My writing endeavor did not start out as a literary project. I was designing a mental health app. One of the features was for the improvement of sleep health. I hired a freelance musician to compose original sleep music and a few writers to compose sleep stories. The written products I received from the freelance writers were disappointing. The stories were bland and did not lead anywhere.
I know what you are thinking. Boring and pointless stories should put anyone to sleep, right?
Not quite so. The art of sleep story writing is to engage listeners in mindfulness. The words at the beginning of the stories serve as the anchor for the listener to ground their thoughts. The story then gently unwinds and eventually leads to a peaceful and serene place.
Believing none of the freelancers would ever be able to write sleep stories the way I wanted, I set to work. I began with a few fairy-tale-styled stories. I read them to my 9-year-old daughter and they passed her litmus test. As I produced more stories, I started auditioning for voice artists I found on Upwork. We narrowed the pool down to four talented artists. One artist, whom I will call Jane, had a voice that suited so well to the stories and I assigned her the most scripts. Jane was professional and punctual with product deliveries. We worked very well together and we learned bits and pieces of each other’s personal life.
One day, I sent Jane the script for “The Race Down The River”. It was a story about a woman whose husband and father died. She was so heartbroken that the god of death gave her a chance to bring them back to the land of the living. He told her that he would take her husband and father on a raft. The woman was to follow them on another raft. If she could catch up with him and bring her husband and father back on her raft, she could have them back alive.
To find out what happens in the end, you will have to read the whole story in Wake, or just keep reading this article. But the point of the story was about death as a part of the human life cycle. We will all face death sooner or later. We’d be setting ourselves up for more painful wounds if we pretended it wouldn’t happen to us or someone we love. And wishing it had never happened only drowns us in deeper sorrow.
A few days passed after I send Jane the script of “The Race Down The River” and I did not hear from her, which was uncharacteristic. I sent her a message to make sure everything was all right. She apologetically replied that she had to re-record the script many times because she couldn’t stop crying.
I got to talk more and Jane shared with me that her father had committed suicide a year earlier. She never fully processed the loss and her grief. As with most suicide survivors, Jane’s grief was texturized by unanswered questions, guilt, and shame. I apologized to her if my story triggered difficult emotions and pains.
She graciously thanked me and said that, in fact, the story was very helpful to her healing. Like the woman in the story, Jane was looking for her father, trying to catch up with his raft. The longer the quest, the less sustainable her raft became. In the end, she learned she must let him go with love and find a way back to shore where new meanings awaited.
Jane and I stayed in touch after the project ended. She continues to do well and is working on her own writing project. I am very excited to see the finished product.
Because of the effect it had on Jane, I decided not to include “The Race Down The River” in one of the sleep stories. Nonetheless, it is one of my favorite stories in Wake. It may not have the traditional happy ending you’d expect from fairy tales, but in my mind, the ending is always wise and kind.