Baby's getting anxious; the hour's getting late

It was just another night doing my show at WFMU, but something was wrong. Horribly wrong. The song that I was playing was getting perilously close to ending, and I hadn't cued up my next song yet. I knew exactly what I wanted to play, but for some reason the CD itself was eluding me.

My heart was pounding. I was in a panic. WHERE WAS THAT CD?!?! I KNOW that I pulled it before I went into the studio to start my show. I'd stake my life on it -- and, in the moment, it feels like that is in fact what's at stake. Looming in the corner of the studio, and getting closer with every second counting down on the CD player, is every DJ's mortal enemy: the Grim Reaper of dead air.

It's not by accident that the phrase used to describe silence on a radio station starts with "dead." A radio station with no sound?? It goes against everything radio is about -- people turn on the radio to hear something: music, news, a ballgame, morons calling other morons on the telephone, something! Even at a station as diverse as WFMU, where periods of silence are sometimes part of the recordings that are played, we have a robot that starts frantically calling station management if more than 20 seconds goes by with no sound (or sound at an imperceptibly low volume).

So, more than selecting the "right" song, an even greater concern is just putting on any song, so that the dead air is avoided. But even that was impossible for some reason -- I was fixated on finding the specific track I had in mind (EMF's "Unbelievable," if you must know), and nothing else would do. I kept flipping through the cart of records and CDs that I'd wheeled in at the start of my show, sure that what I was looking for was there. Then I noticed something that gave me a chill down my spine and a knot in my stomach: the CDs that I was looking at weren't even the ones I pulled! They were all totally different... things I didn't recognize at all. Then I noticed a small box of singles sitting atop the CDs. I grabbed the box and started looking through it... Calypso records?! What the hell?! And suddenly it hit me: this was Irwin's record cart, not mine! None of my records were on that cart. There was nothing I could play. Dead air was upon me. I was doomed.

And then I woke up.

And, after the few seconds it took for me to be suitably relieved, I chuckled knowingly to myself: I'd had another one.

Next time you talk to someone you know who is a DJ -- or used to be one -- ask them about their radio anxiety dreams. Chances are he or she will immediately respond with tales of multiple recurring nightmares related to either an inability to find a song to play or an inability to get into the studio at all. What's striking to me is how similar these dreams are from one person to the next. For example, here's Monday morning man Charlie's recurring DJ nightmare:

I'm in the record library, getting ready to do my show, only the library is completely unfamiliar to me, and I can't find any of the records that I want to play.  Time is running  out, and I realize that I'm going to have to start my show with only one song prepared.  Then I'm in the studio, and before I know it, that first song is over, and there's dead air.  It seems that I actually have records there with me, but for some reason, none of them is playable.  Panic sets in.  What feels like an excruciatingly long time passes, as I try to figure out what to do.  Then I wake up  (thankfully).

DJ Tamar's subconscious mixes it up a bit, but still it all comes down to not being able to get that crucial next song on the air:

As recognizable a genre as they are, they seem to be different each time. Sometimes I start off looking for a record in the library (which tends to be more like the library in the old building in East Orange, or one from WESU or WRSU, but usually involves not enough recorded material on old wooden shelves) and I just can't find the record I'm looking for. In the process of looking for it, I realize that the entire library has been rearranged so that I don't know where anything is, or that all the records are warped to the point of unplayability and the CDs are too far away, or none of the CD cases have CDs in them or they are all the wrong ones, or my search keeps taking me further and further away from the studio and I'm lost, or all there is in the library/studio is in some format that I'm unfamiliar with and I can't find anything I know how to play. Or the turntable needle isn't there.
Eventually I wake up.

