Hey, Sleepy, Want to Buy a Good Nap?

ALEXIUS OTTO, a junior at Hunter College in Manhattan, has a perfectly good bed in his apartment in the East Village. But twice over the last month he has paid to take short snoozes at Yelo, a new salon on West 57th Street that sells anxious New Yorkers the promise of a brief but cocooning sleep.

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PILLOW TALK There are now so many products dedicated to inducing sleep that an insomniac might try counting them instead of sheep, including body washes, balms, mists and aromatic roll-ons to apply to pulse points.

Yelo consists of seven private chambers that can be rented for 20- to 40-minute naps. Each hexagonal pod has a beige leather recliner, dimmed lighting, a soporific soundtrack and a blanket of Nepalese cashmere. Clients may also book reflexology treatments, designed to lull the body to sleep, for their hands or feet starting at .

On a recent Thursday, Mr. Otto lounged on a bench in Yelo's lobby, waiting for a sleeping pod to become available. He was hoping that a nap in a cubicle far from the distractions of home would help balance his chaotic college life. He often forgoes sleep in favor of studying, meeting friends and looking for part-time work, he said.

"I'm going out tonight to meet someone about a job," said Mr. Otto, who was visiting a friend nearby and had dropped in for a 20-minute nap. Cost: . "The nap will help refocus me."

Sleep is the new bottled water. Although it can be had free, it is increasingly being marketed as an upscale amenity. Nationwide, sales of prescription sleeping medications reached about billion in the first nine months of last year, according to IMS Health, a healthcare research firm. That does not include the more than billion spent on nocturnal accouterments like pillowtop mattresses, adjustable beds, hypoallergenic pillows, white-noise machines and monogrammed cashmere pajamas.

And now, at a time when spas are treating everything from acne to smoking addiction, sleep is becoming a province of the wellness industry. Spa Finder, a company that compiles spa directories and publishes Luxury Spa Finder magazine, is forecasting sleep as a top spa trend for 2007.

"More clients are talking about it and more spas are offering treatments," said Susie Ellis, the president of Spa Finder. "We are starting to see some spas doing sleep medicine or sleep education programs while others are creating sleep environments with enhanced bedding and wake-up systems that don't involve loud alarm clocks."

But do Americans truly need more sleep? An often-quoted estimate from the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research of the National Institutes of Health said that up to 70 million Americans - almost one out of three adults - have some kind of sleep problem.

But the Center for the Advancement of Health, a nonprofit group in Washington that advocates using science as a basis for making health decisions, has criticized the statistic in its newsletter, saying that it is based more on extrapolation than on hard epidemiological data.

Jessie Gruman, the president of the center, likened the occasional sleepless night to adolescence, menopause and balding, calling them all "normal human conditions that have become medicalized."

"Now when people can't sleep for a couple of nights, they think they are part of a national sleep epidemic and there should be something to fix it," Ms. Gruman said. "You can buy sexual arousal, a new shape for your face, a skinnier silhouette, so why shouldn't you be able to buy sleep?"

According to TNS Media Intelligence, pharmaceutical companies spent almost 2 million in the first nine months of last year on advertisements for the most popular sleeping pills, marketing the idea that interrupted sleep or the lack of instantaneous sleep are alarming conditions that require intervention.

Sleep is the top concern among her clientele of hypercompetitive stockbrokers, time-pressed mothers and overworked students, said Abby Fazio, the chief pharmacist and an owner of New London Pharmacy on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea.

"The No. 1 question I get is: ‘How can I fall asleep without a prescription?' " said Ms. Fazio, who counsels clients in a small frosted-glass room behind shelves stocked with homeopathic remedies. "Back when I started working here as a student in the 1970s, only the elderly were on sleeping aids, but now it's everybody ages 25 to 40."

There are no end of products to treat self-diagnosed sleep problems. Ms. Fazio recommends nonprescription melatonin pills as well as herbal items that contain lavender or chamomile and are meant to induce calm before bedtime, leading to a more restful sleep, she said.

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