Stories to Sleep to is an ongoing performance series hosted by Mayomi Basnayaka, inviting artists to tell sonic and narrative tales for overworked and under-rested audiences to rest. Through the age-old form of the bedtime story, artists share folklore, personal mythologies, and dreamlike fictions rooted in their cultural and artistic practices.

Rooted in decolonial temporality, the series emerges from a longing for more time and space for communal rest. It resists linear, productive time and reimagines storytelling as a collective descent into dreaming where past, present, and imagined futures coexist between fact and fiction. Here, rest is practiced collectively, not as self-care in service of better work, but as a shared embodied refusal of extractive time.

For this edition, the host Mayomi Basnayaka herself will tell the great tale of කුරුඳුල්ලා (Kurundulla), the Sri Lankan cinnamon bird.