Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This

Escaping your thought prison in order to sleep

Maria Gentle Whispering, the Meryl Streep of ASMRtists Credit: Getty Images/The Washington Post

Sometimes life presses in, and we have to tend to the business that chooses us over the business we have chosen. Which is why there will be no wholly new Slack Tide this week. Though if it’s new to you, as it likely will be to about 97 percent of you, don’t whine. Just let my old light shine. As I’m running a golden oldie from my pre-Substack personal archive.  

I’m not facing a true emergency or anything. Well, kind of. My wife took up a correspondence with Steve Bannon in prison, they’ve gotten a little too close, and now I’m worried she’s gonna come back from “family visitation” day with her hair all mussed, wearing two shirts, and talking about how we really need to clean out our IRA to help Steve finish that wall.  (Only kidding, Sweet Cheeks!  And Mr. Bannon, please don’t sue me, as I imagine you’re spending a lot of time in the prison law library to avoid eating the Snickers left on your pillow by your cellie.)

But because I’m otherwise occupied, here’s a short I wrote years ago on a sleep trick that I subscribe to: ASMR. I’m not an early adopter by nature. I only (finally) adopted a smart phone three years ago, when soup cans joined by waxed string were no longer a practical option. But as a chronic night owl/insomniac, I was in on the ground floor of ASMR since its earliest days, around 2010 or so, and I still swear by it. It’s gained massive popularity in the years since, but if you still don’t know what it is, you’re in luck, as the piece below explains it.

And it might be just what the doctor ordered in these trying, overstimulated times. When yet another news cycle crashes over our heads before the last wave has even dissolved into foam. So trust me, you will be just fine without me inflicting opinions — political or otherwise — on you this week. (Hell is other people’s opinions. I need a break from them myself, even when they’re my own.) And take my sleep tips if you are sleep-challenged. They are battle-tested, and they will help you, as odd as they might sound.

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Whatever being a red-blooded American man means these days (not much, it seems), I like to think I am one. I chop wood. I’ve never had a manicure and refuse to wear skinny jeans. I relieve myself outdoors with great regularity, even when indoor options are available. And though I don’t hunt my own meat, I sure as hell eat plenty of it.

But with my manhood established, I have an embarrassing confession to make: I like watching YouTube videos of women brushing their hair and whispering. This might not be as bad as coming out as a Brony, or as someone who collects bootlegs of Coldplay concerts. Close, though. As I’ve promised my wife, it’s not sexual. It’s hard to be lustful while being lulled into a coma. Which is precisely why I watch my whispering vixens, in an uneasy bit of rationalization that marks the cyber-age’s final triumph over us as sovereign beings: The internet—the very thing that overstimulates our brains—is now the only thing that can unplug them.

I’ve never gone in for prescription sleep aids. And somewhere along the way, my favorite over-the-counter remedy, antihistamines‘n’Maker’s Mark, lost its ability to render me unconscious. That’s when I fell under the sway of the weird little subculture known as ASMR videos. Coined just seven years ago in a Facebook group, the term stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response.” Which is intended to sound official, medical even. But it’s really just a hollow pseudo-scientific term, like “electrogravitics” or “Al Gore.”

The idea of ASMR videos is that they “trigger” you. Not in the negative way we’ve come to associate with triggering (an Oberlin undergrad being subjected to the humiliation of her media studies professor using a non-gender-neutral pronoun). Rather, your ASMRtist performs deliberative acts such as whispering softly, or gracefully tracing a magazine ad with her finger (ASMRtists are about 95 percent female) that are intended to hit that magic lever in your brain, releasing serotonin and oxytocin, heightening sensation while simultaneously yielding complete relaxation.

ASMR has been known to give everyone from tightly wound corporate cubicle monkeys to war vets with PTSD something they’d never know otherwise—temporary release from their own thought prisons. Not for nothing do they call these sensations “braingasms”—though ASMR videos often last for 30 minutes to an hour. If you can have the other kind of gasm for that long, you have better things to do than fall asleep.

While non-erotic, ASMR is a bit like sleep porn. And as with the regular kind, it caters to every predilection. At this very moment, you can punch up videos of ASMRtists doing everything that could possibly float your boat as a sort of self-hypnosis. They might repeatedly tap their fingers on an Altoids tin, or run a makeup brush over their face, or pretend to do a lice check of your scalp (I’m not kidding), or crinkle gum wrappers—the last of which is a bit like nails down a blackboard to me. Come to think of it, there are nails-down-a-blackboard ASMR videos, too. The variations are endless. Which yet again evidences the deranged beauty of the internet: However weird you think you are, someone weirder is always just a quick Google search away. To some, this makes the world feel a little less lonely.

Over the years, I’ve become attached to my own favorite ASMRtists, too myriad to list. But without ever communicating with them, it’s like they’ve become members of my family. I noticed when “amalzd” showed up all of a sudden one day with a nose ring. (No! Don’t do that.) When VeniVidiVulpes, the ginger queen of hair-brushing ASMR, stopped making videos two years ago, I felt like notifying the authorities to put out a missing-persons bulletin, enduring sleepless nights over all the nights I would no longer have her videos to put me to sleep. When Skyler Rain’s brother died in an accident, as she announced one day in a video, she gradually went from a sunny, fetching blonde, to a more sober, sad brunette, before she dropped out of ASMR altogether. I miss her. She gave one of the best fake cranial nerve exams in the business.

To each of these, and many more, I owe a debt. As they’ve given me something that doesn’t come easy—the gift of sleep. The triggered will tell you that sleep is the safest space. As Hemingway once put it, “I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”

Bonus Tracks:  Jack White understands. Here he is doing “I Guess I Should Go To Sleep”:

And Tom Waits does, too. Here he is doing “Lullaby”:

Bonus Writing: If you really need a new shot of me, here I am at the end of last week, pinch-hitting for the lovely’n’talented Nellie Bowles on her TGIF column over at The Free Press. (She’s on maternity leave, God bless her.) While several hundred Free Press’ers subscribed over here after my guest stint (welcome!), their readership contains a lot more surly MAGAbots than we have in our ranks (my MAGA adherents tend to be even-tempered, and even forgiving of my frequent disparagement of Cheeto Jesus— for which I’m grateful! Since I want all comers to come here, even the ones I disagree with.) Though plenty of theirs wanted to roast me on a spit after I made jokes like this:

Maybe he’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline: On the other hand, Trump might want to hold on to his running mate for dear life. Because now comes a rumor—spreading on X like a bad rash—that J.D. Vance accentuates those baby blues by wearing eyeliner. Sure, Vance might be alienating childless cat ladies and the La-Z-Boy corporation, but it’s pretty safe to say the hillbilly elegist has the Appalachian-men-who-apply-eyeliner vote sewn up. One can almost see Skillet turning to Skeeter as they’re counting out oxy tablets on the front porch and saying, “Check out this J.D. tweet. That boy’s eyes pop harder than a claw in a coon trap.” 

But as my old profile subject/spiritual guru, Kinky Friedman, used to say when hecklers threatened to hang him and worse, “If we can reach just one person……”