Aurora - Bedtime Story for Grown Ups by Dan Jones

[@Davlavi]

Great story.

[@lindazink4126]

Thank you Dan. Love it.

[@johnrandolph1539]

Loved this one Dan!! Your bedtime stories work wonders in helping me get to, and staying relaxed & sleeping!! Even help in allowing me to have positive & fantastical dreams instead of the nightmares I would commonly experience. Thanks for all you do for people like myself!! Cheers!!!!

[@DanJonesHypnosis]

Thank you, I'm glad they are helpful. This one is different to every single one of my other 300+ sleep stories, in that it is the only sleep story I've ever scripted to try to make something of significantly better quality to see if that helps with views of my stories and whether it is worth doing in the future, although it takes me so long to write a script like this one that it would be a struggle to keep up creating one story per week if I scripted them, but if it gets the video a more usual number of views that a channel like this would expect per story, then even if I have to reduce to one story every two weeks it is worth it just to be able to keep posting on my channel, so I'm really hoping this does significantly better than all of my previous story which are made how I normally make my stories, just ad-libbed in a single take from a list of randomly generated words (as I used to do in my live sleep story creation sessions)...

[@SunnyAquamarine2]

I love the name and word Aurora. I'll be falling asleep to this right now.

[@rosemariebrewer5000]

Anosolutely great thank you Dan xxxx

[@brendasimmons9045]

I fell asleep I'm listening to your story. Thank you,

[@TikiStanford]

I’m really enjoying this one, at bedtime and now for a nap. As always, thanks Dan. You rock!

[@JB-ln2nx]

I'm SO excited to listen to this tonight 😍

[@sylviawatts4027]

What a lovely story for once I heard it all the way through ×

[@justicebrewing9449]

Awesome!

[@traingirl1843]

Very good and relaxing but still my absolute favourite is Woman and Gerbil's Road Trip Adventure. Listen to it regularly and have sent it to relatives and colleagues. Love it and will continue to listen the story often. A Gerbil playing Maracas :-) What a thought :-)

[@DanJonesHypnosis]

The gerbil made a reappearance in my recent Slumberland Bedtime Stores Collection Volume One...

[@sylviawatts4027]

HAPPY 15th Birthday 🎂

[@introvertedfox6826]

Been a while since I heard this one, curious to see how it does as an experimental/scripted piece. I knowit was hard for you but perhaps if you end up doing more it will become easier

[@introvertedfox6826]

Saw you ❤ my comment and for a second was wondering what you are doing up at this hour...then I realized its 7am there and its just ME that needs to go to bed. Unfortunately I'm having one of those nights where not even your stories are settling me . Was just about to put on the body scan

[@DanJonesHypnosis]

Maybe the lucid dreaming video would help... I can't imagine writing/scripting the stories getting much easier as I've written a lot over the years and my fingers work so much slower than my mouth and brain, which is generally fine when writing nonfiction, and is okay when writing fiction where I know the plan, like The Hypnotic Assassin where I know there is this character in this world with this goal and I'm letting my fingers figure out how the goal will be achieved and everything was there for it to happen, I just had to discover it. But it is no good for having to keep writing something new. This is why the third children's stories book ended up not happening and why the charity children's stories book didn't happen, that with the first book, Sleepy Bedtime Tales, I was thinking of a character and an idea to introduce the characters and it took a very long time and was incredibly hard work to do, but I got it done, in the second book I was trying to think of a second story with each of the characters from the first book, I struggled to write stories as long as in the first book, it took me about 3x longer to write, but I eventually got it done. The third book I spent about a year and at least 50 hours per week desperately trying to write the stories and failed to complete a single short (1500-2000 words) story, then it was about four months from Comic Relief and so I decided maybe I should try to write a Comic Relief version of the book to raise money for charity, maybe that slight difference and a fixed deadline would help with getting the job done. I wrote half a story in the four months, about 600 words, when the plan was to have written all eleven stories, with each story being about 1500-2000 words, and so I gave up on the idea of writing more children's stories because it was too stressful. The flipside is that if I know where the story is going I struggle to write it, so because I know where the rest of the Hypnotic Assassin's story is going I can't manage to write any of it because it is complete in my mind. I've tried many times since 2011 to write the sequels. I also can't write easily with my brain and fingers working at different speeds because I forget things, never to be recalled, almost as quickly as they have left my mind, so trying to allow things down to typing speed means that I don't remember what I had thought by the time I am trying to type what I thought, so I may think I've got an idea of where this next bit of heading, but as I'm now slowly writing that I have totally forgotten it and no longer have any idea where it is heading. My second fully scripted story for my channel still sits with only a few hundred words written and I have no idea how to progress the story. It is open on my laptop and every day I revisit it to try to write more and can't even think of a next line and so will likely never complete it. Obviously, if the scripted stories, which will be significantly better worded and structured etc than my ad-libbed stories does well (like getting the kind of views you would expect a sleep story on a channel of this size to get, like perhaps 40,000 views in its first month), then I would make more scripted stories no matter the time it takes me, because it would be worth it for the higher quality of story I would be producing and the results seen in producing stories of that higher quality. I think part of my problem is that I'm obviously not particularly creative, or a particularly good storyteller, I struggle to read or write fiction or to understand the point to reading or writing fiction if it isn't being created for therapy and so can do storytelling how I do it in therapy, like any other therapist does, where you have your therapeutic goal and information which has come out in therapy and then you just follow the logical course of creating therapeutic metaphors from the content and weaving them together, but they don't sound like a story as a storyteller would tell a story, they don't have the same kind of structures etc (like I've written in this story), they are normally a character going through a string of therapeutic metaphors and techniques (like journey's and transitions etc) and can end up sounding very similar when though on the surface they are very different, because they aren't really stories in a traditional sense... So I've been trying to learn and improve actual storytelling...

