At 3:12 a.m. it woke me up to tell me my sleep score was excellent.
The LumaRest Sleep Pod arrives in a box the size of a canoe and promises to “re-engineer rest from the ground up.” It is a large white egg with a mattress inside, a curved lid that closes over you like a clam, and 31 sensors that, according to the manual, “listen to your body.” It turns out your body has a lot to say, and the pod has a lot to say back.
Setup
Setup took ninety minutes and required downloading the LumaRest app, creating an account, linking a second account for “LumaRest Community,” agreeing to 46 pages of terms, and calibrating the pod by lying in it while a calm voice asked me to “think about nothing.” I thought about the $2,400.
The first night
The lid closed with a soft hydraulic sigh. Ambient lighting dimmed from “gentle dawn” to “gentle dusk” to “gentle nothing.” A soundscape of rain began. For about four minutes, it was the most luxurious experience of my life.
Then the rain stopped and a man’s voice said, “Hey, it’s Chad from the LumaRest Sleep Stories podcast. Tonight, let’s talk about cold plunges.”
I could not find a way to turn off Chad. Chad went on for fifty-five minutes. Chad has opinions about mouth taping.
The data
In the morning the app gave me a Sleep Score of 61 (“Fair”), a Dream Quality Score of 44 (“Unremarkable”), and a Breathing Consistency Score of 88, which it then described as “concerning, because it is suspiciously high.” It recommended I upgrade to LumaRest Premium to “unlock insights.”
On night three, at 3:12 a.m., the pod woke me with a chime to tell me that my sleep score was excellent. I lay awake for the rest of the night. It noted this.
Pros
- Extremely comfortable when nothing is happening.
- The lid blocks out all light, sound, and accountability.
- My cat loves sitting on top of it and staring down through the lid like I’m a specimen.
Cons
- Chad.
- Cannot be opened from the inside during a firmware update, which happened once, at night, for eleven minutes.
- Asked me to rate my sleep on a scale of 1 to 5 every morning, then disagreed with my rating.
Verdict
The LumaRest Sleep Pod is a beautifully engineered machine for turning rest into a performance review. I slept better on night six, when it lost Wi-Fi, than on any other night. Two stars, both awarded during that outage.