This guy speaks random nonsense to help you fall asleep

[kaini]

According to Greek myth, Hermes, the cleverest God, used his inimitable wit to tell stories so long-winded, so fatuous, that they lulled the many-eyed monster Argus to sleep. By the same logic, insomniacs of modern times are often advised to read the phone book or—the classic choice—to count sheep before bed. Unfortunately for them, there’s a good chance that such techniques are useless. Patients who counted sheep in an Oxford University study had no better luck falling asleep than a control group. Insomniacs who struggle to stay awake during presentations at work often find, when they climb into bed at night, that anxiety crowds out the body’s attempts to signal its sleepiness. In such situations, what the sleep-challenged need is not sheer boredom, a state slipped passively into, but the scantest grasp of mild amusement, from something that is distracting without being stimulating. The ideal bedtime story, according to Nitun Verma, a national spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, is one that “doesn’t build upon itself,” like a movie “with a lot of parallel stories that don’t connect at the end.”

 

Drew Ackerman, a.k.a. Dearest Scooter, the forty-two-year-old creator and host of the popular podcast “Sleep with Me,” has an ingenious intuition for this narrative balancing act. In the three one- to two-hour-long episodes he releases each week, he keeps his voice gravelly, at the bottom of his vocal range, and so slow that his upstate-New York accent takes on a tinge of Southern drawl. His sentences are mazelike constructions that turn on countless “if”s, “or”s, and “so”s; he drifts off into pointless tangents, or doubles back to ask himself if he really means exactly what he just said. His plots are equally labyrinthine: a recent few episodes centered on a magical female pirate named Lady Witchbeard; another imagined a secret war between See’s Candies and Whitman’s Samplers. In his Sunday-night-TV recaps—the most recent batch of which is titled “Game of Drones”—he might delve into a meditation on the Red Priestess Melisandre’s eldritch choker necklace, which might then inspire a detailed exploration of the science behind mood rings. Where a traditionally good yarn pulls the listener effortlessly along, the fibres of Scooter’s stories gradually unravel into wayward puffs of wool. These zany tales are downloaded roughly 1.3 million times each month; last year, the show broke iTunes’ list of top-fifty podcasts.

The podcast is here and it's one of the most wtf things i've ever heard. it's like someone connected Ira Glass to a Markov chain generator, or maybe hours of one of those bad lip reading videos.

 

here's an mp3 of the most recent one - skip about 10 minutes in. listening to it gives me a mild feeling of what having a stroke must feel like.

 

there's a typically excellent new yorker article here.

[zlemflolia]

What the fuck

 

It's like the result of being on psychedelics and thinking any little analogy that comes to mind or comparison is valuable so you keep rambling and never stop

[Brisbot]

I think totally random thoughts and words before falling asleep myself. I guess others are like that too? Then if I'm still semi paying attention random visuals will start popping in this uncomfortable area between real and not real. But i'm only a quarter awake now so i don't care. Thinking about the most random stuff, phrases that make little to no sense, but they are usually semi complete sentences.

 

[zlemflolia]

Also if this works for insomniacs then would reading Finnegan's Wake also work 

[kaini]

Also if this works for insomniacs then would reading Finnegan's Wake also work

lol that also occurred to me. it's very burroughs/joyce/flann o' brien

[kaini]

i was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket...

[Salvatorin]

I do this every night for my girlfriend by just talking about my feelings.

[Leon Sumbitches]

[MadameChaos]

So just watch Lost then?

[KovalainenFanBoy]

feels like watching Xavier Renegade Angel

[pyramidpanes]

lol at start at 24 min -

 

http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/f/d/7/fd77069797afb7b6/SWMP426.mp3?c_id=12533341&expiration=1472440090&hwt=3b901d1336ba43aad216d0bf00e369d9

 

just heard 'can we get to lugahar rape us, like in a rapist restaurant' 

[sweepstakes]

Wow, I just realized very recently that I get way sleepier when my nighttime anxiety finally dissolves into bizarre, nonsensical thoughts. I didn't realize there was a podcast dedicated to this, let alone any research into it.

