Sleep is a luxury

Sleep is a luxury.
Most people only get three or so hours a month, unless they're pregnant or a Guild official. Despite the Guild's best efforts, only so much Sleep can be extracted from the Well, and most of that gets shipped out of Centralia for trade.

Of course, there's the off-brand shit, but that's always a gamble. Most dealers dilute their product, some to the point that you can wake up to rain or a car passing by. Even if you do end up getting the strong shit, there's still a lot of stuff from the Synthetic Well around. Believe me, nightmares ain't fun. Of course, the Red Church seem to like it, but then you should take the opinion of a bunch of mare-cultists with a grain of salt.

Of course, you could always just off yourself, but the Guild won't supply euthanasia until you hit sixty, and if you try to blow your brains out your family endures a year without sleep. Still, death-lust is an issue, but on the bright side, the Guard seems to be more well-staffed than ever.

Welcome to the waking world. Try not to go mad.

Go on...

*sweats nervously*
fuck that's all I got

Its an interesting concept.

I'll try to expand on it more
Meanwhile, feel free to throw ideas into the pot.

How is everyone not insane from sleep dep?

Through their domination of Sleep, Centralia has pretty much managed to gain economic control over the world. The Well itself is held in the near impenetrable fortress, watched constantly by scientists from the Centralian Prosperity Guild to monitor its output. The first war in generations occurred thirty years ago, when an Albian spy managed to get their hands on a diagram of the well, and attempted to create a Synthetic Well, challenging Centralia's stranglehold on Sleep with their own, mass-produced variety. However, the sleep produced by the Albian Well suffered a major drawback: it produced horrific nightmares.

The Monks of the Sands engage in complex meditative practices that allow them to stretch small samples of Sleep for days, by only keeping half their brains on at a time. All of them have a wide distant look, and depending on which side is active are alternatively impassioned and mad, or calm and unbearable lucid.

It is rumored their ascended masters and abbots have so developed their minds they can recreate the Lost Art, and sleep at will. Such notions are publicly denied by the Monks and regarded as heretical and illegal by the Guild.

Sleep deprivation doesn't seem to have any physical effect: apart from feelings of intense exhaustion, most people can operate fine. The real danger is its psychological damage: having your brain 'on' for extended periods can lead people to snap. Thus, the rations.

The Red Church is the closest thing to a 'religion' in Centralia: even the Monks of the Sands deny their practice is anything more than conscious manipulation of the brain's operation. Founded quickly after the Centralian/Albian War, they seem to be a response to the Synthetic Sleep which flooded the Centralian underworld at the beginning of the war. The Red Church claim that the nightmares the Sleep invoke are not random firings of neurons, but visions of a different place (of course, there are debates among the different sects as to what, exactly, that place is.) Perhaps it's merely mass suggestion, but many taking Synthetic Sleep report similar themes, concepts, or images in their dreams.

Um...pretty sure that humans die without sleep. Like we have loads of examples and animal tests. Unless that's just how this world works, in which case, I dun fucked up.

They do but ssssh it's Industrial Fantasy(tm)

The well was built by an ancient lost civilization to keep a great unspeakable horror asleep beneath the mountain

And soon it will all be consumed and the great whisperer of the red church will walk the world once again

UP

>unless they're pregnant
Alright guys, I think I have something we can work with...

For this reason, many Centralian men refer to their naked form as their 'nightgown'.

>Sleep deprivation doesn't seem to have any physical effect:
Wrong. The brain naturally prunes and reorders a fraction of the neural connections made over the course of the day while you sleep. Around the 30 hour mark, it switches the process on while you're awake and doesn't shut it down until you pass out or die. Around the 45 hour mark this results in permanent brain damage.

See replies.

So...now that you've dumped this real life factoid, what rammifications would it have in this vague world where it's not true?

