Sleep is not something I easily slip into. I often wake up surprised I slept at all. Other times, I'm not even sure I slept. I have to scan my memory for some irregularity or something surreal, like a version of me as a count in a coffin in a bell tower with bats—I'm not a count, I say to myself, and I'm on a bed, and this is a regular house with no bats, so, I was dreaming. And if I was dreaming, I must have been sleeping. This confirmation immediately clears my mind and I'm ready for the day. But if there's no dream, no way to know if I slept or not, the fog in my mind never clears, and so my very long day is much like those short and dim ones Seattle experiences in the middle of winter.

This is where music plays an important role. If I command my music robot to start, at the lowest volume possible, a playlist called Acropolis, which begins with Harold Budd's Perhaps, an insomniac masterpiece I know by heart, then I can tell exactly where I fell asleep (if I fell asleep) because I will have no memory of listening to the album beyond, say, its opening track ("Templar") or reaching its concluding track ("Ghost Cloud").

It's here we can now turn to Insomnia: The Bach Goldberg Variations, a string interpretation of a musical composition with few equals in the classical canon.