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.

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.

Memorable Sleeps: Somewhere Over the North Pole

My husband and I recently adopted a four-month-old sleeper.

After an amazing, exciting, exhausting three weeks in southeast Asia, it was time to fly home to New York with our new babe.

Do you know about bassinets? The kind you can get on airplanes? If you're booking a long flight and traveling with a baby under about 22 pounds, request one. It cunningly attaches to the bulkhead in front of you, becoming a cozy dresser drawer for infants. There you are "reclined" in coach, or, as we were, in premium economy — very nice, but not business class — while baby lounges deliciously.

For days we dreaded this flight. How could we mix 30 bottles of formula on our tray-tables? Surely we would be pounded by the collective glare of a hundred passengers when baby screamed over four continents, or even one territory. Can you change a diaper in one of those restrooms, or even shut the door behind you while joggling a small wombat? We figured twenty-three hours of trippy (at best) time awake was a foregone conclusion.

But in between Thai Supper #3 and Thai Supper #4, in between staring at the baby, which was more fun than any of the cable channels, I did somehow fall asleep.

I dreamed of flat things. Bookshelves, bowling alleys, the floors of lakes. I dreamed hungrily of horizon lines, rooflines, the paved surfaces of empty roads through the desert, a vacant beach, a ruler lying peacefully in the middle of a desk. I was madly jealous of that ruler. I almost became the ruler. I so craved the sensation of horizontalness that I finally woke up, had an epiphany, pushed our enormous nappie-and-bottle-stuffed duffle into the aisle, and lay down underneath the baby, feeling triumphant as a polar explorer.

Therewith followed the coldest, loudest, shallowest, most miserable nap. An electrical plate made an impression on my left cheek that did not even fade by the time we flew over Visby. Miraculously, the little mammal, for his part, slept almost all the way home in that bassinet. It was Baby Business Class.

Stay tuned for more tales, and insights, under the new category Baby Sleep!

Memorable Sleeps: Our Parents' Bedrooms

Before there were high-thread-count sheets, before there were mattresses thick as hay bales, back when people got their percale at Kresge's, swapped car keys at parties, and would have thought Duvets sang covers on K-Tel, there were our parents' bedrooms. The beds, indifferently covered with bedspreads the color of dried parsley or Etch-a-Sketch screens, were only of interest for jumping on. Otherwise they lay empty as Mayberry on any old afternoon.

You got married, you got a trousseau with white, glass-covered casseroles, some crocheted potholders, some functional towels — monogrammed, maybe — and sheets, and pillows. What kind of pillows? Rectangular pillows. Bed pillows, daughter. White, rectangular pillows that slowly yellowed and turned to sacks of cement and were never replaced. (They became fearsome weapons in pillow fights with the occasional visiting cousin.)

What went on in that bedroom was not connected with the bed. What went on in that bedroom? The energies and activities that created us existed and didn't exist, like the light in the refrigerator after you closed the door.

On any given day, my mother might be in there, in dimness, riding out a migraine, the strong small pill dissolving underneath her tongue. "I have a bad head," she would have said at breakfast, her tone a mix of resignation and apology. The day's activities were canceled. If it was Saturday, that meant not going to the synagogue, and I could (oh glee! sitting so still, because if I was noisy I would ruin it) watch cartoons softly downstairs.

You could tell the nadir had passed when you heard Canadian Public Radio coming through the bedroom door. The perky theme from As It Happens meant the world was returning. There would be pot lids coming down, and drawers shutting, and doors opening. Dinner was going to be french toast, or maybe pizza and sodas in the tall, pale-blue, gold-flecked booths of the restaurant so far away (a ten-minute drive, I realized, returning to that suburb as a grown woman).

I interrupted her migrainous confinement only once, to tell her what I saw on television: President Nixon had resigned. The bed was a plain square shape in the light-dark of a curtained summer afternoon. There was a washcloth on my mother's forehead. She didn't say anything. Part of me was disappointed, but mostly I was filled with purpose and importance, as if I were an Information Minister with intelligence so vital I could walk into any bedroom in the neighborhood, without even knocking, to announce it.

