I settled on a similar way to keep the demons away.<p>For the past few years I've been falling asleep listening to an old iPhone 4 tucked under my pillow with the volume at it's lowest level. No earphones are necessary and my wife doesn't even realize I'm doing it.<p>I don't listen to podcasts but dialog-heavy movies that I've seen many times. I have a list of about 2 dozen movies that I go through depending on my mood, but they're all relatively quite without much action, just pleasant material. Since I've seen the movies it's easy to visualize along to the dialog and sleep comes (relatively) easy.
I think everyone can relate to falling asleep listening to a voice or background noise. I wonder if there any science about quality of sleep that results if you do this all night.