A High-Tech Device With Everything From A to Zzzzz

Designer Michael Geraghty has seen the future of sleep accommodations and it is shaped like an egg, goes 2 to 3 m.p.h., and boasts a CD player, a heated, vibrating water bed and strobe lights designed to relieve stress.

It is the Strata Wishsonic, a sleep chamber that promises to lull even the most severe insomniac into blissful rest.

“We just wanted to stimulate the imagination of what we hope sleep will be in the future,” says Geraghty, president of Torrance-based Strata Flotation, which designed the water bed in the chamber and consulted on its overall design. It was built by the HB Dream Bed Company LTD of Hiroshima, Japan.

The unusual chamber sells for $150,000 but was not built for the market. Instead, it was designed to show off the wonders of sleep technology, Geraghty says. None have been sold, although HB Dream Bed sold three not-as-fancy precursors in Japan.

The red strobe lights flicker at high speeds, sending a relaxing message to the brain, Geraghty says. Switches control air temperature and the temperature of the water in the water bed, which is equipped with a massager.

If that doesn’t do the trick, slip in a CD recording of ocean waves and listen to the sound of thrashing currents emanating from 34 speakers, 28 of them tiny ones under the bed (“So you can feel the sound,” Geraghty says).

Still can’t sleep? Two TV sets, a VCR and the chamber, mounted on three wheels, move at 2 to 3 m.p.h. A closed-circuit television system provides the eyes.

“That was done just for kicks,” Geraghty says. “We joke that with our rush-hour traffic you could stay in bed until you got to the office.”