Nah, it sounds like pregnant women are just given priority, not that pregnancy grants you sleep.
and the alternative is too lewd

The worst part is I'm sure we can all relate to this feeling. When you are tired and are laying in bed and staring at the ceiling but you are so anxious about falling asleep you can't fall asleep and the hours tick by and the boredom mixes with anxiousness so it feels like you've been laying there even longer and it becomes a cruel vicious cycle.

Just work really hard at something. You're never bored and sleep is lovely.

So we got
>The Centralian Prosperity Guild, monopolizing Sleep and effectively controling the entire world via the Well (as yet unexplained)
>The Red Church, a cult of nightmare-worshippers addicted to Synthetic Sleep
>A country that created a Synthetic Well, and is responsible for the Red Church
>The Monks of the Sands, an order which specializes in the extension of Sleep
What else could exist here?

So, part of the setting is that humans have been magically altered ages ago to not require sleep from a physiological standpoint, but psychologically sleep is still healthy and desirable.

I imagine a lot of people would find false reprieve from sensory exhaustion via forcibly rendering themselves unconscious.

They don't get the benefits of genuine sleep, but being able to just choose to completely stop seeing, hearing, smelling things for a short while is probably desirable.

Lots of cases of brain damage from various self-inflicted traumas among people who get carried away with their "breaks".

Hate to be that guy, but wake initiated lucid dreams, sensory deprivation, and meditation break this entire setting. These have been practiced for millennia

Probably illegal under the Guild, for a number of reasons.

Those sorts of things don't work, at least, they haven't for a while. It's the same reason people can't get to sleep without, well, Sleep. See, there are *things* that move through the world, even if you can't see them or hear them. They brush against our plane like ripples in the sea, and they buzz like flies deep inside our skulls. That's why we built the Well, back when we still could.

Cant you come up with a better reason than "it dont work"?

Those who stray too close to the reality of the sleepers catch glimpses of things beyond mortal reckoning. Beasts vast and impossible trapped behind a thin veil of reality. Every trance, every day dream, every halucination is a needle through the fabric whcih seperates unknowable horrors from the fragile psyche of the awake. There are those who willingly submit to the realm of the sleepers. Monks, mad men, those who lust for power. They give in to the sleep of the mind, discontent to watch idly as their world is destroyed. They bare the strength, courage, or stupidity to face these horrors head on. What they quickly learn is the land of their dreams is no longer their own. Few return from their brief reprieve from reality intact.

I think you need more then a family threat to prevent suicide, somethign like eternal undeath without sleep or some such edgy shit, otherwise peopel would just kill their families and themselves with it. Also i would like to know more about how this came to be, were humans always like that? If so how did they first manage the well? Most importantly how does no sleep actually affect people in the setting? Of course as you said to toher people permanent brain damage is off the table, but other then that how does the lack of sleep hit people exactly?

Not OP, but:

What if there used to be more wells of Sleep, and they were destroyed in antiquity, and the increase of population that has come with modernity has stretched the supply thin?

Have a bump for your sunless sea shit, thread.

It's a crying shame that this thread didn't get more love.

This is hilarious to me only because Centralia is a terrible town south of here with nothing to speak of but a train station and a meth problem.

In the guild dormitories, the Sandmen administer the sleep to those with valid ration-tokens.
But their ranks are riddled with corruption. Accusations are constant; a steelmill-worker in the west district claimed that he was pulled from his cot after 10 minutes so one of the Sandmen could sleep in his stead.

one last bump

Some very rare few find themselves able, through skill and practice, or simple innate talent and blind luck, to induce a lucid dream but pause at the boundary to the other side. Walking astride two worlds, they face the depredations of the unimaginable and the spillover of such into our world, but with immense mental fortitude and some practice, one can alter reality to a limited degree around oneself. But the human will is a flickering candle against the roaring inferno that moves parallel to our world, and eventually this invariably results in a handful of unspeakable horrors of darkest black and indeterminate form quietly slipping their way through the veil and thanking their summoner with bladed claws before beginning their endless prowl.
This is why merchants exit the city walls with large retinues and armoured wagons, why fields are always patrolled by steelclad men with great lances, why battlefields are most dangerous after the battle is over, and why the fires must never, ever go out.

