Sleeping and lying-in-bed in underwater hotels: sensing (dis-)comfort in an alloútopian space

This paper focuses on a comprehensive view of underwater hotel bedrooms by reflecting on their common sensory dimensions and their objective capacities to shape the practice of sleep and lying-in-bed. Drawing from reflexive sensory ethnographic fieldwork, this article contributes to our collective understanding of performative and more-than-representational sensuous geographies by arguing that underwater hotel bedrooms replicate familiar environments through a variety of creature comforts, while simultaneously subverting the ordinary experience of hotel stays through multi-sensory exposure to unfamiliar, exciting, and in-part uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing environs. We base our argument on the original concept of alloútopia. An alloútopia (from the Greek alloú, for else or elsewhere, and topia, for place) is a realized utopia where humans and non-humans encroach upon each other’s lifeworld by way of an enclave which enables their temporary co-presence.