Gardens Before Dreams

5 Bedtime Stories for Adults for Relaxation, Quiet Reflection and Peaceful Sleep

Collection Details

Narrator: Elizabeth Copnall
Number of Stories: 5
Total Listening Time: Approx. 4 hours and 21 minutes.

Stories Included

  • Under the Sakura Moon
  • A Table for One in Casablanca
  • Where the Tide Forgets your Name
  • Where the Ferns Remember You
  • The Weaver of the Ninth Temple

Quiet Thresholds of Garden and Night

About This Collection

Gardens Before Dreams is a collection of five bedtime stories for adults, each set within a quiet natural or sheltered space at the edge of evening. The stories are available as both an ebook bundle and an audiobook collection, narrated throughout by Elizabeth Copnall. Across the five pieces — Under the Sakura Moon, A Table for One in Casablanca, Where the Tide Forgets Your Name, Where the Ferns Remember You, and The Weaver of the Ninth Temple — the shared atmosphere is one of gentle enclosure, natural stillness, and quiet return. Each story is written in British English, without plot or conflict, and designed for evening reading or listening.

Stories in This Collection

Under the Sakura Moon

Cherry blossoms drift through a mountain village as the last light fades to amber and rose. Lanterns glow to life along a cobbled street, and a wooden bridge crosses a still pond scattered with fallen petals. Beyond a quiet shrine gate, a bench beneath the largest cherry tree waits beneath a full moon.

A Table for One in Casablanca

A woman walks alone through the medina as Casablanca settles into evening, drawn by lantern light into a small courtyard café built around a murmuring fountain. A stranger in a pale suit joins her table and begins an old story of his own, while a boy with a camera arrives later carrying a photograph that seems impossibly familiar.

Where the Tide Forgets Your Name

Fog rolls over a quiet shoreline where a woman walks without quite remembering how she arrived, her footsteps erased behind her as fast as she makes them. She gathers driftwood and shells left by the tide, then follows the sound of deepening waves toward a weathered jetty reaching into the mist.

Where the Ferns Remember You

A train brings a woman back to a village she left long ago, and a forest path leads her beneath ancient oaks to a cottage untouched by the years. Ferns brush her ankles as she walks on by moonlight to a stone circle she remembers from childhood, where the trees seem to recognise her return.

The Weaver of the Ninth Temple

Morning light reaches a mountain temple where a weaver sits at her loom, receiving silent visitors who arrive one after another throughout the day. Each presence shifts the pattern taking shape on the cloth, spirals opening and closing like the quiet turning of grief into peace.

Gardens Before Dreams coastal garden at sunset with an open journal, compass, flowers and a lantern-lit stone cottage overlooking the sea.
An open journal rests beside a quiet coastal garden as the setting sun illuminates the sea and distant village in Gardens Before Dreams.

Read the Kindle Edition

You can read Gardens Before Dreams as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.
The story is available in multiple Amazon stores worldwide.

Choose your Amazon marketplace below:

  • Genre: Poetic garden reverie fiction
  • Core Theme: Memory, stillness, quiet renewal, sheltered natural spaces
  • Main Setting: Five quiet garden, courtyard, and coastal settings at the threshold of evening
  • Narrative Focus: Five bedtime stories move through blossoming gardens, courtyard cafés, misty shorelines, forest cottages, and mountain temples, each offering a quiet passage into stillness and memory.
  • Emotional Tone: Reflective, contemplative, unhurried, calm
  • Reading Mood: Best read slowly across quiet evenings, when the mind is ready to settle into memory and stillness.
  • Listening Mood: Best listened to while resting in low light, when the body is still and ready to drift into calm.
  • Length (Kindle): 34,145 words – 121 pages
  • Length (Audiobook): Approx. 4 hours and 21 minutes
  • Narrator: Elizabeth Copnall

Listen to the Audiobook on Audible

Prefer listening before sleep?
The narrated audiobook edition of Gardens Before Dreams is available on Audible, performed by Elizabeth Copnall.

Select your Audible marketplace:

Listen on Apple Books

If you prefer listening through Apple Books, the full audiobook edition of Gardens Before Dreams narrated by Elizabeth Copnall is also available there.

This includes:

  • audiobook
  • Elizabeth Copnall
  • Gardens Before Dreams

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 Gardens Before Dreams bundle, a collection of five poetic tales written to quiet the mind.
The audiobook anthology, narrated by Elizabeth Copnall, 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 Gardens Before Dreams

If this story brought you a moment of calm, you can share it with someone who might need the same.

Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn

Audiobooks narrated by Elizabeth Copnall

A Table for One in Casablanca fountain scene with flowing water and a notebook resting beside a tiled basin at evening

A Table for One in Casablanca

In a quiet courtyard, where lantern light rests softly on water, she sits alone at a small table. The fountain moves in gentle circles, carrying no urgency. Nothing asks to be solved. Nothing needs to be held. And in that stillness, something within her begins to settle.
Read More
Where the Tide Forgets Your Name close portrait woman soft expression calm atmosphere

Where the Tide Forgets Your Name

The morning arrives without fanfare, wrapped in mist so thick it seems solid. She finds herself walking along the shoreline, though she cannot remember beginning the journey. Her feet know the rhythm already, leaving impressions the fog immediately claims as its own. The beach exists in its own time, measured not in minutes but in the space between one wave…
Read More
Where the Ferns Remember You cottage at the forest edge with glowing windows and wild garden

Where the Ferns Remember You

Where the Ferns Remember You follows a quiet return to a forest that has not forgotten. Over the course of a single day and night, small encounters and familiar places gently ease the mind into stillness, where memory and presence settle without effort, and nothing needs to be followed or resolved.
Read More
The Museum of Lost Weather hidden among ivy covered stone walls and wildflowers in the golden evening light.

The Museum of Lost Weather

The afternoon had thinned into that particular hour when light loses its weight, spreading low across the fields without casting the sharp shadows of midday. A traveller moved along a footpath that cut through open countryside, boots pressing into grass still warm from the sun, though the warmth itself seemed
Read More
A woman in a red kimono stands beneath cherry blossoms and a full moon in a tranquil Japanese village, bathed in soft lantern light — a poetic scene from Under the Sakura Moon, part of the Before Your Dream series.

Under the Sakura Moon

Cherry petals drift through lantern light, falling without urgency, without regret. The village breathes softly beneath the moon, each step along the cobbled path smoothing the day’s edges. In this gentle hour, beauty asks nothing—only that it be witnessed.
Read More
The Song of the Stone Well – an old stone well in a peaceful countryside landscape at sunset, surrounded by wildflowers and evening mist.

The Song of the Stone Well

At the meadow’s heart, you see it: a circle of weathered stone rising from the grass like a perfect ring of ancient song. The well. Even from this distance, you can sense its presence, not imposing, but magnetic in the way certain places draw you without explanation. It waits here.
Read More
The Weaver of the Ninth Temple weaving at night beside a visitor in a softly lit temple room

The Weaver of the Ninth Temple

A woman known only as the Weaver tends her loom inside an ancient mountain temple, receiving in silence the pilgrims who seek her out. Each visitor leaves a trace in the cloth she creates. The patterns are not designed — they arrive through stillness, one thread at a time.
Read More

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top