Human sleep is normally organized by circadian rhythms, daylight, and bodily needs. Sleep is also understood as a withdrawal from the social world: a period, in which social time “pauses”. However, there is a new practice of “sleeping in VR”, an emergent socio-cultural practice in social virtual reality. Users of VR Chat join public virtual spaces to inhabit a common temporal rhythm (despite geographic distance) , “cuddle” (despite embodied constraints), and feel co-presence of others in a “social” act of going to sleep. VR environments can ignore or alter the typical temporal cues of sleep, as users may experience a different relationship to day/night cycles and social schedules. Also, in VR, sleep becomes a form of social participation, rather than social absence.
Building on the findings of Recent VRChat ethnography, this talk discusses the practice of sleeping in VR, looking at how virtual sleep is possible in the first place. It targets questions such as: What affordances can we find for sleeping in VR? And can an avatar remain temporally present, when the conscious body is asleep? With a focus on the question of temporality, the talk further explores how sleeping in VR transforms sleep from a temporal interruption into a form of continuous social co-presence. It proposes that VR sleep reveals that temporal experience is increasingly shaped by socio-technological infrastructures, rather than natural rhythms.