I Can’t Sleep - Storytelling | Gentle Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

Unwind with calm bedtime reading about storytelling to ease insomnia and sleepless nights. This soothing episode explores the timeless art of sharing stories, from ancient oral traditions to modern literature and media. Benjamin’s peaceful cadence makes it easy to relax while learning about how storytelling shapes culture, teaches lessons, and connects people. There’s no whispering or hypnosis—just calm, fact-filled narration to quiet your mind, reduce stress, and invite rest. Press play, enjoy a gentle journey through the history of storytelling, and drift into sleep. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Storytelling, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Storytelling. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch. I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause.

With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, and become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Storytelling. Storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment.

Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters, and narrative point of view. The term storytelling can refer in a narrow sense specifically to oral storytelling and also in a looser sense to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story. Storytelling predates writing. The earliest forms of storytelling were usually oral combined with gestures and expressions. In addition to being part of religious rituals, some archaeologists believe rock art. may have served as a form of storytelling for many ancient cultures. The Australian Aboriginal people painted symbols from stories on cave walls as a means of

helping the storyteller remember the story. The story was then told using a combination of oral narrative, music, rock art, and dance, which bring understanding and meaning of human existence through remembrance and enactment of stories. people have used the carved trunks of living trees and ephemeral media such as sand and leaves to record stories in pictures or with writing complex forms of tattooing may also represent stories with information about genealogy affiliation and social status with the advent of writing and the use of stable portable media stories were recorded transcribed and shared over wide regions of the world. Stories have been carved, scratched, painted, printed, or inked onto wood or bamboo,

ivory, and other bones, pottery, clay tablets, stone, palm leaf books, skins, parchment, bark cloth, paper, silk, canvas, and other textiles, recorded on film and stored electronically in digital form. Oral stories continue to be created, improvisationally by improvisationally by prompt to storytellers, as well as committed to memory and passed from generation to generation, despite the increasing popularity of written and televised media in much of the world. Modern storytelling has a broad purview. In addition to its traditional forms, fairy tales, folk tales, mythology, legends, fables, etc. It has extended itself to representing history, personal narrative, political commentary and evolving cultural norms.

Contemporary storytelling is also widely used to address educational objectives. New forms of media are creating new ways for people to record, express, and consume stories. Tools for asynchronous group communication can provide an environment for individuals to reframe or recast individual stories into group stories. Games and other digital platforms such as those used to. in interactive fiction or interactive storytelling may be used to position the user as a character within a bigger world. Documentaries, including interactive web documentaries, employ storytelling narrative techniques to communicate information about their topic. Self-revelatory stories created for their cathartic and therapeutic effect are growing in their use and application,

as in psychodrama, trauma therapy, and playback theater. Storytelling is also used as a means by which to precipitate psychological and social change in the practice of transformative arts. Oral traditions of storytelling are found in several civilizations. They predate the printed and online press. Storytelling was used to explain natural phenomena. Bards told stories of creation and developed of pantheon of gods. and myths. Oral stories passed from one generation to the next, and storytellers were regarded as healers, leaders, spiritual guides, teachers, cultural secret keepers, and entertainers.

Oral storytelling came in various forms, including songs, poetry, chants, and dance. Albert Bates' lord examined oral narratives from field transcripts of Yugoslav oral bards, collected by Millman Perry in the 1930s. In the text of epics such as the Odyssey, Lord found that a large part of the stories consisted of text which was improvised during the telling process. Lord identified two types of story vocabulary. The first is called formulas.

