A slow, quiet retelling of the journey of Sun Wukong, told from the beginning and made for falling asleep to.
The whole story of the Monkey King, at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.
He was born out of a stone on a mountain top, which was already an unusual start, and he spent most of the rest of his life refusing to accept that anything was above him. What follows is the years he spent studying under a master who taught him things he was never meant to learn, the weapon he took from the bottom of the sea because nothing lighter would do, and the moment he crossed out his own name in the register of the dead. Then a long quarrel with heaven itself, a title he was given to keep him quiet that only made things worse, and a punishment that held him under a mountain for a very long time. And after that, the road west — the pilgrimage he was let out to protect, walking for years alongside a monk who could not defend himself, running into something new and stranger at every stage of it. He is proud, funny, impossible to kill, and slowly, over the course of the journey, he changes.
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 on the mountain where he was born and wake up much later, halfway along the road west, 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, 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.
