If you’re an American who cares about other people, the earth and everything that lives on it, decency, truth, kindness, justice, peace — or even just an American who wants to afford groceries or gas — the past year or so has been pretty rough. Every day, we’re greeted with a barrage of news telling us of the cruel, hypocritical, and destructive actions of the very worst of humanity. Reading the news in the morning is ill-advised, and reading the news before bed is positively dangerous. For anyone who has had trouble sleeping in their lives, these times are especially challenging. It’s not the good old middle-of-the-night spiral of worry and panic — a scolding for a mistake made at work, worry about sickness or pain, that stupid thing you said to a classmate 20 years ago — these days, we honestly don’t know if tomorrow will see WWW III started by some sorry fool or apocalyptic lunatic. These days we don’t know if we will see tomorrow.

But people have always had trouble sleeping, times have always seemed hard, and yet we have always somehow found a way to get out of bed in the morning and to get on with our lives. For me, lately, dreams have been more important than ever. I have always loved them, but lately I find that I crave them. What a remarkable thing, to escape from reality for a short while into another universe where anything is possible — sometimes wonderful things, sometimes bewildering things, sometimes frightening things, but always from within a part of you, always your own wonderful, bewildering or frightening things.

I believe there is solidarity in understanding that we all experience worry and pain and sickness and sleepless nights. We always have, we always will. We will always have dreams to carry us away from our troubles or help us work through them. Everybody does. And sometimes people write songs about all of this, and we’ve compiled a small playlist of songs on sleep, sleeplessness, and dreams, which we present to you with the sincere wish that we can soon return the days of lying awake worrying about all the old familiar worries.