At night, the inside of my head sounds like Midtown Manhattan at rush hour. Each street corner has a speaker booming the voice of a sports commentator proselytizing God and the gridiron as One via their podcasts. Facebook feeds snake their way down Broadway, honking an occasional cry for attention. Massive screens covering the bottom half of skyscrapers project Snapchat stories and Instagram feeds. Above, helicopters buzz the latest tweets. Every so often a plane flying overhead dumps its internet waste over the whole mess.

 Sometimes a solution rises above the discord.

 The first solution came from an obstinate ex-linebacker turned podcast host, with an ego pumped full by the memory of gameday glories, testifying that the secret lay in a pre-sleep vitamin smoothie.

 I ordered the smoothie—at the price of two for one, how could I resist?

Fifteen minutes before going to bed I chugged the smoothie.

I never made it to bed; the smoothie and my stomach disagreed, arguing audibly in rumbles and grumbles. Their noise could’ve made a compelling, albeit short, podcast; the stomach won the argument, sending the smoothie up and out of me.

Later, the FDA would find three synthetic hormones that they felt necessary to ban. They didn’t help pay for new sheets, though.

Another solution came from an article on a friend’s Facebook feed shouted: “4 Ways to Wake Up a Better You!”

Number one said to lie back, close your eyes. Feel your feet. Feel their weight. Once your feet relax, feel your knees. Feel their weight. Feel your knees, feel their weight, and then feel your thighs. Feel their weight. Once they relax, you move to your abdomen and chest. Feel their weight, and then…

I do feel a bit more limber, but it’s so hard to get some shut-eye bent over at the waist and stretching like that.

Number two, inconspicuous on the screens above the street, was codified via meme in an Instagram post of a classic 1950s magazine ad. In the ad, a rugged man sits astride a horse smoking a ‘Kool’ cigarette while the sun sets over a mountain range towering in the background. A caption underneath the man says, “A sensation beyond the ordinary.”

 Photoshopped over the photo is a red circle, bisected by a diagonal red line.

As I’ve never been a smoker, it looks like I’ve been actively practicing number two to no avail. I thought of taking up smoking just to quit before a helicopter chirped a tweet from above.

The tweet encapsulated number three. It buzzed, “Self-release equals self-satisfaction! #youfirst”.

Number three said to find your trigger.

Obviously that could only mean one thing.

And it worked!

Until a week goes by and my girlfriend notices the stains on my bed sheets—new sheets, unblemished from any charlatan miracle smoothies. I told her about finding my trigger and how it’s helped me so much.

She asked if there was anyone else finding my trigger.

She asked how come I wasn’t asking her to help find my trigger.

She asked how I would feel if she was no longer around at all.

The article never explains how to deal with this situation.

So I moved on to number four, which I saw displayed on the screen next to the cool cowboy smoking his Kool (apparently he hasn’t read the article yet). A Snapchat story from a fitness guru showed a series of fifteen second clips where the guru demonstrated various exercises and techniques to help obtain, “The body you’ve always wanted!”

I was fascinated. I didn’t know there were so many exercises I could have been doing, yet here they were, laid out succinctly for me in fifteen second intervals.

Problem is, once the story was over I had forgotten all the exercises.

But just when I was about to give up on the noise, a plane flew overhead. As it approached Midtown it’s back hatch opened and out from it poured a stream of articles, online surveys, scam promotions, and all the rest of the internet’s sludge. The sky darkened as the murky information fell to the street.

As the muck cleared an article floated in front of me. Something about the headline popped out and I snatched it before it fell to the ground. It said, “Somnum, today’s answer for tonight.”

There was a toll-free number listed at the bottom of the page. I called and, after being told that just one dose of Somnum before bed will bring sleep within my grasp and agreeing to sign a few waivers, they decided I was worthy of a sample of Somnum.

I took a double dose—if one dose will bring sleep within my grasp then a double does will make sleep all mine. Plus, my case was a severe one—who would know that better than me?

The transition is quick: there’s nothing, and then my head swells up like that ex-linebacker’s ego. My eyelids start to sag, as if holding the weight of all the sleep I’ve missed, and quickly give in and close.

I sit in silence for a minute or two, possibly three, and start to imagine…

…that I’m in a countryside, standing in the middle of a dirt road untouched by technology. No people, no man-made structures, nothing trying to grab my attention. Instead, just empty fields on either side of me, small ridges in the distance perking up into the sky. It felt like sitting in the bottom of a bowl.

