Power Nap Alarm
I read once that Einstein was a napper, and that he had an interesting method of napping. He’d put his keys in his hand and his hand over the side of his chair, and when he’d fallen asleep deeply enough that he’d let the keys drop, the noise of the keys hitting the floor would wake him up. A kind of a mechanically timed nap that can’t get into too deep a sleep.
I don’t think my keys hitting the floor would wake me up, though. So how about a device that would go on a keychain and could be set by a switch to making an alarm clock sound upon impact after a short fall.
Tags: power nap alarm, product idea
June 5th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Not to nitpick, but just because it’s such a fun, crazy book — it was Salvador Dalí, not Einstein, who did the power-nap-with-key. (He used a plate, upside down on the floor, to augment the noise. I suppose a busted cymbal could fit the bill if you’re a sound sleeper.)
In his book “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship“, amidst exploring the lost magic of the paints the Old Masters used and his “Ten rules for him who wishes to be a painter” (#8: ‘Painter, Paint!’; #9: “Painter, don’t drink alcohol and chew hashish only five times in your life”) Dalí describes the “Slumber with a Key”.
“You must seat yourself in a bony armchair, … with your wrists held out in space and lubricated with oil of aspic, … to facilitate the benumbing of your hands at the moment when slumber approaches, inducing the tingling that is produced when one of your members goes to sleep — a tingling which is in reality a counterpitch, the physical ants, antidotes of the psychic ones of your redoubtable impatience to paint.”
A bizarre, wonderful book, impossible to read but filled with passages impossible to forget.
Buckminster Fuller also experimented with his sleep — among other things, he patterned his sleep patterns after a housecat’s, getting in many short, limited catnaps during the day.
June 7th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Just to add that you don’t really want to drop keys and wake up when you start to sleep properly, instead you want to complete a REM cycle and *then* wake up, according to this:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/how-to-design-the-perfect-nap.html
It’s the same intent as polyphasic sleep, where you take many naps instead of having an 8 hour sleep at night.
As for real products that would help, try looking up SleepTracker. It’s a watch that monitor’s your sleep phase and tries to wake you up in light sleep. Might work if you set it to wake you up in 10 minutes and took a nap - presumably it would sound earlier or later to match your sleep cycle.