The True Dreamhelmet Story
As a lad growing up in Burbank, California, I became very aware of the importance of sleep as I saw my mother struggle by herself to raise my younger brother and me. She was one of the almost half million women made famous as ‘Rosie the Riveter’, building warplanes to fight Hitler and the Japanese during WWII. Wearing her own uniform of slacks or denim overalls and her hair done up in a bandanna, she first built Lockheed P-38 fighter planes and stayed on to build Constellations after the war.
Her generation of women, mostly small-town girls, toughened by the hard times of the Great Depression, were anxious to contribute to victory while the men were away in uniform. They were also lured by the opportunity to make a respectable income (about $1.00 per hour) at skilled factory jobs previously only available to men, and flocked to California aircraft plants and other war industries.
Because of a financial emergency, for a year or so, my mother worked two eight hour jobs to support the three of us. She would get up at 6 AM, go to her day job, come home at 5PM and sleep for a couple of hours, then get up, have a bite to eat, and go off to her night job, coming home before sunrise to get a few hours sleep, and then repeat the process. Mom would leave a list of ingredients and instructions on what to cook for her, my brother, and me – and at what time. Everything needed to be ready when she got home from work, so she didn't waste precious time cooking. Her sleep time was all-important, and could not be wasted. She had to go to sleep and stay asleep; there could be no light entering her room, and we could not make noise or disturb her.
To get to sleep immediately, I found it effective to place a pillow or some article of clothing over my head to block light and sound. This type of sleeping is called a ‘power nap’ for good reason. I learned that a small, intense, period of sleep ‘recharged my batteries’ for hours. Also, differing from the reports of some sleep researchers, it is not always necessary to sleep for hours in order to enter the alpha wave REM dream state. If you are really tired, it can happen within minutes.
After graduation I traveled, backpacking and hitchhiking across the US and around Europe and Morocco, eventually working my way back to California on a freighter out of Bremen, West Germany. Because of my experience staying in hostels on my travels, I eventually became the owner of a chain of Jim’s Hostels in Venice and San Diego in California, the North Shore of Hawaii, and Victor, Colorado. For seven years I wrote and published a book on budget accommodations called Jim’s Backpackers’ Bible.
In 1998, while sleeping on my sailboat in Marina Del Rey, California, I experienced what I hesitate to call a vision, or maybe a ‘lucid dream’. Whatever it was, I saw myself sleeping with an eye mask attached to a pillow around my head. The dream was so vivid, that when I awoke I could still remember the details of what I saw, but it was fading fast from my waking mind. I realized it was a great idea, but that I had to write it down or make a sketch before I forgot it. I rapidly wrote and sketched on a note pad, and at that point the Dreamhelmet, like magic, jumped over from the dream world into our world of conscious reality, as lines on paper.
To protect my invention, I joined The Inventors' Assistance League, and kept a strict inventor's journal. I then enlisted the sewing expertise of Sandy, a visiting Australian fashion designer friend of mine, to sew some sleep mask pillow prototypes, placing a special sound-blocking foam in the pillow over the ears. I soon perfected a workable prototype based on my dream-inspired drawing. Then, through a patent attorney, I applied for, and was awarded, a patent on the Dreamhelmet, as a sensory inhibitor; a sleep mask attached to a pillow that blocks sound as well as light. The versatile product that resulted from this dream would combine the functions of eye masks, pillows, neck supports, and often earplugs.
Because of my experiences traveling on a shoestring, and later providing lodging for adventure travelers (backpackers) sleeping in unusual places and situations, I decided to call this dream product the Dreamhelmet. Because it was designed for adventurers in real life as well as protecting the sleeper, teddybear-like, during adventures in the waking, as well as, the dream world. Consequently, we think of sleeping with the Dreamhelmet as ‘adventure sleep’.
Today, the Dreamhelmet also helps its owner protect valuables (secret "HiPockets"), keep hands warm (converts to a muff), and wake up on time (place alarm watch in secret HiPockets).
Comedian Howie Mandel saw the Dreamhelmet advertised and was so intrigued with it that he featured it at the start of his first national TV show of 1999. He asked who in the audience had a birthday on that day and gave the lucky lady a Dreamhelmet sleep mask as a birthday gift. Though hesitant to try it on at first, she soon warmed up to the idea, put on the Dreamhelmet, and spent the first half of the show actually snoozing on stage at the foot of Howie's desk.
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