Name: Extreme sleeping.
Age: As old as sleep itself.
Appearance: Terrifying.
Sleep doesn’t sound very extreme. That’s because you’re probably doing it wrong. Let me guess, you have a pillow?
Yes. And a duvet?
Yes. I suppose you also have firm ground beneath you the whole time you’re asleep, you wimp.
I think you’ll find that’s actually doing sleep right. It isn’t extreme sleeping, though, is it? There isn’t a constant sense of nerve-shredding panic permeating through your every snooze, is there?
No, because that sounds terrible. Tell that to Phoebe Smith. She is the world’s leading authority on extreme sleeping. She even wrote a book called Extreme Sleeps in 2013.
OK, great. Unrelated question: why? Look, everyone needs a hobby. Smith’s lust for sleeping precariously began when she became the first person to sleep at the top of each of mainland Britain’s most extreme points.
Again, why? After that, she embarked on what she called an “extreme sleepout”, which involved her going to sleep while dangling from Clifton Suspension Bridge, the highest trees in Wales and the top of the Alhambra theatre in Bradford.
Why are we talking about her? Oh God, she’s dead, isn’t she? No! Although it does seem she has come quite close to death in the past. Talking to the Telegraph, Smith described a hairy moment she experienced sleeping while suspended 98 metres above ground, over the mouth of the Gaping Gill cave in Yorkshire, when she encountered a problem with a supporting strut. “Something suddenly went boom,” she said. “I honestly thought it was all over.”
Jesus Christ. I know.
Still, why are we discussing her? She has used her extreme sleeping events to raise tens of thousands of pounds for the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint and has now been nominated for the Everywoman pioneer of the year award.
That’s awfully good of her. I’m sure she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t enjoy it. There must be something invigorating about the thrill of an extreme sleep. Maybe it’s the vulnerability of it, or the solitude, or the way it allows you to commune with Mother Earth.
I would be more worried about communing with the pavement. Listen, people like Smith are what makes the world great. Perhaps we could all gain something from her pursuit of extreme sleeping. It doesn’t have to be dangling from a bridge. Maybe you could fall asleep in a treehouse, or next to a lake.
Or at the wheel of a speeding juggernaut. Too extreme! Too extreme!
Do say: “I want to die peacefully in my sleep …”
Don’t say: “I want to die plummeting from a bridge.”
