Most adults feel a dip in alertness after lunch, and most institutions pretend they don't. This course takes the nap seriously: the science of the dip, the history that pushed daytime sleep out of ordinary life, and what it would take to let people sleep when their bodies ask to.
The nap is a biological need that modern work schedules erased. This course studies its science, its history, and its return. Every week comes back to that line, and by the end you are expected to have an argument about it that survives contact with someone who runs an institution.
What you will do
Nap on purpose, keep records, and defend a policy — in that order, because each one needs the last. You will measure your own alertness with two deliberately unglamorous instruments, nap under observation in the Nap Labs, and keep a fortnight's log of what your own sleep actually does. Then you will read how the nap was removed from the working day, how other societies kept it, and who is permitted to be seen sleeping now.
You leave with a nap policy for a real institution — costed, argued for, and already survived one room of people whose job was to object to it.
The shape of the semester
Twelve weeks in three movements. Weeks 1–4 are the science: what a nap is, why length decides everything, and why the afternoon dip is on the clock rather than on the menu. Weeks 5–9 are the argument: industrial timekeeping pushed daytime sleep out of ordinary life, other cultures kept or lost it on their own terms, and permission to rest turns out to track social position more closely than it tracks need.Weeks 10–12 put it back: what the measuring devices can and cannot see, what sleep does for memory, and how to design a workplace, school or hospital that lets people sleep when their bodies ask to.
Who it is for
Anyone, in any degree. This is a 1000-level breadth course and no prior knowledge of sleep science is assumed — the biology starts in the first lecture and never goes deeper than a first-year course can carry.
You should expect to nap on purpose in front of other people, to record and hand in information about your own sleep, and to write a policy you can defend out loud. If any of those is a problem, read the policies before you enrol rather than after: each one has an alternative, and every alternative is easier to arrange in the first week than in the sixth.
Where to go next
Nap Labs
The weekly schedule. Each Nap Lab carries that week's substance — what to bring, what happens in the room, what you leave with.
Lectures
Short, and each one ends with a claim you are asked to argue against. Every one comes with a deck.
Assessment
Three pieces, assembled across the teaching weeks rather than set at the end of them.
People
Who teaches this, how they ended up on it, and what each of them is worth asking.
One more thing
This site has a Nap Mode. It dims the page, enlarges the reading text, folds the navigation away, and puts itself back to normal after 20 minutes — the nap length week 2 argues is the right one. The button sits at the bottom of the screen and stays there, because it is the switch that ends a nap early and should never be inside the menu it just closed.