Sleep Long and Prosper

a.k.a. Ambient drones from (a completely invented version of) outer space.

My wife Dania hasn’t been sleeping well lately. We’re not exactly sure why, and over the past few months, she’s tried a variety of different remedies, from herbal teas to limiting her screen time and purposely leaving her phone outside of the bedroom. Are any of those things working? It’s difficult to know. Insomnia can be a tough issue to solve, and even when Dania does manage to get a good night’s sleep, it’s often unclear if whatever method she tried was responsible.

Last week, I suggested she try something new, and so far, it’s been working wonders. What is this mystery elixir? White noise. There’s obviously nothing inherently revolutionary about that—people have been falling asleep to wave machines and the sounds of the rainforest for decades—but the sounds we’ve been listening to each night come from a very different source: the starship Enterprise.

I should probably pause a moment while everyone who hates sci-fi quickly hits delete or closes their browser tab, but if you’ve managed to resist that urge, I’ll explain why I’m writing about this in First Floor, a newsletter that’s supposed to be focused on electronic music. Believe it or not, the sounds of Star Trek (and other sci-fi franchises) make for some incredible ambient drones.