[@introvertedfox6826]

@@DanJonesHypnosis thats tough, obviously there are exercises and tricks etc to help with some of the issues you've mentioned such as keeping a notepad handy to write down fleeting ideas...though I imagine these days, especially for you, voice recording them on your phone would be easier, or writing techniques and exercises to help you better think of ideas and dismantling writers block but I'm not sure anything lije that would work for you. Also, I know you don't agree as myself and others have expressed it in past. But I do think you are creative, the method of how you create your stories may not be traditional and you may go about it from a logical/therapeutic mindset but you still come up with amazingly unique stories. I told my therapist about you and she asked what kind of stories you do/what they're about and had to give a very general answer-because its quite hard to explain how within 30-50 minutes i will have started out as a human, ended up being shrunk down, meeting a fairy, riding a Pegasus, trading through at least one portal, ended up in the ocean, on top of a mountain, and in space and then end up back as a human and had all of that somehow make sense is not something you can explain.

[@DanJonesHypnosis]

Thank you... Regardless of people, like yourself or Abbie, saying I'm creative, I can't get my head around the idea as it seems odd to me to think of just following a logical train of thought as being creative as I think of creativity as someone using their imagination and thinking in a creative way, for example to find a non logical answer or to create something from nothing (I don't know the words to describe what I mean, but like the way an author can magically seem to write a story they have made up in their mind, or the way someone can come up with a non logical idea or use for something). I write things down and use notepads, I don't give audio notes as I would have to listen to these to review them and know what they are, whereas written stuff I can just see. But it is never story ideas etc, it is only ever business ideas or solutions to problems or inventions etc. I don't really have ideas which relate to or could be used in a story. The only two times I've had that is once with the first paragraph of what became the Hypnotic Assassin. I had someone all me if it would be possible to give someone a heart attack using hypnosis. I thought about this, obviously it led to a long discussion, but I then thought about what that would look like and wrote the first paragraph (which was significantly extended many years later as a significant event in the first chapter of the Hypnotic Assassin, for years I couldn't think where to go when I had peaked with the first page) of my novel. The second time was just the idea of using ice knives for killings and thought this would make an interesting serial killer where it looks like they look with different weapons but actually they use ice. I wrote the idea down and then wrote a first few pages of a detective discovering a body to give an idea of what the crime scenes would look like, but never wrote more. I wouldn't necessarily think of it as writers block, although it technically is, I just think of it more that my brain doesn't really work well with fiction. I struggle to grasp and understand the point of fiction generally and of much of the rubbish written in novels padding them out, like dialogue and relationships and details of scenes etc. I prefer a single page synopsis of the story essentially bullet pointing the key outline, which is why I prefer films to novels, so as soon as I try to write 'properly' I struggle. Obviously I've got dozens of books on how to write novels and short stories and how to overcome writers block etc and none of them seem to offer anything of use for the challenges I have, although some offer useful information for things like how to structure stories, how to pace proper stories, what constitutes a short story, novels, novel etc, how to format stories, how to show not tell etc, so the process stuff, and that is all helpful to learn...

[@introvertedfox6826]

@@DanJonesHypnosis I definitely get what you mean about not seeing yourself as creative but I its much similar to how people having to told me I'm quite intelligent, I don't think I am at all because I've a certain idea of intelligence in my head and I focus on all the things I do or get wrong and use this as evidence against the claim.