Rosie fingered dawn, the windark sea, and other specific set phrases had long been known of in Homer and other oral epic. Lord, however, discovered that across many story traditions, fully 90% of an oral epic is assembled from lines which are repeated verbatim, or which use one-for-one word substitutions. In other words, oral stories are built out of set phrases which have been stockpiled from a lifetime of hearing and telling stories. The other type of story vocabulary is theme, a set of sequence of story actions that structure

a tale. Just as the teller of tales proceeds line by line using formulas, so he proceeds from event to event using themes. One near universal theme is repetition, as evidenced in Western folklore was the rule of three. Three brothers set out. Three attempts are made. Three riddles are asked. A theme can be as simple as a specific set sequence describing the arming of a hero, starting with shirt and trousers and ending with headdress and weapons. A theme can be large enough to be a plot component. For example, a hero proposes a journey to a dangerous place. He disguises himself, his disguise fools everybody, except for a common person of little account,

a crone, a tavern maid, or a woodcutter, who immediately recognizes him. The commoner becomes the hero's ally, showing unexpected resource. of skill or initiative. A theme does not belong to a specific story, but may be found with minor variation in many different stories. The story was described by Reynolds Price when he wrote. A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species homo sapiens, second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.

Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence. The opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths. Folklorists sometimes divide oral tales into two main groups, Mirchen and Sagan. These are German terms for which there are no exact English equivalents. However, we have approximations. Meichen loosely translated as fairy tales, little stories, take place in a kind of separate once-upon-a-time world of nowhere in particular, at an indeterminate time in the past.

They are clearly not intended to be understood as true. The stories are full of clearly defined incidents and people by rather flat characters with little or no interior life. When the supernatural occurs, it is presented matter-of-factly without surprise. Indeed, there is very little effect, generally. Blood-curdling events may take place, but with little call for emotional response from the listener. Sagan, best translated as legends,

are supposed to have actually happened very often at a particular time and place, and they draw much of their power from this fact. When the supernatural intrudes, as it often does, it does so in an emotionally fraught manner. Ghost and lovers leap stories belong in this category, as do many UFO stories and stories of supernatural beings and events. Another important examination of orality in human life is Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy, a technologizing of the Word, 1982.

Ong studies the distinguishing characteristics of oral traditions, how oral and written cultures interact and condition one with another, and how they ultimately influence human epistemology. Storytelling is a means for sharing and interpreting experiences. Peter L. Berger says human life is narratively rooted. Humans construct their lives and shape their world into homes in terms of these groundings and memories. Stories are universal in that they can bridge cultural, linguistic, and age-related divides. Storytelling can be adaptive for all ages, leaving out the notion of age segregation.

Storytelling can be used as a method to teach. teach ethics, values, and cultural norms and differences. Learning is most effective when it takes place in social environments that provide authentic social cues about how knowledge is to be applied. Stories function is a tool to pass on knowledge in a social context. So every story has three parts. First, the setup, the hero's world before the adventure starts. Second, the confrontation, the hero's world turned upside down.

Third, the resolution. Hero conquers villain, but it's not enough for a hero to survive. The hero or world must be transformed. Any story can be framed in such format. Human knowledge is based on stories and the human brain consists of cognitive machinery necessary to understand, remember, and tell stories. Humans are storytelling organisms that both individually and socially lead storied lives. Stories mirror human thought as humans think in narrative structures and most often remember facts in story form. Facts can be understood as smaller versions of a larger story. Thus, storytelling can supplement analytical thinking.

Because storytelling requires auditory and visual senses from listeners, one can learn to organize their mental representation of a story, recognize structure of language, and experience. his or her thoughts. Stories tend to be based on experiential learning, but learning from an experience is not automatic. Often a person needs to attempt to tell the story of that experience before realizing its value. In this case, it is not only the listener who learns, but the teller who also becomes aware of his or her own unique experiences and background. This process of storytelling is empowering as the teller effectively conveys ideas and with

practice is able to demonstrate the potential of human accomplishment. Storytelling taps into existing knowledge and creates bridges both culturally and motivationally toward a solution. Stories are effective educational tools because listeners become engaged and therefore remember. Storytelling can be seen as a foundation for learning and teaching. While the story listener is engaged, they are able to imagine new perspectives, inviting a transformative and empathetic experience. This involves allowing the individual to actively engage in the story as well as observe, listen, and participate with minimal guidance.

