In the basement of a museum, there exists an imaginary world. It is called The Archive of All-in-All. Here, “it is always late at night and always raining outside”, says actor Hayley Atwell, who conceived the comforting, cocooning space – one of the immersive audio scenescapes available on the Sleep Worlds app, which launched fully in February this year.
“I loved the idea of a building with one light on, and [describing] what happens down in the basement,” Atwell continues, “with someone doing filing, someone doing art restoration, and everything scaled down, like a doll’s house.” Her eyes light up as she describes the quiet industry of the subterranean labyrinth. Poet Emily Berry, who wrote the “world” into being with novelist Joe Dunthorne, adds: “It’s like an underground library – like my safe space. Somewhere soothing.”
The Archive is one of several “worlds” available to listen to on Sleep Worlds, which was founded by software engineer Mike Wrather and tech executive William Fowler. Berry became editor-in-chief in 2022; Atwell creative director last year. Both were introduced to the founders by mutual friends, and are major shareholders. The content is intended to be “non-narrative and very atmospheric”, says Berry – less about storytelling and more about world-building. “They don’t have a plot, there’s no suspense.” Atwell jumps in: “It’s something that feels immersive and descriptive without being so interesting that you feel like you can’t go to sleep.”
Today the pair have gathered to build the next “vignette” in a high-ceilinged recording studio in London’s Fitzrovia where Atwell, 43, will voice the audio. She is polished in a black double-breasted suit and platform heels. Berry, 44, cuts a softer silhouette in tactile bright textures, her long red hair shot with a streak of blonde.
For both women, this is an invigorating side hustle – part passion project, part entrepreneurial adventure. “It feels like an ongoing creative conversation that I’m having with you,” says Atwell of her relationship with Berry. “Something that I can dip in and live beside.” She has just finished a sellout run of Much Ado About Nothing with Tom Hiddleston in London’s West End. Her second outing in the Tom Cruise franchise Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning – is culminating in a global press tour as it arrives in cinemas. Berry’s work is award-winning: she has published three anthologies, including Stranger, Baby and Unexhausted Time (Faber). At Sleep Worlds, Berry co-writes some of the worlds and also commissions other writers.
There is, of course, no shortage of sleep apps, and the market is hungry for them. Headspace, following a merger with Ginger, was valued at $3bn in 2021. At its Covid-19 peak in mid-2020, meditation app Calm, which includes sleep stories, had 9.54mn downloads. Berry has had just one of her previous sleepscape stories (for another app) played “millions of times” on YouTube. It is, she says with a laugh, “my most read work”.
Sleep Worlds has launched off the back of one friends-and-family funding round, which raised $500,000; currently still pre-seed, its largest backer is the co-founder of Jawbone and Zulu Ventures, the British-Lebanese entrepreneur and investor Alexander Asseily.
But while many of the apps currently on the market focus on tracking, breathing or meditation, Sleep Worlds is “more subtle”, says Atwell, who describes it as taking listeners to “a fluid, flexible, liminal space that is a special time”. She adds: “Sleep Worlds is not trying to solve anything. What if instead of trying to make someone go to sleep… you honour that time between waking and sleeping where your mind might want to float around.”
The creative process sounds brilliantly bizarre. The 6,000 to 12,000-word brief is “to sort of skirt what’s boring”, says Berry. “Or maybe that’s the wrong word. You want to skirt what’s not interesting.” Adds Atwell: “It’s not about building suspense and having a payoff.” The pair ping-pong between them a list of writing limitations: no mentions of time (“no one wants to be lying in bed, unable to sleep, and hear ‘it’s one in the morning’”); nothing edgy or unsettling; nothing sexy; no anticipation; facts have to be true (anything incorrect “really irritates people”); no characters who make you curious. But there can be glimmers of humour, says Atwell. “I love the woman [in one story], the painter who paints her own knees. It’s inferred that she doesn’t have that many buyers, so she refuses to paint anything other than her own knees.”
Atwell – who was initially approached about voicing a world but wanted to be involved from inception – loves coming up with ideas that tread the line between the mundane and surreal. Those currently in the collection include The Cabin, “a refuge for hikers, somewhere safe to rest for the night”, says Atwell. There are atmospheric naturescapes: the Archipelago of Fog and The Forest of Rains. Coming soon is Tiny City, “about this little model town inside a larger town, which has some mini people living in it that nobody knows about”. As an audio experience, Atwell likens it to being a child in bed and hearing your parents pottering about downstairs. That “light murmur” of activity. Reassuring. Safe.
“It’s a funny brief,” concedes Berry. “Because you’re essentially writing something that’s going to make people fall asleep.” Yet there is something magical about it. The founders call it the “familiar-new paradox – simultaneously comforting (familiar) yet unpredictable enough to prevent the mind from wandering (new)”. They take such care in order to address the most common feelings associated with lack of sleep: loneliness and anxiety.
And the worlds are gorgeous to listen to. “It’s literary. It’s about the juiciness of the language, in a way,” says Atwell. “When I’m performing it, it’s pleasurable for me to say.” Narration is slow, calming. A number of voices can be chosen – as well as Atwell’s purr, there’s the aristocratic rasp of another narrator, “Cyril”, or the Shipping Forecast tones of “Vince”. Each world has a unique background soundbed: falling rain, radio white noise. The worlds are written in chapters or scenes that can flow in any order, and be added to over time. If you love a world, and return to it, there’s the reassurance that it will have evolved.
Could you call it poetic? “It doesn’t feel related to poetry really,” says Berry – but Atwell isn’t so sure: “We’re playing with language to evoke a particular feeling or emotion without a resolution. For me, that is poetic, because poetry is making language. Like a piece of exquisitely written music. It can immediately take me somewhere.”
Berry concedes: “I suppose the conjuring of a world in a small scene is [poetic]. And then there’s the rhythm. When I’m writing it, I’m thinking very much about the rhythm and how it will sound. The stories are not made to be read on the page – it’s like song lyrics. They don’t live in the way they do when you hear them.” It sounds like a fun challenge. “It is,” says Atwell. “Loads of fun. It’s also, like, how far can you go? Where can you go? What about space? What about under the sea? Can I be a mermaid?” Berry laughs. “Yeah.”
sleepworlds.com