5 ways to make money by sleeping

The fact that bed testing is a hugely popular job, hardly comes as a surprise.

When luxury bed specialists Simon Horn, makers of the Savior Beds for the Savoy Hotel, asked for participants for their month-long “sleep survey” in 2009, they received 600 applications within 48 hours.

Roslin Madigan was chosen for this specific job, as her application stood out because of the quality of her writing. Besides sleeping on top of designer mattresses, the winner needed to be articulate and interested in writing about their experience. She got paid £1,000 to sleep in luxury beds every day for a month.

Similarly, when Drew Iwanicki answered NASA’s 2013 advertisement looking for participants to lie in bed for an uninterrupted 70 days, he was one of 25,000 applicants.

Whereas Madigan was chosen for her writing ability, Iwanicki was chosen on the grounds of his physical health, making him a suitable candidate for the kind of data NASA was looking to collect. He received a whopping $18,000 for his time in bed.

Now, it’s also not every day you will stumble upon a NASA job spec of this order. There are, however, other opportunities to sleep for the sake of scientific advancement.

These jobs won’t always be advertised as such, so the best way to find out about them would be to make yourself available for clinical trials. Of course, this may include a wide range of experimental treatments, so you seriously have to be up for some… interesting challenges.

Depending on what kind of trial you take part in, how invasive the trials are and how long they take, you can earn anything from £100 to about £4,000.

If you have mastered the art of sleeping, you may be able to help other exhausted people do the same by becoming a sleep coach.

Now, the term ‘sleep coaching’ is most often associated with babies and toddlers whose overwrought parents need an extra pair of hands to help them sail off to la-la land at night.

However, an increasing number of adults are turning to this form of therapy to combat their own insomnia too.

Of course, to be able to help others, you will need to know exactly what it is that helps you fall asleep at night and articulate it effectively.

Once you’ve mastered this, you have a couple of options:

• Compile an eBook for people to download at a suitable price
• Present a workshop and sell tickets for people to attend
• Do a paid online seminar
• Start your own consultancy

As more and more companies are following the lead of Google and the likes in embracing the power of the nap, sleeping pods are becoming an increasingly important office feature.

If you’re into innovations, this is a great emerging industry to invest in.

If you’re a musician, you could always put your abilities to good use by creating soothing songs that will help people fall asleep.