#i don’t know what to tell you. i’m 40 years old and protesting the bedtime i gave my own self

[mylittleredgirl]

kind of wild how i’m absolutely sure that going to bed every night at 9:30 pm without my phone would improve my life in every conceivable way, an action that’s both free and easy to do if it weren’t also somehow impossible

[brideofcthulhu10]

Could you do a reaction where the lost boys are hanging out with their S/O at their house. It’s 3 am and s/o falls asleep. They hear a crash down stares so the boy investigates, his face all vamped out. They find the s/o younger sibling in the kitchen who is around 4 yrs old with their hand in the cookie jar. The sibling sees them with their fangs and runs over to them yelling “Kitty”! The next night their s/o tells them they are tired because their younger sibling Made them look for a cat.

Okie doke, super specific but I think I did a damn dandy job on it if I do say so myself lol. Well, I hope you enjoy it!

The Bats Being Cats

Lost Boys × fem!S/O fluff with little brother

David 

It was a rare occurence when David slept outside of the hotel, but with the numerous break ins he didn't feel comfortable leaving you alone. You insisted you weren't alone! 

"Having a stray neighborhood cat you feed doesn't count as protection," he retorts, arms crossed. 

"No that's not what I mean-"

"-Just let me keep any eye on you, kitten. Please?"

Being asked please by David just made your heart ache. Pleasantries were partially limited as it was but David was not one for saying please. You sighed, taking his hand in yours. "Fine, but please don't kill anybody. My parents would be pissed if someone got blood on the carpets."

All had been going pretty well, you managed to cook him up a home made meal for once having to repeatedly remind yourself absolutely no garlic, and after a slashers marathon on TV you were ready for bed. It was only 2 am! David was far from tired, but at your behest he obliged under protest. Being the nocturnal vamp he was, he just laid beside you while you slept enjoying the peace and quiet. Beds weren't exactly his forte so it didn't make him any less awake. Too squishy. The loud banging coming from the kitchen didn't exactly serenade him into slumber. 

An intruder huh? Well, you did say not to kill them… but you never said anything about mmaiming. Besides, he had to skip a blood meal to be here, might as well have some fast food while you were off in dreamland. David gently scooted himself off the bed as best he could without disturbing you and pulled the blankets over. Watching you burrow against the pillow made him smile softly, pushing your hair out of your face. Slowly he leaned in for a tender kiss, after all he wasn't in a hurry. "Sleep tight kitten, I'll be right back."

Carefully he slunk down the stairs with ease. Sure enough a stream of light trailed off from the dining room. The closer he got the more he continued to hear rattling within the kitchen. Drawers slowly rumbling as the were slid open, the cabinets squeaking, the… chairs being scraped across the floor? 

Okay so they were a very short burglar, whatever. Turning the corner with fangs ready to tear into whatever pitiful mortal thought it wise to enter his mate's home- who the hell is that?

Rather than a short man dressed in all black, he had come to find a small boy sitting on the counter in a red race car t-shirt with matching race track print shorts elbow deep in a dog-shaped jar labeled "COOKIES". Currently the tiny pastry thief was smeared with chocolate chips and crumbs, half a cookie sticking out of his mouth. There was such a heavy awkward silence and they both just stared at each other until the boy finally gasped. "Wow you're a big kitty!"

"Ki-?" Immediately David became flustered as the little one scrambled off his kitchen chair ladder and HUGGED HIM. David immediately scrunched his body together as if it could make him smaller. He hardly hugged anyone other than you, the sensation was almost so foreign he nearly rejected the crumb coated tyke who was smearing chocolate on his jacket. Grrrreat. 

"Uh.. Yeah sure, kitty, let's go with that," he quickly dismissed the kid, awkwardly patting his head. "Kitty says off to be or I'll tell-"

"You can't tell Y/N! She'll tell mummy when they can't back!"

Mummy? Go figure you forget to mention you had a little brother! "Well then we better go to bed then, huh? Otherwise we'll both get in trouble. See, your sister doesn't want me getting lost around the house showing off my teeth. So we gotta keep that a secret, got it?"

