Don’t stay up too late—keep a responsible and satisfying sleep schedule thanks to a vicious beast that will live in your house!

Background:

Taking a nap in the late afternoon can be a very appealing prospect.

The issue:

Unfortunately, a late-in-the-day nap can easily mess up a person’s sleep schedule, causing them to stay up until 3 AM.

What is needed for most people is some sort of “nap deterrent” that will promote a daylight-hour-compatible sleep schedule. (Individuals who work a night shift can replace “nocturnal” with ”diurnal” in the idea below.)

Proposal:

To promote a nighttime sleep schedule, we obtain a vicious nocturnal animal and train it to sleep on the user’s bed during the day (Figure 1).

The exact method of training this adversarial animal companion is left as an exercise to the reader.

Once the sun sets (and the animal wakes up), the bed will again become appealing for sleeping in.

***Fig. 1:*** Left: this snake (or “danger noodle” as zoologists call it) coils up on the bed during the daytime, making it difficult for anyone else to sleep in the bed. Right: at night, the bed becomes unoccupied and the animal slithers around the house incessantly. As an added bonus, the unsettling slithering could encourage its owner to go to bed rather than stay awake in constant fear.

Details:

Ideally, this animal would be cold-blooded, so as to reduce its feeding requirements and make the whole setup more eco-friendly.

PROS: Helps maintain a schedule that is compatible with standard business hours and the waking hours of most other human beings.

CONS: The same thing might be accomplished by just getting a really angry cat, so it’s hard to see how anyone could make money off this idea.