Future of Sleep: Call for Pitches for Our January Theme Week

"You'll sleep when you're dead." The Motherboard team recently had an argument over the meaning of this phrase: half of us thought it was a bad thing, like you're working so hard that you won't sleep until you're dead, while the other half thought it was a good thing, like, you'll have plenty of time to sleep when you're dead so you should live life to the fullest now.

Either way, sleep is highly unpopular in 2015. Whether it's because instead we want to work or instead we want to party, no one wants to do it. Modern society often forces us to conform to a schedule that conflicts with our natural sleep rhythm, which has disastrous effects on the body—if sleep deprivation doesn't get you, sleeping in will. The magic pill that can replace the need to sleep is perhaps as vaunted in science fiction as the elimination of aging. Entrepreneurs are working on it. The military is working on it. Biohackers are working on it.

As we wait for our magic pill, technology is also trying to help us maximize the sleep we are getting. Make your sleep more productive, in other words. We've got EEGs, apps, sleeping pills, and lucid dreaming masks. We're working on human hibernation. Until then, YouTube offers hypnosis videos for the 21st century insomniac.

All these newfangled sleep mods are becoming, seemingly, increasingly necessary. Many of us stare at screens for eight hours a day and then sleep with our smartphones under our pillows. What does that do to our sleep?

Motherboard is running YOU'LL SLEEP WHEN YOU'RE DEAD, a week of stories from January 18 to 22 about the present and future of sleep. Pitch your favorite Motherboard editor or hit the party line at editor@motherboard.tv.

As usual, please send your pitches with a proposed headline, deck, three to four sentence description that does not consist of a series of questions, word count, and deadline.