Mythology And Folklore For Sleep

The Complete Story of Roman Mythology: The Gods, Heroes and Founding of Rome | Mythology for Sleep

A slow, quiet journey through the whole of Roman mythology, from the gods to the founding of the city, made for falling asleep to.
This is the long one. Not a single story but the whole arrangement — and the first thing to say about it is that it isn’t simply the Greek version with the names changed, however often people claim that.
The oldest Roman gods are stranger and vaguer than their Greek counterparts: forces rather than personalities, with almost no stories attached, worshipped carefully by farmers who were mainly concerned with getting the ritual exactly right. A god of doorways and beginnings who faces both ways. Household spirits kept in a cupboard and fed. A goddess whose fire in the centre of the city was never allowed to go out, tended by women who gave thirty years to it. Only later, once Greek literature arrived, did the big Olympian personalities get laid on top — and the seams are still visible.
Then the part the Romans actually cared about: how the city got here. A refugee sailing out of a burning Troy with his father on his back, seven years at sea, a queen in Carthage, a descent into the underworld to speak with the dead, and a war in Italy to win a country he’d been promised. Centuries later, in the same line, twin boys put in a basket on a flooding river, a she-wolf, a quarrel over a wall, and a killing that the Romans never stopped being uncomfortable about. Everything afterwards — the kings, the rape and the revolt that ended them, the heroes who held bridges and burned their own hands — was told less as myth than as instruction.
Hours long, by design. There’s no part of it you have to be awake for.
The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off among the old household gods and surface somewhere on a hillside above the Tiber, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.
Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.
Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Roman myths and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.

Laelaps and the Teumessian Fox: The Complete Story of the Unending Hunt | Greek Mythology for Sleep
A slow, quiet retelling of Laelaps and the Teumessian fox, made for falling asleep to.
It’s the shortest paradox in Greek myth and one of the strangest things the gods ever had to deal with.
There was a fox sent to punish a city, and it had been made so that nothing could ever catch it. And there was a hound, given as a gift and passed down through several hands, which had been made so that nothing it chased could ever escape. The two of them were eventually, inevitably, set against each other — and the moment they started running, the world had a problem that could not be resolved by anything inside it.
What follows is how they got there, which takes some telling. The fox has its own story, demanding a child from Thebes every month until somebody thought to solve the matter with a dog. The hound has a longer one: a wedding present, then a payment, then an inheritance, passed between people who each used it for something and each came to a bad end — including a husband and wife who kept giving each other magical gifts out of mutual suspicion, which ended exactly as badly as that sounds.
And then the chase, which is still going in one sense. Zeus looked down at a creature that always catches and a creature that is never caught, both at full speed across the Theban countryside, and did the only thing available: he stopped them both, turned them to stone, and put them in the sky, where they are two of the constellations. The hunt never finished. It was simply paused and hung up where everyone could see it.
The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off before the chase begins and surface long after both of them are in the sky, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.
Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.
Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.

The Complete Story of Japanese Mythology: The First Gods and Japan’s Creation | Mythology for Sleep

A slow, quiet journey through the beginning of Japanese mythology, from the first gods to the making of the islands, made for falling asleep to.
This is the long one. Not a single story but the opening of the whole arrangement, in the order the oldest surviving Japanese book puts it — a text written down in the eighth century precisely because the court was worried the stories were slipping away.
It starts with something formless and a bridge in the sky. The first generations of gods come and go without doing much, and then a pair of them are handed a jewelled spear and told to make something of the ocean below. They stir it, and when they lift the spear the brine that drips off the tip hardens into the first island, and they go down and stand on it. What they do next — the courtship, the circling of a pillar, the wrong word spoken first, and the terrible result that followed — is one of the stranger beginnings in any mythology, and the way they correct it says a great deal about the world being built.
Then the islands are born, one after another, and then the gods of the sea and the mountains and the trees, and then the one whose birth killed her — and what follows is a husband going down into the land of the dead after her, a warning not to look, a lamp lit anyway, and a flight back up with the whole underworld behind him. What he washes off in a river afterwards becomes the sun, the moon, and the storm — and from there the rest of Japanese myth begins.
Hours long, by design. There’s no part of it you have to be awake for.
The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off on the floating bridge and surface somewhere on the way back from the underworld, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.
Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.
Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Japanese legends and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.

Argus and Io: The Complete Story of Hera’s Hundred-Eyed Guardian | Greek Mythology for Sleep

A slow, quiet retelling of Argus and Io, made for falling asleep to.
The useful thing about a guard with a hundred eyes is that he only ever closes half of them. He never slept — not properly, not all at once — which is why he was given the job, and which is also, eventually, what killed him.
The story is a domestic quarrel that got badly out of hand. A god took an interest in a young priestess, his wife came looking, and he turned the girl into a white cow before she arrived. The wife, who was not fooled for a second, asked politely for the cow as a gift, and then tied it to a tree and set the hundred-eyed watchman over it. What follows is what was sent to get her back: not force, but a storyteller — somebody who sat down beside the guard and simply talked, and played, and told a long, slow, circling tale until the eyes began to close one pair at a time.
And then the rest, which is the sad half. A girl still in the shape of an animal, driven across the whole of the known world by a stinging fly, from Greece to the Black Sea to Egypt, passing a chained Titan on a rock along the way. It takes years. She is restored at the end of it, in Egypt, and the eyes of the dead guardian are set into the tail of a bird, where they still are.
There is something fitting about an episode whose central scene is a very long story being told to put somebody to sleep.
The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off before the last eye closes, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.
Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.
Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.

The Complete Story of Egyptian Mythology: Creation, Battles and the Underworld | Mythology for Sleep

A slow, quiet journey through the whole of Egyptian mythology, from the first mound of earth to the last gate of the underworld, made for falling asleep to.
This is the long one. Not a single story but the whole arrangement, which is worth taking in one sitting — because the Egyptians kept the same world running, with the same gods in it, for longer than any other civilisation has kept anything, and the pieces only make sense together.
It starts in water, with nothing in it. Then a mound rises, and on it something stands up and begins naming things into existence — and there are several versions of that moment, from several cities, all of them certain their own mound was the first. What follows is the family that came out of it: a sky, a ground, air and water between them, and the generation after that, whose quarrel is the heart of all of it. A good king killed by his own brother. A wife who searched the length of the country for the pieces. A son who grew up to take the throne back, in a dispute that ran for eighty years and was settled in a courtroom.
Then the two things the Egyptians thought about most. The sun, which is not simply up there but a boat crewed every night through the dark on the other side of the world, attacked at the same point every single night by something that has to be driven off before morning. And the dead, who make a journey of their own — gates with their own keepers, each with a name that has to be spoken, a hall where a life is weighed against a feather, and whatever lies past that.
Hours long, by design. There’s no part of it you have to be awake for.
The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off on the first mound and surface somewhere deep in the night boat’s journey, that’s the intended use. Most people don’t make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.
Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.
Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can’t sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.