Join your local sleepers club tonight

Last night was one of those nights. I woke up at midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep. I tossed and turned, checking my phone every fifteen minutes to see how much precious nighttime I was wasting, getting more and more stressed about being awake. It’s nights like these that make me wish my most boring friend would come over and tell me a long, rambling story about nothing that would finally let me turn my mind off and fall asleep.

Luckily, that’s the thinking behind Sleep With Me, a bedtime story podcast from Drew Ackerman (a.k.a. Dearest Scooter). Drew had his own childhood struggles with insomnia and found comfort in late-night radio programmes like the Dr. Demento Show. After growing into an adult with creaky, dulcet tones and a penchant for tangents, he thought he could help others who struggle to fall asleep. And help he has—Sleep With Me has earned millions of downloads and a loyal fanbase since starting in 2013.

It would be oversimplifying things a bit to say that Drew makes boring stories. Sleep With Me episodes are not actually boring. They couldn’t be, otherwise your mind would start to wander back to everything that stresses you out. No, Sleep With Me keeps you just entertained enough to distract you, but not so entertained that you can’t fall asleep. A key element of that is the tangents, the side quests into nothingness. If you’re in the right pre-sleep mindset, it’s these meanders that will pull you into dreamland.

I met Drew almost a decade ago, shortly before Sleep With Me joined Night Vale Presents, the network I was working for at the time. I was already a fan of the show, and as I worked with and got to know Drew, I quickly became a fan of the person behind it. One thing I loved about Drew was that he took the idea of a “network” very seriously, and enjoyed the camaraderie of being part of a group of like-minded shows and producers. So it’s no surprise that when we were trying to figure out how to promote other network shows on Sleep With Me without ruining the sleepy vibes, Drew had a brilliant and creatively generous idea.

See, some of Sleep With Me’s most popular and long-running mini-series were recaps of popular TV shows like Game of Thrones and Star Trek. Drew thought—what if we did crossover episodes with Night Vale’s fiction series in the style of sleepy recaps? These crossovers ended up being a big success—the creators loved them, listeners of both shows loved them, and we built bridges between shows that other networks only dreamed of. We started with big hitters Alice Isn’t Dead and Within the Wires, but we also managed to get in a crossover with Chuck Tingle’s Pounded In The Butt By My Own Podcast (renamed Puffed In My Pillows to maintain Sleep With Me’s PG rating).

Since Local Files Club launched, a crossover with Sleep With Me has been in the back of my mind. Of course, when I pitched it to Drew, he had an idea that would take this collaboration to another level, just like old times. Over on Sleep With Me’s paid tier, producer Posty Posterson will often make “Super Deluxe” episodes where he remixes Scooter’s stories along with music and sound effects. Why not invite the producers of Local Files Club’s releases to do the same?

So that’s exactly what we’ve done with Local Sleepers Club, the first in what I hope is a long line of collaborations between the Sleep With Me podcast and Local Files Club. First, we have Scooter’s sleepy retellings of Ms. Shipton’s Travelling Tea Shop and Salt Bloom. Then, sound designers Oliver Morris and Justin Hellstrom have turned around and fully sound-designed and soundtracked Scooter’s narration in their own “Super Deluxe” episodes.

This whole exchange is such a fascinating and unique opportunity—how often do the original creators get to interpret reinterpretations of their own work? For Oliver and Justin, it was a chance to think about what made for a good bedtime story, not only in how you change the text but the sonic landscape as well. For fans of Ms. Shipton and Salt Bloom, these episodes will be rich aways to revisit the stories while also pondering questions on the nature of adaptation. Or maybe skip the pondering and just try and get some shut eye.

Local Sleepers Club, Vol. 1 is available now on Bandcamp. It’s completely free to stream and download, or pay-what-you-want to add it to your Bandcamp library and help support future Local Files Club productions.