# How a Sheeps story is made

> Each Sheeps story is written for one listener from their own settings — comfort themes, an avoid list, a narrator, a length and a weirdness level — by a language model working within fixed rules. It is checked against the avoid list, read by a synthetic voice, cut together with real silence, and made when you ask for it.

Source: https://dreamsheeps.space/how-it-works
Published: 2026-09-28 · Updated: 2026-10-14

## What goes into a story?

Five settings. The avoid list is set once, when you start; themes, narrator, length and weirdness can be changed each time you make a story:

- *Comfort themes* — any of twelve places where a mind feels safe (forest, ocean, a cosy kitchen, night trains, libraries, gardens, mountains, small harbours, bakeries, gentle machines, snow and meadows), your own, or none at all.
- *An avoid list* — anything that must never come up. Spiders, deep water, heights, hospitals, crowds, or whatever you type.
- *A narrator* — one of several voices, each with a short sample so you can compare them on the same line.
- *A length* — from 5 to 60 minutes. Most people are asleep long before the end, and that is the idea.
- *A weirdness level* — from 1, gently odd, to 4, full dream logic. Never unsettling at any level.

Stories come in English or German.

## How is the story written?

A language model writes it, inside rules that do not change from night to night. The rules are the point: they come from the research on how thought changes as people fall asleep, and they are what make the story plotless rather than merely calm.

- *Eight to forty-eight scenes*, depending on length, each a run of two or three small places or objects.
- *Cut, never joined.* Each image is unrelated to the one before it — no shared object, colour, sound or kind of light — and nothing ever turns into anything else. Only the narrator stays the same: the same calm register, tempo and warmth throughout.
- *No goals, threats, questions or instructions.* Nothing is chased, lost, solved or hurried, and the listener is never told to imagine, breathe or relax.
- *No talk of sleep.* No heavy eyelids, no drifting off. Reminders that you are meant to be sleeping are reminders that you are not.
- *A decaying shape.* Sentences open at fourteen to eighteen words and end as fragments of four to eight; grammar simplifies, words get plainer, and forward-looking language drains from the final third.

Each story also gets a title and a cover picture: a bright painting of one imagined place, drawn from the story’s own scenes, so your past stories are easy to tell apart.

Why each of these rules exists is covered in [plotless sleep stories](https://dreamsheeps.space/plotless-sleep-stories) and [cognitive shuffling, explained](https://dreamsheeps.space/cognitive-shuffling).

## How is it checked?

Before anything is recorded, the story goes through two checks, and they are built differently on purpose.

1. *The avoid list, literally.* Every scene is searched for the terms on your list and their listed synonyms, for threatening vocabulary, and for instructions. A scene that fails is rewritten on its own, without touching the scenes that passed. This check is a gate: a story that still fails it after the rewrites is not delivered at all.
2. *The avoid list, by meaning.* A second model then reads each scene for anything that suggests one of the first eight terms on your list without naming it — a euphemism, an image — and rewrites those scenes too, which then go back through the first check. If that model cannot be reached, the story still has to pass the first check.

The first check cannot be talked out of anything, which is why it is the gate. The second catches what a word list misses — a free-text entry like “hospitals” has no synonym list of its own — but a model can be wrong, so it adds reach rather than replacing the gate.

The shape is measured as well: whether the sentences really shorten and the pauses really grow. That is what the generator was tuned against, and it is checked on every story, though a story whose last scene averages nine words instead of eight is still delivered.

## How is it read?

A synthetic voice narrates each scene at an unhurried pace. The voices were chosen for a low, even, unhurried delivery — what research on relaxation and falling asleep consistently favours — rather than for drama.

The silence between scenes is added afterwards, as real silence, not left to the voice: about two seconds after the first scene, growing to about seven by the end, close to the eight-second rhythm used in the research on [serial diverse imagining](https://dreamsheeps.space/learn/eight-second-gap). Over the last five minutes the voice gets quieter and a little darker, then fades out completely over its final ten seconds, and the file stops.

There is no music or soundscape underneath at any point, and nothing at the end: no chime, no sign-off, no next episode. The last moments of the file are digital silence.

## When is it made?

When you ask for one. It starts playing while the rest is still being written, and plays without a connection once it has downloaded.

Past stories stay in your Dream Journal to replay. The Browse shelf holds stories that were made once for everyone and cost no credits to play, and Radio skips the story altogether: single concrete words, each followed by a pause you choose — two seconds unless you change it, up to ten — for as long as you leave it on.

## What does the app leave out?

Quite a lot, deliberately. The player shows how long a story has been playing and how long it is, never how long is left, because a countdown is a deadline. The screen dims after twenty seconds. There are no streaks, badges or scores, nothing asks how you slept, and every screen is dark.

It is not a sleep tracker, a meditation course or a library of sleep sounds, and it is a wellness app, not a medical product.

## Questions people ask

### Are the stories written by AI?

Yes. A language model writes each story within the rules above, and a synthetic voice reads it. No person writes or narrates your story. The rules, the checks and the silence are what make it a Sheeps story.

### Is my avoid list shared with anyone?

It is used for one thing: keeping those words, and anything that suggests them, out of your stories. It is sent to the services that write and check the story, and it is never part of the app’s analytics, which count how many terms you chose but never which. The [privacy policy](https://dreamsheeps.space/privacy) has the detail.

### How much does it cost?

Sheeps is free to download; using it needs Sheeps Plus, a subscription at €4.99 a month or €39.99 a year in euro storefronts. It includes 30 story credits a month; a credit is 5 minutes of story, so a fifteen-minute story uses 3. The [terms](https://dreamsheeps.space/terms) set out exactly what you get.

### Does it work in German?

Yes. The app, the stories and the narrators are available in English and German.

## Sources

1. [Beaudoin (2014) — A design-based approach to sleep-onset and insomnia: super-somnolent mentation, the cognitive shuffle and serial diverse imagining](https://summit.sfu.ca/item/17237)
2. [Speth, Schloerscheidt & Speth (2016) — As we fall asleep we forget about the future: a quantitative linguistic analysis of mentation reports from hypnagogia. Consciousness and Cognition](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.08.014)
3. [Beaudoin, Digdon, O’Neill & Rachor (2016) — Serial diverse imagining task: a new remedy for bedtime complaints of worrying and other sleep-disruptive mental activity. Poster abstract, SLEEP 2016](https://summit.sfu.ca/item/16196)

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Tonight’s story is made when you ask for it: your themes, nothing from your avoid list, the weirdness you chose, and silence at the end. Sheeps on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6749510901