Highlights
- Despite wanting to learn about Pokemon and improve his sleep, the author's attempts to use Pokemon Sleep have been unsuccessful due to their bad sleep pattern and technical difficulties.
- The author's sleep data has been consistently disappointing, with only a few hours of sleep and a low percentage of optimal sleep achieved.
- The author is considering deleting the Pokemon Sleep app to avoid making Snorlax, the Pokemon in the game, sad, or potentially cheating to improve their sleep results.
Pokemon is a phenomenon that has mostly passed me by. When the series started I was a teenager with a PlayStation and neither enough money nor any desire to switch allegiance to Nintendo. I mean it was 1996. I had tombs to raid while falling in love with Lara Croft. So Pokemon simply became another iconic series I never played.
Now I have kids of my own who talk about Pokemon a lot, I’ve been meaning to pick up one of the many games in our house, but I never got around to it. I needed something quick, easy and accessible. I tried a mainline game with Alpha Sapphire but one of my kids stole my DS and overrode the save file and I couldn’t face restarting. I then tried Pokemon Go but I’m not a fan of leaving my house, so that was a failure as well. So, when Pokemon Sleep was announced I thought I’d struck gold. Now I could learn the names of the Pokemon and all I had to do was sleep. It sounded perfect, and it would have been. Except my sleep pattern is bad enough to make Snorlax cry.
The names of Pokemon that aren’t Pikachu or Charmander aren’t the only thing that has eluded me for years, so has a good night’s sleep. Being autistic and having sensory processing disorder and frequent bouts of insomnia is mostly to blame, but I live in hope. One day I’ll find the perfect pillow and blanket combination that won’t be too itchy, hot, lumpy, weird, or smell wrong. I’ll lie down and drift off into a beautiful sleep, snoring peacefully for six-to-eight hours like other members of my household who will remain nameless.
Sadly it has not happened yet, so I hoped to trick my brain into sleeping by getting excited about Pokemon. I wanted to know what it made of my sleep pattern, and if I really was getting as little sleep as it felt like. So, the first night I set everything up, said goodnight to my little Snorlax and pressed the sleep button. Pikachu appeared and I thought I was set. I carefully put the phone down by my pillow and fell asleep, eventually.
In the morning, 4.30am to be precise, I picked up the phone to see what Snorlax made of my night’s ’rest’ only to find an unexpected message. “Your sleep data is invalid”. Great. One day in and I’m already being told my sleep is invalid. I think I’d been asleep for about three hours so invalid felt about right but still, it stung.
The next day I tried again. I double-checked everything and once more placed the phone carefully down beside me. This time a little further away on the bedside table right next to my head, just to make sure I didn’t accidentally yeet the phone off my bed in the night and ruin it again.
The next morning I went to wake up Snorlax to find the app completely frozen. I could do nothing at all and had to reset it. Another fail.
I was now on two strikes, and everything was riding on this third night. If I struck out again I was ready to hit delete. So I once more went through the nighttime ritual of feeding Snorlax and hitting sleep before placing the phone carefully face down, screen on, in an optimal position.
I woke up and finally, I had some data! After 90 minutes trying to get to sleep I had clocked up an enormous… four hours, pretty much evenly split between dozing and snoozing with a massive nine minutes of slumbering time. Snorlax was sad, and so was I.
Since then, I’ve managed to get a few more nights of data with similar results. When I look at my graph it seems that there’s a chart with 100 being the optimum amount of sleep you need. In the last week and a half, I’ve not yet managed to get past the 50 percent line and if any more Psyduck appear, I might turn into one.
It seems I’m destined to be a bad sleeper, no matter what I do, but at least if I hit uninstall I’m no longer making Snorlax sad. Alternatively, I may take a leaf out of my colleague Ben Sledge’s book, and simply cheat. Just don’t tell Snorlax, he’s already upset with me.