It was my birthday this week. LA still burns; they say there will be a ceasefire in Gaza tomorrow; and David Lynch, filmmaker of ineffable noir led by unsettling dream logic, has died.
Last year I moved into a building of tiny studio apartments next to the University. The walls are terribly thin but my studious neighbors are quiet as mice, so usually I can ignore it. But last night I could hear a very animated conversation happening somewhere in the building as I was trying to sleep. Even with my usual earplugs and ambient music I still couldn’t ignore it.
I dozed off into a sleep paralysis-induced lucid nightmare where I was in a kind of dark subway tunnel purgatory. All sorts of mayhem was happening around me on the train tracks, in the corners of the platform, and people I knew were there, telling me things I now forget. The location shifted and I re-emerged in a version of my room cast in a strange moonlight. A lot like Lily-Rose Depp’s dream scenes in Nosferatu, actually: compelled under an eerie half-light by the powerful gravitational force of an unseen demon.
After much struggle I finally called out for divine intervention, which instantly broke the spell and woke me up. In the microsecond before waking I heard a loud whisper: Good…bye…Sandy. Hellraiser-esque parting words from a disappearing demonic spirit. I knew this was addressed to me, because Sandy is the name of my mom’s sister who died in a car accident before I was born. Technically, I’m named after her: my middle name is Suzanne, which is her real name, but everyone called her Sandy.
Anyway, after waking up from that twilight nightmare, I knew it was induced by poor sleep due to the nonstop ranting still coming from downstairs. It sounded like a couple of students having late night substance-fueled “deep conversations.” I descended the stairs and identified that the sound was coming from the apartment directly below mine.
I listened for a few seconds to gauge if the situation seemed threatening. I realized it was just one voice, probably on a phone call, and it kind of sounded like an especially animated job interview. It was 2am and this had been going on for 3 hours straight, so probably they were doing an interview for an internship in Australia or something, but like, this was ridiculous.
I knocked on the door and the voice paused. They definitely heard me, but instead of opening the door, I heard them move into the bathroom and keep talking. I figured that was the best I was gonna get, so I went back upstairs and found some white noise on Spotify. I realized it reminded me of something I read about using white noise in music production before I quickly fell asleep.
When I woke in the morning, my white noise was still playing, and I put on one of my usual wake up tracks, “Nine Red Squares” by Cynthoni. For the first time, I noticed that the track opens with white noise.