Listening to a storyteller can create lasting personal connections, promote innovative problem-solving, and foster a shared understanding regarding future ambitions. The listener can then activate knowledge and imagine new possibilities. Together, a storyteller and listener can seek best practices and invent new solutions. Because stories often have multiple layers of meanings, listeners have to listen closely to identify the underlying knowledge in the story. Storytelling is used as a tool to teach children the importance of respect through the practice of listening, as well as connecting children with their environment through the theme of the stories and give them more autonomy by using representation.

repetitive statements, which improve their learning to learn competence. It is also used to teach children to have respect for all life, value interconnectedness, and always work to overcome adversity. To teach this, a kinesthetic learning style would be used involving the listeners through music, dream interpretation, or dance. For indigenous cultures of the Americas, storytelling is used as an oral form of language associated with practices and values essential to developing one's identity. This is because everyone in the community can add their own touch and perspective to the narrative collaboratively.

Both individual and culturally shared perspectives have a place in the co-creation of the story. Oral storytelling in indigenous communities differs from other forms of stories because they are told not only for entertainment but for teaching values. For example, the Stolo community in Canada focuses on re-e-enectual. enforcing children's identity by telling stories about the land to explain their roles. Furthermore, storytelling is a way to teach younger members of indigenous communities about their culture and their identities. In Donna Eder's study, Navajos were interviewed about storytelling practices that they have had in the past and what changes they want to see in the future.

They notice that storytelling makes an impact on the lives of the children of the Navajos. According to some of the Navajos that were interviewed, storytelling is one of many main practices that teaches children the important principles to live a good life. In indigenous communities, stories are a way to pass knowledge on from generation to generation. For simple indigenous people, experience has no separation between the physical world and the spiritual world. Thus, some indigenous people communicate to their children through ritual, storytelling, or dialogue. or dialogue. Community values, learns through storytelling, help to guide future generations and aid in identity formation.

In the Quechua community of Highland, Peru, there is no separation between adults and children. This allows for children to learn storytelling through their own interpretations of the given story. Therefore, children in the Quechua community are encouraged to listen to the story that is being told in order to learn about their identity and culture. Sometimes children are expected to sit quietly and listen actively.

This enables them to engage in activities as independent learners. This teaching practice of storytelling allowed children to formulate ideas based on their own experiences and perspectives. In Navajo communities for children and adults, storytelling is one of the many effective ways to educate both the young and old about their cultures, identities, and history. Storytelling helped the Navajos know who they, are, where they come from, and where they belong. Storytelling in indigenous cultures is sometimes passed on by oral means in a quiet and relaxing environment, which usually coincides with family or tribal community gatherings, and often events such as family occasions, rituals, and ceremonial

practices. During the telling of the story, children may act as participants by asking questions, acting out the story, or telling smaller parts of the story. Furthermore, stories are not often told in the same manner twice, resulting in many variations of a single myth. This is because narrators may choose to insert new elements into old stories dependent upon the relationship between the storyteller and the audience, making the story correspond to each unique situation. Indigenous cultures also use instructional ribbing, a playful form of correcting children's undesirable behavior in their stories.

For example, the Ojibwe or Chippewa tribes use the tail of an owl scratching away misbehaving children. The caregiver will often say, The owl will come and stick you in his ears if you don't stop crying. Thus, this form of teasing serves as a tool to correct inappropriate behavior and promote cooperation. There are various types of stories among many indigenous communities. Communication in indigenous American communities is rich with stories, myths, philosophies, and narratives that serve as a means to exchange information. These stories may be used for coming-of-age themes, core values, morality, literacy, and history. Very often, the stories are used to instruct and teach children about cultural values and lessons.

The meaning within the stories is not always explicit, and children are expected to make their own meaning of the stories. In the Lakota tribe of North America, for example, young girls are often told the story of the white buffalo calf woman, who is a spiritual figure that protects young girls from the whims of men. In the Adawa tribe, young boys are often told the story of a young man who never took care of his body, and as a result, his feet fail to run when he tries to escape predators. This story serves as an indirect means of encouraging the young boys to take care of their bodies. Narratives can be shared to express the values of morals among family, relatives, or people who are considered part of the close-knit community. Many stories in indigenous American communities all

have a surface story that entails knowing certain information and clues to unlocking the metaphors in the story. The underlying message of the story being told can be understood and interpret with clues that hint to a certain interpretation. In order to make meaning from these stories, elders in the Stolo community, for example, emphasize the importance in learning how to listen, since it requires the senses to bring one's heart and mind together. For instance, a way in which children learn about the metaphor's significance for the society they live in is by listening to their elders and participating in rituals where they respect one another.

