Sleep has long been associated with transformation. Here I review how this manifests in fairytale, science fiction, and managerial/corporate approaches to sleep. I argue that, in line with neoliberal sensibilities that overvalue action, self-control and self-transformation, sleep is increasingly understood not as a state of rest, release, or dreaming but as an active mode of being that needs to be analysed, controlled, used to improve production, and indeed acted within. In the second part of the article I introduce two contemporary texts that work with sleep in transgressive ways: Julia Leigh’s 2011 feature film Sleeping Beauty and Philipp Lachenmann’s 12 minute video SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby). Both works deploy sleep to explore spaces of stasis, of hollowness, and to express what I call the anti-matter of the neoliberal imperative to ‘Just Do It.’