Fall asleep with Henrik

Hi, Sleepy. It's me again. Henrik.

I'm a Swedish man with a microphone and no filter, speaking English as well as I can.

I talk about being a parent. About loneliness. About oceans and boats. About triangles on Venus. About how little I can control, and what a birthday must have felt like in 1348.

I tell you what I'm afraid of. I say thank you to my imagination. Then I keep talking, because that's what I do. Some of the words find each other. Some don't.

This isn't a lullaby. It's something else.

Sleep tight.

More about me: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl

From the archive, first heard in May 2025.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Sleepy.

I'm lying on my sofa in Stockholm. It's summer when I do the recording. The window is open and it's quiet out there.

I talk about minds meeting across time and distance. About Harold the hamster, who keeps running. About a girl who asked her father why she has to exist.

These are the questions that come when the lights go out. Forever. Being. Not knowing. I don't have any answers. I just walk around in the questions for a while, and you can come along.

Sleep tight.

More about me: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl

From the archive, first heard in June 2025.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Sleepy.

This sort of a reintroduction, cause of lovely newcomers!

I'm Swedish and I'm doing this in English. I'm nervous. I don't have a plan.

I talk about being afraid of failing. About being a boy. About sleep as a kind of vacation. About doing something without knowing how.

No sheep. No whalesong. I just talk. And somewhere in there is the idea that you are not alone in this.

Sleep if you want. Or don't.

Sleep tight.

More about me: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl

From the archive, first heard in May 2025.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi Sleepy!

I'm getting older. My body knows it. My thoughts move slower than they used to. Inside I still feel like I did at twenty.

For many years I tried to be the kind of man I thought I was supposed to be. I drank too much. The shame from those years is still with me.

Now I make the things I want to make. It took a long time to get here.

I also think about consciousness. About what a self is. The cells in my body. The universe. And me somewhere in between, one single person who can never be replaced.

You don't have to follow along. Let the words pass.

Sleep Tight!

From the archive, first heard in June 2024.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi sweet Sleepy!

A rerun from the archive, first heard in May 2024. In this one I drift between my teenage years with my best friend Marcus — our ambitious attempt at a homemade fantasy film, and a little improvisation game we invented called "Book of the Day" — and bigger things: the Voyager probes, the Golden Record, and our strange urge to send a piece of ourselves into the void. It gets a bit dreamlike towards the end. Don't follow the thread too closely.

Let my voice wash over you, and drift off.

Sleep tight!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi dearest Sleepy!

A rerun from the archive — this was the very first English episode I ever made, back in May 2024. No music, no guided meditation, none of the usual sleep podcast stuff. Just me, letting my mind wander in my imperfect English: furry conventions, untranslatable Swedish phrases, and why we're so hard on ourselves. Don't listen too closely. Let my voice wash over you, and drift off.

Sleep tight!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi Sleepy.

This time I wander through childhood memories, my old teenage barbershop quartet, an old friend, and some thoughts about how strange it is to simply be alive.

My English stumbles here and there, my thoughts wander off, and I occasionally forget what I was talking about. As usual.

You don’t have to follow any of it. Just let me talk somewhere in the background and see where we end up.

Sleep tight.

From the archive, first heard in May 2024.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

First day back after the summer. I sit down and I start with gravel.

Not the interesting kind. There isn't an interesting kind. But where I grew up almost nothing was paved, and when you came off a bike on that surface it took a wide decorative area out of you and filled it with small stones. And those stones lived in your knee until September.

So this one is mostly that. Two memories from a very small village in the middle of Sweden. My little brother and a friend stuck in a ditch full of clay, and one single boot left lying on the road. And a boy called Pontus who did a skid that tied a knot in itself.

There are old people in it too. Real ones. Born so long ago they had probably seen the nineteenth century. One of them stood on his steps and offered us sweets and then wanted to hear about our lives.

Then I talk about my summer. Copenhagen with my daughter, who navigates vintage shops she found on TikTok while I stand there holding the bags. Being told, gently, that my life is unfair. Driving alone to places nobody else wants to go to, and slowly noticing that the pleasure in it is running out.

And whether or not I have been swimming this summer. You can decide that one for yourself.

No script. No plan. One hour, and then a timer goes off.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It is summer, with all that comes with it, so this is a rerun. A fallback to a more innocent time, when I was still quite new at this whole speaking-English-into-a-microphone thing.

This is me letting my mind wander. No script, no soothing affirmations, just my imperfect English and whatever thoughts show up. That was sort of the point then, and it still is.

I talk about the spaceship I invented as a kid, the Adventure Wolf. About my drinking, back when that was a thing, and how I found my way back to my childhood imagination. I get into national identity and why I would rather belong to the whole world than to one flag. Somewhere along the way there are schoolyard bullies, old Swedish poetry that romanticizes war, and some thoughts on sleep and the lack of it.

You do not need to follow any of this. Just let my voice be there in the room while you drift off. It is completely fine to fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. That is what it is for.

From the archive, first heard in May 2024.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Sleepy.

Tonight I try to stand on the floor of not knowing. Not as a clever sentence, not as a podcast slogan, but as an actual place to put your feet in the morning. From uncertain times and foggy future towns to acting, meditation, smartphones, forecasts, sobriety, fathers, daughters, white beards I cannot grow, and the strange certainty that if you are hearing this, I somehow made it all the way to the end.

This is an episode about uncertainty, but in the sleepy way. No alarms. No instructions. Just a Swedish boy-man in Stockholm talking himself through the fog while you drift in and out beside him. Maybe falling asleep. Maybe just resting inside the fact that none of us really know what comes next.

It is what it is. What happens, happens. And right now, there’s nothing we can do about it.

Sleep Tight!

More about Henrik, click here: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.