Some people also make a case for different narrative forms being classified as storytelling in the contemporary world. For example, digital storytelling, online, and dice and paper-based role-playing games. In traditional role-playing games, storytelling is done by the person who controls the environment and the non-playing fictional characters and moves the story elements along for the players as they interact with the storyteller. The game is advanced by mainly verbal interactions with dice-roll determining random events in the fictional universe, where the players interact with each other and the storyteller. This type of game has many genres, such as sci-fi and fantasy, as well as alternate reality worlds based on the current reality, but with different setting and beings such as werewolves, aliens, demons, or hidden societies.

These oral-based role-playing games were very popular in the 1990s among circles of use in many countries before computer- and console-based online MMRPs took their place. Despite the prevalence of computer-based MMRPs, the dice and paper RPG still has a dedicated following. Stories in indigenous cultures encompass a variety of values. These values include an emphasis on individual responsibility, concern for the environment and communal welfare. Stories are based on values passed down by older generations to shape the foundation of the community. Storytelling is used as a bridge for knowledge and understanding, allowing the values of self and community to connect and be learned as a whole. Storytelling in the Navajo community, for example, allows for community values to be learned at different times and places for different learning.

learners. Stories are told from the perspective of other people, animals, or the natural elements of the earth. In this way, children learn to value their place in the world as a person in relation to others. Typically, stories are used as an informal learning tool in indigenous American communities and can act as an alternative method for reprimanding children's bad behavior. In this way, stories are non-confrontational, which allows the child to discover for themselves what they did wrong and what they can do to adjust the behavior. Parents in the Arizona TWA TWA community, for example, teach morals to their children through traditional narratives. Lessons focus on several topics including historical or sacred stories or more domestic disputes. Through storytelling,

the TWA community emphasizes the traditional wisdom of the ancestors and the importance of collective as well as individual identities. Indigenous communities teach children valuable skills and morals through the actions of good or mischievous stock characters while others allowing room for children to make meaning for themselves. By not being given every element of the story, children rely on their own experiences and not formal teaching from adults to fill the gaps. When children listen to stories,

they periodically vocalize their ongoing attention and accept the extended turn of the storyteller. The emphasis on attentiveness to surrounding events and the importance of oral tradition in indigenous communities teaches children the skill of keen attention. For example, children of the Tohono Udam, American Indian community, who engaged in more cultural practices,

were able to recall the events in a verbally presented story better than those who did not engage in cultural practices. Body movements and gestures help to communicate values and keep stories alive for future generations. Elders, parents, and grandparents are typically involved in teaching the children in cultural ways, along with history, community, values, and teachings of the land. Children in indigenous communities can also learn from the underlying message of a story. For example, in a Nahuatl community near Mexico City, stories about Ahuakas or, hostile water-dwelling spirits that guard over the bodies of water contain morals about

respecting the environment. If the protagonist of a story who has accidentally broken something that belongs to the Ahuaka does not replace it or give back in some way to the Ahuaka, the protagonist dies. In this way, storytelling serves as a way to teach what the community values, such as value in the environment. Storytelling also serves to deliver a particular message during spiritual and ceremonial functions. In a ceremonial use of storytelling, the unity-building theme of the message becomes more important than the time,

place, and characters of the message. Once the message is delivered, the story is finished. As cycles of the tale are told and retold, story units can recombine showing various outcomes for a person's actions. Storytelling has been assessed for critical literacy skills and the learning of theater-related terms by the nationally recognized storytelling and creative drama organization Neighborhood Bridges in Minneapolis.

