Ah, from now on there won’t be anything like this anymore. Or will there? While the picture has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I think it conveys a bit of the nostalgia of leaving a dreamy place and time. (The text is from the song S.S.S! (Sun Shiny Day), which is quite like that.)

One of the things I am likely to miss after moving to the apartment, is playing my stereo in the wee hours of the night. No, I am not rocking it out, quite the opposite: The sound is LifeFlow 2, a delta brainwave entrainment track. By passively listening to this, more and more of the brain is synchronized with waves of 2 Hz, which is close to the frequency of deep, dreamless sleep.

I don’t think such induced brainwaves are a complete replacement for sleep, but on the other hand this deep sleep is something we tend to get less and less of as we grow older. It seems to me, as purely subjective experience, that I am actually less tired at work when I have woken up 3-4 times in a night and turned on the delta track. This could be coincidence, of course. I won’t say it happens every single time.

But what happens almost every single time is that I fall asleep pretty quickly, since I don’t have to worry about whether I fall asleep or not. I’m good anyway, which is the ideal condition for falling asleep in the first place.

Obviously a stereo by the bed will be less popular if you share bedroom with someone. Well, unless they go to sleep at the same time, I guess, in which case it should be just as useful for each.

Earphones can also be used, but are kind of unwieldy, depending on your favorite sleeping position. Ear plugs are supposedly less effective, unless you can make sure they are inserted exactly to the same length in each ear. That won’t work for me, since my ears are quite different in construction. Standard ear plugs will fall off my left ear almost at once, but stick just fine in my right.

Supposedly the entrainment effect has very little to do with the volume, as long as it still reaches your subconscious, so I suppose I may try to keep playing, just more softly. Or perhaps by now I may be able to induce that frequency just by deciding to. I doubt that, though. It is one thing to do it with alpha waves and upper theta, but delta is not something you normally synchronize while awake.