From EsquireUK:
Every night for the last week, I’ve walked down a back street in a quiet suburban town. I know it well, or maybe it’s my first time there. I find a door. Behind the door is a dark room. In the middle of the dark room is a beautiful crafted miniature city. I’m not sure what happens at that point. I tend to fall asleep.
During the pandemic, I’ve got very into sleep podcasts. I don’t mean I stick one on occasionally; since about May last year I’ve come to rely on them, rifling through as many as I could find, trying and discarding new hopefuls. Too nasal. Too scratchy. Too slow. Too fast. Too distractingly whimsical. Too abrasively boring. I have my favourites, and I don’t really know what I’d do without them.
If you don’t tend to spend the early hours of the morning staring at the wall and worrying about work, or your family, or your partner, or the time eight years ago that you ate your flatmate’s Cathedral City and he found out and it was weird for a bit between you, then the concept sounds odd. These are podcasts which are designed not to be listened to. The less you hear of them, the better they are.
But the stresses of the last year have made them big business. Audible’s Bedtime Stories series, in which celebs including Nick Jonas read short lectures on quilt-making, maths, baseball and other mildly diverting topics, became Audible UK’s best-selling podcast of 2020 despite only dropping in June. Five other snooze-inducing titles from Audible’s Sleep Collection made the year’s top 100 bestsellers.
Mindfulness app Calm says that its Sleep Stories section, launched in 2016 after the company noted a spike in users meditating around bedtime, is its most popular segment. Celebrities including Matthew McConaughey have read stories, and downloads have doubled since the start of the pandemic, topping a billion in 2020. A lot of us need them.
Fortunately, there are a lot to go round, and the shapes they take are endlessly varied and fascinating (or, rather, deliberately boring). Unlike much of the podcasting ecosystem, sleep podcasts haven’t yet been hammered into a one-size-fits-all format. Some, like the much-loved Sleep With Me, are a gently surreal stream of consciousness; others read classic literature or lead meditation practices. Some craft ambient, New Age synthscapes. Others use whispery ASMR.
My favourites, though, mix all of them: washes of sound with subtle plinks and plonks, plus meandering, reassuring narration. There’s something slightly spooky about how they seem to reach right down into the brain and turn the lights off, though. I want to know how they do it.
Get Sleepy launched in November 2019 and when we speak in October 2020 its host, Thomas Jones, says each new episode is downloaded between 50,000 and 60,000 times. By mid-February, after two further national lockdowns and the darkest days of the pandemic, Get Sleepy is downloaded between 75,000 and 100,000 times a day, and the show has edged into the top 20 on the iTunes podcast chart.
It’s made by a small team of four, plus freelance writers and narrators from around the world. Without a professional studio at home in Buckinghamshire, Jones clears his girlfriend’s clothes from a built-in wardrobe and clambers in to record his introductions and narrations.
As far back as Jones can remember, he’s had trouble sleeping. “I’m still struggling to this day with it,” the 27-year-old says over Zoom. “A few years ago I started using some apps and podcasts as I was falling asleep and tried listening along, and it sort of had an effect – it wasn’t absolutely foolproof every night but I definitely thought, ‘Wow, this is a cool idea’.”
Jones got in touch with Michael Brandon, CEO of the app Slumber, to find out how someone got into the sleep podcast game. At the time he was managing a flooring shop in Southminster in Essex, but soon he was writing and recording his own stories for Brandon.
Over the last year and a half a formula of sorts has been formed, and there’s now a 10-point guide for Get Sleepy’s writers. A story should run to about 3,000 words, and there should be no dialogue (“Dialogue requires slightly more processing power from the listener”) or anything likely to make a listener unhappy or self-conscious (“Keep in mind common fears/issues/insecurities like claustrophobia, arachnophobia, infertility, loss of grandparents, alcohol use, concerns about weight or appearance, etc”). Simple language is good, and so are moments of relaxation and mindfulness, where a character feels grateful and content. Sensory, tactile descriptions are important too.
“It might describe the character touching a coin or something like that – how does that feel on your fingers?” says Jones. “So that people can really put themselves in the story in that situation. Sort of like carrying them into a dream themselves, with these visualisations.”
. . . .
“It’s impossible to disentangle really how they might be working,” says Dr Matt Jones, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Bristol. He’s researched sleep for much of his career, and while he doesn’t know any papers about sleep podcasts specifically, sleep itself varies so widely between people that there’s no one answer as to why they work.
“If a sleep podcast is working for people,” he says, “it’s probably working in different ways for different people.” Dr Jones himself swears by For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver as a sleep aid in hotel rooms.
Both Get Sleepy and The Sleeping Forecast might be exploiting the same bit of my brain, though. The type of sleep you settle into as you first drop off is non-Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, Dr Jones explains.
Link to the rest at EsquireUK
