Dreaming After Pasolini

I’ve been sleeping a lot.

Not the peaceful kind that restores you, but the heavy kind that folds time in on itself. I wake up and it’s as if nothing has moved — not the world, not me. It feels like a pause, but maybe it’s a kind of protest. A refusal to keep producing, performing, explaining my worth in a system that measures everything by output.

Universities used to feel like places where thinking mattered. Now they move to the rhythm of markets they didn’t create, chasing metrics that erase what can’t be counted. I’m told again that my job is at risk — the fourth time in ten years, the second this year. Each time it happens, I feel a little more like a symptom of something larger: a world that treats insecurity as motivation, exhaustion as proof of dedication.

Lately I keep returning to Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom.

What unsettles me isn’t just its brutality, but its structure — how domination becomes a kind of routine. Watching it now feels less like stepping into history and more like glimpsing our own reflection, blurred but recognisable. Power has simply changed costume: less leather, more spreadsheets.

Pasolini saw it coming. He warned of a metamorphosed fascism masked by capitalist seduction. Not the fascism of rallies and uniforms, but the kind that trains us to desire our own submission. He spoke of a shared, compulsory and wrong education that pushes us to own everything at any price. That feels uncomfortably close to how we’re taught to chase visibility, outputs, rankings — even when they hollow us out.

It’s not that universities are fascist; they’re caught in the same storm as the rest of us, bent by economies that feed on scarcity and competition. The cruelty is diffused — spread thin across policy, software, and deadlines. No single person designs it, yet everyone helps keep it moving, afraid of what happens if we stop. The system runs on quiet compliance rather than command, which somehow makes it harder to resist.

Maybe that’s why I sleep. Because sleep suspends the game for a while. It earns nothing, proves nothing. It’s a small refusal. And yet, in those long hours, I still dream — of classrooms filled with curiosity instead of fear, of colleagues who have time to think, of music that doesn’t need permission to exist.

Perhaps that’s the real act of defiance: to keep imagining, even when the machinery insists you shouldn’t.