Theseus and the Minotaur: The Complete Story of the Labyrinth | Greek Mythology for Sleep

Theseus and the Minotaur: The Complete Story of the Labyrinth | Greek Mythology for SleepA slow, quiet retelling of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, told from the beginning and made for falling asleep to.The whole story of the labyrinth, at a pace that's deliberately too slow to follow properly. That's the point. You're not meant to reach the end.It starts, as these things usually do, with someone breaking a promise to a god. A king was sent a bull out of the sea on the understanding that he'd give it back, and he kept it, and what came of that was a child that couldn't be shown to anybody. So a building was commissioned — designed by the cleverest man alive to be impossible to get out of — and the thing was put inside it, and every few years a ship arrived from Athens carrying young people who were sent in and not seen again. What follows is the young man who volunteered for that ship, the king's daughter who fell for him and gave him a length of thread, what happened in the middle of the labyrinth, and the far less satisfying business of what came afterwards: an island where somebody was left behind, and a sail that somebody forgot to change, and a father watching from a cliff. Almost nobody in this story ends up where they wanted to be.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 before the ship has even sailed and wake up much later, deep inside the labyrinth, 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.