← Get Sleepy: Sleep meditation and stories
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Get Sleepy is a production of Slumber Studios and is made possible thanks to the generous support of our sponsors and Premium members. If you'd like to listen ad free and access weekly bonus episodes, extra long stories and our entire back catalogue, you can try out Premium free for seven days by following the link in the episode notes. Now a quick word from our sponsors. Get Sleepy is sponsored by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day and this year BetterHelp is celebrating all the amazing therapists who do such important work to make the world a better place. From my own experience in therapy, it feels incredibly freeing to have a space dedicated to working on my own mental health. A space where I don't feel judged and can be completely open and true to myself. The key to feeling that level of comfort is finding the right therapist for you. And BetterHelp has over 12 years experience in finding the right match. With an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews, BetterHelp's track record speaks for itself. This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who've helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com getsleepy that's betterhelph e lp.com/get sleepy. So good, so good so good.
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Welcome to Get Sleepy where we listen, we relax and we get sleepy. My name's Thomas and I'm your host. It's so lovely to have your company and a very happy Halloween to anyone who celebrates or enjoys the occasion. This is the fifth and final bonus episode for the month of October and it's your last chance to try Get Sleepy Premium or the entire Slumber Studios Premium Bundle with a 90 day free trial. Once October is done, this amazing offer won't be available for at least another year. With the 90 day free trial, you can listen to all our episodes completely ad free, access our Premium exclusive Thursday episodes and enjoy our entire back catalogue of stories and meditations dating all the way back to November 2019. It really is the very best time to become a premium member. So to enjoy your 90 day free trial, visit slumberstudios.com premium and I'll put a link in the show notes too. As for our story this evening, I want to give a big thanks to Alicia Stefan for writing yet another intriguing yet sleepy tale which I have the pleasure of reading for you. Thousands of years ago, people began observing dancing flames and orbs in the darkness. These elusive lights weren't celestial rather, they seemed to be attached to the earth and the water. Separately, cultures all over the globe created stories to explain these mysterious beacons. Tonight, we'll explore that mythology and the science behind it. We'll hear tales of the fairies and their mischief, of lost souls making up for bad deeds, and of deities who foretold the fate of mariners. Before we set off in search of these ethereal apparitions, make yourself completely comfortable. Adjust your pillow so that your head and neck rest heavily. Feel the pull of gravity as it encourages your limbs to embrace the support of the matt. Let all your cares of the day slip away, and as you breathe more slowly and more deeply with each inhale and exhale, close your eyes and lose yourself in the darkness you find there. This is where our story begins. Imagine for a moment that you've been transported to a rural village in Ireland. Hundreds of years in the past, you and your friends have just enjoyed a night of merriment. Perhaps there was a celebration of some kind, or a gathering at the home of a friend. Whatever the case, you and your near neighbours are now walking home together through the utter darkness of the autumn night. In order to light your way, each of you carries a little carved turnip that contains a single ember from the fireside you just left. Your friends helped you fashion these rough lamps before your departure, amid much laughing and many jokes. But the comical little root vegetables will give you welcome illumination to keep your steps sure and your route as straight as possible. The night air is brisk. You pull your scarf more tightly around your chin as you travel this familiar path. The leaves on the trees around you lightly rustle in the chilly breeze. A faint smell of smoke drifts by on that wind, telling of a warm hearth in a home somewhere nearby. You think of those folks nestled in their cottages and yourselves outside. You have fond thoughts for your warm bed at home and wish to reach it very soon. But even as you near your destination, one of your friends whispers loudly and points into the darkness. A flame, he says, breathlessly gesturing to the marshy field, you and your companions stop and stare, stepping almost imperceptibly closer to one another. You hardly breathe as you watch and listen. You see nothing. Your friend exclaims that it was there the fairies were about, he whispers. You all laugh softly, chiding yourselves for your alarm. But you link arms more tightly and hasten to finish your journey, because each of you knows the fireside stories about the fairy lights. Since you were a child, you've known about the bad luck that is bound to befall those who allow themselves to be led astray in pursuit of a distant flame. As you bid your friends farewell