Other DJs chimed in, all reporting very similar dream scenarios:

I'm dreaming that I'm doing my show as normal, and somehow i get distracted or I space out. The result is that I end up exposing the poor listener to every DJ's nemesis: dead air, with no recourse or corrective measure taken to rectify this dire situation. I wake up.                                                    
                                                                                             -- Gaylord Fields

I've had a recurring dream for years now.  It's the typical dead air, nothing is cued nightmare with very little variation.  Sometimes the studio is different but it's usually the same.  In my last one, about 2 weeks ago, Liz Berg asked me to fill in about 5 minutes before her shift and that was the variation.  It's totally fascinating to me how I keep having the same dream. I guess it will never stop.
                                                                                             -- Debbie D

Debbie, I have some bad news for you: you're right, it won't. WFMU supervolunteer (and 2006 Listener Hour guest) Colleen Kane was on the air pretty regularly for most of the 90s, but hasn't had a steady radio gig since 1999. And yet, all these years later she still has dreams that are "some variation on not being prepared...the song's about to end, I have nothing cued up, nothing even pulled for the show...you know the drill." We know the drill alright -- only too well.

Sometimes, the dreams don't even allow the hapless DJ to get into the studio, as one staffer reports:

I used to have this dream frequently when WFMU was in East Orange. Driving there from NYC can be very convoluted, especially when there are freeway gridlocks and unpredicted detours. My repeat DJ nightmare was being beset by one traffic detour after another through Harrison and Newark when I'm supposed to be on the air and I'm trying to get there.

It was a little like living the old geometry puzzle -- that if you halve  the distance between yourself and a destination, repeatedly, you never actually reach that destination.

These dreams are the ONLY recurring nightmares I have. Nothing else affects  me that strongly, for some reason.

Veteran WFMU DJ Rix also has a tough time getting to the station in his DJ anxiety dreams. But even when he finds himself on the premises, things don't go well:

I suddenly realize I'm scheduled for a show, usually within the next half-hour, I'm completely unprepared, and I cannot possibly get to the station in time. Where I am when I realize this is sometimes an anachronism, like my childhood home.

My dream WFMU is nearly always based on the East Orange studios, although the journey there may resemble the one to Jersey City. The building and studio are always configured strangely. Usually the board looks very old.  Often, there's only one turntable. and even if shelves filled with CDs and records are in the room, I can't think of anything to play, and it never occurs to me to just grab anything.

If I use the music library, it might be split between two different floors, and the filing system is unfamiliar. This part of the dream comes from when, during shows, one runs into the music library during a 3 minute song only to forget what one is looking for. In both real and dream worlds, the Music Library is a Temple of Forgetfulness.

The nightmare came true only once, the day we officially moved from East Orange to Jersey City. I had the first hour slot that morning -- I won the gig by lottery -- and had picked all the music in advance. Hardly anything worked right.

Another WFMU DJ whose anxiety nightmare came to life is Antique Phonograph Music Program host MAC, proving that these dreams are not just the province of those who traffic in the more contemporary music heard on the station:

I dreamt was at the station, knowing that my show was about to start, and I was procrastinating. I knew that others around me were aware that I was supposed to be on the air soon, but no one said a word as I scrambled around the different floors of the station trying to look busy.

10 minutes to go. I knew I was in trouble since I did not have my 78 rpm records with me, and since my show was so specific the FMU record library did not have any for me to pull from. Finally, Ken said to me "MAC, shouldn't you be in studio B ready to go on the air? I gave him a confident acknowledgement that I was aware of the situation, doing my best to hide the fact that I had NO IDEA what I was about to do for a show.  The clock had ticked down to 2 minutes. I heard Brian on the house intercom in a pleading and desperate voice saying over and over "MAC, Where are you? Please call me in the studio". It was time to go on and I just had nothing. I felt like I was just going to hide. I then woke up at what would have been the most interesting part of the dream.

