Let me sleep...

I’ve had trouble sleeping lately. My wife suggested I try her sleep app (one of the well-known ones), and she offered me a “sleep story” to listen to. Apparently there are a lot to choose from, but my sense is that the basic formula is a person with a soft voice blabbering about nothing very interesting in a fairly monotonous voice. There may be some background music: twinkles and diddles to provide a soft layer under the voices. And the reassurance that “it’s OK that you’re awake; don’t be hard on yourself about that.”

Which is all fine and good, except I found myself lying there critiquing the thing: here’s what it’s doing wrong, here’s what they should do instead… A lot of this had to do with my sense of pacing: the voices are too monotonous, and there are no pauses; the music is pointless and relentless; and the talk is, well, whatever…

Pretty quickly I realized that what what the sleep app was doing wrong was simply not being the track “And Dream of Sheep” from Kate Bush’s 1985 masterpiece, Hounds of Love.

Hounds of Love came out when I was 18 and I loved it. I listened to it over and over, hundreds of times, and many many times while I was in bed headed for sleep. If you don’t know the album, I should point out that conceptually, it’s actually two albums: Side One has all the hits (“Running up that Hill,” “Cloudbusting,” and the title track, “Hounds of Love”) while Side Two is a song cycle called “The Ninth Wave.” What I didn’t know in 1985 (because the album provided almost no context) is that Kate Bush had conceived of The Ninth Wave as a kind of musical theatre production, about a woman lost at sea, waiting for rescue. Much later, in 2014, she mounted this as a full production (the first time she’d performed live in 35 years) under the title Before the Dawn. But no matter: the 1985 album was still a masterpiece, even if some of the imagery was a bit opaque to me. And it is, I tell you, an absolute killer sleep app – I will try to explain.

The opening track of The Ninth Wave is “And Dream of Sheep” – here, we encounter Kate, floating in the water in the dark with her PFD on. It begins with a little piano figure, doubling the vocal melody.

Little light, shining…
Little light, guide them to me…
My face is all lit up…

What I didn’t know in 1985 is that the little light is the beacon on her PFD, that it’s supposed to guide her rescuers to her. No matter. What’s going on here is a lovely rhythmic movement: a pull, and then a lull, a release. The notes come in a little flock, and then there is silence, and then the next flurry of notes comes, and another lull. The effect is, of course, like floating on the waves: a peak comes, and then we wait in the trough for the next crest. Is a wave even more primal than a heartbeat?

The next few lines have more syllables, so it comes a bit more continuously than the first ones, but the meta-rhythm continues:

If they find me racing white horses
They’ll not take me for a buoy

Then the refrain –

Let me be weak… let me sleep… and dream of sheep

– delivered in three even flourishes, with subtle fermata between them. Like waves. But then the intensity increases:

Oh, I’ll wake up… to any sound… of engines

Here Kate Bush does a very Kate Bush-y thing: under the “sound of engines” there’s a big surge of bass frequencies, an ambient sound effect that threatens to almost unseat the music itself. She does this same thing a bunch of times across this album – most famously in the drum climax of “Running Up That Hill,” as well as in “The Big Sky” when she tells us to “Pause for the jets…” and again with the Pink-Floyd helicopter at the end of “Waking the Witch.” Again the wave motif: the big green wave rolls under us, picking us up and then setting us back down, leaving the song to continue:

Every gull seeking ground
I can’t keep my eyes open
Wish I had my radio

The ‘engines’ give way to gull cries panned to either side, and we find ourselves back in the water again. But she’s lonely, and wishes she had her radio…

I’d tune into some friendly voices
Talking 'bout stupid things
I can’t be left to my imagination

Here’s the most important advice for would-be sleep storytellers: friendly voices talking about stupid things. I remember, as a kid, anchoring out in my parents’ little sailboat. In the dark of the evening, we would tune the radio to whatever we could find. Those friendly voices talking about stupid things were so comforting, a line to company and civilization from an otherwise dark and lonely bay.

After the refrain once more, she wraps up the song with the following (accompanied by the simplest possible figure on Uilleann pipes, luring us off to some Irish Hamelin):

Oh their breath is warm…
And they smell like sleep…
And they say they take me home

The cover of the album features Kate lounging with two big red hounds, and so for my 18-year old self, the identification was obvious: it’s the dogs, with their warm, sleep-smelling breath that will take her home. But then she does this:

Like a poppy, heavy with seed
They take me deeper and deeper

The first hundred times I heard this, I swear I heard Like a puppy. But it’s not a puppy, it’s a poppy heavy with seed, which of course has its own relation to sleep. That’s a great poetic switcheroo, but also, in the overall scenario of falling asleep, it’s evocative of a dream: the puppies somehow become poppies because of course, and our chain of thoughts is no longer our own.

And then, deeper and deeper, Kate falls asleep (floating in her PFD with the little light), perchance to dream, and those dreams will carry us through the next few songs, which take us to other places entirely – but without breaking the spell. Because that’s what this is, a spell; that’s what it takes to put someone to sleep: not calming therapist voice droning on with positive self-talk, but a spell that takes you away to someplace else: someplace nicer, someplace safer, someplace we didn’t expect to go.