“Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world,” to utter the echo in Czesław Miłosz’s poem “A Magic Mountain.” Lying awake at night, I have sometimes found myself turning this idea over in my head. Like millions of slumberless souls, I have suffered with regular bouts of insomnia, which, in my case, were triggered by overworking, psychological pressure, and obsessive thoughts. Insomniac sleep deprivation provoked in me a profound anxiety, shades of paranoia, and the promise of depression. However, during one tempestuous summer a few years ago, I discovered an aural way to silence it.

Beleaguered in the stifling intensity of two interim jobs, I worked too much, too hard, and too long; stress-ridden and marooned in the city, I fell over the edge into a nightly insomnia. Like quicksand, the more I tried to sleep and ignore the freneticism of my racing thoughts, the harder it became to drift off—I couldn’t say how I partook in Miłosz’s becoming. I tried everything, from books on balmy midnight sleepwalks to friendly lectures on temperance. Nothing worked. A sleeping pill prescription was complicated by side-effect trepidation spawned by my state of nervous distress; my mental health suffered, and I feared a repeat of depressive episodes. In the past, I had used music to modulate my emotions, so I trialed a kind of self-directed musical hypnosis. Finally, here was something that hit a chord.