The boy quickly nodded, pretending to zip his lips shut. Watching David put the cookies higher that the chair could help him reach. With cheeks puffed up he stomped away, whining under his breath that the mean kitty was no fun. David rolled his eyes, sinking away his fangs back into his mouth. With dawn approaching he debated his options, quickly scribbling down a "sleeping in here, do not open" to tape on your closet, using a wadded up towel to seal up any cracks. Not ideal, but better than being burnt to a crisp. Once the sun went down again, he came out to see you utterly disheveled. How were you tired you slept half the night, if anything he should be tired! Well apparently your little brother B/N insisted he found a giant, bossy kitty cat "with a dumb hair cut" in the house and demanded you spent all day helping him find it. David hadn't the heart to tell you, although the chair cut line made him tempted to scare the little turd. Maybe not, so he just shrugged it off suggesting perhaps the kid was sleepwalking.

Dwayne

Well Dwayne had a fair share of handling children before, but this was ridiculous. It seemed like a cute little suggestion, spending the night at your house. He wouldn't exactly get much sleep. Still, he didn't mind cuddling with you in your bed, get the opportunity to maybe look around your room and get some better insight about who you were before he met you. Besides, any opportunity to sleep in a real bed again that wasnt caked in cobwebs was a golden opportunity in his eyes. 

You certainly were a trooper, you insisted on staying up as late as you possibly could. After ordering from a pizza shop he opted just to devour the barbecue wings while you nibbled down on classic pepperoni. You insisted there was no garlic, but he wasn't going to risk anything spoiling tonight. When his hunger couldn't be satiated you offered him the uncooked beef shoulder your mom was saving for dinner next week. It was disgusting, wringing it out like a sweaty sock, watching your juice pitcher fill up with red juices. When you struggled to squeeze out  anything else, Dwayne straight up dug his teeth into the partially dried hunk of meat until it started to turn grey. The entire process was gruesome. You couldn't help make a face, although you were still glad he had some sort of blood. 

"What's animal blood like anyway? I mean, usually you drink human right? Is animal like… vampiric vegetarianism?"

Dwayne pondered the inquiry, wiping the red from around his mouth. "I guess the best way I can describe it, it's like junk food in a way," he explained, polishing off the last bit and smearing his mouth on his jacket sleeve. "It fills you up okay, but not as well as human blood. Eventually it won't be able curb the hunger for very much longer."

"Hm. So it's like having potato chips for dinner," you asked, going to rinse out the jug before he had the chance to lick up the remainder. 

"Pretty much."

After dinner, you settled on the couch watching the IT miniseries on tv, sharing a bowl of popcorn. Half way through the three hour series you had dozed off, head lightly nuzzled beneath his arm into his chest. Gently he swept you up into his arms, carrying you down the hallway into your room. Just as he laid you down he heard a bunch of clanking around in the kitchen. Looking back at you he pushed your hair out of your face, stealing a gentle kiss. "Don't worry princess, I'll handle this one," he whispered against your lips. Guess he was going to get that human blood after all. With fangs bared he swept through the hallways with ease, slinking into the dark kitchen ready to strike, and then the lights flipped on. Standing beside the fridge was a young child, couldn't be more than 4 or five sitting on the floor with a handful of pinwheel cookies. Literally caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the bits eyes turned to saucers. "KITTY CAT!" 

Dwayne flinched when the crumbly toddler hugged his waist. Alright so you had a brother. That was new. Carefully he lifted up the toddler, balancing on his hip like he had done with Laddie. "Well hi. I wasn't expecting a cookie thief tonight."

"Are you Y/N's kitty? You're really big!"

"No, I'm a big ol' panther. I usually eat all the bad kids who stay up past their bedtime," he teased with a fanged grin. "Know any?"

The boy rapidly shook his head. "Nope! Uh uh! I was uh, sleepy walkin'!" 

"Oh well, then I guess we should get you back to bed then, huh?"

Laddie used to pull the same thing all the time. They always put him to bed around 4:40 am, sometimes he could push it to almost 5, but then Dwayne would catch him sneaking around the tunnels at 6 am. Except with Laddie he would just hang upside down with him or go back to Star. He couldn't exactly do that with a four year old human. Instead he shuffled his boots through scattered toys, kicking them out of the way as he tucked the little boy in bed. Out like a light. Boy he was good. Softly he tip toes back into your room and laid beside you until the sun started coming up. He snuck into your parents room with their dark, heavy curtains drawn and wedged himself into their walk in closet just to be safe. Thank god your dad hates sunlight too. The entire day time he could hear your little brother shouting "Kitty?! Mr. Kitty?!"

