Pleeo the Sandpiper's Murmurations, and other sleep tales

Props to Emmanuel Perron,
who does all the awesome illustrations at Relax Melodies

Gnome Jam - my go-to self-created mix

Some of the hundreds of sounds to pick from with the composer feature

  Have trouble sleeping?

  I’ve been writing ‘slow lit’ (bedtime stories for adults) for Relax Melodies (now known as Bettersleep) for a while now, and the first three of these tales have finally been produced and released: Gizmo the House Cat, A Penguin’s Voyage, and Pleeo the Sandpiper’s Murmurations. They’re not all about birds, but I manage to sneak birds into all of them, heh heh. More stories are on the way.

  Slow lit is a challenging genre to write — the stories have to be engaging…but also boring soothing enough to put people to sleep, so it’s a bit of a literary razor’s edge. It’s super weird to hear my stories being read by a professional narrator, with all the sound effects and music.

  Relax Melodies is a Montreal-based relaxation app, and they hustle — they have over 55 million downloads, and are always trying to tweak their product to better suit their many devoted customers. They have loads of favourable reviews from customers as well as media, with an average rating of 4.6/5 from more than 215,000 individual reviews on the apple app store.

  Aside from the stories, there are other features to help get you to sleep — meditations, breathing exercises, ‘sleep moves,’ and my favourite, the composer, where you can make your own sound mixes. I actually listen to the mixes I created most nights to help me slip off to meet the Sandman. My mixes are mostly ‘nature’s white noise’-type things, with wind and rain and whatnot, but straight-up ‘cat purring’ also knocks me out every time.

  My stories are not on the free part of the app, but there are a few other stories on there you can listen to for free on your smart phone or computer. A yearly subscription is about $30, and they often have sales. They also have a 7-day free trial, and lifetime subscription options.

  Anyway, they didn’t ask me to write this, but I reckon it’s worth a listen if you have issues slowing down your mind when trying to get to sleep.