The Psyduck of sleep

The Pokémon Company has revealed its development of Pokémon Sleep, an app that will track players’ sleeping time and incorporate the data into its gameplay.

In his quest to make sleep entertaining, chief executive Tsunekazu Ishihara is entering a realm where many have fallen short. Celebrated French director Michel Gondry, for example, once thought it would be a good idea to make The science of sleep, which turned out to be a really bad film.

Key to promoting sleep to a marquee event for Pokémon trainers, then, will surely be preserving it as a personal experience.

Someone sharing the dream they had last night is often a boring ordeal – one topped only by someone making that observation as if it’s new – but to the individual, sleep can be a spiritual journey around their own psyche. That’s what tempts us into putting it into words or art and turning people off us for life.

That’s also what enables Pokémon to gatecrash the mundane prospect of going to bed by adding some meaning to our sleeping patterns and tapping into our boundless self-obsession.

Judging by how it’s already repurposed our churches into Mewtwo’s local Fitness Firsts, making bedtime fun should be a walk in the park. We’ll probably have our first Pokémon Poo by 2022.