Despite Albion’s massive public support during the war, their propaganda posters are widely regarded as some of the worst ever made, even among Albian officials. There’s a very simple reason for this: it’s nigh-impossible to make sleeping people look heroic.

laying down with eyes closed until you fall asleep breaks the setting

So who would the PCs be in this setting?

damn, so I'm not the only one who thinks this sounds a lot like something from the Fallen London setting, except more dystopian?

This setting seems like it’d work pretty well for a noir campaign.

>wake initiated lucid dreams, sensory deprivation, and meditation
None of those things are the same as sleeping.

asylums, lots of them
some that are nice and some that are just four walls and a roof
quite possibly most of the homeless (if they're permitted to exist) are people in various degrees of sleep-deprivation-induced madness, known to ramble on and mumble under their breath about things that don't exist or just nothing in particular, fond of searching out and hoarding anything comforting in the vain hope it'll help them find peace, looked down on by many but pitied by nearly everyone
the destitute would be prime candidates for breaking the Anti-Concussion Act, and would help explain why they're so unhinged and so far outside of normal society
like this?
not sure about that one, sounds like a different setting at this point
I like the idea of everything about this, except for Sleep and the Well and the structures and strictures built around them, being dreadfully dull
it encourages exploration of the central premise and it's a good fit for wanting to sleep but not being able to

it's the only life they know
like imagine if you saw a world where sugar was only present in one food, or maybe it's salt instead, let's call the food blardell
it would be in high demand all the time because people instinctively want it once they've tasted it, so it would be expensive
you'd say that sounds horrible, but those people would just be used to a blander, simpler, less appetizing sensation for the things they eat on a daily basis
a lot of them would wish they could have blardell more often, or that they were rich enough to have it all the time, or that they could taste blardell (because what else would you call sugar in this world?) in other foods without paying out the ass for it and then mixing it with something less good
actually come to think of it that fits this pretty well because like the artificial Sleep, people would try to make artificial sweeteners, but like in real life they would never taste quite the same as real blardell, and they would have questionable health effects, and you'd have to use different amounts of them in cooking compared to blardell and compared to each other and watch the temperature and all that fuss that comes with cooking with artificial blardellizers, and of course many if not most would have just as many calories as the famously fattening blardell, so you'd still have to watch your intake even if you don't believe the rumors of it causing cancer, psychosis, and death

>guild
do you even know what this word means?

sounds cool OP

The guy who set the record for staying awake didn’t suffer brain damage and was back to normal after one or two nights rest.

thank you

In a previous post they noted that sleeping at will was a "lost art" implying that at one point people slept normally.

Every so often a person will find that even Sleep brings no reprieve from wakefulness. These accursed beings are killed as soon as their affliction becomes known, both for political and spiritual reasons.
Tales are told of how they are monsters wearing human skin, that bring death and destruction in their wake.
The reality is so much worse...

Sleep comes in small hypos and can be exchanged for basically anything. it's not the defecto currency of any nation, but it IS good basically everywhere.

There's an entire, expansive underground crime scene dealing in everything from contraband (including sleep for synth-sleep exchange booths, if that's your thing) to favours and information networks.

people are encouraged to trade away their Sleep because while everyone wants it, sleep isn't strictly neccesary. It's a luxury, unlike food for example.

This is cool. We should make more settings based on vague song titles.