 

This podcast is definitely pretty wtf. Anyone actually tried to fall asleep to this yet?

[caze]

lol at start at 24 min -

 

http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/f/d/7/fd77069797afb7b6/SWMP426.mp3?c_id=12533341&expiration=1472440090&hwt=3b901d1336ba43aad216d0bf00e369d9

 

just heard 'can we get to lugahar rape us, like in a rapist restaurant' 

 

arepas =

 

[user]

What is it about me that I need to overthink even clocks?

 

I've been using an app called sleep genius that generates random words. What also really works for me is just going through the alphabet, try to think of all I words I know starting with an "a" then "b" etc. Both methods have been paying off.

I also noticed having weird non-sensical thoughts before falling asleep and sometimes when waking up, love this hypnagogic state. 

 

Fuck that arepas looks delicious.

[pyramidpanes]

Wow, I just realized very recently that I get way sleepier when my nighttime anxiety finally dissolves into bizarre, nonsensical thoughts. I didn't realize there was a podcast dedicated to this, let alone any research into it.

 

This podcast is definitely pretty wtf. Anyone actually tried to fall asleep to this yet?

i tried last night but with headphones, switching it off after a while worked better though, but perhaps by headphones is a bad idea as the sound was more intense then being backgrounded 

[Tatdylf]

This is basically hanging out with a crazy guy

[Psychotronic]

[joshuatxuk]

I think totally random thoughts and words before falling asleep myself. I guess others are like that too? Then if I'm still semi paying attention random visuals will start popping in this uncomfortable area between real and not real. But i'm only a quarter awake now so i don't care. Thinking about the most random stuff, phrases that make little to no sense, but they are usually semi complete sentences.

 

 

 

Yeah sometimes when you realize you're in that half-way to sleep stage the visuals and internal dialogue makes no sense. Or you start to get really creative and thoughtful...IIRC some people purposely exploit this state of mind for that reason. Edison used to cat nap instead of sleep and would come up with many of his inventions and ideas while doing so.

[ghOsty]

Wow, I just realized very recently that I get way sleepier when my nighttime anxiety finally dissolves into bizarre, nonsensical thoughts. I didn't realize there was a podcast dedicated to this, let alone any research into it.

 

This podcast is definitely pretty wtf. Anyone actually tried to fall asleep to this yet?

 

I've never really thought much about it but I suppose I'm the same way, once I stop worrying about stupid shit and start relaxing my thoughts get very random, like my brain rambles itself to sleep. I suppose that's the science behind this podcast. Gonna have to give it a listen.

 

 

Haha, this is great.

[tec]

I do this every night for my girlfriend by just talking about my feelings.

 

lol

 

A mate used to do this with Bob Ross, sounded lovely.

[joshuatxuk]

feels like watching Xavier Renegade Angel

 

i love that show, it's like mental scrubbing of the brain

[joshuatxuk]

I was thinking about this and realized I've heard friends and family speak random nonsense as they are falling asleep or half awoken. In fact my wife's family has a term they coined for it, the "winkies"

 

Not just slurred words or half-finished thoughts but distinct words and sentences of nonsensical thought or very well enunciated gibberish. My mom is prone to this a lot, once she gets dreary she is either easily baffled or amused to hysterics over really random things. The stuff she utters deadpan is hilarious. Once she was like "what's that song, you know the one that's like...pomp, pomp and circumstantial evidence."

 

One of the funniest things I've ever observed was with my mother in law. She had fallen asleep while we were all watching tv. She got and before she went off to bed she looked at my wife and asked:

 

"Did you dap thaa hal draa?"

 

-to which my smiling but perplexed wife responded "...what?"

"Thaa hap a dasblahm psst, dah ahapadah, hah!" (during this moment she looked at me, point at my wife and giggle as if to imply she was the crazy one..one of this "you believe this guy" reactions) 

 

She then walked off as we said goodnight and she muttered goodnight and half-waved. We were in stitches for quite awhile.