This paper acknowledges and discusses the analyst’s sleepiness as a defense against affect in the patient and analyst. It explores the phenomenon as an enactment of parental unavailability and abandonment and a primitive communication from the patient about early states of psychological deadness and unintegration. In the context of relational literature that celebrates engaged and enlivened registers, this article considers the problems and potentials of dwelling in a distanced and deadened intersubjective field.