On West 57th Street, in Manhattan, you can now pay for the privilege of taking a 20-minute nap in a specially designed sleep pod. If this strikes you as absurdly overindulgent - the kind of thing people would part with cash for only if they had more than they knew what to do with - then consider this still more extraordinary fact: apparently, there are people willing to buy water in bottles, even though perfectly good water comes out of their taps for free! Suddenly, paying for sleep begins to seem slightly less ridiculous.
"It's a matter of self-preservation," said Nicolas Ronco, the amiable French entrepreneur who opened the Yelo sleep centre (heloyelo.com) in Manhattan a few weeks ago. I'd just emerged from the silent darkness of one of his sleep cabins - 20 minutes costs $12 - where I'd dozed on a hyper-comfortable version of a dentist's chair, my feet elevated above my head to slow my heart rate, my torso swaddled in a cashmere blanket, relaxed to the point of spacing out. "People live crazy lives in cities," Ronco said. "In a desert, you would value a bottle of water. And New York is a desert for sleep."
Not that Ronco pretends he'll ever persuade workaholic city-dwellers to chill out and take siestas, as he did as a boy in Tunisia. In fact, none of the current resurgence of interest in sleep, of which Yelo is a part, seems to have much to do with slowing down. "It's all about combining sleep with a super-efficient society - using sleep wisely so you can perform better," Ronco said. This made me feel slightly less relaxed.
The most extreme manifestation of this trend is polyphasic sleeping - abandoning the idea of a core overnight sleep and instead taking short naps at four-hourly intervals round the clock. It's a cult phenomenon online; the web is littered with bloggers' excruciating accounts of trying - and failing - to adapt their bodies to this system, eager to feel well-slept on two to four hours' sleep, instead of seven or eight. They come across as relentless, obsessed with maximising productivity to the point at which it plays havoc with their lives (and therefore, of course, their productivity). True, Steve Fossett is reported to have used a related system while circumnavigating the globe in a hot air balloon, but I think those probably count as exceptional circumstances.
Yelo's approach to using sleep in the service of productivity seems altogether healthier. Apart from anything else, paying for sleep turns out to be transforming napping from something taboo - an indication of insufficient busyness - to a fashionable lifestyle accessory: already, it's drawing a steady stream of executives from Time Warner's nearby HQ. (Canary Wharf in London tops Ronco's list for expanding his sleep empire worldwide.) And if that's what it takes to get us to care about sleep, why not? People value what they have to pay for, as the world's bottled-water producers could tell you if they weren't too busy chuckling to themselves.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
