Because it's raining, raining in my heart*
Sunday, 17 January 2016 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59Having Music And Art Speak To You And Move You To Your Core Is A Beautiful, Beautiful Thing, But Whenever It Happens I Can't Help Worrying That The Voices And Too Much Meaning Are Lurking Around This Bend Or The Next Or The Next.**
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My CPAP is making a high-pitched whine that wakes me up. I've been wearing earplugs, but then there's the noise of my own breathing with the mask on, which sounds like Darth Vader. It's a stupid problem, a princess-and-the-pea problem—I'm overly sensitive in so many ways.
So I considered playing music, but music is problematic.
Music is supposed to be soothing, but it isn't. It can be relaxing, it can be cathartic, it can be exhilarating, joyous, distracting, mournful, celebratory—it can be all those things, but for me it is never soothing. Music speaks to me, it shakes me up, it agitates me in good ways and bad. I have to be careful with music. When I'm driving, if things are bad, the music goes off. The worse I feel, the less I want music pulling threads and stirring up dust.
I've tried this before. I make a disc of songs, tell it to shuffle and repeat, lie down, and listen. And things happen in my head. Good things, bad things, lots of things. Nothing settles down, I wonder when the soothing will start, but it doesn't start. I think about the songs; I tear apart the grammar, I ponder the trivia, I relive the times and places I heard them before. My mind becomes chaotic and I'm overwhelmed.
Sometimes I manage to sleep. Sometimes I have to get up and shut it off.
Shutting it off doesn't return me to status quo. It leaves an echo of the music that isn't playing anymore and my head feels empty and lonely and strange; the dark seems darker. I sleep weird.
So music is out. I've also done thunderstorms and rain and surf. I have a little machine that creates these sounds, but they sound synthetic. (And why not, they are synthetic. And, yes, I can tell the difference. Do you know why the music has to shuffle? Because if the playlist plays in the same order, I wait for the next song that I know is coming. I do this in my sleep. It's not restful.)
But I got a CD with a real thunderstorm on it, and I finally remembered to bring in my CD player (which was in the car for reasons irrelevant here). I plugged it in, got it going, then stuck it under a box. This is necessary because the display is a big blue light, and—I'm sure this will surprise you—I can't sleep with lights in the room. It was nice, listening to the thunder and pretending there was lightning. It was soothing.
*Raining in My Heart, Buddy Holly
**Mark Vonnegut
-:- -:- -:- -:-
My CPAP is making a high-pitched whine that wakes me up. I've been wearing earplugs, but then there's the noise of my own breathing with the mask on, which sounds like Darth Vader. It's a stupid problem, a princess-and-the-pea problem—I'm overly sensitive in so many ways.
So I considered playing music, but music is problematic.
Music is supposed to be soothing, but it isn't. It can be relaxing, it can be cathartic, it can be exhilarating, joyous, distracting, mournful, celebratory—it can be all those things, but for me it is never soothing. Music speaks to me, it shakes me up, it agitates me in good ways and bad. I have to be careful with music. When I'm driving, if things are bad, the music goes off. The worse I feel, the less I want music pulling threads and stirring up dust.
I've tried this before. I make a disc of songs, tell it to shuffle and repeat, lie down, and listen. And things happen in my head. Good things, bad things, lots of things. Nothing settles down, I wonder when the soothing will start, but it doesn't start. I think about the songs; I tear apart the grammar, I ponder the trivia, I relive the times and places I heard them before. My mind becomes chaotic and I'm overwhelmed.
Sometimes I manage to sleep. Sometimes I have to get up and shut it off.
Shutting it off doesn't return me to status quo. It leaves an echo of the music that isn't playing anymore and my head feels empty and lonely and strange; the dark seems darker. I sleep weird.
So music is out. I've also done thunderstorms and rain and surf. I have a little machine that creates these sounds, but they sound synthetic. (And why not, they are synthetic. And, yes, I can tell the difference. Do you know why the music has to shuffle? Because if the playlist plays in the same order, I wait for the next song that I know is coming. I do this in my sleep. It's not restful.)
But I got a CD with a real thunderstorm on it, and I finally remembered to bring in my CD player (which was in the car for reasons irrelevant here). I plugged it in, got it going, then stuck it under a box. This is necessary because the display is a big blue light, and—I'm sure this will surprise you—I can't sleep with lights in the room. It was nice, listening to the thunder and pretending there was lightning. It was soothing.
*Raining in My Heart, Buddy Holly
**Mark Vonnegut