A good night’s sleep is priceless and also unmeasurable — or so I used to think. Modern consumerism has proved me totally wrong on both counts. I am referring to the rip-roaring $585 billion “sleep economy,” which sells happy Z’s not only via ergonomic doodads (like weighted blankets and eye masks and earplugs) and potions (supplements, essential oils) but also through the ubiquitous salve of our times: data-logging technology. Some 42 percent of Americans use a wearable fitness tracker — like an Apple Watch or Oura Ring — that alerts them to how they’ve been sleeping. People are trekking to clinics and retreats to analyze their sleep quality. Apparently, we are a civilization of insomniacs determined to do better.
And do better we can! For those with the means, the Rolls-Royce of sleep improvement is the Eight Sleep Pod, a $3,500 air-conditioned mattress topper whose power users have included Elon Musk, Bryan Johnson and Mark Zuckerberg. The Pod lets you customize your bed’s temperature, then uses an A.I. “autopilot” program to make little tweaks while you sleep; if you toss and turn, for instance, it might blast some cold to jump-start a REM cycle. For an extra $2,000, an attachment can even physically elevate your head when you snore. Nightly, your slumber is assessed by tiny piezoelectric sensors and given a Sleep Fitness Score. All this has been praised by athletes and C.E.O.s and anointed by coffee-table magazines as “glorious luxury.”
I do not particularly aspire to sleep like Mark Zuckerberg, but the breathless media coverage did make me a little insecure about my dormant hours. I had always assumed my sleeping self was unknowable, the way your id or appendix are unknowable. Yet it turns out plenty of people are surveilling, cataloging, practically conversing with their sleep — so what are they learning?
My test Pod arrived in late March, via two enormous boxes that seemed to literalize the weighty task of trying to understand your unconscious state. The sensor-infused topper tucks discreetly between a bed’s sheets and mattress, but the Pod’s water tubes plug into a nearly-foot-and-a-half-tall tank — a black tower that must sit near the bed, like a sloshy sidecar. Over the next couple of months, my shins would become intimately familiar with this structure.
The Pod can send a bed from griddle to igloo and back. And, interestingly, it can do this differently for each side of the bed. So, each night, I dialed my personal weather system to “+2,” while the man who sleeps next to me — an igloo enthusiast and ordinarily my adversary in an endless A.C. war — got to have the “–3” of his dreams. No longer did either of us try to plead our thermostat case to the other; quietly, simply, we pressed buttons and split apart. If the popular Scandinavian sleep method encourages a couple to use two separate duvets to achieve better rest, then the Eight Sleep Pod is like an electrified version of the idea that also lets you preserve some outward appearance of togetherness for, say, reasons of aesthetics or nosy houseguests peeking into the bedroom.
But soon I learned that separate doesn’t at all mean equal. While my partner napped in bliss, I always seemed to wake up too early or too tired; no amount of manual or autopilot temperature-tweaking could nudge my REM time into “optimal range.” Sometimes I’d feel I slept well and my Sleep Fitness Score would tell me the opposite. Sometimes the Pod would fail to log my data, claiming confidently that I was “away last night” — a glitch with the sensors, a customer-service rep told me, though this explanation did not dull the strangeness of being told by an object that I wasn’t there in my own house and bed and body.
“How’d you sleep?” my partner would often ask me in the morning, bright-faced, as if he’d just returned from a yearlong alpine spa retreat.
“Not great,” I’d sigh, receiving a pitying frown back.
“Fine,” I started lying eventually.
“Wonderfully,” I said on a morning on which I felt positively vampiric, my eyes dry red pools of dilated capillaries.
How would he know it wasn’t true? Sleep, fundamentally, is not a shareable thing like a work meeting or a French restaurant or a Marvel movie. It is not possible to inhabit another person’s consciousness, let alone their unconsciousness — and, while we’re at it, it is not possible to fully understand your own unconsciousness.
But if there is an industrious, expensive tool available that promises to help improve your sleep on a regular basis, then it is easy to believe that the hidden self is completely conquerable. That with just a few physical tweaks, you can pummel it into submission. And if the person right next to you appears to be evidence of this — if he can figure this out so easily — then why can’t you? Each morning, I would wake up, stare at my mediocre, objectively enumerated score and then walk around all day thinking about what went wrong and how to fix it. I was sure I could eventually get there, calibrating my perfect sleeping conditions and winning a utopian night’s rest. But this was the opposite of restful. This had all started to feel a little like … sleeplessness.
On the day I shipped the Pod back, I tried to recall the greatest night of sleep I’d ever had. College? Toddlerhood? It was most likely before I was capable of forming memories at all. The phrase “sleeping like a baby” comes to mind. A baby’s sleep does not involve thinking about or interrogating their sleep. Babies are never, ever thinking about their sleep. And if only there were a gadget, or an app, or any amount of money under the sun that could buy us that.
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