A slow, quiet retelling of the story of Pan, the wild god of the woods, made for falling asleep to.
The whole story of the god of shepherds, music and forests, told at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.
He never lived on the mountain with the others. He stayed down in the hills where the flocks were, half goat and entirely uninterested in being respectable, and the people who left offerings for him were the ones who actually worked out there. What follows is where he came from, the pipes he made out of reeds after something he wanted turned into them rather than be caught, the music contest he probably shouldn't have entered, and the strange stillness of the hour around noon when shepherds believed he was asleep and knew better than to wake him. He is also where we get the word for the particular kind of fear that arrives out of nowhere in an empty landscape. And there's the old story, passed on centuries later, that he was the only one of the gods who ever died — which nobody has ever quite been able to prove or let go of.
But the point of this recording isn't really the story. It's the hour or two spent drifting through it. The voice stays low and even the whole way through. No music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Every sentence sits at roughly the same level as the one before it, so nothing ever pulls your attention back up to the surface.
That's what makes it work on the nights when your head won't switch off. It's just interesting enough to give your thoughts something to hold, and slow enough that they let go of it on their own. You don't have to follow along. You don't have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift off somewhere out in the hills and wake up much later, in the middle of something you've missed the start of, you've used this exactly the way it's meant to be used. 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 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.