and deposit your little Jack o' Lantern by the door, you smile and shiver to yourself. Ever so slightly, you turn towards the wilderness, offering the deep darkness of the landscape a final good night. Then you open the door and find your way to the bright fire that still glows in your own hearth. Through this imagined experience, you have walked in the steps of many a historical nighttime wanderer. Stories of fleeting, distant lights are cross cultural, spanning continents and centuries and appearing in places ranging from swamps to salty oceans. Lights on the nighttime horizon have traditionally held a variety of meanings for the people who saw them. To some, they were the mischief of a ghost or woodland sprite. To others, they were omens, both good and bad, indicating what type of luck was coming. But these widespread and unpredictable lights have one thing in common. Whether attributed to naughty sprites or saints, and whether over land or sea, folklore has cast almost all of them as supernatural in nature. Folk wisdom has advised those who saw them to keep their distance or protect themselves with charms and rituals. Such a fleeting display of mysterious lights has gone by many names, but there are a few that are most well known. One of those is Will o' the Wisp, and it is often found in the folklore of northern Europe. Others are also likely to sound familiar. For example, as the centuries passed, the tales of Will o' the Wisp became intertwined with those of the Jack o' Lantern, now a much loved tradition of modern Halloween and Samhain celebrations. In both cases, the name refers to figures from folktales who carry a light through the darkness. When people started to write about these lights, there were those who preferred to call these mysterious flashes by a Latin phrase. They named them ignis fatuus, which roughly translates to foolish fire. For many rural northern Europeans, the lights were attributed to fairies. Early on, they were sometimes called elf fire. Shakespeare seemed to be channeling this belief when he portrayed the mischievous Puck of A Midsummer Night's Dream in scene two of the famous play, a fairy asks of Puck, are you not he that frights the maidens of the villagery mislead night wanderers laughing at their harm? Puck later says, I'll follow you. I'll lead you about around, through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar, Sometime a horse I'll be sometime a hound, a hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire, and neigh and bark and grunt and roar and burn like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire at every turn. The reference about misleading maidens to harm was well known in folklore before Shakespeare, which generally portrayed these country spirits as creatures to to be avoided. They existed in many cultures and went by countless names. In fact, Shakespeare didn't invent the name Puck. It was already a word used to describe mischievous household and nature fairies. Looking beyond the British Isles, you might have heard of the unpredictable Min min that glowed in Australia, or the serpent creature called the boytata that could be found in Mexico. In India they whispered of the misleading Bram rechoke with its pot of fire. And in Korea, the tokaebi Pul, or goblin fire could be seen in the rice paddies. But perhaps one of the very earliest proofs of the phenomenon of fairy lights is found in a written character from the Chinese Shang dynasty of the second millennium bce, which seems to represent a human like figure dancing over fire and surrounded by dots. Back in the British Isles, the lights of the will o' the wisp were often attributed to a widely recognised folk fairy named Robin Goodfellow. In fact, Shakespeare playfully embodied this familiar peasant figure with the character of Puck. Shakespeare gave his Puck familiar attributes of the naughty imp Robin, who was famously blamed in stories for both good household deeds and all sorts of bawdy misbehavior, ranging from pinching and kissing maidens to stealing from villagers. In her 20th century book an Encyclopaedia of Fairies, accomplished folklorist Catherine Briggs also pointed out how Shakespeare seems to make Puck and Robin one and the same. She wrote, shakespeare's Puck is the epitome of the hobgoblin, with the by name of Robin Goodfellow. In folk tradition, emphasis is perhaps most laid on Puck as a misleader. She also noted that Robin was the best known and most often referred to of all the hobgoblins in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Indeed, in a sense he seemed to swallow all others and their names were made nicknames of of his. Robin seems to have been a very versatile and busy trickster, similar to Shakespeare, who gave Puck the Ability to appear as fire. A poem generally attributed to 17th century writer Ben Jonson suggested Robin also produced fairy lights. It said sometimes he'd counterfeit a voice and travellers call astray, Sometimes a walking fire he'd be, and lead them from their way. Some call him Robin Goodfellow, Hobgoblin or Mad Crisp, and some again do term him oft by name of Will the Wisp. Apparently, after the Protestant Reformation, the Christian church made an earnest effort to stamp out talk of robbing Goodfellow. However, he was still well liked and the general population kept him around. As mischievous spirits go, he