Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stated in 2017 that his company was “competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.” Just a few years earlier Jonathan Crary warned that sleep is the last barrier protecting us from being fully absorbed into a new configuration of non-stop capitalism that threatens to reduce us to full-time producers and consumers. Given that the 24/7 society has already invaded our bedrooms, Crary’s seems more relevant than ever. The rapid changes in sleep patterns is prompting a flurry of new research into the world of slumber in the humanities and social sciences. Based on a book project that is nearing completion, the proposed talk is a first attempt to bring the Middle East into the conversation. Relying on medical texts, court records, travel accounts, court and popular poetry, and even treatises on statecraft, the study offers a first peek into the largely invisible world of sleep in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on eighteenth century Istanbul and Jerusalem as two - very different - case studies. In a society that was based, at least officially, on strict hierarchies of religion, gender, age and social class, sleep may appear at first sight to be the only common denominator, the one natural constant in a world of socially-determined variables. But it was not. The night in general, and sleep in particular did not lie outside the power matrix of the day. The only “natural” thing about sleep was the biological need for it. Everything else, from sleeping time to sleeping place, from bedtime fears to sleep disturbances, depended on one’s social position. My main argument is that in contrast to common ideas about the sound sleep of “simple people,” the lower one's social status, the poorer the quality of her or his sleep was likely to be. Historicizing sleep in the Middle East may contribute not only to our understanding of this crucial aspect of the history of the region, but also to wider contemporary discussions. While our bedrooms are indeed being invaded, we should be careful not to contrast dystopic accounts of a sleepless future with naive portrayals of the supposedly peaceful slumber of times past. Any conversation about the future of repose must consider its history, fraught as it was with inequalities.