I’ve been pretty stressed out recently for many reasons (Trump, mercury retrograde, deadlines, too many Sour Straws ™, cat fur matting too much, Trump, finding out your old pal on Facebook is anti-choice, work, weird hair, etc) and last week it unfortunately bled into my sleep cycle, like a stain sample caressing fabric in a Tide commercial. I flopped and turned, kicking at things both real and imagined, and finally rolled over and did the thing you are not supposed to do in bed, which is gape at the bright lights of the web on my phone. Happily though, I came across an article which highlights from movies, all of them 12 hours or more. I think they’re all supposed to be comforting (save for the 12-hour loop of the creaky throat noise from the horror movie The Grudge, why???) but some of them made me nervous, particular the noise of the Tardis from Doctor Who, which sounds a bit like an aging cyborg exhaling through a pneumatic tube. The real gem in this lot is the looped sound of the technology humming within the apartment of Rick Deckard, the main character in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner. The sound of various mechanical objects humming within the warmly insulated, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed walls of this futuristic bachelor pad is a hugely soothing example of weirdo white noise, and it has calmed my freaked-out brain for three nights in a row now. If you’re tired of lulling yourself to dreamtown with ASMR and podcasts, give one of these a whirl, why don’t you? Sleep tight.
Alison Lang is the editor of Broken Pencil.