was a survivor. And so beings like Robin, Puck and the ubiquitous Will, with his wisp, perpetuated the pagan ideas about the causes of fairy nights. Despite Christianity interfering, the legendary poet John Milton brought together folklore and religion in his masterpiece paradise lost during the 17th century. In one part, he alluded to wandering lights as the serpent led Eve astray. He described it as a wandering fire, compact of unctuous vapour, which the night condenses and the cold environs round, kindled through agitation to a flame, which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends, hovering and blazing with delusive light, misleads the amazed night wanderer from his way to bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool. And somewhere between the overtly pagan nature of the fairies and the very religious nature of Milton, there was another category of folktales that has existed to this day. Those are the ones calling the lights a jack o' lantern, or one of the many variations on the idea of a person who was fated to wander the wilderness, in Jack's case, because of his wrongdoings in life. Consider the original Irish story of how the Jack o' Lantern came to be. A man named Jack made a poor gamble and tried to cheat the devil. Although he initially succeeded in his trickery and managed to keep his soul, he found himself stuck forever on earth. As a result, he didn't have to go home with the devil, but he was also blocked from heaven due to his sins. As the story goes, he was fated to wander the countryside forever, with just an ember to light his way. He has been known as Jacko the Lantern ever since. While the folktale was first seen in print in the mid 19th century, it's hard to say how old the concept of a jack o' lantern was really is. As early as 1658, the Oxford English Dictionary recorded the term being used to refer to the phenomenon known perhaps by earlier folks as Will o' the Wisp. And more formally in Latin as ignis fatuus. As we mentioned earlier, those terms really stuck because they are still around today. Before that time, people may have been using lots of lesser known names to describe a spirit who carried a light around, although without any story as specific and moral as that we find for Jack. A search of folklore connected to Will o' the Wisp will turn up numerous human sounding names for fairies or creatures who moved the light about. For example, writings from the 19th and early 20th centuries Reference People using kit of the candlestick, Hobbady's lantern or pegger lantern. In fact, an article from the late 19th century quotes a poem from the 1777 issue of Poor Robin's Almanac that mentions Peg I should indeed as soon expect that pegger lantern would direct me straightway home on misty night as wandering stars quite out of sight. Peg's dancing rite does oft betray and lead her followers astray. Swedish folklore puts a more neighbourly and petty judgement on the spirit of Jack. According to one source, wandering country lights are the spirits of men who moved important neighbourly landmarks, so they are doomed to strike stroll around forever unable to find their way. Some people might call that getting what you deserve. Similarly, in Germany, the dancing lights have been attributed to dishonest land surveyors who are doomed to forever watch over the false boundaries they created. Cornish people referred to a queen of the fairies in tandem with Jack, who went by the name Joan Awad, which means Joan of the Torch. But really, Joan would be more closely related to a creature like Robin Goodfellow, motivated only by her supernatural objectives rather than morality. And even the character known as Stingy Jack was transformed back into an earthy hobgoblin when his mythology travelled to the southern United States. According to an article in the Journal of American folklore from 1904, people in those parts portrayed a figure called Jack Marlanton, who was more like a goblin than a man and who was to be avoided at all costs due to his bad intentions. And what if a traveller should encounter one of these light bearing spirits despite their best efforts? Catherine Briggs related many general methods of repelling them, some of which were religious in nature. But for simple folks there was another method that came up in numerous sources. She explained that a man who was pixie led, wandering around and unable to find his way out of the field, would generally turn his coat. She further added that this may have been thought to act as a change of identity. The gamblers often turned their coat to break a run of bad luck. Likewise, those in The United States who had the bad luck to run into Jack Melanton were urged to stick a knife in the ground or to lie down with their eyes closed and ears plugged. In Denmark, running into Jack required one to turn their cap inside out and above all, avoid pointing at him. One Scottish sprite named Spunky was seen making lights both over land and sea. Sea which bridged the gap between these earth pixies and their watery cousins who fascinated sailors. In fact, Shakespeare seems to have been intrigued by the idea of ignis fatuus in both the land based and seafaring settings. In addition to his reference in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he also appeared to employ fairy lights in the Tempest. Drawing upon the belief