About two weeks after this dream, I was at the station for my show. I usually use original 78 rpm records and cylinders for my show, but this day, I was using a CD of a "virtual guest" which I do from time to time. About 5 minutes before my show, I put the CD in the player and IT WOULD NOT PLAY! I tried every CD player and even the computer and NOTHING!!! Oh my God! My dream was coming true only this time I could not just wake up! I scrambled around the library like a chicken with its head cut off for a minute until I realized that IT WAS TIME to go on the air. Only one thing to do... The Antique Phonograph Music Program became The Frank Zappa Hour (RealAudio file) for that week.

Lastly, Inner Ear Detour host David Suisman describes the "omnibus DJ anxiety dream" that he had before his last show on the regular schedule back in June of 2004 in this RealAudio clip. (Like Colleen, David reports that despite not having a weekly show for the past couple of years he still gets these dreams.)

I wonder, do people in other occupations have consistently themed recurring dreams like this? I'm sure that work anxiety dreams in general are fairly commonplace, and I'm equally sure that police officers, firefighters, air-traffic controllers and others with critical high-stress positions have anxiety dreams that I couldn't even conceive of (or just don't want to, so I don't start having those dreams instead). After all, it's not like anyone gets hurt if a DJ doesn't get a record on the air in time. But, if you walked the streets of Manhattan and asked, say, hot dog vendors about their nightmares would they consistently describe not having any buns on the cart, or opening up the metal lid, fork in hand ready to skewer a dog for a waiting customer, only to be greeted by sloshing water with no actual hot dogs? Do movie projectionists dream of film reels loaded out of order or celluloid melting before their eyes, helpless in the face of the audience below? Does every vocation or avocation have its equivalent of the dead air menace that haunts its practitioners' sleeping hours?

Tell you what, why don't you sleep on that and get back to me.

Comments

[Steve PMX]

I did an entire 2-hour show once that was completely dead air. Forgot to check the transmitter before starting - turns out the DJ before me had shut it off accidentally. wicked.

[CheeseSnobWendy]

Oh, so it's not just me who has had these dreams.

I haven't had a regularly scheduled radio program since December of 2002 (on rfb in Vermont), and I still get those dreams once in awhile. And they vary, from "my show is about to start and all of my CD cases are empty," to "the song is over and all my other records are warped," to other panicky annoyances like that. Yeah, as I read all the descriptions of dj-panic dreams, the theme and content was all too familiar.

Funny thing is, in all 11+ years of being a cheesemonger, I've never had an anxiety dream about cheese.

[Stewart]

The second station I ever worked at had what I considered a very clever emergency kit: there was a cart that was actually attached to the machine by a cord so it could never get misplaced, that had Roy Orbison's "You Got It" on it. (This song was only about a year old at the time.) This was right at the turn of the '90s, and the station still played about a 50/50 mix of vinyl and CDs, so there were problems with both. In particular, the CD players were awful, and perpetually malfunctioning. But whenever you realized dead air was imminent, you could always jam in the emergency "You Got It" cart, which would buy you three and a half minutes to fix the CD player or run to the record library.

[The Contrarian]

As a sometimes-overnight DJ at East Orange in the 1990s, the fellow whose show followed mine (I am drawing a blank on his name at the moment) used to put on Sun Ra's "Sunrise" when the clock struck six a.m. This gave him a generous 11:49 to search the library for songs to play.

[Listener Therese]

While I have had job stress dreams with every job I've ever had, they all occurred during moments of stress at that particular job. I haven't had a regular radio show since 1995, and I had a DJ nightmare just last week- In addition to blathering inanely for about half an hour to cover the fact that I had nothing cued up, and the song I finally got on the air being laden with expletives, I was doing the show on unfamiliar equipment. In the dark.

[Art]

I've been hosting a show on Sydney radio for about a year now and I've never had any of the anxiety you guys describe. For me broadcasting is the most casual experience ever. Actually, I make a point of always leaving the studio doors open and never broadcasting in shoes.

[dj earball]

Oh, what a relief! Not the confirmation that I'll keep having these frightening nocturnal episodes, but that it's, well, normal. Often I find myself in the studio and the music sections have been completely re-arrranged, or moved down the hall. I can't find things. The clock ticks. I do the dance with dead air.