Cue your groans as you lazily followed him, shooing the boy away from where Dwayne was currently sleeping.

"B/N, you were probably just sleeping after you ate all the freakin' cookies and dreamt there was some big dumb cat."

"No no no, honest Y/N, I saw him, I did I did! We jus' gotta keep lookin'!"

Dwayne chuckled, he'd have to apologize to you once the sun came up.

Paul

Yes! A sleep over at Y/N's place! Finally! He never got to go over there because your parents were such fuddy duddy same-old! Now with them gone for a weekend trip to San Diego, he had you all to himself! Oh he was so giddy when he jumped through your doorway. Wow. Fancy! Two stories, a big ol' tv in the living room with one giant wrap-around couch?! Is that the new Sega system?! There's a freaking pool in the backyard! He's just geeking out!

"Dude, babe, why didn't you tell me your parents are loaded," he exclaimed, jumping over the edge of the couch onto the cushions. 

"I mean the stuff is nice I guess," you shrugged, sitting next to him. "Honestly I just love being with you guys in the hotel. I hadn't really thought about it."

Paul raised his brow. "So, you're gonna give all this up?"

"Well, eventually whenever I decide I want you to turn me." 

Cuuute. Paul just snickered, nibbling on your neck. After that, you were up almost all night. Getting high in your bedroom, concocting bizarre stoner munchies down in the kitchen, video game competitions on the giant television, making out when you were supposed to be watching a scary movie… making out when you guys are skinny dipping in the pool… whole lot of heavy petting. Finally you had tuckered out in his arms, burrowed beside him with his jacket draped over you. Oh god you were so adorable. It was only 3:45 in the morning, so he had a few hours before the sun came up. 

"Okay sleepyhead," Paul huffed, lifting you up in his arms ", bedtime!"

You groaned some half mumbled whine about not being tired which only made him chuckle. "Shhh, chill out kitten. Time to crash. I'll still be here tomorrow night, mkay?"

It was hard for him to put you down. Not that he didn't want to- you wouldn't let go! You kept clinging to his shirt and whining until he had flopped on the bed with you. "Can't get enough of me, huh baby? Eh, I can't blame ya." 

You mumbled something along the lines of "shut up" then went back to sleep. Still adorable. Well he got cozy, gently rolling you off of him once he was sure you were asleep. That's when a loud crash came from the kitchen. A break in? 

Paul sat up- and was immediately yanked back down! "Fuck meee," he groaned, looking over at you. Really?! You were holding his HAIR?? "Ugh, babe you suck."

In a frenzy he managed to untangle the chunk of his blonde hair caught in your vice grip. Carefully he peeked around the corner of the hallway. It couldn't be your parents, he would have been able to hear their car perfectly. No this was down in the kitchen. 

Raccoon, burglar, hobo squatters, whatever he was, it was a little past midnught but he could still go for a snack. 

There was a light on in the kitchen just barely illuminating the living room adjacent to it, Paul could see some sort of shadow shifting around, clinking sounds of glass were, the fridge opening. He tore around the corner, fangs ready to dig into his newest treat. Apparently, someone else was craving a snack. 

There was a breakfast bar hanging off the counter top by the sink in the center of your kitchen, and happily wedged in a tall bar stool was a mop top kid sporting batman pajamas with a big ol' glass of milk and the jar of cookies with the lid off. 

"Whoa!"

"Oh! Shit- uh, hey kiddo," Paul stuttered.

"Shit," the kid questioned, making Paul choke. Crap! 

"Oh crap-! I mean fuc-! I mean-," he smacked his forehead in frustration just so he'd shut the hell up, plunking his butt in the stool trying to process what to say. 

The boy was still staring at him, then with a firm hand, pointed right at him. "You're a really tall cat!"

"Yeah? I like to this so." Paul chuckled, snatching a cookie from the jar, not even waiting to finish chewing before he asked him "What's your name kiddo?"

