Sound Asleep Pillow with Embedded Speaker
This "Sound Asleep Pillow," which has a small speaker inside that is supposedly audible only to the person whose head is resting on it, would be the perfect thing to buy to subconsciously reprogram a loved one via nighttime mental impregnation. They'll thank you for their new productive life of service—because you told them to.
It's £20, but seems like an easy project for a maker-crafter.
Catalog Page [IWantOneOfThose.com via Gizmodo via Random-Good-Stuff.com]

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I had one of those at least eighteen years ago. My parents must have bought it when we lived in England, but I doubt it cost us 20 pound then. I used to take it to camp so that nobody else would know that I had to listen to tapes to fall asleep.
I look forward to makers moving on from steampunk towards things like this, or maybe a nice Charles Rennie Mackintosh laptop.
How big is the chunk of hardware inside the thing? As a longstanding princess-and-pea-type, I suspect I'd find this unusable. :(
At least the one that I had had the tape player in the upper corner, so you still had a nice soft space in the rest of the pillow. The only problem was that to adjust the volume or change tapes you had to take the whole thing apart. Maybe they've added a remote to this one.
I have used - for years - a pillow speaker, like this ...
http://www.thesourcecc.com/estore/Product.aspx?product=3300209
...so that I get all the benefits of the thing above, but I can move it between pillows, and change to a new pillow every now and then. It's a nice idea - but its already a solved problem. And, yes, it is true - nobody but you can hear the radio coming through the pillow speaker.
That would be great with a white noise generator, for the insomniacs.
I am one, and have been using a looped waterfall sound (more organic than just synthetic white noise) to drown out noise pollution with great success!