Company for the Hours You're Awake - Why We Exist
Why The Western Sleep Co exists and what it means to be kept company in the dark.
There is an hour that belongs to no one, somewhere past two and before the birds. The house has gone quiet in a way it never is during daylight, and you are the only one left in it who is still awake. You can hear the fridge, and the clock turning over, and your own thoughts, which are louder than they have any right to be at this time of night.
I know the hour well, because I have spent more of my life inside it than I would care to admit. The thing nobody warns you about is how lonely it is. It is not sadness exactly, it is something closer to loneliness. Everyone you love is asleep, the world has clocked off for the night, and there you are holding the whole of it on your own.
That is why this exists. It does not exist to fix whatever it is that is keeping you up. The Western Sleep Co exists to keep you company in that hour, so that you do not have to sit inside it alone.
What it actually means
Company is a small word for what I mean by it.
I mean a voice in the room when there has been no voice for hours. I mean someone who is also awake at this strange time, talking to you softly, not because they want anything from you but because they understand what it is to be the last one up.
The audio’s will never ask you to count, or to breathe to a particular pattern, or to picture a beach you have never been to. Instead they describe the room you are already in. They name the weight of the blanket, and the dark beyond the curtains, and the street that has gone still outside, the kettle you boiled an hour ago and never drank.
Something happens when a voice does that for you. Your mind, which had been running ahead of itself, finds something real to rest on. It is given the present moment, handed back to you gently and then again, until you stop bracing against the night and allow yourself to sink down into it. There is nothing in any of it to perform and there is no way to get it wrong. A great many people have told me that this is the past which finally lets them let go, the slow releasing that nothing at all is being asked of them.
Why a company, and not simply an app.
I did not want to build a thing that kept score for you. I wanted there to be no streaks to maintain and no graph of your sleep climbing up and to the right, and no quiet sense that the night is a test you keep failing.
This is what I believe, and it is the belief that everything else hangs from. Being awake at night is not a malfunction, and you are not broken for lying there unable to go under. Some nights the body simply will not settle, for reasons that are not yours to solve at 3 in the morning, and the kindest thing in the world in that moment is not a solution at all. The kindest thing is for someone to stay. So I built someone who stays.
There are 5 voices, one for each of the ways a night can feel. There is a guardian for the nights you need to feel watched over. There is a builder for the night’s your mind refuses to put it’s tools down. There is a wayfinder for when you have lost the thread of where you are. There is a caretaker for the night’s when you have spent the whole day looking after everyone else and there is no one left to look after you. And there is one voice for the night’s that arrive without any warning, when you simply need a hand to hold in the dark, and would rather not be asked any questions. They all do the same thing underneath. They sit with you, and they keep watch, so that you don’t have to.
What I would like you to take from this.
If you remember only one thing about us, I would like it to be this. The night you cannot sleep is not a problem we are trying to solve for you. It is an hour we are trying to be there with you.
You do not have to earn your rest here. You do not have to improve anything, or become a better sleeper, or have your routine mended by Wednesday. You only have to press play and let the voice keep you company until your body decides, in it’s own time, that it is alright as well, because at least you will not have spent those hours alone.
That is why we exist. Someone ought to be awake with you, and so one of us always will be.
Rest well.