dreamtime self-determination. Whether ending
with the bliss of perfect repose, or the blackness of exhausted oblivion, the game ends with the need to
refine, recalibrate, and begin again.
Sleep Settings are available for you to choose in order
to help you find that perfect night-time balance.
A Breathing Game brings your embodied self into synchrony with the world of the sleep
system.
By entering the Hotel Lobby you move from semi-consciousness into a light sleep, inevitably
troubled by self-doubt and anxieties.
The Guide sets you on your journey to explore the house of dreams, empowering you to revisit and reflect upon your recurring traumas and their meanings.
The Lecture offers an opportunity to revisit your failings through a performance anxiety dream, and to dwell on a recurrent longing for escape.
The Interview foregrounds the ways in which you have fallen short of societal standards, and the effects this has had on your self-perception, your health, and the ways you are being judged by the world.
The In-Flight Peril episode is a nightmarish scenario of contagion, infection, immobility, and dread.
The Desert of Ruined Ambitions offers a space to find agency and power through modulated expectations of yourself and others.
Taking Up Wordly Burdens: which of the global challenges the world faces will you take up as your own responsibility to address, and which will you let go?
The Judge summons you to wind through uncertainty paths and scaffold together a life whose goals are obscured, yet clearly lie ahead.
The City of Dreams is your goal, your refuge, and an echo-chamber reflecting the admonitions, self-talk, and worries that plague you on your quest for lucidity and control.
Deep Sleep is the momentary bliss of an unconsciousness towards which you must continually strive, and earn again, night after night.
psychasthenia:
a neurotic state characterized especially by phobias, obsessions, or compulsions that one knows are irrational
