Within Western contemporary social thought, the claim that social acceleration is a key feature of the late-modern world has been widely circulated. A criticism of this argument is that it is often based on conjecture and hyperbole instead of on actual empirical evidence (Rosa and Scheuerman, 2009; Wajcman, 2008). A viable way to subject the social acceleration argument to a higher degree of empirical scrutiny is to deploy the sociological study of sleep as a key indicator. Such an insight builds upon research in the nascent sociological study of sleep, which has established how some developments in people’s sleep lives may signal broader shifts in the socio-temporal order (e.g. Baxter and Kroll-Smith, 2005; Melbin, 1987; Williams, 2005, 2011). I contribute to this emerging body of literature by emphasizing the importance of being sufficiently precise and nuanced when sleep research is deployed as a measure of the social acceleration phenomenon. I appeal to Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration (2003) as a way to advance a more explicit, multi-faceted and open-ended understanding of the social acceleration concept. Rosa’s theory is unique because it identifies three distinct facets of the concept that can be empirically grounded. By undertaking an exploratory study of what evidence regarding people’s sleep lives can be used to test these three facets, I find that this yields a more discontinuous and context-driven view of social acceleration.