Maybe not good dreams, mind you. But not bad ones, and lately that's a big plus. A couple of nights ago I was listening to one of my favorite old-time radio programs overnight, Suspense or Escape I think, and had astonishing nightmares. I mean the kind where there's a guy coming to kill me and I'm plotting to kill him first. So maybe suspense isn't the best thing to listen to while you're sleeping. (Then again, I think that was also a day I went to an MSG-heavy Indian buffet, which may well have had more bearing.)
Regardless, for the two nights since then I've been playing a show called "Lights Out" overnight. I think I blogged about it towards the beginning of this blog, back when I was listening to old-time radio all the time in the day time as well. It was a show written by Arch Obler and was very well-received back in the day. I can't see it. Mr. Obler was obsessed with internal monologues, and tended to let them degenerate to pointless babble a fairly high percentage of the time. Also the show was supposed to be terrifying, but tended more to be merely tiresome and unpleasant.
However, it has the great advantage of being largely recorded at a constant volume level. Thus, playing it back when one is trying to sleep is unlikely to lead to sudden spikes that will wake one (or at least me) up. Anyway, nightmares have been kept at bay so far. The only disadvantage is that if I wake up in the night anyway, it still doesn't make for very entertaining listening while I'm trying to get back to sleep. But I mean it isn't terrible; just not all that outstandingly great.
Arch did have one wonderful episode starring himself. He had done an awful lot of shows featuring Irish cops. In this one, he imagined a monster which then started killing everyone he knew. The police were called in and when they found out who he was, one said, "He's the guy who does that radio show where all the cops are Irish." Of course, this cop was Irish, too. Well I thought it was funny!
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