In this master's thesis, I propose an analysis of the sleep-core online content. It is memes, video, and photo edits, centring sleep as a dreamt about, desired form of being. Before conducting a visual discourse analysis, acknowledging the visual and textual language of the content, I open with an excursion through sleep as a socially bound practice. Taking into account the constructed nature of its ideal rendering, I broaden the field for further interpretation of the otherwise-studied form of online engagement. Is the drive behind looking at illustrations of baby animals' childhood nostalgia? Is engaging with the content pushing us toward a realignment of our dissatisfactory contemporaneity, perhaps even posing as a form of (everyday) resistance? Or is it just a version of cruel relief, offering only a disingenuous helping hand? These questions lead into an interpretation of what the longed-for sleep actually is, utilising multimodal tools for ethnographic research in the process. The thesis is, as such, an exploration of online world-building and its propagation within the field of cultural anthropology, posing questions on how to meaningfully. interpret a digital phenomenon.
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