Tonight, we can thank Olivia for our latest sleep story. She sent a very simple request, please do a sleep story about horses. That's all she said.And it's amazing how one simple request can totally stump me. I don't actually know a lot about horses. And they're beautiful, obviously. But growing up, I was never one of those horse crazy girls. The only book I remember about horses was way back in elementary school. It was about the wild horses of Sable Island.And it had these beautiful illustrations I haven't thought about in years. But once I remembered it, it seemed to me to have every single element of a perfect sleep story. And I like it because it's a simple story.I feel like the world gets more complicated every day. It's hard to keep track of all the things we're supposed to be worried about right now. That doesn't help with sleep, does it? And if you're like me, you're tired of things being so complicated, serious.So let's take a break from modern life and go somewhere simple and beautiful. Let's go to Sable Island, a place neither you nor I have ever been, because we're not horses. And this is a place that belongs entirely to horses who do not lie awake at night worrying about the world and their place in it.So let's be with them for a while. And together, we'll find a little peace and contentment and sleep. But first, please make sure that you are somewhere safe to listen.This episode uses relaxation techniques and light hypnotherapy designed to help you fall asleep. So please ensure that you are somewhere safe when listening. And preferably, that's your comfortable bed and not anywhere.You need to stay alert. And if this podcast helps you find sleep and you've ever wondered how to support the show, consider joining the Snoozeville Sleep Club. The subscribers keep the show going. They keep it ad free. And there are plenty of perks that go with the subscription. For more information you can check the shownotes. And thank you for considering it. And now, let's help you get settled. Let's begin by helping you find your way into this moment of rest.Take a slow breath in, fill your lungs, and then breathe out. Just let it flow out slowly. That longer exhale is doing something important. It's activating your vagus nerve, a pathway that runs from your brain all the way through your body. When you lengthen your exhale, you're sending a signal along that pathway. You're safe. So let's do that again. Breathe in nice and slow. And then breathe out.Make it long and slow and complete. And then continue breathing this way. Just let each exhale be a little longer than the inhale. And let your body do the rest. There's nothing to do now. Just be here. The day is done. And as you lie here in the stillness, I'd like you to bring your attention to your shoulders. Throughout the day, tension often builds there. We unconsciously lift them towards our ears, and they have a tendency to stay there. But right now, let them drop. Feel the weight of your shoulders settling down and back. And notice your hips, those amazing joints that hold your entire upper body and allow you to walk and move and dance. They're often tight from sitting too long or from standing all day. Let your hips become heavy and loose. Become very conscious of your arms, feeling heavy at your sides. Wonderfully heavy. And your legs, growing heavier with every breath. Even your feet can finally rest. The arches releasing. The tension melting away. Continue breathing. Slowly and deeply. In and out. And for the next little while, let my voice be the only thing you need to follow. Just this voice and the sound of your own breathing beneath it. Let your eyes rest. Notice how heavy your eyelids already feel. So heavy, in fact, that you might notice they don't even want to open right now. So let them stay closed. Let them be heavy and still. And let your mind drift with me now. All the way out to a small, wild island. Far off the coast of Nova Scotia. Further out into the Atlantic than most maps bother to show, there's a thin, curved strip of sand called Sable Island. It isn't much wider than a country road in places. Barely 40 kilometers long. With open ocean on both sides, there's no permanent town here. No roads. Nothing built up in any real way. Just dune grass. Low hills of sand held together by roots. A scattering of small freshwater ponds and wind. The wind is almost constantly moving in off the water, carrying the smell of salt and the green scent of marsh grass. For well over 250 years, this strip of sand has also been the home to horses. Several hundred of them live here now. They're spread out across the island in small family groups. And every one of them is entirely wild. Nobody treats them when they're sick, or trims their hooves, or brings them in out of a storm. There is no fencing anywhere on the island at all. They choose their own paths. Their own mates. Their own company. It's rare, even among wild horse populations elsewhere in the