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The Night Coaster: For Considerate Snoozers
Posted by Matt Hickey at 1:00 PM on August 7, 2008
The Night Coaster is a small device you keep on your bedside table to host anything you might need during the night, like eyeglasses or your cigarettes or keys for the handcuffs. The neat bit is that it has a motion sensor that makes the coaster glow as you reach over to it, but not enough to wake your partner, just enough so that you can get what you need quietly. I believe this would be a great low-cost gift for the wedding of a couple you don't really care about that much. [Taylor Gifts via 7Gadgets via Geek.com]
We spend around a third of our lives asleep... but that can't justify spending US$60,000 on a bed, can it? The makers of Cosmovoide think it can. Their luxury bed is shaped like an egg (to either give you Morkian dreams, or wrap you up in cozy cosmic harmony or some such nonsense), has hammock-like suspending springs, seven rainbow-coloured LEDs, a telephone, and a DVD/home theatre set-up including a TV at its foot. Most fascinating? Its twin "electric relaxation bed frames," which just get the mind boggling. That price is the base model, by the way: it's customisable, according to its crazy French manufacturers. [
There's a Lucid Dream Machine sleeping mask on Instructables that pulses LEDs in your eyelids four hours after you fall asleep, waking you up just enough to notice your dreams and control their outcomes. The mask requires a fair bit of soldering and programming experience, so it isn't for DIY luddites like me. Which is good, because my sleep is too precious and my dreams are too weird to want one of these anyway. [
I am all about taking naps whenever the opportunity presents itself. The problem is that getting comfortable is often a major obstacle when there is no bed in sight. The Pilo Pilo ring from the Downstairs Studio offers a solution by attaching a tiny cushion to the end of a ring so that you can prop your head up on a soft surface. Unfortunately, those of us with freakish cartoon heads would probably find this method to be ineffective. What we need is something with more surface area--like a 
The glo Pillow is an alarm clock (alarm pillow?) that wakes you up by shining a gradually intensifying light in your face for 40 minutes, until it reaches a blazing, blinding crescendo. If that sounds uncomfortable, your significant other smacking the crap out of you for smashing the snooze button every five minutes is probably worse (unless you're into that kind of thing). [
Useful for Austin Powers wannabes living in tiny apartments is the BedUp: a bed that retracts into the ceiling. Saving you up to 30 square feet, the bed slides up when you're not using it and can even have lighting integrated into its underside— so much more 21st Century than the flip-up closet Murphy beds. 
