EP One & Two | Sleep Token | Lore Explained
Here is my interpretation of the story Sleep Token’s 2016 EP One and their 2017 EP Two.
** What follows is my personal interpretation of lore. I base my explanations on the lyrics, music video imagery, band interviews, and fan theories.
EP One:
Track 1) “Thread the Needle”
The human (whose real name we don’t know because his identity and all his past memories have been lost to him) enters into a dream. But its not just any dream, his subconscious has wandered into the realm of nightmares ruled by an androgenous god of that realm named “Sleep.”
When we get to the heavy section of this song, we flash forward in time and next thing we know, we see this man experiencing his rebirth as the vessel for this deity named sleep. He will henceforth be referred to as “Vessel.”
Track 2) “Fields of Elation”
This song I believe explores Vessel’s revelry in his new world. He and Sleep are now one being and he is loving it. It’s a bit like rolling around in the warmth and comfort of your bed not wanting to face the cold responsibility of the world outside.
It’s also very womb like, and I think this represents Vessel’s incubation period where he is being remade from the inside out by being both consumed by and consummated with Sleep. In this way, he can be seen as both the father and the child of Sleep’s creation.
Track 3) “When the Bough Breaks”
This is Vessel wanting to stay in this “womb like” transformative state of existence within the cocoon of Sleep’s perfect world of suspended time. However, the bough must break, and he must emerge to be reborn so that he and Sleep, together as one, can set about their mission to transform the collective consciousness of humanity.
There are also the seeds of red flags here that signal the toxic sort of relationship to come.
EP Two
Track 1) “Calcutta”
Side note: Calcutta is a city in India named after the Hindu goddess Kali who represents time, death, rebirth, change, power, and destruction along with sexuality and violence. “She who is black” or “She who is death.”
Here we go back in time to get a closer look at the God(dess) “Sleep” who has taken over Vessel and is able to “live” again through him. We now get Vessel’s backstory. I said earlier that Sleep is an androgenous god, but he/she can take any form. When she meets Vessel, she reads his inner thoughts and desires and finds that he will best be confronted by her female form, so she takes on a feminine shape.
The deity Sleep has been trapped in another realm. I imagine it as a nightmare realm of exitance where nothing is quite real (locked away and only able to reach humanity through dreams and nightmares), wishing for the day she can walk the earth again.
This song I believe is Vessel meeting with Sleep on multiple occasions. Each time he wakes, he wishes he could go back to her. One night he dreams he enters this temple in India and stands before the statue of the goddess Kali. The statue begins to speak to him, and he learns her real name which no human can pronounce so he calls her “Sleep”.
Now, the man who will soon be known as “Vessel” falls in love with this goddess. He is positively enraptured and obsessed to the point of near madness. He has never felt this way about anyone or anything before. It’s surreal, it’s all consuming, it’s love on a whole other level. It’s more than an emotional and even more than sexual connection, it’s a desire to own, her to devour her, and become one with her.
He learns Sleep feeds on human emotions but thus far she is only able to feed off emotions experienced in dreams/nightmares. These are fabricated by her. However, she wants the real, unadulterated, raw emotions. She desperately wants to walk the earth again to feed on these emotions, but she requires the possession of a human in order to enter the human realm. In her dreamland, she asks for Vessel to become—well, her vessel on earth.
Willing to do anything to please her, he says yes, (yet he doesn’t realize it will come at the cost of his memories). She possesses him by eating him alive and when he wakes up, he is no longer himself. He is one now called Vessel. And this is where “Thread the needle” takes place and we get the scene of his birth.
Track 2) “Nazareth”
Vessel wakes up beside his girlfriend. He is no longer his old self. Though his consciousness is still present, it’s altered. His soul had merged with that of the goddess Sleep and he and her become this sort of Frankenstein being of man and deity—mortal and celestial—where both are conscious inside of Vessel’s body, but there is almost no way to delineate one from the other because when Sleep devoured him, not only did he become her, she also became him as well—sort of this symbiotic relationship. (And that is why Sleep is sometimes referred to as “he.” Vessel is the male counterpart to Sleep. They are two sides to the same coin.)
As a way for Sleep to test her new vessel, she tells him to kill his girlfriend. He agrees and shoots her. But he doesn’t stop once she is dead. After that he and Sleep… um, eat her dead body. (Vessel can change forms and take one of Sleep’s many monstrous shapes when he chooses. I imagine them taking a cockroach-like form as they devour her body.)
Track 3) “Jericho”
After this bloodbath, Vessel has proven himself to Sleep. He and Sleep are one and it is true synergy. This song is the celebration of their union and Sleep and Vessel have a… Sexual encounter possibly while in one of Sleep’s more monstrous forms. I’m not going to go into detail explaining how that looks, just use your imagination:)
Once they are done, Sleep tells Vessel what it is she wants him to do for her. She wants to be worshiped and wants to bring the masses to their knees before her. Vessel is only too happy to oblige.