Written and illustrated by Kelly O’Grady
As children, our parents read us bedtime stories to send us to dreamland, but as adults we really don’t have that luxury. If you’re like me, you have roommates and thus have to try to fall asleep to the rhythm of video-game explosion noises or your roommates engaging in loud, drunken intercourse. Usually, I elect to drown out the din by watching documentaries on Netflix.
I would advise not to watch documentaries that are too riveting, because then you’ll just stay up all night watching them; hence, documentaries to avoid include crime docs (Making a Murderer) or ones about government conspiracies and UFOs. You’ll run the risk of subliminally taking them in and then waking up as a murderous, paranoid alien conspiracy theorist who wears tinfoil hats.
Slow and mildly interesting are the key. Here are some selections of Netflix movies that I find useful as a sleep aid.
The Civil WarA documentary by Ken Burns, 1990
Very dry narration over black-and-white photos of dusty people during the Civil War, with sad, old-timey violin music playing on top of it. Eighty percent of this movie is people reading letters, like, “Dearest Martha, they sawed off my foot today; then we ate some hard tack”—blah, blah, blah. Really, any Ken Burns movie is great to fall asleep to because they’re all four hours long and feature a lot of old people describing things.
The Endless Summer
A documentary by Bruce Brown, 1966
A movie about beach bums driving around one of those cool old wooden station wagons as they surf around the world. This is a great movie to fall asleep to because it’s full of mellow surf music and the sounds of waves crashing, with the narrator occasionally saying something like, “Mike really caught a crunchy wave.”
Tesla: Master of Lightning
A documentary by Robert Uth, 2000
Some business tycoons and Thomas Edison conspire to rip off the patents of a crazy foreigner—that would be Tesla—who also happened to be sexually attracted to both electricity and pigeons. This movie culminated in Mr. Tesla dying in a flophouse after years of abject poverty. You may wake up in the morning with a more-than-casual understanding of alternate eletrical-current systems and a general contempt for Thomas Edison.
History of the Eagles
A documentary by Alison Ellwood, 2013
This documentary chronicles the ups and downs of ’70s music group the Eagles, and just like the music of the Eagles, it’s boring. You can find out about how Don Henley wrote the song “Hotel California” while taking a dump. In terms of sleepiness, this one is a double threat due to both the soundtrack and the subject.
Wicked Chowdah There, Fitzy!
A documentary by Kristoff Walker, 2011
This documentary follows the everyday life of a septuagenarian named Pat Fitzpatrick who sells clam chowder out of a cart in Worcester, Massachusetts. The Boston accents in this film are almost as thick as Pat’s chowder, to the point where the entire thing is subtitled. It’s like if you took all the cop drama out of Martin Scorcese’s The Departed and just made it about a foul-mouthed old man.
If you fall asleep to this movie too often, you’ll start talking like Mark Wahlberg.
