The way humans sleep has fundamentally changed in accordance with different prevailing aspects of modern civilization. Now we have to think about how much our pocket-computer phones affect our cycles, what light and noise pollution mean for our biology and a host of other problems that attend sleep. Many thinkers and scientists smarter than we agree that there’s no sure way to hack sleep — but that doesn’t stop a quite dedicated community from exploring and testing a number of sleep schedules and hacks and reporting on them.
There’s the Dymaxion sleeping schedule (four naps of 30 minutes taken every six hours; two hours overall), the Uberman (six 20-minute naps spaced throughout the day; two hours overall) and the Everyman (a single three-hour nap and then three 20-minute naps; four hours overall).
To help give himself time to “do all the things” (which judging from his YouTube channel may consist of reading comics and playing with action figures), James from TheHackSmith practiced the latter sleep cycle for several months and, as hard as it may be to believe, found that he actually enjoyed the results. One problem that cropped up though was having a consistent, decent place to count sheep, an issue that led him to go about creating the C.A.S.P.E.R. (Centralized Automatic Sleeping Pod with Enhanced Revitalization) napping chamber you see above and below.
Constructed from steel, the garage door opener-controlled pod has a climate control system, LED setup, sound dampening insulation and sleep tracking hardware that’s paired with a tablet. You can guess what kind of mattress and pillow James chose to put in the C.A.S.P.E.R.
To build the chamber, it cost about $3,000 in materials and took James and his team about three weeks to build — although given his weird napping schedule that’s really not that bad.
To learn more and scare yourself straight from a similar attempt, here’s a video on the project.
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