"B/N," he answered. "You're not gonna tell me sister right? I saw you wrestling with here earlier. Are you like a lion or something?"

Again, Paul nearly choked on his cookie, knocking back the milk. Fuuuuck that kid saw you guys on the couch. "Uh, yeah! You're sister is trying to be a lion tamer, so I'm helping her!" Leaning his cheek on his hand he gave him a sneaky smile. "And I won't tell on you if you don't tell on me and your sister. Your mommy and daddy wouldn't be real happy if she let a big ol' lion in."

B/N nodded firmly as if he was given the most intense secret mission of his short life. Paul just spent a few minutes with the oddball talking about video games, the best cartoons on nowadays, showing him how to stick up some devil horns and head bang. Kid was a natural! Tongue out and everything! With snack time over he shooed the boy back to bed, tucking him in awkwardly.

"Good night Mr. Lion. You're awesome," he yawned, snuggling into bed. Paul felt a twinge of guilt, knowing one day he'd have to take this kid's big sister away… maybe they'd wait just a little longer. Wedged happily inside Y/N's closet atop a pile of her unmentionables with plenty of clothes and some duct tape courtesy of said lovely babe, he couldn't help but hear the boy burst in with excitement, jumping on her bed. 

"Ugh, B/N it's like 9 am, what is it," you groaned from your bed, trying to roll back over under a pile of comforters. 

"You wouldn't believe it! I hung out with a lion last night! He was huuuuge!"

"Yeah? I met he smelled like kitty litter and weed," you half mumbled. 

Oi!

"Nuh uh! Don't you remember? He was the one you were wrestling with in the jacuzzi!"

You sat up straight, your face bright red. "You little twerp, you supposed to have been in bed by then!"

Paul had to stifle a laugh, rolling over. He'd explain it later. After all, lions weren't morning cats.

Marko

When you mentioned your parents flying to Florida to take care of your granny, he couldn't resist the urge to spend the night with you. At first you seemed opposed to the idea. You weren't supposed to have guests over! If your parents caught you home with a boy of all people, they'd kill you then dance on your grave. 

"Pretty please baby doll," he'd hugged, nuzzling his nose into your neck. He wiggled his arms around your neck, teasing beneath your ear with sweet kisses until you practically melted. "I'll be good. Honest, baby girl. No one else is gonna see me, it's not like you'll get caught."

"Well…," you'd hesitate. Well, of course all it took was those bonnie blue eyes, Marko pouting out his bottom lip. "Okay fine, but only if you don't cause any trouble."

"When do I ever?"

You were sure to stock up on snacks for the night. Chips, soda, three types of gummies. You two were the dynamic duo of sweet tooths, if it weren't for his hyper healing he was sure his fangs would've rot out by now. 

 But you were determined. Tonight had to be a perfect sleepover for you and your boyfriend. Later in the afternoon you managed to sneak into the blood drive going on at the beach and steal a cooler of AB negative. After all, it was a special night.

 In regards to the sun, you had made up the guest room with heavy curtains tightly taped to the wall to prevent any light. You even made sure the closet was cleared if that wasn't enough. 

You were so excited once he arrived, practically jumping into his arms. Marko gushed over how cute your room was. Posters, plushies, a plethora of reading material along a wall-height bookshelf, although once he spotted your bed there wasn't much talking left over. When you two were all done having a good ol' time doing the Devil's tango, you insisted on him having a home cooked meal for once. 

"Don't you ever get tired of greasy, soggy chow mein," you ask, sauteing a pan of teriyaki soaked beef. 

"It is not soggy," Marko insisted, feigning offense. 

"You didn't say it wasn't greasy though."

After you two fattened up on a sundae making contest, you crashed on the couch with him, laying comfortably on top wiggled tightly in his arms. Even Marko grew drowsy slurping on the end of a blood pack. You were just so sweet and soft, he couldn't resist the allure of the perfect cuddle partner. Eyes were drooping, almost dozing off.

The sound of clinking glass in the kitchen jolted him awake. You two were supposed to be alone, or so he thought. 

It was nearly impossible to wiggle out from underneath you. When he began to move you verbally whined, holding onto him. "Shhh she it's okay baby girl. I'll be right back," he cooed, lifting you up then laying you back down on the couch. Draping his leather jacket over you, his heart nearly kickstarted again when you snuggled up against it with a weary smile. "Oh you're gonna bring me back to life just to kill me, babe."

