New Book, 'The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep,' Claims To Get Even The Most Active Child To Sleep Within Minutes
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Getting your kid to fall asleep so you can have some peace and quiet is quite the chore sometimes. One method is reading them a bedtime story. Now, what if that bed time story wasn’t aimed at entertaining your child, but instead making them fall asleep quickly? A new book that’s racing up the charts says it’ll do just that.
The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep is the first self-published book to reach the top of Amazon’s best-seller list. Written by Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin, a Swedish behavioral psychologist, the book is filled with psychological reinforcement techniques that are aimed at making people fall asleep within minutes.
"These are formed in a way to help the child relax, fall asleep faster, and sleep calmer every night," Forssen Ehrlin told The Independent. "The tale gives suggestions to the child's unconscious mind to sleep."
Parents are advised to read the story, which is 26 pages long, slowly and methodically. There are characters in the book named Uncle Yawn, Sleep Snail, and Heavy-Eyed Owl, and parents are advised to yawn at certain points, and over the course of reading the story.
Speaking with CBS News, Dr. Umakanth Khatwa, director of Sleep Laboratories at Boston Children's Hospital, said, “The authors use the words, the patterns, and the story in a way to induce a kind of hypnosis. The characters' names even sound like sleep initiation."
It’s all about getting your child to sleep as quickly as possible, which has actually rankled at least one parent. The Guardian’s Imogen Williams calls the book “sinister” and “terrifying,” all the while questioning whether or not children’s books should trick kids into falling asleep.
The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep was first published in Sweden in 2011. Its English translation made it to American shores in 2014, but it’s just now receiving recognition from the sleepy mom and dads of the world.