While Laura sleeps on the couch I put in a BBC Planet Earth disc — very beautiful on Blu-ray; the format flatters luminous underwater ocean scenes — and leave the sound off. On the CD player I put on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2. This combination is absolutely nightmare gasoline. There have been volumes of white and red wine. I am in the late-night a.m. interval between evening intoxication and the sleep that hatches hangovers. The episode is the one called “Shallow Seas”, an hour of eye-boiling, hair-eating hallucinations. Uncanny alien animals in water, all hungry, peering out from the screen with grim and ghastly patience. Underwater storms of writhing thigh-thick sea snakes flying low over coral masses squirming with teethed slimy things. Walls of translucent white jelly-beings undulating around an unseen cameraman who we must assume never stops screaming. Vertically hovering whales gesturing a fin toward beams of light somehow shining up from the deep. And everywhere fish, terrible fish — they breathe liquid, they never blink. Accompanied by one or the other of the Aphex Twin discs, glacial swells and pulsings of evilly hushed machine-born flesh-creep music. — “Shallow Seas” ends and I try the “Jungles” episode, but ambient audio horror over breakdancing freak birds makes me merely sleep.