Again that loud thump in the kitchen drew his attention. Someone must've either been real stupid or had some twisted death wish to break into your house. With teeth bared he stepped in, swinging the door open. 

Oh! At first he thought maybe it was a raccoon, but following the trail of candy wrappers led him right to the culprit. A guilty six year old covered in chocolate. 

"Well, hey there," Marko chimed, crouching down to look at him. "Where'd you come from?"

"My room," the smart mouth retorted, trying to hide the candy behind him. "Are you some sort of cheetah?"

Marko burst out laughing, the light glinting off his set of fangs. "Heck yeah I am. And who are you?"

"I'm B/N," he mumbled. "Is that why you and my sister were having a roaring contest earlier?"

It was hard not to laugh at that, biting on his bottom lip. "Yeah, but you gotta keep it a secret, okay? It's official Cheetah business, I'm sure you understand."

B/N was a tricky one, Marko could definitely see the family resemblance once he asked

"What do I get if I'm quiet?"

Tricky little bugger wasn't he? That smirk was so familiar it was almost weird. Kudos to this kid for playing the hustle. Bad judge of character though. Marko leaned close and grinned, baring his fangs again. "Well, for one I won't eat you."

The boy gasped, but instead of crying he just laughed. "Okay, deal. Throw in a candy bar?"

"Hm.." Marko tilted his head still squatting in a frog position with his hands resting on his knees. "Well I can't argue with that. You got a deal, kiddo."

Escorting the boy back to his room, Marko crossed his arms as he leaned against the doorway. "You're pretty smart, kiddo."

"Yeah, Y/N always say never get played for a sucker," he sighed between yawns. Typical. He was nearly hustled by a 6 year old. Waltzing back to you he lifted you up still wrapped in his jacket and laid you in your room. If you had been alone he probably would've kept you in the guest room with him. But somebody had to watch the little punk. So wearily he slunk into the quiet room, locking the door for extra measure so no nosey kids came bursting in. He hadn't heard much while he was sleeping that day, but when he came our again you were frazzled after putting your brother to bed around 7pm. Apparently he insisted there was a talking cheetah in the house with a bad attitude who wanted to eat him. "Nah," Marko insisted, shrugging his shoulders with a smirk. "I hear punk kids are too tough and chewy for cheetahs to eat."

[newstfionline]

Sleep Is the New Status Symbol

By Penelope Green, NY Times, April 8, 2017

At M.I.T.’s Media Lab, the digital futurist playground, David Rose is investigating swaddling, bedtime stories and hammocks, as well as lavender oil and cocoons. Mr. Rose, a researcher, an inventor-entrepreneur and the author of “Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire and the Internet of Things,” and his colleagues have been road-testing weighted blankets to induce a swaddling sensation and listening to recordings of Icelandic fairy tales--all research into an ideal sleep environment that may culminate in a nap pod, or, as he said, “some new furniture form.”

“For me, it’s a swinging bed on a screened porch in northwestern Wisconsin,” he said. “You can hear the loons and the wind through the fir trees, and there’s the weight of 10 blankets on top of me because it’s a cold night. We’re trying a bunch of interventions.”

Meanwhile, at the University of California, Berkeley, Matthew P. Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory there, is working on direct current stimulation as a cure for sleeplessness in the aging brain. Dr. Walker is also sifting through the millions of hours of human sleep data he has received from Sense, a delicately lovely polycarbonate globe designed to look like the National Stadium in Beijing that measures air quality and other intangibles in your bedroom, then suggests tweaks to help you sleep better.

“I’ve got a mission,” he said. “I want to reunite humanity with the sleep it is so bereft of.” Sense is the first product made by Hello Inc., a technology company started by James Proud, a British entrepreneur, for which Dr. Walker is the chief scientist.

In Paris, Hugo Mercier, a computer science engineer, has invested in sound waves. He has raised over $10 million to create a headband that uses them to induce sleep. The product, called Dreem, has been beta-tested on 500 people (out of a pool of 6,500 applicants, Mr. Mercier said) and will be ready for sale this summer.

