Does it calm you down to watch a stranger sleep? Would you enjoy waking him up with a shrill noise, or even better, an AC shock? In 2022, there are people who answer “yes to everything” and indulge their primal urges with dream streamers: people who sleep with a camera in front of their bed live-streaming their dream for an audience that is watching and… not doing. Keep your mouth shut.
It’s every mortal’s dream: make money while you sleep. In its early days, the dream streamers understood. They went to bed, turned on their streaming station – the cell phone with a well-positioned tripod – and recorded themselves asleep for several hours. Those monitoring their sleep, many of whom have been confined to their rooms due to the pandemic, said the spectacle of other people’s sleep calmed them, helped them relieve insomnia and enjoy peaceful company. They didn’t make much money, but when they woke up they could read the thousands of messages their followers had left them. If they were sponsored by a mattress or pillow brand, business would pick up. That was the case in 2020, when this practice flourished, but in 2022, the year of reality, you have to fully monetize the broadcast, and to do that you have to wake up as many times as the audience is paying for, namely the most annoying, loudest and most extravagant way there is. . “The more chaos, the better. The audience loves the chaos,” concludes Jakey Boehm.
Boehm is a 28-year-old Australian Tiktoker with over a million followers and a leader in interactive Dream streaming. According to Wired and The Wall Street Journal, you can make $35,000 every month without leaving your bed. Every night at ten he puts on his pajamas, climbs into his bed, dims the lights and goes live on TikTok to engage a global audience who want to see him sleep and play a wake-up game all night.
With the camera trained on his bed, he tries to sleep while thousands pay to wake him up. During the broadcast, hundreds of them buy virtual gifts that disrupt their sleep with lights, sounds, and loud music. One of the “gifts” is the scariest audio from The Shining, Jack Nicholson’s character saying “It’s Jhonny!”. It’s a video game and Boehm is the target. Whoever manages to wake him up with the most excitement wins. For one dollar you can write a message in the chat that a bot yells in Boehm’s ear, for two you can send him virtual glasses that yell “Chrissy, wake up!”, a yell from the very popular Stranger Things series on TikTok . For $95, you can send him a spasm that comes to him through a bracelet he wears on his wrist. For $380, a follower can activate any device in the room for five minutes and make a fuss. The price includes notifying all TikTok users to peek into the streamer’s room. The torture lasts until 5:20 am. At this time, Böhm shuts down the live, edits the content, goes back to bed around 6:30 a.m. and sleeps until 12:00 p.m.
Boehm has increased the entertainment offerings for his audience. He doesn’t want people to get bored while he sleeps. Where viewers initially only had access to your printer, now your setup is much more sophisticated. If they pay enough, they might turn on a bubble machine in your room or set you up with an inflatable doll as a bed partner.
In exchange for his hectic nights, Boehm keeps a portion of what his fans invest in gifts. He hopes to use the proceeds to buy a home and support mental health charities.
The spectacle of seeing people sleep is not a creation of digital culture. In 1964 Andy Warhol introduced his film Sleep, a tape that showed his lover John Giorno asleep for five hours and 20 minutes. In 2004, the National Portrait Gallery in London presented a video artwork by artist Sam Taylor-Johnson called David. At work, a young Beckham could be seen shirtless for a long 107-minute nap.
Why do we enjoy watching others sleep? Some dream streamers have had trouble sleeping and say they fell asleep peacefully the first time they saw a live broadcast of a stranger’s dream. Apparently, just as a yawn is contagious, seeing someone fast asleep can help induce sleep. Two years is a short time to study whether streamers have an impact on the quality of their followers’ dreams, but some dream and hypnosis experts like David Spiegal believe we’re social beings programmed to empathize, so Watching someone sleep might help us get into a state of mind conducive to rest.
Successful dream streamers don’t exactly disclose their earnings, apart from figures published by Wired and the Wall Street Journal on Boehm. It is known that they earn more when they get a sponsor and that this is more common on quiet shows where no mob is trying to wake them up. For the interactive show on Twitch or TikTok, which brings streamers more audience and visibility, and also means more sacrifices, they earn less but enough to pay the bills and rent with two broadcasts a month, according to a report in Wired Mikkel Nielsen (26 years old), a streamer adding 1.4 million followers between TikTok, Twitch and YouTube.
For Erin Duffy, author of (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love and expert on the economics of social media, these profit models are unstable and can cause problems. In addition, the rapid success of the first streamers of the dream may attract other creators who will no longer have the same luck and will sacrifice their quality of life for charity. Duffy believes we are dealing with a microniche of online content where few will have monetary rewards, and these will likely already be positioned. When they arrived, they were the first, they capitalized on the fad and reached an integrated audience that will flee at any moment to the next internet redirection.
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