Project Sleep Over started as an ambitious idea, a method to remove the need for sleep completely from a person, and for years the best scientists worked hard at this concept, from genetic manipulation, synthetic implants, even resorting to spiritual "awakenings" so to speak, but nothing brought fruit. Instead, what came about was the development of the Pillow Talk implant, what was originally designed to assist people, became a horrifying punishment. A device implanted into the center of the brain, that prevents a person from sleeping, no matter how much Sleep they are given, named so because the device supposedly 'talks' to the brain nonstop, preventing the mind from relaxing. Thus the government took hold of this device, and instigated the Sleep Over punishment, for extreme crimes, criminals would be implanted with a Pillow Talk, and forced to live the rest of their lives, forever awake.

I believe we are running under the assumption that sleep can be "extracted" from people and stored in some sort of physical container, thus even if you "lay down with your eyes closed" you will not sleep.

Don't be a douche

wouldn't this have to be followed by incarceration?
Otherwise it'd involve sending unstable criminals out and flooding the street with psychotically tortured unpredictables

This is a neat setting idea. What system do you recommend I play this with?

I imagine so. Incarceration with forced labor. I imagine most criminals get a ration of a few minutes of sleep, not much, but humane, but the really bad criminals get the Sleep Over treatment, and maybe even temporary Sleep Over for other prisoners as a alternative to solitary confinement

a temporary Sleep-over on someone in your custody would just be not giving them any sleep though. Unless the in-prison smuggling is so extensive that people are getting Sleep in.

Well Sleep-Over is different from just not having Sleep, it constantly keeps your brain active, meaning you can't even relax your mind from the lack of sleep. Imagine being in prison and having someone whispering in your ear around the clock for several days, I think that's how a temporary Sleep-Over would work, where as a permanent one would be non-stop whispering and racing thoughts for the rest of your life.

What if there was someone who was either rich and powerful enough, or had something special about him, and is asleep all the time

I feel like we should establish a solid tech level for this setting. In the same thread we’ve gotten caravans and torches and highly advanced implants. Personally I’m thinking 1930s.

It's Dreampunk Fantasy.

Tech levels can change across the land. Like, the closer you get to the 'center' of the country, the higher the tech, where as the outskirts are torches and wagons

You need Sleep Walkers.

Now, I don't know what Sleep Walkers are, but I'm imagining them as some kind of nightmarish horror whose origins may or may not lie in getting too much or too little (no) sleep.

guy who has been sleep dep'd before. You can get by on astoundingly little sleep for surprisingly long. Sure, math gets hard, but after day 3, you get used to a half hour of sleep per day. Of course, that's way different than no sleep, but it's worth mentioning.

honestly though, if we've been engineered to not need sleep, or as much sleep, for reasons other than psychology - you'd be surprised at how much you could adapt.

Do you think there would be people who form Shamanic practices based on trying to interpret the "talking"?

Probably a really crazy prisoner who somehow escaped jail, and got even crazier, perhaps forming an entire personal cult around the Pillow Talk, believing "in our sleep deprived minds, the words speak of deep truths, we are not prisoners, we are the only one's actually awake!!"

There are probably multiple mini cults based on certain aspects. I mean, imagine how such a culture must perceive reality. 72 hours without sleep and you start hallucinating, this entire society must be seeing crazy shit around the clock

I wouldn’t think it would vary *that* much
Presumably the industrial revolution still happened

I'm gonna copy&paste all the posts that add detail to the setting and put them on a document. Should I upload them to Mega or something else?

Biology doesn't work that way.

I'm sorry allow me to elaborate. Let's take that same idea, but instead apply it to breathing, heart beats, or some other vital function. Your body fails and you die without it. If you are in such a state that you survive that means you don't need those things any longer, which by its very nature implies that you aren't in pain from lack of having it. Because the discomfort is derived from the associated injury.

Sleep also doesn't come from a Centralian-controlled Well. Your point?

I like the idea, but want to flag that you used "of course" 3x in the above. You might have a fixative writing problem

Pastebin, maybe?

The idea doesn't make any sense. The premise is a massive plot hole that without more of an establishing idea clarifying what OP is actually talking about. Won't work well.

OP here. I cringe every time I have to reread what I wrote. Proofread your work, friends.

