Sleep doesn’t seem like something that should need to be managed, but we’ve all had those nights when you just can’t get settled, and the next day is spent stuck in low-energy doldrums.
Some months back, my wife bought a sleep sound machine that plays your choice of 30 different, non-looping sounds for a specified period, to help block out whatever other noises might be preventing you from falling and staying asleep.
I’ve slept with “white noise,” a sound best compared to the static of a dysfunctional television; old-timers might know it as “Broken Antenna” and younger generations as “No Signal.” But apparently “pink noise” and “brown noise” also exist, each emphasizing lower frequencies than white noise. These and many other sounds were available on our sleep sound machine, and we experimented by trying all of them.
One, which was supposed to be rain falling on a rooftop, sounded to me like I was sleeping in a caravan of horse-drawn wagons on the Oregon Trail; I dreamed of cowboys for the first time since I was 10 years old. Another setting, supposedly the relaxing noises of a fireplace, sounded to me like the house was burning down around us.
Have you ever thought, “Gosh, I like the sound of a fan, but I just can’t stand its cooling, oscillating blades?” If so, take heart—there are fan sounds on the machine, although to my ears they sounded like the inside of a helicopter or a small plane, two locations not particularly conducive to sleep.
We settled back on white noise, but the experience got me wondering: what else was out there in the universe of sleep sounds? I found one machine that plays 70 sounds, including such relaxing settings as “crowd,” “hairdryer,” “helicopter” (for real this time), and “vacuum” (the noisy household appliance, not the complete silence of outer space).
It also features “snoring,” though many of us with spouses already live with that sound as a non-optional feature. (Just remember, though: women don’t sweat, they perspire—actually, they don’t perspire, they glow. And in much the same way, they don’t snore, they merely inhale and exhale noticeably.)
The 70-sound machine also features “lions roar.” I know you’ve got to get creative once you get above 40 sounds or so, but I don’t think my ancestral Serengeti survival instincts would ever allow me to get used to the growls of massive predators—nor should they.
Meanwhile, humpback whale songs are completely absent; at one time, these made a popular soundtrack for relaxation, but they seem to have fallen out of favor. Maybe too many people woke up thinking they were drowning.
The most intriguing setting is called “surprise,” and not owning the deluxe version of the device, I can only theorize that it’s one of two things: a patchwork, randomized sequence of the other sleep machine sounds; or a person yelling “Surprise!” over and over, like the key moment of a birthday gathering played on a two-second loop.
I don’t know if either “surprise” setting interpretation is correct, but I had a good laugh reading an online review that said the user’s machine had started to cycle through all the sounds at random in the middle of the night, “[..] causing me to lose sleep instead of helping me sleep.” Surprise!
Considering the panic and chaos this might imply, with wind, rain, fire, and other natural disasters combining with wild animals, crowds, and flute music, I thought the reviewer’s final words showed admirable restraint: “I would not purchase again.”
To each their own, I suppose, but it seems every sound could potentially backfire: a lullaby can be a gentle send-off to sleep, but in the context of a horror film, a lullaby is often an unnerving signal that something bad is about to happen. And speaking of horror movies, that relaxing white noise might not be so relaxing if memories of the movie Poltergeist, and its ghosts-in-the-staticky-television conceit, come to mind.
I remember fellow parents who purchased a sound machine that mimicked the sound of a heartbeat, supposedly to provide comfort and help their child fall asleep at night. But all I could think about was the child’s reaction when the timer reached its limit, and suddenly there was no heartbeat anymore.
Even if you did convince the kid, subconsciously, that he or she was still in the womb, wouldn’t that mean that every morning would replicate the trauma of being born? Ripped from the womb daily, ugh—good thing children don’t remember the first few years, or we’d need a lot more psychotherapists.
Even if a sound machine can’t promote sleep, it could be useful as a form of therapy itself, desensitizing people to the everyday noises of nature or cities as needed. A child-rearing technique called “Ferberizing” teaches an infant to self-soothe, but it requires the parents to leave the child alone for gradually increasing intervals at night instead of rushing in at the first sound of distress.
It’s difficult for parents to ignore a child’s cries, but after regular exposure to a machine playing the sounds of a wailing infant, parents who use the Ferber method may tune out and forget they have a real child at all, which raises issues of legal and moral responsibility, but does wonders for beauty sleep.
Lots of people sleep with the TV on, which makes more sense now that sudden volume changes between commercials are mostly a thing of the past. For me, watching golf is better than Ambien, but YouTube offers a myriad of other sleep soundtracks, including, for example, the ambient engine noise from 1970s sci-fi productions like Battlestar Galactica and Alien, along with modern, non-fictional ambient space sounds like those of the International Space Station.
You can even listen to an audiobook of 2001: A Space Odyssey, narrated by the AI-produced voice of HAL. It’s a soothing, calming, robotic voice that could help you fall asleep—or keep you awake all night, wondering if, once asleep, you’d ever wake up again.
The Boring Books for Bedtime podcast features a soporific reader making her way through works by Charles Darwin and Emily Post, among many others. The ASMR Scotsman, a YouTube personality with over 3,000 followers, has a 45-minute clip of him reading from the phone book.
There are hundreds of other similarly-themed options, and as an author myself, the idea of reading my publications aloud to a sleep-seeking audience is extremely appealing. After all, I’d either satisfy their need to nod off, or I’d happily listen to their complaints, which would be exactly the sort of blurbs you’d want on the back cover of your book: “Exciting, never boring.” “Pulse-pounding.” “Grabbed my attention and didn’t let go.”
Regardless of personal sound preferences, the goal of all of these methods is the same: to block out noises that would make sleep difficult or impossible. In my case, the primary culprits are late night microwaving by teenagers, early morning blending and juicing by adults, and all night barking by a restless dog who likes to keep tabs on any backyard goings-on. I dub my preferred, no-technology method of countering these interruptions “the head sandwich.” It requires sleeping on your side, and two pillows, one under the head and one on top. The top pillow needs to be flexible, preferably down-filled, so it can wrap around the eyes and ears without choking off oxygen to the nose and mouth.
Ideally, the fabric at the end of the pillowcase makes a tight but comfortable sleep mask, without having an actual mask and its elastic band to deal with.
It’s a bit of a dangerous game, since if my wife were to decide to smother me in my sleep, I’ve already done 90% of the work for her. I suppose “the head sandwich” also increases the danger of me suffocating myself, but what won’t we risk for a good night’s sleep? Either way, I’ll rest in peace.
