5 Songs to Help You Fall Asleep

We're not all air-traffic controllers, but most of us toss and turn and can't get to sleep at one time or another. For those restless nights when sleep is elusive, Paste put together a list of songs to help you find it, tunes with "a special kind of melody—something captivating yet calming, powerful yet peaceful—to put someone into that perfect dreamy state." A sampling:

• Mazzy Star, 'Into Dust': Mazzy Star could pretty much sing the phone book to relaxing results, but in this "song’s harrowing and mournful lyrics, there’s something calming about envisioning the whole world fading into dust while you’re fading into sleep."

• The Rolling Stones, 'Wild Horses': One doesn't necessarily equate Mick Jagger with low energy, but this "is one of the dreamiest examples of how the Stones can master a slow song just as well as their signature rock songs."
• Iron & Wine, 'The Sea & the Rhythm': Resistance is futile: "Your hands they move like waves over me/ Beneath the moon, tonight, we’re the sea."
• Incubus, 'Aqueous Transmission': Chinese instruments, Japanese orchestra, and the lead singer Brandon Boyd's promise to make a listener "pee his/her pants" from sheer blissed out chillitude.
• Joan Baez, 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright': Sure, it's Dylan's song, but Baez's version dumps the grating harmonica, adds her "logatto tone," and "amplifies the song’s already languid theme."

Click for Paste's other five picks. (More sleep stories.)