The hills are alive – for now, anyway

The ability of the human mind to set aside the fact that nature is always trying to murder him, so that listening to the sinister sounds of his potential murderer is considered relaxing, must be a relatively recent development, psyche-wise. Because while the hills are indeed alive, that doesn’t mean they want you that way.

Do you know how many predators you can hide in here?

Waterfall by Nicole King on Unsplash, Leopard by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

Take the sound of waterfalls. People go to sleep to these sounds. And yet, the tumbling of millions of gallons of water creates enough noise to mask an entire squadron of leopards (that’s what a group of leopards is called, right?) creeping up on the poor, slumbering fool.

Heck, they don’t even need to creep up. They could stomp in, pushing and shoving each other like juvenile delinquents, laughing and swearing and the buffoon snoring under the roaring blanket of sound wouldn’t know it until the first leopard made an appetizer of his nose.

We’re not saying that there’s something inherently wrong with listening to nature sounds. But you have to wonder what our ancestors would think.

The horrible sounds of nature

If George Washington showed up today and did a sleepover at your house, and you said “Let me play you some streaming nature sounds on Spotify to help you sleep, Mister President,” most likely you’d be sedated and thrown into jail because those are some crazy drugs you’re on.

Like George Washington would listen to Spotify.

Anyway, years ago, before there was any kind of streaming service that you could pay for that would let you sleep to the sound of streams (see what we did there?), you had to buy CDs of nature sound compilations. You would listen to these CDs exactly once every six months for a year.

No more.

Because they were boring.

But nature sounds aren’t all boring, are they? Buried not too deep in our subconscious minds, we know that hiding underneath the sound of steady rain, there’s probably a Viking Horde ready to come in and burn our village.

Or maybe the rustling wind is blowing in a battalion of spiders to infest your nasal passages. (A group of flying spiders is called a battalion. Look it up. Then tell us what they’re actually called, or what you want to call them. Leave it in the comments. Heck if we like it, we’ll use it and give you credit for one word on this post, e.g. Special thanks to Turfwaddle for the word “zippy”, as in, A zippy of leopards).

The point is, nature hasn’t really been our friend. It’s not there to sooth us. And that’s something that Pop reminded us about years ago. Check out our latest video and let us know if you ever listened to these nature sounds.