In for 4, hold for 7, out for 8. The long breath out slows the heart.
Tonight’s kind word
I have done enough for today.
Something slow to read
The keeper of the last lamp, 5 minutes
The lighthouse stood at the end of a long green headland, where the grass grew short and soft from the salt wind. It had been lit every night for a very long time. Tonight was the first night it would rest.
Its keeper was an old woman named Maren, and she had known for a whole season that this evening would come. A newer light had been built farther along the coast, small and bright and able to look after itself. The ships no longer needed the old lamp. So Maren had decided that she would put it to bed properly, the way you would settle anyone who had worked hard for a long time.
The lighthouse stood at the end of a long green headland, where the grass grew short and soft from the salt wind. It had been lit every night for a very long time. Tonight was the first night it would rest.
Its keeper was an old woman named Maren, and she had known for a whole season that this evening would come. A newer light had been built farther along the coast, small and bright and able to look after itself. The ships no longer needed the old lamp. So Maren had decided that she would put it to bed properly, the way you would settle anyone who had worked hard for a long time.
It had been snowing since the middle of the afternoon, and by evening the little library at the edge of the town was wrapped in white. The snow had filled the path to the door and rounded the tops of the hedges and settled in a thick, quiet layer on every windowsill. No one would come in tonight. No one needed to.
Inside, the librarian, a tall, unhurried man called Tobin, had lit the stove in the reading room. It was an old iron stove with little windows in its door, and through them the fire showed orange and slow. The warmth spread out across the wooden floor and up the tall shelves, and the whole room began to smell of woodsmoke and old paper and the faint sweetness of the pine logs.
The night train left the city a little after nine, and by the time the last lights had slipped away behind it, the plains had opened out on every side, wide and dark and still.
You have a small compartment all to yourself. It has a narrow bed made up with crisp white sheets and a thick grey blanket folded at the foot. There is a little lamp above the pillow with a green glass shade, and a window with a blind you can pull down or leave open. You leave it open.
The tea house sat halfway up a green hillside, at the end of a path lined with moss and small smooth stones. It was a low wooden building with a deep roof, and its wide doors were slid open to the garden. Tonight a soft rain was falling. It was the kind of rain that does not so much fall as drift, fine as mist, settling on the leaves and gathering into slow bright drops.
Inside, a young woman named Iri knelt on a cushion beside a low table. She had come in from the evening walk with rain in her hair, and the owner of the tea house, a quiet old man with gentle hands, had given her a soft towel and a warm place near the brazier. Now he was preparing the tea.
The lake is so still tonight that it holds the whole sky. Every star is there twice, once above you and once below, and the little wooden rowing boat floats in the middle of it all as if it were drifting through the night itself.
You are sitting in the boat with the oars resting across your knees. You rowed out a while ago, slowly, just far enough that the shore became a soft dark line of trees. Now you have stopped rowing. There is nowhere else to go. The boat does not need to go anywhere.
In a small town in the hills there was a baker named Olin who worked at night, while everyone else was sleeping. Most of what he baked went to the townspeople in the morning, warm loaves and rolls and little braided buns with seeds on top. But one loaf each night was different. That loaf was for the moon.
No one remembered how the custom had started. It had simply always been so. Every night, when the moon rose over the hills, Olin baked one round loaf especially for it, and when the loaf was done he set it on the sill of the high window at the back of the bakery, where the moonlight fell. In the morning the loaf was always gone, and the sill was always dusted with something soft and silver, like flour but finer.
High above an old city, in a room at the top of a narrow house, there was a windowsill that caught the last of the day's warmth. The stone had been in the sun all afternoon, and even now, as evening deepened into night, it held that heat the way a loaf holds the heat of the oven. And on the windowsill, as she did every evening, lay a cat.
She was a soft grey cat with white paws and a white tip to her tail, and she had no particular name, though the woman who lived in the room called her Dusk, because that was when she usually appeared. She had come in over the rooftops, as she always did, stepping lightly along the tiles and the old stone gutters, and had arranged herself on the sill with great care.
You have been walking all day, and now the walk is over.
The mountain hut stands in a hollow just below the pass, a small stone building with a slate roof and a red wooden door. Smoke curls from its chimney into the evening air. The last light is fading from the peaks around you, turning them rose and then lilac and then soft grey, and the first stars are coming out above the ridge.
The last ferry of the evening left the harbor just as the lamps along the quay were being lit. It was an old ferry, painted white with a blue stripe along its side, and it moved at its own unhurried pace between the islands, calling at one small dock and then another, all through the night.
Nell had a seat on the upper deck, near the back, where a wooden bench ran along the rail under a canvas awning. She had a thick coat and a woollen hat and a flask of cocoa, and she had nowhere she needed to be until morning.
At the top of a low hill in the desert there was a small white observatory with a round dome, and on warm nights its dome stood open to the sky.
The desert was quiet after sunset. The heat of the day rose gently out of the sand and the rocks, and the air was soft and warm, and it smelled of dry earth and the faint resin of the scrubby bushes that grew between the stones. The sky was enormous out here. It began at the edge of the land in every direction and went up and up, darker and darker, until it was deep indigo overhead, thick with stars.
The harvest was finished. The last basket of apples had been carried down from the orchard that afternoon, and now the trees stood lighter in the evening air, their branches lifting a little now that the weight of the fruit was gone.
Hanne walked up between the rows as the sun went down. She did not need to walk up there. The work was done. But she liked to see the orchard at the end of the harvest, when it was quiet and the trees had nothing more to give and nothing more to be asked of them.
The hot spring lies in a hollow among pine trees, a little way up the mountain from the village. It is a round pool of dark, clear water ringed with smooth grey stones, and steam rises from it all the time, drifting up through the branches in slow white clouds.
Tonight it is snowing. The snow falls gently, in large soft flakes that seem to take a long time to come down. They drift out of the dark sky and turn in the lantern light and settle on the pine boughs and the stones and your shoulders.
Rain, sea or a fire
Nine nights, each made live in your browser so no two ever sound alike. Pick one, or lay two together.
A quiet night
Choose a sound, or two
Rain
Sea, woods and fire
A steady hush
Sleep timer: Off
The page dims to near black over the minutes you pick. In the last minute the sounds and music fade away, then stop.
This browser cannot play generated sound.
When to sleep
Get into bed at
A sleep cycle is about 90 minutes, and falling asleep takes about 15. Waking between cycles feels lighter.
Five cycles, 7.5 hours
23:15Into bedasleep by 23:30
01:00Cycle 1 endsmost deep sleep is behind you
02:30Cycle 2 ends
04:00Cycle 3 ends
05:30Cycle 4 endsthe longest dreams come next
07:00Alarm, as cycle 5 endslight sleep, easier to wake
awakedreaminglightdeep
23:15
01:00
02:30
04:00
05:30
07:00
How deep the sleepDreamingA typical night drawn from the 90 minute cycle, not a measurement of yours.
The air where you are
Temperature, humidity, air quality and pressure tonight, and what each one does to sleep.
One tap reads the forecast for where you are. Your location goes to Open-Meteo for the reading and is not kept anywhere.
Temperature
–
What it feels like, and the sky
Humidity
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Dry, comfortable or close
Air quality
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The US air quality index
Pressure
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With the wind and the UV index
Sleep impact factors
Tonight’s moon, and a jar for worries, are on the unwind page.