Curiously, I feel relatively stress free when actually doing my show in the waking world, even when I'm still previewing songs with 20 seconds to go in the previous song. I guess I just suppress all my dj angst then, only to have it emerge later.

Hang in there, all. At least it's "dead air" and not "dead host."

[chewy-Z]

I regularly DJ'd college radio for 5 or 6 years, was very dedicated, worked on sets and themes (sometimes, anyway), but I don't know that I ever had those kinds of dreams. . . maybe once, but certainly not 'recurring' ones. I DID have a few memorable dreams involving other 'weirdness' in the station, weird pseudo-sexual surreal combinations of paranoia and long lost childhood friends appearing out of the woodwork. I DO remember co-hosting a show with a friend of mine one night, and daring him to let the air go dead. . . a form of DJ "chicken"-- he won: after God knows how long (probably only a minute, but seemingly 5 minutes or more) I ran in and cued up a record.

[Parq]

I did my last radio show in July of 1979 (WZBC in Boston) and it was the 90s before I stopped having that dream. Worse, a few years ago, it started coming back, but with a twist. The thing is, both ZBC and I were fairly mainstream in those days, and in this new version of the dream, I'm invited back as a guest alumnus and I'm dying to show everyone what decades of listening to FMU taught me about real free form radio. So inevitably, I've just started the show, the first track is about to run out, and all I can find anywhere in the studio are two or three useless schlock albums. The rest of the studio contents comprises nothing but non-audio junk like magazines. Makes me yearn for those nice calm dreams where I'm falling off a building . . .

[lee]

i worked in lumber and woodwork for years and dreamt several times of flying/swimming [?] through woodgrain. i can only imagine what undertakers dream of.

[Jack Tourette]

A Florida college station I listened to in the early 1980s played 20-30 minutes of a skipping record when the DJ got locked out of the studio during a bathroom visit. Kind of a twist on the extended remix of Cage's 4:33.

[John L]

THANK YOU!! That is EXACTLY why I never became a DJ. Fear of what to play next.

And when I was working as a tape librarian I would often have dreams of being faced with shelves and shelves of tapes in an unlimited expanse up and down. Probably had some fear of heights in there too.

Am glad to know that many DJs face this fear. I know that these days I wouldn't have the imagination or interest/need to find something to play next, one after the other and avoid dead air, but back maybe from the early 70s until the late 90s I probably could have. These days, silence is just fine. ("The only music is time, the only dance is love" - Stanley Kunitz.)

I still wonder though, how do DJs remember on what album that song that is? Or what the name of that song is out of all the millions of things you hear and like. I hear some keep notebooks but then how do you find that song in pages of notes. Do you write down, "goes boom boom boom then bang" or "neat organ". How do you tell the difference between that song with the neat organ and all those other songs with the neat organ with only seconds before the next song must play?

Someday I'd love to see "How to be an FMU DJ". How you do it. Both the hard and fast rules and the suggestions, how people have done it. (Whatever happened to that book that someone was writing?)

Cheers,

Lipwak

[shawn]

Absolutely! I've been a DJ at various stations since 1990, and this is the only recurring dream I've ever had. In mine, I'm in the studio, and for whatever reason, when my song ends, I don't have anything else cued up and ready to go. Then I scramble, but the CD players won't work, or the song won't cue, or it's like moving through syrup to get to the CD library. And then I'll go on the air to try to say something while I'm attempting to remedy the situation, but I won't be able to think of anything to say. The details change slightly (the dream used to take place in a station where I thought at the time I really wanted to work, in what was supposed to be my first show there), but the basic idea is always the same: dead air and some sort of general incompetence!

[Bruce the Moose]

Back in the 80's I did a lot of programs. One night, another formerly regular dj was going to do a then rare apperance. He was there several hours ahead of time, carefully putting together his show. 5 minutes into his show, the transmitter went down. We couldn't get it restarted.

