Season 1, Episode 3: The Night Carnival, a meditation for sleep

This is the first meditation I wrote just for myself. It’s how I wish I could go to sleep every night. I love the magic and excitement of a carnival, especially as it appears in my imagination from hazy childhood memories. I included techniques that I wanted to have fit my own wind-down, but I couldn’t find together in any of the bedtime meditations out there.

This one puts me to sleep almost every time, but I’ve heard from a beta listener that it doesn’t always work for the hard-core insomniacs out there. For them, I have another meditation coming in two weeks — a track so sleepy, I had to review it for quality five minutes at a time, with breaks in-between or I would fall asleep.

This one has a short body scan, to spend more time in dream-inducing visualizations. One of these is reviewing the day, a commonly used techniques, one I first learned from Headspace, which is in fast flashes like I have here, but I’ve since encountered this elsewhere as in Total Yoga Nidra's excellent sleep course.

One tip from this course is repetitive, fading language to help the mind drift off to sleep. I also slipped in some basic hypnotic language to reinfoce goals for the next day, including reinforcing any habits.

As far as I know, I came up with the concept of an anamatronic you in a carnival ride. I’ll probably never top that.

The music was a RAV Vast D Celtic Minor, and a Hokema Sansula (tuned to Sunflower).

I also included lots of silence to help sleep come a little easier, especially at the end. Although hopefully no one listening to this has the track on repeat, or the beginning music may wake them up again!