Mattress Firm is proud to announce “Are You Sleeping?” its first-ever podcast series, in partnership with Vox Media’s Vox Creative.

The 10-episode podcast showcases unique stories and community-sourced questions to help listeners understand why sleep matters.

Host Kate Berlant and sleep psychologist Dr. Shelby Harris speak with a rotating cast of experts exploring topics like sleep cycles, the short-sleep gene, sleep divorces, supernatural experiences, sleep to enhance peak performance and anything else you can dream of.

"Unlike other people, sleep is a cornerstone of my life. I’ve always been obsessed with getting it and have been dreaming since the late 80s,” says Berlant. “It's been a blast to host this podcast where I get to talk to many fascinating people about their sleeping lives and how sleep defines them."

The first episode, which is live now, features Benjamin Reiss, author of “Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World,” in a fascinating discussion about the search for the perfect night’s sleep.

Over the course of the podcast, “Are You Sleeping?” will feature:

• Lauren Gibbs: As an Olympic athlete, Lauren had to adjust her sleep to meet the demanding needs of being an athlete under the never-ending pressure to perform.
• Joanne Osmond & Jane Evans with Dr. Ying-Hui Fu, professor at UCSF: Sisters Joanne and Jane knew something was different about their sleep habits, so they signed up for a study with Dr. Fu to examine them as short sleepers, a fascinating sleep-gene that allows certain people to unlock another level of productivity in their waking hours.
• Baland Jalal: Baland shares how his sleep paralysis, and the supernatural experiences that he found himself trapped in, drove him to become a PhD scientific researcher studying narcolepsy and the impact of sleep and dreams on our brains.
• Brian Badgette: Brian talks about lucid dreaming, what it is, and how it runs in his family – he discovered as an adult that his father is also a lucid dreamer.
• Amy Scurria: As a composer, Amy shares how her compositions come to her in her sleep when she has a creative block, allowing her to become a better artist and performer.
• Antoinette McIntosh: As a truck driver working alongside her significant other, Antoinette shares how she struggled to make her big rig feel like a home and adapt to an abnormal sleep cycle.
• Kameron Schmid: Due to a series of traumatic and unfortunate circumstances while also facing the challenges of being a student, Kameron was faced with living in his car for two years and reflects on how his sleeping habits have recovered since then.

To listen, just go to your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and search for “Are You Sleeping?” Don’t forget to subscribe or follow to get updates about new episodes.

And to learn more about sleep, including how COVID-19 has impacted sleep, and to calculate just how much Junk Sleep you've gotten, visit Sleep.com