I’ve had insomnia troubles for years. It can take me hours to fall asleep and I can wake several times during the evening. I’ve tried all kinds of shit, earplugs, caffeine abstinence, exercise, etc. Lately, it’s been the worst ever, enough for doctor to prescribe me Ambien. I’ve been taking it for about two months and the stuff is great shit. I pop a pill and in about twenty minutes I drop like a sack of meat and stay that way till morning; waking with no residual grogginess. I love Ambien, but I’m reluctant to take it often. Reliance on prescription drugs to sleep is probably not the best course to pursue.

Anyway, what I usually do is take Ambien during nights where I have to work the next day, that way I don’t show up at the office completely cracked out from only two or three hours of fitful sleep. Over the weekend, I try not to take Ambien, trying just to relax or at the very least, test how bad the insomnia is currently.

One thing I’ve been looking into is hypnosis and the use of binaural sound to induce relaxation and/or sleep. I purchased my first binaural recording about fifteen years ago and I’ve been collecting them here and there since then. I find that some headphones and some binaural sound on loop can really put me down into a light trance state at times making it much easier to sleep or at the very least, relax.
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I’m really into Metal. Death Metal, Black Metal, Sludge, Doom, Blackened Death Metal, Viking Metal… on and on. It’s the best shit in the world. But, I will admit I’ve become addicted to the polar opposite. As of late, I’m all about hippy, nature sound recordings.

You know, those CDs that sit in the bargain bin of your local record store’s New Age section. The albums where some geriatric and well-bearded hippy trudges a recording setup out into the middle of some remote and uninhabited area and records whatever natural, ambient noise is going on, slaps it onto a CD and sells it out of the back of his VW bus to keep himself in yogurt and granola.

I’ve always been a fan of ambient noise and these nature sound disks deliver well, but due to their being just a recording of background noise, I can crank it up without being distracted.

Here’s a link to a collection I’ve been downloading off of eMusic. Out of the bunch, the forest one is my favorite so far.