There was a major ice storm happening at the time, the antennae iced up and reflected the power back to the transmitter. Protection devices apparently failed and a fairly major ceramic capacitor in the final amplifier shattered (as we found out later).

The regular engineer was out of town, and the backup engineer (wisely) didn't want to get out on the roads. The regular engineer returned the next day, and (as I recall) spent several hours fixing the damage.

Anyhow, that night the dj spent several hours playing his planned show, only for himself.

Bruce the Moose
Duluth, Minnesota

[Homer Fink]

Funk -

My radio nightmare is that I'm working at a radio station on Long Island. On the ground floor of the building is a clinic that may or may not be performing a certain controversial "procedure". Everyday, religious "nuts" kneel and pray outside the building making it really uncomfortable showing up for work each morning.

In my dream, I'm on the air and the GM walks in and says, "You DJs have it easy, you only work 4 hours a day. Us sales guys have to work all day!" He leaves.

But then I realize it's not a dream. It really happend.

To be continued.

[lee]

i would like to say that all radio is dead air compared to you folks. and maybe a cupla others. i hope most of your dreams at least are very nice. you all deserve em.

[Ray-C-Ray]

Similar to Stewarts "You Got It" cart, at WRCT in the 80's we had an endless loop cart of crickets I usually fell back on. Beats dead air, I guess.

Worst real-life nightmare on air: I was on during a bad thunderstorm, so bad you could probably hear the thunder rattle though the open mic. After a spot on mic, I opened the studio door to check out just how bad the storm was. I got my answer as about 3 inches of water poured right into the air studio. At first my DJ instincts kicked in. I pulled out the legal FCC sign-off cart, potted over there and stood in 3inches of water while I logged the transmitter levels and patiently waited for the sign-off to complete. It was a long one. Finally reality stuck. Why the hell am I screwing around with the studio electronics while STANDING IN THREE INCHES OF WATER? I finally shut down the studio.

Turns out the flood waters broke through a storm sewer and then broke through the wall in the library right in O and P in the rock section. If 'RCT still has it's vinyl, you can probably still see the big section of white generic LP jackets we replaced the wet and stinky originals.

[Don]

Funny you mention WRCT Ray-C-Ray, I just started a show there and indeed, there are many white LP jackets because, as was probably true during your tenure, WRCT throws nothing away. Ever.
But as for DJ dreams, I only had one recurring one until I read this post. It was the standard "I have a responsibility on this day and it's that day and I'm late!" half-awake/half-asleep dream where you wake up in a sweaty panic only to realize it is in fact not that day. Then I read this post.
Just had a dream where I was at WRCT doing my show except I kept falling asleep or blacking out and couldn't remember what I was broadcasting. Friends and family were stepping in and doing the show, but they weren't supposed to or were doing it badly. Everything was dark and I kept thinking I had to fix things but then would just black out again.
Thank you WFMU. I never thought you'd poison my dreams. Kudos.

[Doctor B.]

I'm a DJ at WHRW in Binghamton, NY, the alma mater of DJ Spinna and some good folks at 'FMU. I've been on the air snce 1979. Even though I'm in the "pop" department, I spin anything which fits onto a turntable or into a CD player.

Early in my DJ career, I had a nightmare that I had to do a jazz show. I mean, a cold-sweat nightmare! Jazz was one of those kinds of music which I usually liked when I heard it, but knew almost nothing about. Two weeks later, guess what happened? The station had a 5-day jazz marathon. Guess whose air slot the marathon included? Rather than collapse into a pile of quivering protoplasm, I quietly sat down and thought of aome names I'd heard dropped in the past on WHRW. Let's see, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Chick Corea, Karel Velebny and SHQ and even a little mid-70's Frank Zappa...I diligently gathered a carefully-selected armload of jazz sides from our record library. All in all, my worst nightmare ended up being one of my better shows.