That is when Ben Olsen, an Australian entrepreneur, hopes to introduce Thim, a gadget you wear on your finger that uses sound to startle you awake every three minutes for an hour, just before you go to sleep. Sleep disruptions, apparently, can cure sleep disruption (and Mr. Olsen, like all good sleep entrepreneurs, has the research to prove it). It is his second sleep contraption. His first, the Re-Timer, a pair of goggles fitted with tiny green-blue lights that shine back into your eyes, aims to reset your body’s clock. He said that since 2012, he had sold 30,000 pairs in 40 countries.

For years, studies upon studies have shown how bad sleep weakens the immune system, impairs learning and memory, contributes to depression and other mood and mental disorders, as well as obesity, diabetes, cancer and an early death. (Sedated sleep--hello Ambien--has been shown to be as deleterious as poor sleep.)

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls sleeplessness a public health concern. Good sleep helps brain plasticity, studies in mice have shown; poor sleep will make you fat and sad, and then will kill you. It is also expensive: Last year, the RAND Corporation published a study that calculated the business loss of poor sleep in the United States at $411 billion--a gross domestic product loss of 2.28 percent.

Companies now fight “presenteeism,” a neologism that describes the lackluster performance of foggy-brained, sleep-deprived employees, with sleep programs like Sleepio, an online sleep coach, and sleep fairs, like the one hosted last month in Manhattan by Nancy H. Rothstein, director of Circadian Corporate Sleep Programs and otherwise known as the Sleep Ambassador, for LinkedIn. For the last few years, Ms. Rothstein has been designing sleep education and training programs for a number of Fortune 500 companies. At the LinkedIn sleep fair, she taught attendees how to make a bed (use hospital corners, please) and gave out analog alarm clocks. (It was her former husband’s snoring, she said, that led her to a career as a sleep evangelist.)

If sleep used to be the new sex, as Marian Salzman, a trend spotter and chief executive of Havas PR North America, proclaimed 10 years ago, today it is a measure of success--a skill to be cultivated and nourished--as a “human potential enhancer,” as one West Coast entrepreneur told me, and life extender.

“Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body,” Dr. Walker of U.C. Berkeley said. “We have a saying in medicine: What gets measured, gets managed.”

Sleep entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and beyond have poured into the sleep space, as branders like to say--a $32 billion market in 2012--formerly inhabited by old-style mattress and pharmaceutical companies.

“I can see sleep being another weapon in competitive parenting and career-building,” Ms. Salzman said. “If you want your child to succeed, do you have to buy them these sleep devices? Sleep is personal, it’s class, not mass, and now the sleep industry is based on technical services, customized for me. It’s a bizarre marriage of high tech and low tech. Chamomile tea is going to have a resurgence, as the antithesis to the whole pharma thing.”

The familiar paradigm of success used to center on the narrative of the short sleeper: Corporate titans and world leaders--like Martha Stewart and our last two presidents--counted abbreviated rest as proof of their prowess. It turns out that short sleepers, as they are known, may have a genetic mutation, as Arianna Huffington pointed out in her 2016 book, “The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time.”

(It’s worth noting that George W. Bush, formerly a sleep outlier among his presidential peers for clocking in around nine hours of nightly shut-eye, along with a daily nap, is newly popular.)

The Army has proclaimed sleep a pillar of peak soldier performance. Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, who used to take a sleeping bag to work when he was a lowly computer programmer, has said that his eight hours of sleep each night were good for his stockholders. Ms. Huffington’s new company, Thrive Global, whose first-round investors include the internet entrepreneur Sean Parker and the venture capital firm Greycroft Partners, is working with Accenture, JP Morgan Chase and Uber, among other companies, on antiburnout programming, which educates their employees on the importance of sleep. Aetna, the health care company, is paying its workers up to $500 a year if they can prove they have slept for seven hours or more for 20 days in a row.

But the growing pile of apps, gizmos and gurus--some from unlikely corners--has led to “pandemonium in the bedroom,” Ms. Rothstein said.

