Bring in da noise

I used to sleep in a cave.

Well, not really. Just felt like one. It had to be completely dark and cold and quiet. I don’t really know when it stopped working for me. Maybe college?

Senior year of college, I had an in-window air conditioning unit that made a lot of noise. I had to sleep with it on or I’d roast. So I got used to the sound.

In the apartment I’m in now, I did run the overhead fan on high but then it started making weird noises and shaking and I got worried it’d fall in the middle of the night and cut part of my feet off. So I brought in reinforcements.

By reinforcements I mean The Roommate had a fan he wasn’t using and I put it on the floor next to my bed, not to keep me from sweating in my sleep, but for the noise. ‘Cause I’m weird like that. But really, don’t act like you didn’t know that already.

All was fine and good until the allergies kicked in. And a fan full of dust – I clean it, I promise, but that thing collects dust like a mofo – running on high all night isn’t very good for the ol’ sinuses.

At least that’s what I’m thinking, since any night I run the fan I wake up unable to breathe out of my nose. And needing about 8 tubes of chapstick to reverse the damage that’s been done to my lips.

The most recent time it happened – Monday – I started thinking about ways to solve the problem. I need the sound but not the air.

SOUND MACHINE.

Well, not really. ‘Cause THEY HAVE AN APP FOR THAT. No shit. What don’t they have an app for?

So yeah, last night I download this White Noise app, which has several different sound options for lulling you to sleep.

Monkeys and birds calm you down? Listen to the jungle noises.

Do you not have a bladder? Because any one of the nine water-related options will wash you away to dreamland without making you pee the bed.

And wouldn’t you know it, they have both an oscillating fan and an air conditioner as noise options. BOTH. HOWEVER WOULD I CHOOSE?

I tried the fan one first but after about 5 minutes I was convinced there was a noise in the background, something high-pitched that would keep me awake all night. Like a dog whistle.

Next option? Air conditioner. And because iPhones are all crafty and such, I could set the thing to a timer. Perfect, right? Set it for a few hours so I could safely fall asleep and the thing wouldn’t run all night and drain my battery.

I went to bed at midnight, set the thing for three hours and went to bed feeling like I’d made the best $1.99 purchase of my life. AND, I’d save money on Kleenex.

Wouldn’t you know it, I woke up as the damn thing was turning off.

Apparently, I am as conditioned as Pavlov’s dogs (two dog references in one post, WHAT IS THIS) to not being able to sleep unless there’s some sort of white noise.

Waking up when it’s going off? That seems counterproductive. I should have been all peaceful and dreaming about Bradley Cooper.

So after some middle-of-the-night reading and “SERIOUSLY, I am wide awake at 3 a.m.???” I decided to take my chances and not set a timer for the thing to stop, hoping it’d work this time and instead of waking up when there was no sound, I’d just wake up to a different sound – my alarm.

And wouldn’t you know it, this time it worked.

I say it’s that, but it very well could be the meds my at-work drug dealer gave me. Just joking, she’s not my drug dealer, but she did give me some medicine to help.

And who am I kidding, the closest I’ve come to a drug dealer is when the girl sitting next to me at the lunch table in high school sophomore year unwrapped the ecstasy pill she was keeping in aluminum foil in her lunch bag. YAY public schools!

Tonight marks Night Two of the use of my White Knight to help me sleep. So we’ll see what happens.