Washington Irving
A man who sleeps for twenty years, and a headless horseman for autumn nights.
Washington Irving supplies this catalog's most literal sleep story. Rip Van Winkle wanders into the Catskills one afternoon and comes home twenty years later, having napped through a revolution, and there is a pleasant symmetry in nodding off to a tale about the greatest nap in American literature. Andrew Bond reads it for Send Me To Sleep, and it fits in a single evening.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is the better-known companion, the 1820 ghost story of a jumpy schoolteacher and a headless rider in a Dutch village on the Hudson. It is a Halloween fixture, but the scare is a country-legend scare, more pumpkin than dread, and the long passages about Dutch farmhouse abundance are some of the sleepiest writing Irving ever did. Elizabeth Grace and Andrew Bond have each recorded it, on The Sleepy Bookshelf and Send Me To Sleep. Autumn is its season; any month works.