world, to find a herd left this entirely alone. Today, the island and everything on it is protected by law. It is a national park reserve, where nothing is allowed to interfere with what lives there. That protection came from an unlikely place. Back in the 1960s, when it looked for a while like the horses might be taken off the island, it was school children from across Canada who began writing letters, asking that they be left exactly where they were. And ever since, this has simply been the horse's island. Right now, on Sable Island, the light is beginning to soften, low and warm across the dunes. The wind has eased slightly, the way it often does, toward night. The dune grass weighs more slowly than it did at midday. Each blade catching the light along its edge. Not far from one of the island's small ponds, a family band of horses is spread out across a stretch of grass, grazing. There are five of them. An older mare, gray around the muzzle. She moves a little ahead of the others, choosing the patches of grass she wants. Her nose works constantly as she goes, close to the ground, reading the grass, the way a person might read a page, searching out the sweetest stems. A horse's sense of smell is remarkably sharp, and she can tell which patches are worth her time and which aren't. The rest of the band drifts along loosely behind her. It's her experience they're following, not any order that she's given. Beside her, a younger mare stands close. Her coat, a dark, shaggy brown. Thick even now. Though it will grow heavier still once the cold months arrive. The late sun has warmed the coat through, and if you laid a hand against her flank right now, you'd feel real heat radiating up out of it, sun-soaked. The way a dark car feels after sitting all afternoon. Every so often, she turns her head and nibbles gently along the older mare's neck and shoulder. The older mare leans into it slightly, clearly enjoying it, before returning the favor a moment later. And for a little while, the two of them stand like that, trading attention back and forth. A little apart from the two mares, a stallion stands with his head raised, nostrils working the breeze. His sense of smell and hearing are doing most of the real work right now. His ears rotate independently of each other, swiveling forward and then sideways, catching sounds from different directions almost at once. The way a satellite dish might track something moving. There's nothing out here that concerns him tonight. No scent on the wind worth reacting to, but he checks anyway. And then there's the foal. He's only a few months old. Still built more of legs than anything else, all knees in unfinished proportions, he has decided that the important work of the night is not grazing but creating chaos. He trots in a wide, unnecessary loop around his mother. The younger mare, for no obvious reason, the loose sand sprays up behind every hoofbeat, cool where it's shaded and faintly warm where the last of the sun still touches it. He startles himself at his own speed and then breaks into an awkward little half buck before settling back down into a trot as though nothing happened. He puts his head down toward the grass, chews exactly twice, and then forgets why he started. Distracted instead by a moth. He follows it a few steps, ears pricked forward before it disappears and he loses interest. At one point, he approaches the old mare. Stretches his neck out and sniffs at her nose with great seriousness, breathing her in the way horses do when they're deciding who someone is. And then, satisfied by whatever he has decided about her, kicks up both back legs in a small, purposeless burst of joy and trots away. Nobody in the band seems to expect anything different from him. This is just what a foal is like in the night on a good patch of grass. And then slowly, as the light continues to lower, the band begins to drift away from the open grass and down toward a slightly lower stretch of ground. It is more sheltered from the wind. Tucked behind a low rise of dune, this is the older mare's doing mostly. She simply begins walking that way and the others fall in. It's a route worn into the sand, repeated so many times that no one in the band has to think about where they're going.Their bodies already know the way. And as they walk, the air itself begins to change around them. The gold light drains slowly out of the sky, replaced by a darker blue. And with it comes a different smell, cooler and damper. The salt smell of the ocean. Somewhere out past the dunes, the surf rolls in on both sides of the island at once. Dew is already beginning to settle onto the dune grass and the horse's legs brush through as they walk, leaving faint, darker trails behind them in the pale grass. They reach the sheltered hollow just as the last of the color leaves the sky. Here, tucked behind the rise of sand, the wind drops to almost nothing. It's filtered and softened by the dune around it. Stars begin to show above them, faint, and dim. At first, and then more and more by the minute, until the whole sky is thick with them. There is nothing to outshine them. No town glow, no passing headlights, just the enormous, quiet, dark. And the horses standing in it. The band settles in slowly, shoulder to flank, the foal tucked in close against his mother's side, worn out at last from a night of accomplishing nothing.  