“I’ll be like, ‘Whoa, I got a little excited there,’ so I might try to cut that out.” He studiously avoids any content that might elicit strong emotions in listeners.
(He recently hired his first freelance editors, and is seeking listener support or sponsorship to make the enterprise sustainable.) “It’s definitely about controlling my dynamic range,” he told me. Ackerman, who works for the library system in California’s Bay Area and started the podcast to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a writer, says he labors for an average of fifteen hours over every hour of “Sleep with Me,” spending much of it editing out aberrations in pacing or tone. This masterfully maladroit storytelling is no simple achievement. It’s just, uh, it’s gonna need about twelve more hours in the oven.” I don’t know what’s going on with your oven. In an episode that aired in January, he boasted of his “near ability” to tell “stories that can get to moderately interesting.” “When some people tell a story, like a Grandpa Simpson story, the needle will just barely move,” he said, whereas the “really refined” stories of a podcast like the Moth are in the “high green.” His narratives linger carefully in between, “in that old yellow zone.” “With my stories you’d say, is the oven on? It must be on. In one sense, “Sleep with Me” riffs on the trope of boring listeners to sleep-in his preamble, Scooter sometimes calls his show “the podcast the sheep listen to when they get tired of counting themselves.” But the brilliance of Ackerman’s technique is the way in which he calibrates his monologues to grab you ever so slightly: he seems always on the verge of being funny or interesting or profound, but, like narrative tantra, he never quite lets himself go all the way. These zany tales are downloaded roughly 1.3 million times each month last year, the show broke iTunes’ list of top-fifty podcasts. Where a traditionally good yarn pulls the listener effortlessly along, the fibres of Scooter’s stories gradually unravel into wayward puffs of wool. In his Sunday-night-TV recaps-the most recent batch of which is titled “Game of Drones”-he might delve into a meditation on the Red Priestess Melisandre’s eldritch choker necklace, which might then inspire a detailed exploration of the science behind mood rings. His plots are equally labyrinthine: a recent few episodes centered on a magical female pirate named Lady Witchbeard another imagined a secret war between See’s Candies and Whitman’s Samplers. His sentences are mazelike constructions that turn on countless “if”s, “or”s, and “so”s he drifts off into pointless tangents, or doubles back to ask himself if he really means exactly what he just said. In the three one- to two-hour-long episodes he releases each week, he keeps his voice gravelly, at the bottom of his vocal range, and so slow that his upstate-New York accent takes on a tinge of Southern drawl. Dearest Scooter, the forty-two-year-old creator and host of the popular podcast “Sleep with Me,” has an ingenious intuition for this narrative balancing act.
#Put me to sleep now movie
The ideal bedtime story, according to Nitun Verma, a national spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, is one that “doesn’t build upon itself,” like a movie “with a lot of parallel stories that don’t connect at the end.”ĭrew Ackerman, a.k.a. In such situations, what the sleep-challenged need is not sheer boredom, a state slipped passively into, but the scantest grasp of mild amusement, from something that is distracting without being stimulating. Insomniacs who struggle to stay awake during presentations at work often find, when they climb into bed at night, that anxiety crowds out the body’s attempts to signal its sleepiness. Patients who counted sheep in an Oxford University study had no better luck falling asleep than a control group. Unfortunately for them, there’s a good chance that such techniques are useless. By the same logic, insomniacs of modern times are often advised to read the phone book or-the classic choice-to count sheep before bed. Illustration by Min HeoĪccording to Greek myth, Hermes, the cleverest God, used his inimitable wit to tell stories so long-winded, so fatuous, that they lulled the many-eyed monster Argus to sleep. Drew Ackerman, the creator and host of the podcast “Sleep with Me,” tells labyrinthine stories that are intended to put insomniacs to sleep-and are downloaded roughly 1.3 million times each month.
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