Fall asleep with Henrik

In this episode, Sleepy, I try to list everything in the universe before the hour is over. It starts well, with light, the moon, spoons and dust, but then reality becomes rude and starts unfolding in too many directions at once. There are atoms, hiccups, moss, mirrors, shadows, debt, mushrooms, rust, gravity, sleep, and possibly a doctor pie. There is also the strange fact that most things are emp...

Tonight I fall into the strange little trapdoor between Swedish and English, Sleepy, where one word is perfectly innocent on one side of the sea and slightly alarming on the other. There will be Swedish words. Real ones. Suspicious ones. A few that sound rude but are mostly about road signs, ice cream, children, baths, herring, nurses, kindness and the grief of standing in a doorway. Somewhere in...

Hi Sleepy. Tonight we wander into that strange little gap before a feeling has a name. A sound moves the air in your ear, a smell opens a basement door inside you, a birch tree in the wind becomes childhood, and suddenly the body has arrived long before the words come running after it, late and out of breath. There are grannies, boomers, vowels and bowels, thunder at the kitchen table, a cemetery...

Tonight I circle around the small surrender of it is what it is , Sleepy. Weather, gravity, cold tea, ancient rocks, dogs, cats, seeds cracking open in the dark, and the strange comfort of being a tiny passenger on a planet that refuses to ask our permission. This is a soft, wandering journey to sleep about the things we can’t control, the things growing quietly inside us, and the lighthouse keepe...

In this episode I sit on a slightly uncomfortable bar stool in my Stockholm apartment and begin, somehow, with posture. Then we drift, Sleepy, into figure skating, old video cameras, a very expensive leather jacket, a glass of red wine at "The Prince", and the strange fear of being loved too directly. There are teenage storage rooms, unfinished feelings, first relationships, cowardly letters, phon...

In this episode, Sleepy, I speak from my apartment instead of my little studio in the backyard, surrounded by a portable recording booth, a stiff bar stool, and the faint sound of children in the yard outside. From there, my mind wanders to kindergarten, clay birds with bright feathers, fur coats in a hallway, and the strange fact that some part of me may still be waiting to be picked up. Then I d...

In this episode, Sleepy, we wander into the strange workshop of theatre itself. The table readings, the shoes, the frightened directors, the actors holding scripts like shields, the sacred line about saddling the king’s horses. I remember rehearsal rooms, wild-horse masculinity, Shakespeare chairs turned the wrong way, and the old ache of feeling like the dork in an eighties high school movie. The...

Hi Sleepy. Tonight we begin in the usual humble abode, that small studio in the backyard where the past still keeps some furniture, and we drift from sticky thoughts to electric shocks, from the mystery of knowledge forming in the brain to Flingan the tick-covered philosopher cat. There is a warehouse dream in here somewhere. A studio inside a studio. A window with light outside it. There is also...

Tonight, Sleepy, we begin with seagulls, of course. The old fish-gulls of Stockholm, one of them swallowing a whole pizza with the quiet dignity of a fallen emperor. From there we drift into walnuts, childhood, the strange power of being the only one who has ever seen a particular thing, and then somehow, quite naturally, into alcohol, acting school, red wine, Sambuca on fire, shame, freedom, lone...

Tonight, Sleepy, we begin in the blue, get dropped into a forest of the mind, and somehow end up discussing mist, Apple Watch pressure, Swedish community buildings, the dark forest theory, lonely Facebook groups, English consonants, weird words, escape goats, tigers, American politics, Swedish myths, tiny wrists and the strange comfort of being alive at the same time as someone else. This is an ep...

Tonight, Sleepy, we begin with a telephone meeting, pass through the strange social weather of voices without faces, and somehow end up inside Seinfeld , holding a babka with a hair in it and asking questions no one strictly asked us to ask. This is an episode about what happens when a tiny thought opens a trapdoor. About Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, yes, but also about world-building, childh...

Hi Sleepy. Tonight I sit in a tin container in the backyard, talking about monkeys. Not real monkeys. Pieces of monkey. You and me. Worried, wandering, trying to control things that don’t listen. We drift through spring in Stockholm, where the light insists on hope while something quieter resists. A neighbor appears with a memory of a house that no longer exists, and suddenly we’re talking about w...

