It’s easy to nod off to ‘sleep stories.’ Making them is hard
Elizabeth Skipper, a freelance copywriter in Cincinnati, has done something that might make a lot of people jealous.
She’s gone to bed with Idris Elba dozens of times.
No, not in the flesh. Skipper drifts off to sleep at night listening to Elba’s deep baritone narrating a story via the Calm app on her phone. Not much happens in the story, a leisurely travelogue about the African country of Lesotho which slackens into descriptions of alpine valleys and caves with ancient rock art.
But Elba’s tale and other glacially paced narratives, most commonly called “sleep stories,” have become increasingly popular during the pandemic among people looking to quiet their minds and soothe their jangled nerves at bedtime.