Another storyteller researcher in the UK proposes that the social space created preceding oral storytelling in schools may trigger sharing. Storytelling has also been studied as a way to investigate and archive cultural knowledge and values within indigenous American communities. ISEC's study on the role of storytelling in the METES community showed promise in furthering research about the METES and their shared communal atmosphere during storytelling events. ISEC focused on the idea of witnessing a storyteller as a vital way to share and partake in the METI's community, as members of the community would stop everything else they were doing in order to listen or witness the storytelling, and allow the story to become a ceremonial landscape or shared reference for everyone present. This was a powerful tool for the community to engage and teach new learner shared references for the values and ideologies of the Métis.

Through storytelling, the Métis cemented the shared reference of personal or popular stories and folklore, which members of the community can use to share ideologies. In the future, I seek noted that Matisse elders wished for the stories being told to be used to further research into their culture, as stories were a traditional way to pass down vital knowledge to younger generations. For the stories we read, the neurosemantic encoding of narratives happens at levels higher than individual semantic units, and that this encoding is systematic across both individuals and languages. The encoding seems to appear most prominently in the default mode network. Storytelling and serious application contexts, as e.g. therapeutics, business, serious games, medicine, education, or faith, can be referred to as serious storytelling. Serious storytelling applies storytelling outside the context of entertainment,

where the narration progresses as a sequence of patterns, impressive, and quality. and is part of a thoughtful progress. Some approaches treat narratives as politically motivated stories, stories empowering certain groups and stories giving people agency. Instead of just searching for the main point of the narrative, the political function is demanded through asking whose interest does a personal narrative serve. This approach mainly looks at the power,

authority, knowledge, ideology, and identity, whether it legitimates and dominates or resists and empowers. All personal narratives are seen as ideological because they evolve from a structure of power relations and simultaneously produce, maintain, and reproduce that power structure. Political theorists Hannah Arendt argues that storytelling transforms private meaning to public meaning. Regardless of the gender of the narrator and what story they are sharing,

the performance of the narrative and the audience listening to it is where the power lies. Therapeutic storytelling is the act of telling one story in an attempt to better oneself or one situation. Oftentimes, these stories affect the audience in a therapeutic sense as well, helping them to view situations similar to their own through a different lens. Noted author and folklore scholar Elaine Lala states, This process provides new avenues for understanding and identity formation. Language is utilized to bear witness to their lives. Sometimes a narrator will simply skip over certain details without realizing,

only to include it in their stories during a later telling. In this way, that telling and retelling of the narrative serves to reattach portions of the narrative. These gaps may occur due to a repression of the trauma, or even just a want to keep the most gruesome details private. Regardless, these silences are not as empty as they appear, and it is only this act of storytelling that can enable the teller to fill them back in. Psychodrama uses reenactment of a personal traumatic event in the life of a psychodrama group participant as a therapeutic methodology,

first developed by psychiatrist J. L. Moreno MD. This therapeutic use of storytelling was incorporated, into drama therapy, known in the field as self-revelatory theater. In 1975, Jonathan Fox and Joe Salas developed a therapeutic improvisational storytelling form, they called playback theater. Therapeutic storytelling is also used to promote healing through transformative arts, where a facilitator helps a participant write and often present their personal story to an audience. The art of narrative is, by definition, an aesthetic enterprise, and there are a lot of are a number of artistic elements that typically interact in well-developed stories.

Such elements include the essential idea of narrative structure with identifiable beginnings, middles, and endings, or exposition development climax resolution denoment, normally constructed into coherent plot lines. A strong focus on temporality, which includes retention of the past, attention to present action and pretension, future anticipation. a substantial focus on characters and characterization, which is arguably the most important single component of the novel. A given heterogloss of different voices dialogically at play, the sound of the human voice or many voices speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms, and registers. As this is a narrator or narrator-like voice, which by definition addresses and interacts with reading audiences.

See reader response theory. communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialect process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface conditioning a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, arguing for and against various positions. Rely substantially on now-standard aesthetic figuration, particularly including the use of metaphor, metonymy, synectica, and irony. is often enmeshed in intertextuality with copious connections, references, allusions, similarities, parallels, etc.

to other literatures.