On Monday night, I found myself in a meditative ‘sound bath’, lying on my back in an oversized Pokémon-themed hoodie, and surrounded by journalists and influencers.
At one end of the room, someone banged a series of gongs in a manner that made my eardrums vibrate – he described himself as a “sound bath guru” – at the other, dim strains of Blur’s Parklife filtered through from the hotel’s restaurant. Ten minutes in, somebody started snoring.
All for a good cause, I told myself. Half an hour later we were all given smartphones loaded up with the Pokémon Company’s latest project to test-run: a sleep tracking app. Let’s hope that the sound bath tuckered me out.
Pokémon Sleep has been in the works since 2019, and is set to launch later this year. At its core, it’s the sleep-tracking equivalent of Pokémon Go. The aim of the game, delivered via lecture from our handy in-app helper Professor Neroli (at the start of most Pokémon games, a made up prof explains the rules to you under the guise of you conducting some sort of scientific research), is to take care of a sleepy Snorlax, a rotund creature that looks a lot like the title character from Studio Ghibli classic My Neighbour Totoro. This creature’s sleep magnetism (yes, this is now a thing) also draws in other Pokémon during the night to befriend and take care of.
That’s where you come in, humble Pokémon trainer. The app monitors your movement and breathing to establish how much sleep you’re having, and what kind; it then assigns a score that will influence how strong the Snorlax’s drowsy powers are (and how many Pokémon you can attract to your phone overnight).
The type of Pokémon you collect depend on your sleep ‘type’. These are divided into categories of dozing, snoozing and slumbering – that is, light, medium and heavy sleep. I was pegged as a ‘slumberer’ for my seven-hour stint, which merited a score of 82 – and as a result, drew in three heavy sleeping Pokémon types, including a Squirtle and a Pichu. I then bribed my new pals with Poke Biscuits to cement our friendship and ensure they’d stick around. Over the course of a week, your sleep score increases, thus attracting rarer and more desirable critters. Then, the whole thing starts over in a new location after seven days.
Making sense so far? To make things even more complicated, players can feed their Snorlax to further boost its powers (three times a day, no less – I look after this thing better than I do myself) and get their little friends to collect up berries and food. The Pokémon discovered are then added to the player’s rolodex; the aim, as with all Pokémon games, is to collect them all.
Whew. As might be evident from the above, it’s all a bit time-consuming. The app itself needs to be running all throughout the night and needs to be placed on your mattress in order to accurately monitor your data. But not under a pillow or blanket, or it could overheat. Not exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep (though the upcoming separate Pokémon Plus + gadget can be synced to the app and used in its place).
There is some sophisticated stuff at play here. The sleep-tracking app was developed with top sleep-monitoring expert Dr. Masashi Yanagisawa, and does all the stuff that a regular tracker can do: analysing sleep cycles, recording notably loud audio during the night, and determining sleep quality. All the stuff, in short, that makes you feel guilty for going to bed too late.
It does also require you to have an enormous abundance of time spare to check in with your tiny fuzzy friends each morning. As a working professional, I can confirm that blearily feeding my new companions Poke Biscuits every morning to cement our friendship goes slightly above and beyond on the commitment-o-meter - though hey, it’s a fun way to brighten up the commute.
For younger audiences, though? I can imagine this stuff would be catnip. Pokémon have cracked the case – they’ve finally made an incentive for kids (and grown-up kids) to go to bed on time. For that alone it’s worth the price of admission.