Sleeping in Hotels

Sleeper, the co-sleeper, and the short furry sleeper who sleeps most of all, and who smells sweet after her recent bath, are taking off from the plains and driving home.

I have in mind hotel sleep, one of my favorite kinds of sleep, and want to leave you with the closing passage of Patrick Hamilton's wonderful (newly back in print) novel set in World War II, The Slaves of Solitude. The sensible yet sensitive Miss Roach has returned to London after having fled to a greasy little outlying town, Thames Lockdon, for some months during the bombing. She has just inherited a little money from her aunt and has left the dim environs of the Rosamund Tea Rooms for a double room at Claridge's. After her Private bath, she contemplates the war, her scant finances, the terrifying "Waiter. Chambermaid. Valet" buttons, and thinks it would be just her luck if the blitz came back to London the night she returned to it.

"Then Miss Roach—this slave of her task-master, solitude—had to choose which bed she was going to sleep in, and chose the one nearest the window, and then got into bed and stared at the ceiling, and then decided that they were heavenlily comfortable beds anyway and that was all that mattered, and it was lovely and quiet and that was all that mattered, too. And then she decided that she felt like sleeping, and would probably have a good night and so everything was all right, in fact very nice. And then she realized that it would be a bad thing if she didn't have a good night as she had to be up early in the morning looking for somewhere to live...until at last she put out the light, and turned over, and adjusted the pillow, and hopefully composed her mind for sleep—God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us."

(I cherish the rightful use of "hopefully.")

I don't think we'll be at Claridge's tonight, but soon we'll be home in our own heavenlily bed. Till then, sleepers.

Memorable Sleeps: Up So High

Are the pleasures of sleeping far up in the air, above earth, all that great? Speaking from experience, the best part is the possibility: the moment you realize you can do it, and then, after that, when you know you will.

The next best part is going up there. You climb the steps to your roof or treehouse (this one, in France, featured in a recent New York Times article, costs $15,000, which would only be be worth it if you're planning a life of high sleep with the co-sleeper, kids, and the stray duck) (thank you, Vincent Thfoin, for the photos). It's daylight, or twilight, so you can see the thrilling new juxtaposition of bed + horizon. And then there you are, for the first time, in your pajamas — let's hope you're doing this right, the way people picnic with elegant baskets and nice wineglasses, because t-shirts and shorts are the sleepwear equivalent of paper plates — listening to the wind in the leaves, or looking at the stars. It's nifty, but here's the truth: it's a novelty, not the ne plus ultra of sleep.

Waking up in the sky has serious drawbacks. Think for a second about your early-morning routine. I don't have to explain this, right? Moreover, you probably have slept out in the open before. In your topless aerie, you are no less covered with dew, seeds, and flotsam, as are your down pillows. This is especially true of city rooftops. Our French executive has a staff hoist his Hästens bed into the sky. What are you sleeping on?

I'm not saying sky sleep isn't fun, only that the sweet part is in running away from the house, the ground, the received notion of "bedroom." It isn't a lifestyle choice. Pretty soon, on Night No.3, you'll be lying there thinking about your nightstand, your beautiful dry sheets, and the clear calm air of the bedroom you've taken such care to assemble. Even kids abandon their backyard sleeping bags before morning.

It's like flying dreams. The most amazing situation isn't zooming around up where the air is thin. The dreams where you can float just a few feet above the ground, where your perspective changes subtly but also somehow immeasurably, are most thrilling. Likewise, sleeping in a bed that's a foot or two higher than your usual bed, and with a roof over your head, is much more compelling than sleeping in a treehouse. Aren't you relieved?

The offical word: Sleeping in trees is Fluff.

Spalding Gray's (First) Perfect Sleep

In Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray talks a lot about his search for the Perfect Moment. It turns out to happen one afternoon swimming off the coast of Phuket, in Thailand, after he wrapped up his shoot for The Killing Fields.

No peaceful moment, this. While the crew is busy eating something with chopsticks (chopsticks? in Thailand?) for lunch, Spalding, a spitting dog-paddler, in dread of sharks, rip currents, the deep, the unseen, the big terrors that pull, swims farther and farther out, losing himself in the sea, losing his self-awareness, the awareness that his 500 bhat are sitting on the sand for anyone to steal: Spalding, belongingless, becoming a part of the organism that is, oh glory, the same temperature as his body...

