1:37 a.m.
It's 1:37 a.m. Your brain is drafting emails.
Racing thoughts have one weakness: they need things to make sense.
An iPhone app for people who lie awake
Sleep stories with no plot.
Sheeps writes you a new one every night — vivid, harmless, and deliberately disconnected. Nothing to follow. Nothing to stay awake for. Coherence is the thing keeping you up.
Get Sheeps for iPhone
English and German · iOS
Awake mode
Why you can't switch off
Replaying the day. Planning tomorrow. Arguing with someone who isn’t there. Linear, coherent thinking is "awake mode" — and willpower can’t turn it off. Even counting sheep fails: counting is orderly, and order is the problem.
Cognitive shuffling
Falling asleep looks weird from the inside
In the minutes before sleep, thoughts naturally fragment into brief, odd, harmless images. Cognitive shuffling — developed by cognitive scientist Dr. Luc Beaudoin — flips the direction: feed your mind random, gentle imagery, and it takes the hint that it’s safe to power down.
So we removed the plot.
A Sheeps story is eight to twenty scenes that connect by dissolve, not by logic. One sensory detail becomes the next. Nothing is chasing anyone. No question is ever put to you.
- You are walking through a broccoli forest. Mist drifts between the stems.
- The mist thickens into wool.
- The wool is a sweater on a chair in a lighthouse.
- The lighthouse is warm. Somewhere, a kettle.
And then the language falls asleep too.
Sentences start at fourteen to eighteen words and shrink as the night goes on. The last scenes are four-word fragments with seven seconds of silence between them. The voice ramps down, warms, and stops. No chime. No "the end". Just the room, and then nothing.
How weird should tonight get?
Four detents. Each one changes exactly one thing about the sentence below it. Drag it.
You walk through a forest of broccoli; mist drifts between the stems.
Peculiar
Never disturbing, never uncanny, at any setting.
Ingredients
You choose what the night is made of.
Pick the places your mind already feels safe. Sheeps builds from those and nothing else.
And what it must never contain.
Spiders. Deep water. Hospitals. Heights. Whatever yours is — name it, and it is gone, along with its synonyms. The avoid list is enforced twice: once when the story is written, and again by an automated check before a single word is ever spoken aloud.
Voices
Who should read to you?
Six narrators, none of them in a hurry. Every one of them is included from the first night.
Claire
Low and unhurried, like a shelf of old atlases.
Winston
Warm, faintly amused. He knows there is no ending.
Evelyn
Hushed and close — a candle two rooms away.
Levi
Slow static. The midnight shipping forecast.
Luna
Weightless and even. Nothing in it is going anywhere.
Ethan
Level and unhurried, like someone reading to themselves.
The night itself
Built for the dark.
Ready before you are
Tonight’s story is generated and rendered ahead of your usual bedtime, so pressing play costs nothing but a tap. Want a different one at midnight? That works too.
Elapsed and total. Never a countdown.
A countdown is a deadline, and a deadline is the last thing you need at midnight. The player shows how long you have been listening and how long the story is — and then it dims itself after twenty seconds.
It ends in silence
No chime, no announcement, no "you have reached the end". The ambient bed thins out and the track simply stops. If you are already asleep, nothing will wake you to tell you so.
No streaks. No badges. No score.
Nothing in Sheeps congratulates you for sleeping, and nothing records that you did not. There is no light mode, either. It is a dark app for a dark room.
Pricing
Stop chasing sleep
One subscription. Every voice, every level of weird, from the first night. The only thing that is metered is generation itself.
Monthly
€9.99per month
10 credits every month
Annual
€59.99per year
120 credits, all at once
What a credit is
One credit buys ten minutes of finished audio, so a 30-minute story costs three. Unused credits roll over. If you run out, top-ups of 5, 15 or 40 are there — but ten credits is roughly a story every other night, which is what most nights need.
Let the sheeps wander.
The wrong plural is deliberate. Counting sheep fails because counting is orderly — Sheeps is what happens when they wander off.