![]() Nerves set on edge by noise, only able to be calmed by further noise. I wonder if this is what the country mouse feels for the city mouse: a revulsion for his aurally battered, overstimulated existence. Like falling asleep in a wind tunnel, dreaming that someone is holding your head out of an aeroplane, then waking to the sound of someone vacuuming upstairs. Yet to fall asleep and wake up to the same noise feels relentless. I still hear them, but the noise is less piercing, and eventually I forget they are there. The fan sound isn’t loud, but covers other nocturnal noise, including my neighbour’s yapping dogs, who live outside. ![]() It is an impressive sleep solution for noisy environments, a kind of constructed calm (and yet you can still hear the smoke alarm). The lack of fluctuation also makes it possible to tune out the white noise itself. Equal intensity across frequencies means one is less likely to be disturbed by sudden noises: foxes getting sexy, Rory Stewart at the door, a smoke alarm, whatever. White noise is the product of all audible frequencies as a result, it effectively masks background sounds. A friend of mine says it is the only thing that gets his baby to fall asleep, and he’s not RoboCop. I am frankly surprised that so many people swear by white noise. Dohm bills itself as “the original fan-based natural white noise machine”, although I’m not sure what is particularly natural about it. But this very ugliness is apparently a signifier of authenticity. Chunky and dull, it has a habit of attracting hairs of indeterminate length. “Tune noise out” promises the packaging on the Marpac Dohm Classic (£42.95). How does it happen, the blissful drift into restful hallucination? And, more pressingly, when?īy many accounts, here is the answer: a chunky grey plastic dome that emits a constant mechanical whooshing. ![]() How do you sleep at night? Most nights, as I lie in bed replaying the day’s losses, more awake than I will be in the sunlit hours to come and weighing up the benefits of an open window against the inevitable blare of sirens, the very idea of sleep is an alien one. One of the all-time great ambushes, it is also a question I find myself returning to obsessively. It is a clip of the One Show presenter Matt Baker asking the then prime minister David Cameron how he sleeps at night. There is a video I like to play as I lie in bed at night.
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