Have you ever wondered what kinds of noises you make while sleeping? Well, here’s a fart. The Pokémon Sleep app that’s just been released in the United States not only tries to track the length and quality of sleep, it also can also track and record the various sounds that you make. And spoiler alert, you probably don’t sound quite like Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World” while snoozing because “release” is one of the operative words when you’re not awake.
Here’s how Pokémon Sleep works. When you are about to go to sleep, you can put your smartphone face down under or beside your pillow. If you are not crazy about bathing your head in your smartphone’s electromagnetic fields all night, you can alternatively purchase a standalone peripheral—a little pokéball—from the Pokémon Company. This peripheral bears the name Pokémon Go Plus+. The plus sign is there because there’s already been a Pokémon Go Plus. When you are ready to sleep, you can press the button on the app or the Pokémon Go Plus+ to make it go and then press the button again when you ready to stop the app’s tracking and get out of bed.
This is a game that you can literally play in your sleep. You can accumulate points while slumbering not by sleep-collecting characters but simply based on your dozing like how close you get to sleeping eight-and-a-half hours a night. The next morning—assuming that you aren’t a vampire and sleep at night rather than during the day—the app will provide you with various stats, such as the length of your sleep, the time you fell asleep, the time that you spent snoring, the time that you wake up and other measurements.
Not surprisingly, people on Reddit have already been talking about game cheats, something that happens shortly after any new game is released. Changing the clock date and time on your phone can make it seem like you’ve gotten more sleep than you have—because who wants a good night’s sleep anyway, right? As you can imagine that kind of defeats the whole stated purpose of the game—to help you catch more ZZZZs, which ain’t a Pokémon character but a different way of saying more than 90 minutes of sleep at a time.
When you do get ZZZZs during the night, you earn “Drowsy Power.” This allows you to meet a range of adorable Pokémon in your campsite, add to your Pokédex, and feed the Snorlax during the day. And thus your sleep habits have been gamified.
The app can also offer you audio recordings so that you can get wind of the sounds that you produced during your slumber. These recordings can be saved and shared, just in case you wanted to send your significant other something something for his or her birthday. Some Pokémon Sleep users did decide to air those recordings on social media—because that’s the type of stuff that you want to be hearing from random people. For example, @TheDarkMesh got on the horn, so to speak, and posted the following:
No, that wasn’t someone trying to play the trumpet piece to The Beatles’ “All You Need is Love.” It was presumably a fart—you know that thing that you claim that you don’t do.
Of course, not all farts are created equal. It’s common to hear a number of variations of gas leaving you-know-where. Another Pokémon Sleep user offered this toot-in-common recording:
As you can see by the response to the original toot tweet—or maybe twoot—you can choose to disable this recording feature. It’s not as if the app says, “You will listen to what I have to put up with all night.”
Listen to yourself sleeping can provide useful information. For example, getting a sense of your breathing patterns and snoring could alert you to issues such as sleep apnea, which is when your breathing essentially stops during your slumber. This can be the result of your upper airway becoming blocked or your brain not sending the signals necessary for your to breathe. Sleep apnea can not only diminish the quality of your sleep leaving you more tired during the day, it could potentially have serious long term health effects.
Knowing how often and how loudly you fart is probably less useful. There are some things that you can do if you are leaving your bed and whoever else is in it rather a-gassed so to speak. You could try to swallow less air while eating, not chew gum, avoid consuming gas producing or gas-filled like carbonated beverages and beans, and get more physical activity. The recordings could help explain some things too, such as why your partner keeping insisting on not sleeping over with you.
Keep in mind that neither Pokémon Sleep nor any other app that has not been officially medically tested should take the place of a formal sleep study conducted by a legitimate medical professional. Without peer-reviewed published scientific studies, it is difficult to tell whether a given app is accurately tracking what it supposed to track. Nevertheless, you can probably tell the accuracy of some of the measurements. For example, you likely do know when you went to bed and got out of bed. And those unspeakable noises on the recordings are probably indeed coming from you, assuming that you aren’t sleeping on something like a whoopee cushion or someone didn’t sneak into your bed to fart in the middle of the night.
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