Becoming happy; losing his terror, it may comfort us to recall, in the water...

Beginning a rapturous drown in the experience...

SPALDING! STOP, MAN!

A friend, whose Perfect Experience, Spalding later notes, would be death, and who has just casually ridden a riptide out to sea and back ("I'm South African!"), jolts him back to awareness, yelling that those waters haven't been tested. Panic! Flailing! Spalding's atavistic grace — that almost prelingual grace — harpooned.

The Moment in question wasn't the swimming, the state of grace, or the risk. It was the making it back to shore and the telling of the tale. That was elation. That was perfect.

"SPALDING. You are lucky to be alive," says Athol Fugard severely, drinking coffee at the bar.

That night Spalding Gray slept a deep and beautiful sleep, dreaming of sand dunes.

Which makes me wonder: Are the sleeps of hikers in Nepal, of rescuers of old women from burning buildings, of those who have come, whether by choice or by accident, close to the Edge and back, the most perfect sleeps?

What, I want to know, were Emily Dickinson's sleeps like? After days spent writing out those poems in her tiny, perfect hand.

What is my Perfect Moment?

Memorable Sleeps: Chapter Two

One of the best sleeps of my life wasn't mine personally but that of a couple of furry travelers seeking refuge on a snowy night. Remember Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows? There is a scene that concludes, off the page, in what surely is the most satisfying sleep in all of literature.

Mole and Rat were welcomed, mid-storm, into Badger's cave. (Upon ringing the bell, Mole intelligently identifies the sound of a pair of down-at-heel slippers approaching. Clearly Mr. Badger needs my winter pair; bouncy, and good with zebra print). The two drenched and shivering friends were given clean dressing-gowns and a warm meal, a long while to toast themselves by the fire, and then, of course, it was time for bed.

"He conducted the two animals to a long room that seemed half bedchamber and half loft. The Badger's winter stores, which indeed were visible everywhere, took up half the room — piles of apples, turnips, and potatoes, baskets full of nuts, and jars of honey; but the two little white beds on the remainder of the floor looked soft and inviting, and the linen on them, though coarse, was clean and smelt beautifully of lavender; and the Mole and the Water Rat, shaking off their garments in some thirty seconds, tumbled in between the sheets in great joy and contentment."

That lavender just about kills me.

Badger's bedroom probably would not appear in Domino, but that gets to the heart of what it means to be a Sleeper. You don't need a great pillow or a high thread count. The best sleep of your life can happen just about anywhere, if you are safe, and have had a merry chat, and the sheets are washed, and maybe if you're lucky enough, on a winter's night, to be full of roast marrow and parsley salad, hare pie, and Eccles Cake & Lancashire Cheese.

Memorable Sleeps: Chapter One

You lose a lot of things when you become an adult. A taste for string cheese. Hats with kitty ears. Looking sweet covered in pureed spinach. All of that is more than outweighed, of course, by the uptick in medicine cabinet space and the taste of coffee. The loss of being able to sleep in the backseat on long car trips, though, leaves a hole in Sleeper's heart.

One of the chief pleasures of sleep is the aspect of surrender. In childhood it is enhanced by the fact that your father (in Sleeper's case) is driving. The radio plays softly. It's a spring evening; the tires hum on the road, the sky is a gentle gray, and all you see through the window, when you lie back, is telephone wires scalloping along in a kind of wordless script. You're being carried; you are free of responsibilities. Somewhere ahead lies a destination, but here is... is...   ...   ...

Sleeper could sleep so often and for so long in the back of that old Saab that her mother once said to her dad, worriedly, after three or four backward looks at the mound under the yellow blanket, "do you think she's ill?"

Sleeping in the passenger seat as a grown-up is not so great, however far back the seat reclines. The closest you can come to replicating the experience of childhood backseat sleep may be donning an eye mask and stretching out in a vacant row on a transcontinental flight.

Maybe taking a road trip while your own child sleeps in back can be a pleasure, too. Sleeper dreams.