The Daily Mail reported that The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep, by Swedish psychologist Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin, promises to have a child nodding off in no time, with a flawless combination of sentence structure and soporific words.
Advertisement
Parents are directed to emphasise certain words and mimic yawning at some points. Along the way, they meet characters like Sleepy Snail and the wise Heavy-Eyed Owl who give Roger advice on how to fall asleep faster. In this capacity, I am definitely in the market for juvenile sleep aids, preferably, though not necessarily, laudanum-free. There’s also plenty to be said for accustoming children to relaxing their bodies and succumbing to sleep, rather than fighting it. But bedtime stories are not, to me, about deceiving your child into conking out (and still less so with a text full of unintentional horror-film resonances).
The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep. “The entire story is focused on getting the child involved and to get the child to identify with Roger who will fall asleep in the end”, he told CBS News.
“I got the idea of how I could use my methods to help children relax”, he told The Telegraph.
For most authors the prospect of their books sending readers to sleep would be horrifying. With 80 reviews on Amazon.co.uk, it has 3.5 stars.
“When we stopped I wrote it all down on a napkin but it took another three and a half years to come up with the flawless story so that all the techniques were used in the correct order”. “We made it to the middle of page 2”. He has written books on leadership, communication and psychology. “But I ended up falling asleep at the wheel and crashed my auto”.
Roger’s exhaustive search for sleep is reminiscent of the 1947 classic Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown.
Since going on sale, The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep has rocketed to the top of Amazon’s best sellers list.
Advertisement
Despite the book’s popularity, some parents might be a bit put off by the idea of the “magic spells and magic sleeping powder” Uncle Yawn uses on children. The modern day bedtime story has evolved to books such as the 2011 bestseller Go the F*** to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, dubbed a “children’s book for adults”. Have an interesting story to share about your family?