Hi Sleepy. I start somewhere near a phone. Or maybe in the absence of one. I circle around how we look at screens to escape a world that doesn’t quite fit its own stories anymore. Then I drift. Into Jack Bauer, into old TV rhythms, into the idea that maybe we’ve lost the space in between things. The grey. The place where nothing has to be decided. You’re there, somewhere between listening and not...

Sleepy… tonight I find myself somewhere between a waiting room and a memory of falling down the stairs with a sandwich in mind. I talk about time that disappears when no one is looking. About being early. Always early. Sitting there while life behaves perfectly most of the time, even if we insist on remembering when it doesn’t. I drift into my daughter, into the quiet panic of missing her and the...

Hi Sleepy. Tonight I start a story and immediately question it, which feels right. There’s a woman named Constance Mallory. She has green shutters she once painted during a summer that didn’t try to be anything special. And a house that knows her. Or thinks it does. We move slowly through rooms, through habits, through the sound a coat makes when it meets a hook. And then something is slightly off...

Sleepy… tonight I’m sitting with the strange feeling that I might still be me. I checked earlier. The mirror confirmed it. Henrik is still Henrik, at least for now. This episode begins just after a live recording of the podcast. A small basement room in Stockholm filled with mattresses, tea, candy, quiet laughter, and a harp playing softly while people waited. Sixty or so humans gathered in a cozy...

Sleepy. Tonight begins, as it often does, with nothing in particular. A welcome to new listeners. A quiet confession that this whole thing might be “content striving to be non-content.” And then, slowly, the mind wanders. We drift through questions about what really matters. A conversation with Nina about our daughter. A small opera meeting about Händel’s Giulio Cesare that somehow opens a door to...

Hi Sleepy! I start with my hands. Not in a dramatic way. Just soap bubbles and warm water and suddenly the realization that these hands have been with me my whole life. They’ve touched thousands upon thousands of objects I don’t remember. Door handles, coffee mugs, faces, fish-shaped cutting boards that looked more like potatoes with fins. We wander through Falun’s red dust under my childhood nail...

Hi Sleepy. Tonight we float around in the sticky, beautiful weirdness of time. Physics time, dad-time, VHS-time, London-time. The kind of time where a star is a memory and a red light becomes a small moral philosophy. I talk about my broken English, my inner critic, and the strange rebel that keeps turning the microphone on anyway. We visit Darth Vader as my first real encounter with the word “evi...

Welcome. This is a short introduction for those of you who just found the show. A lot of new Sleepys have arrived lately . I'm so glad you did, and if you have any questions or just want to say hi, just reach out to me on any social media or visit my website . ABOUT FALL ASLEEP WITH HENRIK and HOW TO USE IT: This is an improvised sleep podcast. I don’t prepare anything in advance. I sit down, pres...

Hi Sleepy. Tonight I welcome the new UK listeners with slightly nervous hands (if your'e a new listener from the UK, please reach out and say hello), and a very Swedish accent. I explain what this is. Or try to. An improvised hour. No preparation. English as a second language. Me wandering off and sometimes coming back. We talk about dreams and why they are considered boring, about childhood clich...

Hi Sleepy. Tonight I sit in Adventure Wolf, listening to a hum that might be a machine, or maybe just the world breathing. I talk about jars on kitchen counters, about things we never asked, about kindness that arrives without explanation, like a cup of coffee placed on a table and nothing more. This is an episode about small things that carry weight. Seeds that may or may not be real. Grandmother...

Hi Sleepy. This is one of those episodes where the talking just keeps walking. From a cold Stockholm morning to bluish mountains in Dalarna (The Valleys). From old theater hierarchies, fear, and drunk directors, to a warm container called Adventure Wolf where nothing is demanded of anyone. I talk about growing older without growing certain. About fame that once felt urgent and now feels heavy. Abo...

Sleepy, it’s snowing in Stockholm and I’m tired of the snow. I sit in Adventure Wolf with a phone in my hand and a vague, familiar heaviness in my body. So I do the only reasonable thing: I call Existence Customer Service. There’s hold music that feels older than language, a menu that can’t handle mixed feelings, and a guy named Gary who sounds kind, tired, and weirdly official about the fact that...

Sleepy, tonight I wander without a map. I talk about speaking broken English into a microphone and not fixing it. About shame, karaoke bars, Stockholm nights, and the strange courage it takes to stay. I circle illness, family, altruism, and the calm that sometimes arrives when drama stops being useful. This is a quiet hour of drifting thoughts, pauses, and company. You don’t have to listen closely...