The Dream Industry

Mahendra Singh Dhoni rests his head on a satin-covered pillow in a dark room, his body wrapped in an equally comfortable duvet. Into the camera, he says: “Gande waala break up hua hai? Toh so jao (Had an ugly break-up? So go to sleep).” In this shrugging vein, the former World Cup-winning captain continues in Hindi. “Stressed about exam results? Go to sleep. News channels giving you a bad trip? Go to sleep. Want muscle recovery? Just go to sleep.”

The cricketer then goes on to list more everyday problems—long work hours, general overthinking, reducing screen time or making one’s skin glow—with the same punchline: “So jao.”

Now comes the product he is selling, conveniently placed in a palm. The box contains sleep-support gummies, “with melatonin and chamomile extracts, so when you need deep relaxation, pop a gummy and…” In the advert, Dhoni is already asleep, selling the thing the world is most eager to buy in 2026: sleep.

If Dhoni, a man whose endorsements have traditionally tended towards the alpha-male end of the spectrum—from engine oil to fast bikes—is now telling you that sleep might be the answer to the pressures of modern life, you know something has shifted. Sleep is no longer simply what happens after everything else is done. There is a gummy for it, a capsule, a magnesium pow der and a melatonin tablet; there are sleep masks and weighted blankets, cooling mattresses and blackout curtains, white-noise machines and playlists promising frequencies that will lull your brain into submission.

There are smart rings to tell you how badly you slept, watches to score your recovery, apps to coach you through the night and podcasts designed to put you to sleep. Choose sleep. Choose better sleep. Choose eight hours. Choose a tracker, a tincture, a supplement, a blanket, a chai even. Choose a mattress, a meditation, a machine. Choose, in other words, from an increasingly bewildering menu of things that promise to help us do the one thing the human body has been doing without instruction since the beginning of human time.

It is a measure of how thoroughly sleep has been colonised by the wellness economy that the business of sleeping now stretches from pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals to consumer electronics, bedding, wearables, apps and increasingly elaborate bedroom technology. Depending on what is counted, estimates put the global sleep market around $50-100 billion a year. India is part of that expansion as urban lifestyles, longer screen exposure, stress and a growing appetite for preventive health have turned sleep from an unconscious biological function into something to be monitored and, increasingly, bought. India’s sleep-aid products market alone was estimated at $337.7 million in 2025 and is projected to more than double under a decade.

So, at the cost of sounding ridiculous, what really is sleep? The question may sound obvious, but it isn’t rhetorical. We spend roughly a third of our lives turning ourselves off, after all, and yet most of us probably know less about what happens when we close our eyes than what happens inside the engine of our car. On Huberman Lab, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman puts the question to Dr Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the world’s best-known sleep scientists.

Walker’s answer begins with a deceptively simple proposition: sleep is not one thing. It is a nightly negotiation between two fundamentally different states—rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM—each of which performs its own set of essential functions.

The night unfolds in roughly 90-minute cycles. We descend first through the lighter stages of non-REM sleep into deep non REM, when the brain’s electrical activity slows dramatically and large populations of neurons begin firing in synchrony. We then rise back towards REM, the state most closely associated with vivid dreaming, before descending again. Early in the night, the balance tilts heavily towards deep non-REM sleep; as morning approaches, REM occupies an increasing share of each cycle. Cut the night short and you are not simply losing “some sleep”: you can disproportionately lose one of these distinct stages.

As Walker puts it, sleep is “so physiologically systemic” that depriving someone of either deep non-REM or REM produces a different profile of dysfunction. The evolutionary mystery, he suggests, is that sleep is an extraordinarily vulnerable state to have evolved at all—and yet both stages have been preserved because we cannot do without them. That makes sleep rather different from the other things the wellness industry likes to optimise. You can replace a protein shake, a cold plunge or a vitamin capsule with something else. There is no substitute for sleep. Nobody understands this more literally than Bryan Johnson, the American entrepreneur and longevity obsessive who has turned his own body into a sprawling experiment in biological optimisation.

On his Don’t Die podcast, Johnson calls sleep the “number one performance-enhancing drug” available to us—more powerful, he argues, than anything else we can take every day. He says he has built his life around it, treating bedtime not as the thing left over after the day’s commitments but as the most important commitment itself.

Johnson’s approach is quintessentially that of a biohacker: measure everything, change one variable, measure again. He tracks his sleep, his heart rate, his REM and deep-sleep numbers, experiments with food timing, light, wind-down routines and even devices designed to alter sleep. He says he once spent months systematically refining his sleep and discovered that nothing else changed his experience of health and performance as dramatically.

“Sleep is the number one life priority,” he says. For a man obsessed with slowing or reversing ageing, the logic is straightforward: sleep is not merely downtime from the business of living; it is the biological work itself—and perhaps the ultimate biohack is to stop trying to hack around it.

