The House of Sleep | Greek Myth Story for Sleep (1 Hour)

Settle in for an hour in the house of Sleep. The ancient Greeks imagined where Sleep lives, who his mother is, and how dreams find their way to us in the dark. Tonight we follow them: from Night and her children in Hesiod, to Sleep hiding in a pine tree on Mount Ida, to Ovid's quiet cave where the river of forgetting runs past the poppies, to the Moon and her sleeping Endymion, and finally to the real dream temple at Epidaurus, where people lay down on stone floors hoping a dream would heal them. The myths are retold from the original texts, and the history comes from ancient writers and archaeology. When we are in a myth, the narration says so. Sources are listed below. Soft subtitles stay at the bottom of the screen, and there is no music: just a quiet voice and slow-moving paper scenes. Closed captions are available too. Visuals and narration voice are made with AI tools. The script was researched and checked against the sources below. Chapters 0:00 At the Door of Night 1:49 Night and Her Children 9:35 Sleep and Death, the Twin Brothers 19:55 The Cave of Sleep 35:26 Selene and Endymion 42:04 Sleeping for a Cure 55:55 The Gates of Horn and Ivory Sources Hesiod, Theogony (lines 116-125 on Chaos, Erebus and Night; 211-225 Night's children; 744-766 the house of Night), trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914), Project Gutenberg #348. Homeric Hymn 32, To Selene, trans. Evelyn-White (1914), same volume. Homer, Iliad 14 (Hera and Sleep on Lemnos and Ida) and 16 (Sleep and Death carry Sarpedon), trans. Samuel Butler (1898), Project Gutenberg #2199. Homer, Odyssey 19 (Penelope's dream; gates of horn and ivory), trans. Samuel Butler (1900), Project Gutenberg #1727. Ovid, Metamorphoses 11 (Ceyx and Alcyone; the Cave of Sleep; Morpheus, Icelos/Phobetor, Phantasos; the halcyon days), trans. Henry T. Riley (1851), Project Gutenberg #26073. Apollodorus, Library 1.7.5 (Endymion's choice); Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.1.4-5 (Endymion, Elis and Herakleia), 6.20.9 (Endymion's tomb at the Olympia stadium) and 2.27.1-3 (Epidaurus); Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 4.57-58 (the Latmian cave); via Theoi.com, trans. Frazer, Jones, Seaton. The Epidaurian miracle inscriptions (IG IV² 1, 121-122), late 4th c. BC; translation in L. R. LiDonnici, The Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions (1995), via attalus.org (Syll. 1168). Retold in our own words. Sanctuary of Asclepius, Epidaurus: excavations by P. Kavvadias from 1881 (stelae 1881, abaton 1883). Aelius Aristides, Sacred Tales (begun c. AD 171). Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, trans. D. E. Harris-McCoy (Oxford, 2012) and M. Hammond (Oxford World's Classics, 2020). The Euphronios (Sarpedon) Krater, c. 515 BC, National Archaeological Museum of Cerveteri.