Embers Before Dreams
Five bedtime stories for adults narrated by Bryan W. Cripe
Collection Details
Narrator: Bryan W. Cripe (BWC)
Number of Stories: 5
Total Listening Time: Approx. 4 hours 44 minute
Stories Included
- The Keeper’s Last Watch
- The Whale Beneath the Chapel
- Tea With the Emperor’s Ghost
- The Sand Dunes of Samarkand
- The Clockmaker’s Apprentice
Five Stories of Stillness and Time
About This Collection
Embers Before Dreams is a collection of five bedtime stories for adults written in slow, reflective prose for evening reading or quiet listening. Each story follows a solitary figure moving through a world shaped by memory, time, or quiet wonder. Though the settings differ — a lighthouse, a chapel by the sea, a scholar’s terrace, an open desert, and a clockmaker’s workshop — the stories share the same atmosphere of quiet observation and emotional stillness.
Stories in This Collection
The cottage is quiet, the kettle long since cooled. He pulls on his heavy coat, fastens each wooden button slowly, and steps out into the evening air. The path to the lighthouse curves through the grass beneath a rising moon. He has walked it thousands of times — tonight he walks it knowing it will be the last.
The chapel bells have just fallen silent when the boy hears it — low and patient, rising from somewhere beneath the cliff. He sits on the shore with bare feet on cooling sand, breath falling into the rhythm of the tide. He does not move to find the source. He simply stays and listens.
The water is heated, the leaves measured, and a second cup rests on the low table before he can explain why. The scholar settles onto his cushion as the first lanterns kindle in the dusk. When he looks up, the cushion across from him is no longer empty.
The last ember collapses into itself as the caravan disappears beyond the ridge. The traveller does not follow. He lifts the brass lantern, steps away from the dying fire, and walks out into the open desert — without destination, without urgency, without anything but the night ahead.
The workshop is already ticking when the apprentice arrives in the grey light before dawn. Oil and brass, old wood, and the accumulated quiet of years spent attending to small, precise things. The master moves between the benches without hurry. There is a rhythm here that must be felt before it can be understood.
Read the Kindle Edition
You can read Embers Before Dreams as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.
The story is available in multiple Amazon stores worldwide.
Choose your Amazon marketplace below:
- Genre: Five poetic bedtime stories for adults across coastal, desert, historical, and architectural settings
- Core Theme: Memory, time, solitude, quiet observation, the passage of one moment into the next
- Main Setting: Five distinct settings — a lighthouse, a coastal chapel, a hillside terrace, an open desert, and a clockmaker’s workshop
- Narrative Focus: Five solitary figures moving through carefully observed worlds, each shaped by memory, craft, or wonder at the close of day.
- Emotional Tone: Reflective, contemplative, measured, still
- Reading Mood: Best read slowly in a quiet space at the end of the day, when the mind is ready to settle and move at an unhurried pace.
- Listening Mood: Best listened to in low light or while resting, when the body is still and the voice can carry each story without interruption.
- Length (Kindle): 35027 words – 138 pages
- Length (Audiobook): Approx. 4 hours and 44 minutes
- Narrator: BWC
Listen to the Audiobook on Audible
Prefer listening before sleep?
The narrated audiobook edition of Embers Before Dreams is available on Audible, performed by BWC .
Select your Audible marketplace:
Listen on Apple Books
If you prefer listening through Apple Books, the full audiobook edition of Embers Before Dreams narrated by BWC is also available there.
This includes:
- audiobook
- BWC
- Embers Before Dreams
Listen to the audiobook on Apple Books
Free Trial
Get the audiobook free with an Audible trial — choose your country:
About the Before Your Dream Series
Before Your Dream is a collection of poetic bedtime stories for adults — written for reflection, rest, and emotional peace. Each story invites you to slow the breath and listen to the quiet between thoughts: the place where memory, time, and imagination gently meet. Crafted in British English and designed for evening reading, these stories offer calm literary companionship for those who seek stillness at the end of the day.
Collections & Reviews
These stories are part of the Embers Before Dreams bundle, a collection of five poetic tales written to quiet the mind.
The audiobook anthology, narrated by BWC, gathers the same stories in one calm listening experience.
You can choose your Amazon or Audible marketplace in the sections above if you’d like to leave a quiet review.
Share Embers Before Dreams
If this story brought you a moment of calm, you can share it with someone who might need the same.