Lullable: True Stories for Sleep

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Spend one whole winter night in a village cottage four hundred years ago, from rushlight to frost. The family sleeps their first sleep, wakes softly near midnight for the quiet hour between, then drifts into a second sleep until dawn. Along the way, the historian who found this lost rhythm in Chaucer and old prayer books, the scientist who saw it return in long dark nights, and the gentle, still-open question of how people have always slept.

Read in the synthesised voice of Arthur from Ludlow.

More stories in the Lullable app for iPhone and Android: https://getlullable.com/go/podcast

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You rise gently from your own roof and travel outward, past the Moon and Jupiter, until a tilted gold shape appears in the dark. Up close the rings resolve into thousands of fine bright lines, and then into ice: billions of frozen pieces, some finer than dust and some the size of mountains, all drifting the same way at once. You watch small moons carve clean lanes and raise slow waves behind them, hear a gentle unfinished argument about how old it all is, and then settle into the ring plane and stay.

Read in the synthesised voice of Arthur from Ludlow.

More stories in the Lullable app for iPhone and Android: https://getlullable.com/go/podcast

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You cross a frozen street at two in the morning toward the one lit window on the corner, and step into a small tiled room that smells of warm flour. A baker works alone at a wooden bench, unhurried, feeding a glass jar that is older than she is. You learn what is living inside it, why the dough rests before it is touched, what the salt is quietly doing, and how a loaf lifts and sets and turns gold in the last half hour. Then the light goes off, and she walks home to sleep.

Read in the synthesised voice of Arthur from Ludlow.

More stories in the Lullable app for iPhone and Android: https://getlullable.com/go/podcast

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

You settle in beside one of history’s calmest minds. This is a slow exploration of Aristotle’s life and ideas — how he watched the natural world, what he taught about knowledge, character, and friendship, and why his patient way of thinking still shapes how we understand ourselves. The questions are old, the pace is gentle, and nothing needs deciding tonight.

Read in the synthesised voice of David from Oxford.

More stories in the Lullable app for iPhone and Android: https://getlullable.com/go/podcast

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Spend one evening in Uruk, five thousand years ago, when it was the largest city in the world. Reed boats glide in along the canals, the flocks come home to be counted, and the White Temple glows on its platform in the sunset. By lamplight, a writer presses barley accounts into soft clay, some of the earliest writing anywhere, while the city eats its supper, drinks its beer through reed straws, and climbs up onto the flat roofs to sleep under the stars.

Read in the synthesised voice of Arthur from Ludlow.

More stories in the Lullable app for iPhone and Android: https://getlullable.com/go/podcast