But if sleep cannot be hacked around, perhaps it can be understood better. That is what T Sreebhanu, 37, a therapist and founder of Sleep and Wellness in Sholinganallur, Chennai, is trying to do, particularly for adults and parents struggling with their newborns’ inability to sleep. Her approach is deliberately without medication. It is also deeply personal.

Sreebhanu was a biology teacher when she had her daughter in 2018. The child, she says, was perfect in every way—diet, health and everything else—except when it came to sleep. For nearly two years, the baby’s inability to sleep properly meant that Sreebhanu barely slept either. “I didn’t sleep for close to two years after she was born,” she says. Eventually, she consulted a sleep specialist. Within days, her daughter was sleeping properly. By the end of the week, so was she. “It was magical,” she says. The experience was enough to make her rethink her career.

For Sreebhanu, the explosion of interest in sleep is not a passing wellness fad. “To focus on one of life’s essentials—on par with diet, health and nutrition—cannot be a fad,” she says. But she also sees sleep as something that requires work rather than a magic fix. “Sleep is a tool,” she says, particularly for parents, for whom consistency in applying what they learn is the key. She believes the conversation around new mothers is changing too: nutrition, lactation and physical recovery have long been foregrounded, while the mother’s own sleep was often treated as an unfortunate casualty of childbirth. “I think now things are changing very rapidly in that regard.”

On the other hand, Prashanti Ganesh, 36, has travelled almost the opposite route into the sleep economy. A strength trainer and founder of a women’s gym—Ladies Club—in T Nagar, Chennai, she has spent nearly 15 years in the fitness industry and was encountering sleep supplements long before they became fixtures of Instagram wellness culture. Around 2012-13, she was taking things such as melatonin and magnesium glycinate, initially recommended by strength coaches for muscle recovery rather than necessarily for sleep. Much of the information came through coaches’ blogs and especially, she recalls, “white coaches”. Finding the products in India was another matter. Friends travelling from the US would bring them back and, she says, “whatever we could get our hands on we would try”.

That has changed as the information around supplements has expanded. Prashanti now says she has stopped taking most sleep-related supplements, using melatonin only occasionally when she feels she needs it. Her current experiment is consider ably more tangible: a weighted blanket. She began with a 5kg weighted blanket less than three months ago, graduated to seven and eventually to 12 as she grew accustomed to the sensation. She is also clear-eyed about what she thinks works for her. “Melatonin, placebo, but works,” she says. The blanket, she believes, helps during periods when her training becomes intense and she needs better recovery. But her favourite sleep aid is decidedly less futuristic. “I can’t sleep without an eye mask,” she says, and feels it helps her more than anything else.

Perhaps that is where the booming sleep industry ultimately lands: not in a single miracle pill or machine, but in a collection of small rituals, products and behaviours through which people try to make peace with the oldest biological requirement of them all.

Sound sleep isn't the same as sleeping while making a lot of sounds. Snoring is usually just a symptom and anyone who visits a sleep clinic knows it too well. For in stance, at sleep specialist and neurologist Dr Manvir Bhatia’s clinic in Delhi’s Hauz Khas, a sleep test could possibly reveal underlying conditions, including diseases that can progress into debilitating ones due to sleep apnoea. This condition is increasingly being talked about in India thanks to higher incidence of such sleep disorders that, if untreated, can lead to serious health complications and even death.

Anyone who has been to a sleep clinic becomes instantly familiar with the term Apnoea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), which measures the number of apnoeas (complete pauses in breathing) and hypopneas (partial blockages of airflow) per hour of sleep. Seattle-based Sleep Foundation says that in adults, an AHI of fewer than 5 events per hour is considered normal while 5 to 14 is mild apnoea, 15 to 29 moderate apnoea, and 30 or more severe apnoea. It has become the global standard. When the respiratory airflow stops frequently, oxygen levels in the body drop, depriving a person of good rest and resulting in daytime fatigue.

N Ashokan, a journalist in his eighties, remembers feeling excessively sleepy during the day at work, following which he went for a sleep test some 15 years ago. The test confirmed obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), a form of sleep apnoea, following which he started using a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine, starting with a normal one that offered air pressure for breathing in and out, and then shifting to a BPAP (bilevel positive airway pressure) machine, which provides two different pressures, a higher one during inhalation and a lower one for exhalation.

More and more Indians are discovering that they suffer from lack of sleep not only because of stress or work-related tensions or other reasons but also because of sleep apnoea. According to recent studies, including one titled “Systematic review and meta analysis of the prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea in Indian adults”, authored by Tejas Menon Suri and others, India is one of the four countries worst hit by the disorder—besides China, the US and Brazil. According to a 2023 study by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), 104 million Indian adults suffer mostly from obstructive sleep apnoea: 11 per cent of our adult population have OSA and the prevalence is higher among men (13 per cent) than women. The study adds that such cases can cause even death—as it did in the case of a young Delhi-based journalist with a wire agency who was in his 30s when he died. His colleagues remember him dozing off at work and snoring loudly with erratic sounds. Unlike the older Ashokan, this journalist didn’t visit a sleep clinic and paid with his life. Dr Bhatia, an alumnus of AIIMS with decades of experience in treating sleep disorders and author of the book The Sleep Solution, notes that the change after using CPAP machines is quick and people wake up refreshed after a high-quality sleep.

