S l e e p e r

Would You Pay for Sleep? By the Hour, I Mean?

I did. I paid for two naps today, in fact, at Yelo, a pay-per-snooze sleep spa in midtown Manhattan.

Wait! Joke, right? you say. Now that's a thing (you say) only someone in New York would dream up, a place where you pay by the hour to lie down. No pedicure, no psychotherapy, no tanning bed? Just close your eyes and give me your credit card?

But listen, you-in-Ohio: Remember when you were having a hard day at school, with a geometry test and volleyball in gym again and someone threw up on your shoe and you got detention because that girl asked you a question in chem and you were only telling her to be quiet and you even said please? And you really weren't feeling all that well by fifth period. But oh, there was the Nurse's Office.

The nurse's office, calm and quiet and with a someone-in-charge who wasn't interested enough in your problems to make a fuss but instead let you lie there. Nurse's Office, with your grayish walls and crumply landscape print and no one, no one else, for a little while. I love you...

Now imagine if you can, because it's true, that New York is like a bad school day every single day. Imagine a bleak hour between Christmas and New Year's. Everywhere are cross shoppers returning wrong-size slippers. Tourists paddling uncertainly over the sidewalks like baby penguins. There's an ice storm, because that's the style this season, ice storms, and you have no umbrella. And the smokers are smoking especially resentfully outside all the atriums because they work in retail and have no time off. And you have got yourself good and cranky because your girlfriend wanted to see the Klimt show, and it was dull dull dull, you knew it would be. And you're woozy from the consolation wine in the cafe.

Yelo, the sleep spa, is like going to the nurse, but better. You get your own room, with faint white noise and soundproofing to erase the clamor of 57th Street. A nice fellow named Jamie to give you reflexology for ten minutes. A zero-gravity lounge chair and a thick soft blanket and, if you want, aromatherapy, which you actually don't want, the fragrance emitter will wreck you with powerful raspberry essence. It reminds you of a highway rest stop...

And the restroom has strangely cold water, and the pale fabric covering the soundproof walls is faintly bubbled, as though it had been put up in great haste, and smudged, as though a previous napper had fled in haste, and you thought there might be some teak, or at least bamboo, and thicker carpet, because they do offer spa services in addition to naps. But if the nap happens (you tell yourself), who really minds? It is a fact of life in New York that a half-hour spent in peace and quiet can change the course of a day. And another fact that you're not going to take the train home to Brooklyn to have this peace and quiet.

So you pay for it. And the foot rub is good. The towels are warm. The "rain" sound is not too cheezy; there's faint thunder, real enough to give you that cozy feeling you get back home (in Ohio!) when it storms. And you do sleep, in a chair that's so much better than the vinyl couch in fifth grade.* You sleep. For a half-hour. And then the lights come up gently and gradually. The chair was supposed to come to its upright position gradually too, but that part didn't work. All the same, you don't mind so much. The course of the day is changed.

You know, you're right. It is the kind of thing only someone in New York would come up with, but that's the point.

___

Yelo, 315 West 57th  Street, (212) 245 8235 . "Nap Plus," 20 minutes of nap time plus 10 minutes of neck, shoulder, or foot massage, $30. Naps only, starting at $12 for 20 minutes.

*My co-sleeper, who advises against ordering the "animal sounds" off the audio menu — he had expected gentle snuffling and got raucous tweets — was disappointed the bed wasn't horizontal, but he slept, too. Yes, it was a date, in small, separate soundproof rooms. The vanguard of romance.

If You're Gazing Upward at 4 a.m.

Dear Sleepers:

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I'm a conoisseur of sleep, not a sleepyhead (even if I do crave more and more of it since the arrival of our little sleeper, who is a good sleeper, quite). But I love this poem by Dorothy Parker. Who is better at endings than Dorothy Parker?

Yours,
Marie of Romania

INSCRIPTION FOR THE CEILING OF A BEDROOM

Daily dawns another day;
I must up, to make my way.
Though I dress and drink and eat,
Move my fingers and my feet,
Learn a little, here and there,
Weep and laugh and sweat and swear,
Hear a song, or watch a stage,
Leave some words upon a page,
Claim a foe, or hail a friend—
Bed awaits me at the end.

Though I go in pride and strength,
I’ll come back to bed at length.
Though I walk in blinded woe,
Back to bed I’m bound to go.
High my heart, or bowed my head,
All my days but lead to bed.
Up, and out, and on; and then
Ever back to bed again,
Summer, Winter, Spring, and Fall—
I’m a fool to rise at all!

Memorable Sleeps: In Public

Everyone is chattering about $60,000 mattresses, high-thread-count sheets, and timed-release Ambien. But all the beds in the advertisements are empty. Or populated with refreshed-looking awake people. Or a human in obviously-not-real sleep, with nicely arranged hair. 

That's because the act of sleep itself is deeply, deeply private.

Not that you haven't done it in public. Oh yes. You have fallen asleep on the bus, in a friend's car, during a budget meeting, in church. You have swayed into the aisle and jerked awake. You have dreamed of animal sounds and slowly realized the noise is real, and issuing from your own throat. You have sat upright and pretended to have been dusting your lapel for ten minutes. Your friend (a true friend) has seen what your mouth looks like when it's all slack, and she has never mentioned that fact.

"SLEEP seems to be a state that we are all of us ashamed of, and which many people appear to regard as little less than criminal. If it were not so, why should we deny with an intensity approaching irritation, when discovered drowsing, that we have been asleep? Our unwillingness to be found asleep lies in the fact that then we are off our guard, and in the power of the wakeful."

It's odd: You could have been standing there on the train in jeans hanging from your groin bones; you could have been kissing someone passionately, or putting on mascara, or even clipping your fingernails for Lord's sake (I hope you don't clip your fingernails in Grand Central) and thought nothing of it. But it's hard to imagine even a near-naked, aggressively passionate rider on Metro North not feeling vulnerable coming to consciousness drooling into his tats.

So... what was going through my mind when, all those years ago while dating a man I'll call Mr Pantone Marker, I would fall asleep in the middle of parties?  There I was, curled up on a Barcelona chair, while some acquaintance the color of that film you get on hot milk went on about... what did his friends talk about? But I wasn't bored. Oh, no. I would fall asleep happily right in the middle of the music, the mixed nuts, the poker. Come to think of it, that was the time in my life I slept the most soundly.

If you've tried everything in the medicine cabinet and you're still sleepless, you might try cultivating a less fascinating life.

___

The quote is from "The Sinfulness of Sleep" by Junius Henri Browne, published in The Galaxy, Vol. V, Issue II, Feb., 1868.