The Small Sound Machine That Quieted My Bedroom

The dog next door starts in around 5:40 most mornings. It is not really a bark. It is more a low, repeating complaint that comes through the east wall of my back bedroom like somebody left a bass line running. For a while I treated it as an alarm I had never set. Then in April I bought a Magicteam white noise machine, plugged it into the wall behind my nightstand, and quit hearing the dog at all.

I am 53. The hot flashes started at 49 and the worst stretch was the year I turned 51, when I woke three or four times a night and kept a spare sleep shirt folded on the nightstand. I sleep through more nights than not now, but I still flash most nights. Let me be plain before we go any further: a sound machine does not touch the heat. It is not a fan and it is not cold. Everything it does for me happens in the ten minutes after a flash wakes me, which turns out to be the ten minutes that matter.

Before this I had a ceiling fan I already owned, and that was it. My daughter Kayla sleeps with a box fan for the sound, which is how I know what that is like: a hum with a wiggle in it, and it moves air I do not always want moved in November. I did not want a second fan in that room. I wanted the room to be boring.

I read labels and I read return policies, so here is what the Magicteam listing actually promised. Twenty non-looping sounds. Thirty-two volume levels. A timer and a memory function. Power by AC or USB, with a note in capital letters that it has to stay plugged in to run. The unit measures 2.64 by 2.64 by 2.83 inches and weighs 5.76 ounces, which is smaller than the mug I keep my pens in. It sits on the nightstand beside the lamp and takes up no room at all.

A sound machine does not make me cooler. It makes 2 a.m. quieter, and quieter is the reason I lie back down instead of lying there listening to the house.

The setting I use is brown noise, about a third of the way up, timer off. Brown noise is deeper than white noise, closer to a big room with the air running than to a hiss. The first night I lay there trying to catch the loop the way you catch a video restarting, and I could not find it. The nature sounds are a different matter. Brook, birds, bonfire: they are recordings, and to my ear they sound like recordings. Kayla listened once and said it was the inside of an airplane. She was not wrong, and I took that as a compliment to the airplane.

There are thirty-two volume levels on the Magicteam and I have used exactly one of them since April. A third of the way up is loud enough to sand the edges off the dog and quiet enough that I do not feel like I am sleeping in a server room. I turned the timer off in the first week. All night is the point for me. Set it for two hours and it quits well before the garbage truck, and then what did I buy. The memory function earns its keep when I unplug the thing to dust: it comes back on at my sound and my volume instead of resetting to whatever the factory preferred.

What it covers, specifically: the neighbor's dog, the early garbage truck, and the click the central air makes when it kicks on. That click used to wake me more than the compressor did. Now the machine sits between me and all three of them, and the house has a floor of sound under it. My central air is set to 72 because of the power bill, and running this overnight on a wall outlet is not the line item I worry about.

What it does not do is cool me down. When a flash wakes me at 2 a.m. I am hot and awake and the machine has been running the whole time. I sit up, put the neck fan on for ten or fifteen minutes, take it off, and lie back down into a room that is already humming the same note it was humming before I sat up. That is the whole trick. I am not lying in the dark listening for the dog, or for a noise I cannot identify, and my brain does not get to start the inventory of everything wrong with the world at 2 a.m.

Two things worth knowing before you order one. It needs an outlet, so if you are picturing a little battery puck you carry from room to room, this is not that. And you do not aim it. You set it on the nightstand, pick your sound, and leave it alone, which suits a person who would like to stop thinking about her bedroom by ten o'clock.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you this is the least expensive thing I have done for my sleep in years, and that I put it off because a sound machine sounded like something for babies. It is not. It is a small box that makes a steady, unremarkable sound so that the unremarkable sounds around it stop mattering. If you are waking at 2 a.m. and staying awake, the waking is not really the problem. What your brain does in the twenty minutes afterward is the problem, and that part you can work on.

I would also tell you not to expect it to fix the heat, because it will not, and I would rather you buy it for the right reason. Buy the Magicteam if your bedroom has noises in it that you cannot control, and a neighbor, a landlord or a garbage schedule you cannot argue with. Then talk to your doctor about the flashes, which is what I did. And keep the room as boring as you can make it. Mine has a lamp, the sound machine, a fan I already owned, and nothing else asking for my attention at two in the morning.