Mapping sleep is a journey in the train sleep stories of the Calm meditation app

Abstract

Abstract Sleep problems, including difficulties falling and staying asleep, are pervasive and, increasingly, people are turning to mindfulness-based interventions to support sleep routines as well as overall mental wellbeing. A widely used meditation app, Calm, offers a genre of audio-based “sleep stories”, designed specifically to facilitate falling asleep. While sharing some linguistic similarities with other discourses of mindfulness and guided meditation, sleep stories are stylistically unique, challenging conventional storytelling structures in ways that encourage physical and mental downregulation. In reference to a focused, qualitative corpus of sleep stories transcribed from Calm’s sleep story library, this paper examines the most popular form of this new and hitherto unstudied narrative genre: the train sleep story sub-category. Through analysis of you-narration, and the construal of agency and motion, this paper explores how the conceptual metaphor sleep is a journey structurally underpins these unusual stories, establishing an idealised and immersive experience whereby listeners become travellers, the act of falling asleep becomes a journey, and, finally, sleep becomes a destination.