The older mare stands with her head lowered, eyes half-closed. Her weight settled evenly over all four legs. There's a mechanism built into a horse's legs, a way certain joints can lock into place, so the muscles don't have to work at all. It means she can drift in and out of light rest for hours this way. Standing, perfectly still. But there's a deeper kind of sleep that standing alone can't reach. The kind that only comes when a horse lies all the way down into the sand. That kind of sleep only comes when the band feels safe enough to risk it. It usually happens only if at least one of them stays alert nearby. Tonight, that's the stallion. He remains standing a little longer than the others. Ears still moving occasionally, tracking the small sounds of the night. An insect somewhere in the grass. The distant, steady hush of surf. And the wind sighing very faintly over the rise of the dune above them. One by one, the others begin to lie down. The younger mare folds her legs beneath her first, lowering herself slowly onto her side in the cool sand, and the foal presses in close. He is already more asleep than awake. His small chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breath that will slow soon enough. The older gray mare goes down next with a low, contented sound in her throat, stretching her neck out along the sand. The sand under them holds a trace of the day's warmth. Just enough to soften the chill of night. Only the stallion remains standing for a while yet. His outline dark against the star-filled sky. He lowers his head slightly, breathes in deeply through his nose one last time, testing the night air. There's no danger to sense. Just salt, grass, the mineral smell of the sand itself. Satisfied, he finally lowers himself down too, folding his legs under him with a soft, heavy sound. The warmth of five bodies gathered together in the small hollow builds slowly, enough to hold off the cold night air pressing in from every side. Above them, the stars keep turning slowly, the same as they were an hour ago, the same as they'll be tomorrow night. And the night after that. The surf keeps its rhythm on both shores of the island at once, never quite in step with itself. And in the small sheltered hollow behind the dune, five horses lie together in the sand, entirely still now, breathing slow and even in the dark, needing nothing else at all. On Sable Island tonight, five horses sleep together in the dark, and all around them, the same dark sky stretches on, thick with stars, uninterrupted by a single artificial light for as far as anyone can see. It's a big world, bigger than the news makes us feel some days. Even now, all across this very large planet, the same kind of quiet is happening in a thousand places at once. Somewhere, right now, the ocean is rolling in exactly the way it's rolled in for longer than there have been grains of sand on that one small island. Somewhere, right now, animals are settling into sleep the way they always have, generation after generation, untroubled by anything they have read or heard today, because they never have to read or hear any of it at all. Life simply keeps going, it always has, through everything, it keeps finding a way to rest, to grow, to begin again the next morning, the same as it's always done. You don't have to hold the weight of the world's worry in your body when you're trying to sleep, you can set that down, the same way those horses have simply lain down in the sand tonight, trusting that the world will still be turning when they wake. Let your body grow heavy now, the way theirs has, let your breathing slow, the way theirs has. Somewhere, right now, under that same wide star-filled sky, or a sky just like it, life is resting easily, safely, exactly as it's meant to, in your safe, right now, in your own bed, in your own small corner of this very large world. Your thoughts have probably stopped following any real order, drifting instead from one loose, half-formed idea to the next, the way they do in that strange, soft space just before sleep. If your body has gone still and heavy, if your breathing has slowed, you are very, very close to sleep. Somewhere, right now, the stars are turning over a quiet island, over a herd of horses resting easy in the sand, over oceans older than memory, still rolling in the same as they always have.The world keeps surviving, it keeps finding its way back to rest and to morning. You are part of that too, the same as anything else alive tonight. Let yourself feel that, contented, safe, and so very close to sleep.