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.