In 2015, the actor Jeff Bridges made a spoken-word album, “Dreaming With Jeff,” a project for Squarespace, that reached No. 2 on Billboard’s New Age chart and raised $280,000 for the No Kid Hungry campaign, for which he is the national spokesman. He collaborated with Keefus Ciancia, the composer and music producer, on a truly weird collection of quasi-bedtime stories, musings about death and also a humming song, with Mr. Bridges’s familiar gruff voice and all manner of ambient sounds that many listeners found more alarming than sleep-inducing.

“I don’t know where this is leading,” Mr. Bridges said the other day, “but I’m steeping myself in the subject. We’re working on something called Sleep Club, which will be sort of a hub for all things sleep related.”

“Dreaming With Jeff” made me anxious, as did “Sleep With Me,” a podcast by Drew Ackerman, a gravelly voiced librarian in San Francisco, whose ���boring bedtime stories” are designed to cure insomnia and are downloaded at a rate of 1.3 million a month, as The New Yorker reported last year. I’m more drawn to the thousands of “songs” in Spotify’s Sleep Sound Library, particularly “full gutters” and “office air-conditioners,” and I have a white noise machine. But recently, desperately, I craved a more substantial intervention, perhaps a cure for the 3 a.m. fretting that has plagued me for years.

Mr. Mercier sent me his Dreem headset, a weighty crown of rubber and wire that he warned would be a tad uncomfortable. The finished product, about $400, he said, will be much lighter and slimmer. But it wasn’t the heft of the thing that had me pulling it off each night. It skeeved me out that it was reading--and interfering with--my brain waves, a process I would rather not outsource.

I was just as wary of the Re-Timer goggles, $299, which make for a goofy/spooky selfie in a darkened room. My eye sockets glowed a deep fluorescent green, and terrified the cat.

The Ghost Pillow, $85, has “patent-pending thermo-sensitivity technology” designed to keep your head cool. It is wildly comfy, but when I read what it is made from, a polyurethane foam, I lost sleep. I bought a Good Night Light LED Sleep bulb, $28, which comes with its own “patented technology” to support your body’s melatonin production. I can’t tell if that’s what happened, but since the bulb is too dim for my middle-aged eyes, I struggled to read my go-to sleep aid, a worn copy of “The Pursuit of Love,” by Nancy Mitford, and knocked off a good half-hour earlier than usual. I was up again at 3 a.m., however, as my new Sense pod alerted me the next day, through an app on my phone. And again at 5 a.m., when the cat swatted the pod off the night stand and it glowed red in protest. “There was a noise disturbance,” the app explained.

My so-called sleep summary, as provided by Sense, was both compelling and off-putting. Why is my air quality “not ideal”? And how comfortable am I sharing my sleep habits with a Silicon Valley start-up?

Ms. Rothstein, the sleep ambassador, is less bothered by privacy concerns than by the temptation to wakefulness that phone interfaces pose. And nearly every gizmo seemed to have one.

“We’ve lost the simplicity of sleep. All this writing, all these websites, all this stuff. I’m thinking, Just sleep. I want to say: ‘Shh. Make it dark, quiet and cool. Take a bath.’”

Ms. Rothstein taught me her relaxation recipe, a practice that mixed gratitude with body awareness and breathing. Start with your toes, she said, and thank your body parts for their hard work. (My favorite: “Knees, I know it’s not always easy for you. You can rest now.”)

Still, the best sleep I’ve had in weeks cost $22, and lasted 33 minutes. It was a Deep Rest “class” at Inscape, a meditation studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan designed by Winka Dubbeldam, the sought-after Dutch architect, to evoke the temple at Burning Man, and other esoteric spaces, and created by Khajak Keledjian, a founder, with his brother, Haro, of Intermix, which they sold to the Gap for $130 million in 2013.

Mr. Keledjian, a meditator, aims to make the practice both secular and modern: a “mindful luxury,” he said. Though there are human “facilitators” in each class, who gently touch the feet of snoring attendees if they get too loud, the practice is guided by a recording made by an Australian female member of Mr. Keledjian’s company. “We call her ‘Skye,’” he said. It was lunchtime on a rainy Tuesday, and I settled onto a soft mat outfitted with a bolster, a pillow and a cozy fleece blanket. “Skye” urged me to stay awake, and then delivered a script like Ms. Rothstein’s, in mellifluous antipodean tones. I drifted once or twice, and from the muffled snorts of the other attendees, they did too. That night, I slept until dawn.