First time I listened to music to help me fall asleep was after my sister died. I was 19. My sister and I used to have identical beds pushed against opposite walls but after the funeral, when all the visitors left and we returned to somewhat normal life, my parents helped me move things around and drag my bed close to the window.
We lived on the ground floor of a typical Soviet apartment block with its thin walls and loud neighbours. At night, when everyone settled to sleep, there were noises coming from the outside, scuffling and scratching, that kept me on edge. I tried to convince myself that they were from cats or dogs until the central heating’s pipe started shaking – I am still not sure if there was a person in the basement underneath our apartment at nighttime. I don’t think I ever saw a homeless person on our street during the day but there were definitely rumours of them, at least among children. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to hear any of it and I also didn’t want to hear my parents through the wall so I would put music on, playing on the lowest volume setting. It created a presence in the room that settled me. Nobody talked to me about my sister’s death which seems weird in retrospect but felt natural at the time. Having Zemfira whisper her songs to me at nighttime was the closest thing to an intimate conversation available to me.
Next time I remember using music as my sleep crutch was in Moscow, during my first business trip. By then I moved to Saint Petersburg, got a second degree and was beyond myself with excitement about having a real business trip staying in my own room at a hotel. My coworkers and I spent the days in instructor-led training at the Microsoft office (my first experience with free lunches at a tech company). It was a trip I’ll never forget and as I was lying on my hotel bed I went through all of it in my head, the metro stations, the grumpy passersby I asked for directions, the never ending sleet and the tall buildings disappearing into grey clouds. My brain still does it after a day that is somewhat unusual, trying to process it all and not letting me sleep. I remember listening to Morcheeba and I still love that song and listen to it sometimes.
Years later I was in hospital after giving birth to twins. 2020, height of COVID, no visitors are allowed in the hospital and the midwives are run off their feet. A room in a maternity room is almost never quiet. Newborns always grunt even while asleep, there is medical equipment everywhere and you can hear people outside. The inside of my head was even noisier, as usual, and I found myself unable to sleep despite being exhausted. So I got my AirPods and listened to a Spotify playlist: Zero 7 and Thievery Corporation and all the other dreamy, trip-hoppy stuff with gentle voices that feel like comforting presence when I need someone to whisper in my ear to settle my restless mind. I kept up listening to that playlist for a while after getting home until it was no longer needed as I was dropping off to sleep whenever I could, no external help needed.
I traveled for work recently, to Vegas and then to Singapore and once again I was shutting down my brain at the end of the day by listening to music. I didn’t realise it was an unusual thing to do until I mentioned it to someone. Maybe people find other ways to wind down – they do body scans or count sheep or take melatonin – I’ve tried all those things myself, too. Yet I find nothing as effective and as comforting as music mumbling into my ear, just at the edge of my consciousness. It never crossed my mind to think why, until now. And now that it did it’s tempting to wrap all these little anecdotes together in a neat narrative. Interpretations come to me easily, unbidden. Maybe I need a voice from outside of my head to relax the inner voice? Maybe the gentleness of that outside voice compensates for the harshness of the voice inside of me? Or perhaps I’ve been so lonely throughout different periods of my life that music bringing an illusion of closeness was what I needed?
I know an explanation would make for a more compelling story. Yet more and more in my life I tell the part of me that tries to analyse everything to shut up. Explanations inevitably reduce things to the very basics and that’s not what I’m looking for in life. Besides, things closely examined tend to lose some of their magic and do I really want to use my mind on something that helps shut my mind off?
Sails and Commas 