Heres how it makes sense
>It just works
There we go

That's either intentional poetic structure or a minor error from them not having time to properly edit the post. Regardless, the premise needs more work.

It doesn't though. What are the people? Why do they require something to do what a body typically does naturally. If they don't need to do it than why do they feel the need to have it. Is it magical? Technological? Magical realism? Is sleep like a drug fix? Is it something similar to actual sleep, refreshing? I can go on. It raises a shit ton of question just by hearing it. So, it's literally going to define every last aspect of that village, city, region, world. So, yes. It doesn't just work without impacting everything that happens in the plot.

I do
the day is saved thanks to anxiety disorder!

Reminds me a fair bit of Paranoia, good setting idea OP

>One day, thousands of years ago, people stopped sleeping. Then the Wells popped up, and sleep returned. But now the Wells, save one, are gone, and the world is sleepless
There we go.

What about if the Well(s) still exist but the World is gradually (or quickly) running out of Sleep as the Well(s) are starting to run dry?

I like this. I want more countries explored and elaborated on. Could Centralia and Albia be analogous to Cold War-era US and USSR? Mostly trying to one-up each other with spying and propaganda campaigns, only resorting to open conflict when they perceive a massive advantage, like a diagram of the well? If so, is there a buffer state between them? Or buffer states plural, with different ones falling into different allegiances more or less in line with the main powers?

Opinions?

well if you could read between the lines, that's what this thread is about, figuring out the details and implications of a fact like "people only sleep when they ingest this substance but they don't actually need to sleep they just work a little better when they get sleep"
it's been stated they need to eat so that takes care of energy and bodily resources
I would think they would need to rest even if they don't sleep, and during that rest is when healing would happen faster and the immune system would rejigger itself and some of the other essential functions of sleep
or it could just be a copy of some existing organism that never sleeps

I mean, we already have a dystopic pseudo-fascist state with a suicide epidemic and rationing, so I don't think a Cold War analog would be out of place here. Not sure how Albion would manage to be a major power, though, due to their reliance upon Centralia for Sleep.

>and the world is sleepless
Awesome, then why do they need or care about sleep? If you don't need to do it, you don't have any pain from not doing it. Otherwise all we are talking about is an opiate for the masses.

My point is that OP should at least have potential answers for those questions if he's planning on running with it. Which, the claims that that he doesn't.
>fuck that's all I got
So my advice is that he finds some.

>Why do they need or care about sleep?
Imagine having your brain 'on' for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, until you die.

We don't need sex or food that tastes good (unless you think getting basic nutrition gives you taste), so why should a society care about that? Besides that, you have a good point.

Hey, what are we gonna call this setting?

Sleepytime Junction.

Well, they still manufacture stuff out of the Synthetic Well, right?
I could imagine post-war they're cut off from the Well and they're stuck using their own shit. Now they've started descending into madness as a people, eroding what was an orderly Soviet-analog into a mad anarchist horde. Centralia is concerned that another war looms as mare-cultists in Albion make increasingly aggressive overtures, only this time their intent is to destroy the Well.

What if Sleep Medicine commercials are just glimpses into this setting?

Reminder there is some Lovecraftian influence in this setting.

Oh shit, that's really good.
I wonder if this is common practice for Centralia: after a country commits some slight against them, they cut off all Sleep exports for some period of time varying on the offense. Of course, most of the time, the country goes belly-up not long after.

near-future cyber punk

Oh, I like that. It seems to me that Centralia in general and the Guild in particular is built around complacency. There is little ambition, there is little emotion, everyone's just going through the motions. So, when they have a problem they do what they've always done, and expect the same result. Only, they don't get it. This time instead of a meek client state they made a horde of madmen intent on destroying the central aspect of Centralia's dominance at the behest of nightmare creatures from beyond the stars.

How has "don't rest your head" not been mentioned yet?
Are the old fags getting senile?