of Mediterranean sailors that flashes of that light could foretell a storm, he gave the fairy Ariel that role. She told Prospero, I boarded the king's ship, now on the beak, now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin I flamed amazement. Sometimes I'd divide and burn in many places on the topmast, the yards, the bowsprit, would I flame distinctly, then meet and join Jove's lightning. In this case, Ariel delivered the storm herself. But the imagery about the flashing lights that appeared to almost taunt the sailors was reminiscent of of the unpredictability of the will o' the wisp anywhere. As we'll see later, it was a fairly accurate description of a real phenomenon found at sea. In contrast to the people on land who kept folk names for their fairy lights, the sailors in other parts of Europe, many bordering the Mediterranean, attributed them more commonly to deities or saints. Among the names given to the mariners omens were the lights of St. Helen, St. Peter, St. Nicholas and St. St. Elmo. Long after Shakespeare, another author who captured those beliefs of the sailors was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He wrote a poem called Christus A Mystery in which he said, last night I saw St. Elmo stand stars with their glimmering lanterns all at play on the tops of the masts and the tips of the spars. And I knew we should have foul weather today. Greek sailors attributed such lights to Helen of Troy, if they appeared only once in the sky, if twice, they were supposed to be from her siblings, the Gemini twins, Caster and Pollux, and even Magellan's account of his voyage to Circumnavigate the Globe mentioned such fires. In his account, he called them after Saint Anselm. Jules Verne elevated this seafaring type of ignis fatuus to science fiction in his 19th century novel Journey to the centre of the earth during the onset of a storm. His narrator on the mast Already I see the light play of a lambent St Elmo's fire. The outstretched sail catches not a breath of wind and hangs like a sheet of lead. Taking a step back, it seems obvious that this great wealth of stories spanning centuries, religions and countries, cannot have been completely fabricated. Common sense tells us that there must be some kind of scientific explanation for ignis fatuus. And that explanation has in fact become increasingly scientific certain in the past hundred years. As it turns out, there are likely causes of ignis fatuus that do not involve spirits, although the science differs from land to sea, first, it's important to know that any fairy lights on land were most often reported in marshes, swamps and damp wooded areas. Derek Gladwin, a sustainability fellow at the University of British Columbia, characterises these types of places in northern Europe as peatlands. He says this is an umbrella term for what might otherwise be called a bog, a fen or a moor. He points out that peatlands have long been a setting for stories of the supernatural, providing the perfect eerie backdrops for masterpieces such as Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights or the Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He further concludes that although we can't explain the phenomenon of the will o' the wisp with total certainty, we have a pretty good handle on how those peatland lights might have been happening. He turns to a chemist named Kit Chapman, who provides some hard science on the processes involved. In simple terms, marshes are rife with organic matter and this creates gases. One amazing fact about peatlands is that they are one of the largest sources of stored carbon dioxide on the planet, holding about 25% of all the soil carbon in the world. That's double the amount held in our forests. To quantify that further, in the past 10,000 years, peatlands have absorbed up to 1.2 trillion tonnes of carbon. In the anaerobic environment of marshy land, fermentation results in the release of gases called phosphine and diphosphane. Although scientists don't agree upon the details, it's possible that one or both of these gases can spontaneously ignite upon contact with the air, or, in the case of phosphine, at least, emit a low level glow called chemiluminescence. Although the theories about these gases come up most frequently, there are also scientists who suggest that the lights are caused by bioluminescence from certain types of fungi. An article in Smithsonian magazine points to studies performed Using samples from places where these mushrooms are easily found, such as Brazil and Vietnam, they produce a compound called oxyluciferin, which was first discovered only recently, in 2015. This compound emits light. It's one of the types of luciferins also found in other plants and glowing animals, such as fireflies and undersea creatures. According to an article by Dr. Maria Wheeler Dubas at the Phipps Conservatory, there are just over 70 species of these glowing fungi which produce different amounts of luciferins throughout any given 24 hour period. In fact, these mushrooms actually have their own circadian rhythm. Their glow peaks at night and as the Smithsonian explains, they use that glow to attract insects. Those helpful bugs then spread the fungi spores to sheltered places where they can reproduce, so the mushroom's ability to glow facilitates their survival as a species. Could these mushrooms be the cause of the fairy lights that have attracted humans for centuries? Still, there is a lot of skepticism. To begin with, there are almost no documented sightings of this in the wild. However, some scientists argue that virtually all ignis fatuous sightings have died out completely due to the human development of wetlands for other uses and the growth of light pollution which eliminates the darkness. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult for those of us in the modern world to find a more worthy of Cathy and Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. Although the legend of foolish Fire lives on in the eerie dead marshes of JRR Tolkien or in the comical fire swamps of the Princess Bride, they would be tough to find in a real life setting anymore. Conditions may still be favourable for the occasional sighting of lights over the water, however. That's because even though they seem similar to landlocked ignis fatuus in folklore, the lights that mariners have long reported out at sea are probably generated by a completely different natural phenomenon. To start with, it probably doesn't surprise you to hear that these flashes that ignite in watery places aren't really fire after all, fire and water are opposites, right? On the website How Stuff Works the phenomenon of ignis fatuus over the water is described as a gap in electrical charge. Although it's most often spotted in the vicinity of a storm, this electrical phenomenon is not lighting. As the article points out, that's probably why sailors weren't really afraid of it in centuries past. Presenting as more of a glue, this type of mysterious light was viewed with more reverence than fear, as it did not set their ships on fire. Pliny the Elder provided one of the earliest accounts of this display of lights on ships. Like the Greeks, he attributed it to The Gemini twins. He described them as a luminous appearance, like a star attached to the javelins on the ramparts. He then further added, they also settle on the yardarms and other parts of ships while sailing, producing a kind of vocal sound like that of birds flitting about. When they occur singly, they are mischievous so as even to sink the vessels. And if they strike on the lower part of the keel, setting them on fire. When there are two of them, they are considered auspicious and are thought to predict a prosperous voyage, as it is said that they drive away that dreadful and terrific meteor named Helena. On this account, their efficacy is ascribed to Castor and Pollux, and they are invoked as gods. They also occasionally shine round the heads of men in the evening, which is considered as predicting something very important. But there is great uncertainty respecting the cause of all these things, and they are concealed in the majesty of nature. Modern scientists can explain how that majesty of nature actually works. It turns out St. Elmo's fire is plasma, or ionized air that emits a glow. Unlike lightning, it's not the movement of electricity from a charged cloud to the ground. Instead, it's just a spark, electrons bursting into the air. This can happen when there's enough of an imbalance in electrical charge to cause the molecules to pull apart. And just as Pliny the Elder noticed, there can even be a hissing sound that accompanies it. The reason that ignis fatuus at sea once seem to foretell a storm is because thunderstorms create more electrically charged conditions. When that charge in the air comes into contact with a contrasting object, like the mast of a ship, conditions are ripe for a luminous reaction. And unlike lightning, it can last for up to several minutes, emitting an otherworldly blue glow. This display happens readily around the same types of tapered surfaces that act as lightning rods, such as church steeples and ship masts. That's why this kind of ignis fatuus has continued into the modern era, even though we don't sail many ships with big masts anymore. For example, sightings were reported around the Hindenburg in 1937 and around a World War II aeroplane in 1945. Such phenomena were also frequently mentioned in books and referenced in films throughout the 20th century and beyond. Whether they are made by cheeky sprites or awe inspiring gods of old, these mysterious lights will live on in our shared human experience. Our ancestors didn't know about phosphenes or bioluminescence, but they did know that the territories of the wetlands were places to be respected at a distance, preserving a rich trove of biodiversity in a space trod lightly by humans, if at all. In his book the Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare, David Nutt captured the blending of folktale and reality when he described the time altering power of the peatlands. He said, at night the belated wanderer sees the fairy host dancing their rounds on many a green mead. Allured by the strange enchantment of the scene, he draws near. He enters the round if he ever reappears. Months, years or even centuries have passed, seeming but minutes to him. But oftener he never returns and is known to be living on in Faerie in the Land of Bliss. Ignis Fatuus has stayed with mankind for millennia, always making us mindful that there are some flashes of brilliance in nature that we cannot master. Better to simply appreciate them from afar and thank the fairies and the gods hoping for good fortune.