I appreciate the serenity, the lack of noise, until I notice that one side is actually a farm, recently sowed, its dirt lined with alternating incisions and humps of soil.

How did I miss that?

I look to the other side of the road before answering myself and notice fencing, rudimentary wooden posts at intervals with horizontal beams at the top and bottom of the posts, and two diagonal beams making a crosshatch, separating the road from the field. This bit of technology, despite how well it fits in the rustic setting, sullies the pristine landscape—pristine to my urban eyes, at least.

It suggests there’s livestock being kept, and, at the thought of the word ‘livestock’, a cow appears at the fence.

The cow has only one ear, and her head lilts to that side.

It seems cruel. I mean, what did the cow do to me to make me imagine it with just one ear? I close my eyes, shake my head, and imagine a fully eared cow.

I open my eyes to find two cows, both with two ears.

The quick addition causes anxiety to form within me.

The other side of the road, as if to encourage my anxiety, has leaped forward—what moments ago was a field full of sowed dirt is now sporting four baby evergreen trees, neatly lined up where the incisions ended near the road.

It’s shocking that four trees could sprout up so quickly, and even more shocking how only four trees could grow, but then—just like that!, as if hearing my thoughts—the rest of the field sprouts rows and rows of baby evergreens, popping up like prairie dogs checking for predators; with the coast clear, the trees are here to stay.

I don’t remember reading this as a side effect of Somnum.

I close my eyes to dam the anxiety that’s starting to swell up.

And it works!

Briefly, until the honk of a car horn, brief and almost polite, interrupts my newly found peace.

I ignore it, and the driver responds an impatient, extended honk—the time for pleasantries must have been brief.

“Get outta the way!”

I open my eyes and am greeted by a gentleman with a gray-toned, bushy beard sitting behind the wheel of a dust-covered pickup truck, the true colors of the beard and truck hidden by years of hard labor in the countryside. Anything else about him escaped me becuase behind the pickup truck a surge of modernity had rushed into view.

The dirt road was paved over with asphalt, double yellow stripes splitting it in two with single white stripes on each side of the road; telephone poles reaching into the sky like tall crosses, humming with communication itching to get to its destination, lined one side of the street; driveways jutted out from the sides of the road, cutting into the vacant fields.

In the far distance, houses had sprung up and beyond them, on the horizon, the faintest hint of high rises clamoring for the sky were silhouetted against the setting sun.

“You’re blocking the way,” the gentleman says; the matter-of-fact tone does not hide his irritation.

“What are you doing?”

“Take a look for yourself,” he says.

The pickup inches forward, forcing me to the side of the road.

“Hop in the back,” he says, hiking his calloused thumb towards the bed of the pickup.

Whether it’s the Somnum or my general curiosity, I do it, settling onto the tailgate, already down, as if the driver was expecting me all along.

We forward, leaving the dirt into asphalt as we progress. More houses are popping up in the distant fields as if someone burst an invisible bubble to set them free. Closer to me they are bigger farmhouses, spread out from each other, but in the distance the distances shrink to smaller suburban houses, neatly laid out in squares around cul-de-sacs, giving way to tighter blocks of semi-detached townhomes which become rowhomes which, even further in the distance, closer to the high-rises, grow to mid-rises packed one after another.

The cables held up by the telephone poles grow thicker the farther back from the truck they are, humming louder from the increasing demand to deliver information. A light smog forms by the high-rises like a gray blob.

How quickly things change, I think.

“It’s time for inventory,’ a voice to my side chimes in.

I look around and find a sheep in the field that previously was home to the cows.

“Are you ready?” it asks.

I imagine myself saying, “No, I think counting sheep is quite useless, thank you very much.”

Instead, I lay back on the bed of the pickup, feeling the subtle bumps in the road as the truck crawls forward.

“So,” the sheep says. “We start with ‘one’…”

And a sheep jumps over the road, over the pickup I’m lying in and into the other field.

“One,” I state, as if I’m counting a widget and not witnessing a sheep make an impossible leap over me.

“Two…three…four,” I continue counting as the sheep make their leap.

“Five…six…seven,” as the sounds of construction intensify in the wake of our forward progress.

“Eight…nine…ten,” as the pickup gains speed the sheep are jumping faster.

Somewhere around fifty-four my mind starts to slow down, the white noise of an advancing civilization humming in the background.

My eyelids close at seventy-one, but I’m still counting, imagining more sheep hurdling the road and landing safely on the other side.

At one hundred sheep my mind’s switch flips to ‘off’.