Synopsis

Michael Stipe plays a night-shift office worker moving through a fluorescent workplace while the band's strange, stop-frame world turns ordinary routines into a restless dream. As the worker struggles through the night, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Stipe appear in pajamas and bed socks, tossing and turning through daylight hours without finding sleep. Still photographs, abrupt movements, and distorted colors capture the disorientation of living against the clock, giving the video a detached, almost hallucinatory atmosphere.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was shot at Broadway Studios in Astoria, Queens, in September 1998.

• Its unusual motion was created through stop-frame photography. Michael Stipe described the intended result as having a "really druggy, really great look."

• The video's visual concept reflects the song's focus on the alienation and disrupted sleep patterns associated with working the graveyard shift.

• The Snorri brothers, the Icelandic photography team behind the video, reportedly met Stipe in a San Francisco bar while they were working on a Green Day video.

• "Daysleeper" was the first single from R.E.M.'s 1998 album Up and later appeared on the band's 2003 video compilation In View: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003.

• The song's character returns in "The Lifting," a track from R.E.M.'s 2001 album Reveal, which functions as a prequel to "Daysleeper."