30 Day Song Challenge: Day 10 (A Song That Makes You Fall Asleep)

Speaking of David Gilmour and crazy musical geniuses, here’s a little Pink Floyd for Day 10.

Yes, this song can put me to sleep, not because it’s boring or uninteresting, but because I love falling asleep to it. In that foggy-brained half-life between sleep and waking Echoes can force your mind into strange places, making connections you never considered, dragging forth odd images and staining the insides of your eyelids with colours and flashes of light.

When you find yourself dozing on the couch, unable to stay awake, but lacking the energy to move to bed, play this song and close your eyes. The first sound of that sonar piano explodes onto the black canvas behind your eyelids in a dazzling barrage of light, like somnolent fireworks following every note around your brain.

Then you melt into backwards drums and a lazy guitar’s drawling phrases making you feel lightheaded. The world spins as if you were drunk on the music. The seabed forms inside your mind and languorous creatures swim through the jellied waters behind your eyes, a peaceful scene, a moment of quiet before the song opens out and rises to the surface of its psychedelic ocean.

Even if you’ve lost all muscle control, your nervous system shutting down and your brain not far behind, you still manage to wiggle a single toe to the rhythm, a rhythm that carries you along like the wake of a ship, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling, crests and troughs of music crashing into the surf of your unconsciousness.

And just as it begins to become hypnotic, just as you’re finding yourself at the brink of a dream, you’re pulled back into waking by a shrieking, unearthly and ungodly noise unprecedented in the wake of the funk. We’re at the bottom of it all again, an alien world on the ocean floor, an extraterrestrial soundscape, unnerving yet comforting, distracting yet languid. You slip once more to the edge of dreaming, your hallucinations informed now by the ethereal wailing of the deep.

And for the final time you wake, with those sonar fireworks once more making you jump a little, and the song again begins its hypnosis, dynamically revving up into its final swinging-watch move to lull you back to sleep and make you think that what came before has been a strange dream, which it certainly was.

You feel like you’re falling, slipping off a curb but never jerking awake, stuck in freefall along with the song’s cadence until your guts sink to your knees like going over the top of a rollercoaster, and all’s quiet again. You’re back at the beginning, on the ocean floor with the strange creatures, familiar and comforting and consistent now after the tidal forces of the song’s middle dragged you up and down and inside-out, left you gutted, floating in the halfway between bottom and surface, between awake and asleep.

In the end, Echoes leaves you broken and hollow on the beach, a piece of washed-up psychedelic driftwood startled and stunned by what you’ve seen. You can’t comprehend, you can barely remember, you’re fraught with snatches of terror and glimpses of hallucination, you don’t understand how or why your mind did what it did during the past 23 minutes: you’re intrigued and somehow empty, so you lift the needle, drop it back into the lead-in, and close your eyes and wait for it to happen all over again.