Various hospitals across the country offer sleep tests and treatment with awareness slowly rising. A Delhi-based health ministry official, who is also a doctor, notes that earlier people used to take comfort in the fact that their near and dear had died in their sleep, using expressions like “he died peacefully in his sleep”. He adds, “There is possibly nothing much peaceful about such deaths caused by a huge fall in oxygen levels. They suffer a lot in the run-up to their death and poor-quality sleep that makes them often feel drained and live life in pain.”

Mumbai-based Nagaraj Siva says he had started suffering from an “atrocious” sleep deficit since his early 30s despite spending hours in bed, only to wake up in a “rotten” mood both at home and later at work. “I told friends about it—this was some 10 years ago—and they suggested that I get a blood test for Vitamin B12 deficiency. And then I met several doctors and tried several therapies as well as medicines that make you drowsy and fall asleep. One medicine I used to take regularly was Restyl. Five years ago, I met a neurologist because the problem persisted and she recommended that I do a sleep test. ‘What is this sleep test,’ I wondered. A sleep clinic? I had no clue! Soon, I started using CPAP machines and when I started feeling better, I went rogue again, relying on nose drops and numerous other gadgets and lotions they advertise aggressively on Instagram. I am back to using the CPAP machine again,” he says, sharing that he discontinued using the machine briefly because his wife, who is a light sleeper, was disturbed by its sound. “But now she has got used to it just as I also got fully used to having a machine on me,” avers this techie who is now 41.

Dubai-based businessman OV Mustafa says he used to find carrying CPAP machines on work tours and holidays cumber some but with machines becoming smaller and more effective, things are now better. “It is a habit now. I like the feeling of being refreshed when I wake up. When you feel that you are living a healthy life, you do get a certain satisfaction. So, it is a small pain to bear—carrying the machine everywhere you go.”

Meanwhile, several doctors warn that the machines need to be kept clean to avoid respiratory infections. Some of them also add that like sleep apnoea, each condition that causes sleeplessness, including circadian rhythm disorders, narcolepsy, insomnia and restless legs syndrome, needs “accurate and specific” treatments to ensure that the quality of sleep improves. Menopause can also affect sleep and so women may need special care.

According to the Mayo Clinic website, the three main types of apnoea include OSA. According to the website, OSA, the most common form of sleep apnoea, occurs when throat narrowing blocks the flow of air into the lungs. The second one, called central sleep apnoea (CSA), occurs when the brain doesn’t send proper signals to the muscles that manage breathing. Then there is complex sleep apnoea, which develops when OSA—diagnosed with a sleep study—converts to CSA when receiving sleep apnoea therapy, the website explains. While lifestyle changes can help fight the onset of sleep apnoea, which even affects children, the consequences of untreated sleep apnoea include heart attacks and strokes, and irregular heart rhythms like atrial fibrillation, besides insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Studies confirm that untreated sleep apnoea can lead to liver scarring (fatty liver disease) and worsen chronic conditions like asthma.

Shockingly, the study led by Suri states that roughly 47 million Indian adults who suffer from moderate-to-severe OSA are at a high risk for life-threatening complications, which means that with obesity on the rise and focus still high on regular exercise and a healthy diet, policymakers should place greater emphasis on good quality sleep as well, since several people with severe sleep deprivation but who are meticulous about their diet and exercise, continue to die young.

For instance, Sina Jayaraj (name changed), a Gurugram-based senior MNC executive who has no history of diabetes in her family, tells Open that she was crestfallen when she was diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago. “I had a strict boss but I was prepared to work hard. But often, I took work home and my husband and children started complaining. I became badly sleep-deprived. Maybe it was partly because of me that the situation gradually became toxic both at work and at home. It was then that a routine medical test showed an HbA1c reading of 10. My blood pressure was also high. I had to start taking a lot of medicines before these biomarkers returned to a viable range,” she says, stressing what many of us already know: sleep disorders are common among people working in high-pressure corporate jobs. Study after study have shown that sleep disorders often result in high blood pressure and disrupt insulin function besides causing sugar cravings and concomitant metabolic problems. Jayaraj says she makes sure her subordinates sleep well and do not take work back home. “I will not make my team members lose sleep over work unless, of course, there are serious disciplinary issues. That is the best I can do to stay calm. An overworked, under-slept team is not good for you either. Sleep is the cure.”

That is indeed a wise decision because extreme fatigue caused by poor sleep impairs cognition and critical thinking and reduces productivity. In fact, there is simply no substitute whatsoever for high-quality sleep.