“Sweet Dreams”
Medical breakthrough gives you hours of sleep in just minutes
By J. F. Lawton, July 14, 2026.
At least, if you’re a mouse. A team at McDonnell University, led by Doctor Meir Fattouh, have managed to trick the bodies of mice into thinking they’ve gotten a full night’s sleep in as little as five minutes. This is accomplished by giving the mice a medical cocktail containing between six and nine medicines, and then placing them in a chamber where they are subjected to an oscillating, ultrasonic signal. The interaction of the medicines and ultrasonic signal mimic the physiological effects of sleep.
But don’t plan to binge your favorite show all night and still manage to be well rested for your day job. First off, of the medicines used in the cocktail, only two – tranylcypromine and fluoxitane – have been approved for use in humans. But more importantly, as pointed out by Doctor Fattouh, if this process can safely be used on humans, it would be used to treat patients who suffer from chronic insomnia and other sleep disorders. “It’s not meant to replace natural sleep for those of us who can do that,” he stated.…
Catch up on your sleep during your lunch break
By Billy Babbage, April 21, 2042.
We’ve all been there. You stayed up half the night to finish that series despite having to go to work in the morning. And now you can barely keep your eyes open. In days of old, you’d grab another cup of coffee and just forge through. But now you can stay up all night, and still be well rested. All it takes is a $1.3 million investment in a RheumPod.
In a RheumPod, a person takes a pill, and they are then subjected to an ultrasonic signal for ten minutes. The interaction between the medicine and ultrasonic signal trick the body into thinking it has gotten a full night of sleep.
Of course, few people can afford a personal RheumPod, which is why most of the customers are mega corporations who buy them so their employees can use them. As Bernardino López, a regional safety officer of Khedya Mart, pointed out, “The RheumPod has been a huge benefit to our company. We’ve seen a drastic decrease in the number of accidents resulting from sleepy employees. In addition, an employee can work their eight-hour shift, then take a half-hour break to get something to eat and go into the RheumPod, and then they can safely work another shift.” …
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If you liked this story, you might want to check out A Man of Few Words, my collection of fifty stories all under 1000 words.