Take Me Back to Eden | Sleep Token | Lore Explained
Here is my interpretation of the story behind Sleep Token’s 2023 album Take Me Back To Eden.
** What follows is my personal interpretation of lore. I base my explanations on the lyrics, music video imagery, band interviews, and fan theories.
Background: I believe all the art we have with this album is different versions of the deity Sleep. This album takes place in her lair—her home which is the nightmare realm. In this realm her physical body is ever changing. Just like the landscape of nightmares that shift from one second to the next, Sleep’s physical manifestation goes through many forms and in each song, we get to see a different version of what she looks like in her own world.
Track 1) “Chokehold”
We last left off in the previous album with Vessel arriving in the nightmare realm, having scarified his life to come seek Sleep. But when he arrives, he realizes she doesn’t want him back and she’s set her sights on another Vessel.
This track is Vessel explaining how far he’s come to get her back and how he’s not about to just let her go. She has this hold on him; she bewitched him when she made him her vessel and his love for her is inescapable.
Track 2) “The Summoning”
This is Vessel trying to tempt sleep back into his arms. He’s saying he still belongs to her. He’s still her vessel—body and blood—and I believe this is him attempting to seduce her.
Is he successful?
Track 3) “Granite”
He gets VERY close to seducing her. But, at the last minute, she pushes him away. Vessel, now frustrated, tries to talk out their problems.
I believe this song is a bit of a back-and-forth conversation between Vessel’s dialogue and Sleep’s—though Sleep speaks through Vessel, using his own body to have the conversation so it’s like he’s talking to himself. The talk starts off with Vessel being reasonable and pointing out both of their flaws and mistakes made over the years.
Track 4) “Aqua Regia”
This argument comes to nothing and both storm off in anger. Vessel sits alone, watching the landscape change with shifting nightmares and feeling like he is shifting too—like he’s just a part of the landscape—like he’s just a relic of this nightmare land. He fears if his soul/ consciousness stays here much longer he will lose himself and dissolve into the world and just become another tortured soul that haunts the land.
Track 5) “Vore”
Vore is short for “Vorarephilia” meaning a sexual fetish having to do with being eaten alive. And that’s exactly what this song is about. I think Sleep seeks Vessel out and propositions him with this “eating” thing—like they did when they first joined together.
Vessel agrees and though it is extremely painful it’s also sort of pleasurable too in a sick kind of way. He gets to be fully inside of her and see what she looks like from the inside out.
Track 6) “Ascensionism”
From inside Sleep, Vessel gets to—in a limited kind of way—possess Sleep. For once the tables are turned and Vessel sees the world through her eyes.
He sees how desperately she wants to be set free from her nightmare prison and be able to walk the earth again. He then sees her real reason for devouring him: she is using him to trade places—to make him stay trapped in the nightmare realm forever while she uses his lifeforce to ascend to earth.
Track 7) “Are You Really Okay?”
Sleep has now traded places with Vessel, and she Ascends to Earth using his body while he is trapped inside her monstrous body in the nightmare realm.
However, when she arrives on Earth, she arrives at a different time. Through some witchery and reversal in fate, she arrives at the time just before she devoured Vessel for the first time. Back in the EP Two the song “Nazareth” where Vessel wakes up beside his girlfriend just after having agreed to be Sleep’s vessel. That is the time and place where Sleep arrives. She’s unsure of what to do, not expecting this shift in time.
The girlfriend asks if Vessel is okay, and we learn that Vessel, in his life before, was very depressed and suicidal and used to inflict self-harm.
Track 8) “The Apparition”
Here we go back to Vessel in the nightmare world. Having realized what Sleep has done to him, he decides to enact his revenge. He now has control of nightmares as he is the god of that realm. He plays with his powers. Sleep (now having usurped his human body) must sleep so when she does, he hits her with everything he has—granting her the worst possible nightmares he can envision.
In this track I think we see Sleep trying to cope with being more “human” and struggling with what she did to her lover. And between the guilt, and the nightmares where she sees Vessel appear like a ghost, and the time travel, part of her is starting to go a little crazy.
Track 9) “DYWTYLM”
“Do you wish that you loved me?” is the question Vessel poses to Sleep each night when he haunts her in her dreams. I think this track is mostly about Sleep struggling with experiencing human emotions.
Now, she’s still a god in some respects, she still has powers but now she is more human than she’s ever been, and she is forced to endure what that’s like. She is suffering a mental break and is starting to regret what she’s done. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she can’t get her reflection to smile back at her. Vessel’s nightmares are getting to her, and she is starting to become paranoid that Vessel is somehow taking back control of his body.
Track 10) “Rain”
This track is Sleep wishing for Vessel’s forgiveness. Again, we see how the tables have turned, and we now see Sleep on her knees begging for Vessel to take her back. She finally sees what it’s like to be in love in only the way humans can. She wishes to undo everything that’s happened between them.
Track 11) “Take Me Back to Eden”
Vessel hears Sleep’s plea for forgiveness. He was just starting to get used to this god thing and is getting off on the power he has, but he is still deeply, deeply in love with her.
Sleeps asks for him to take her back and he eventually agrees. Since he is the god in charge of the nightmare realm it must be him that goes about undoing things.
He works some kind of sorcery or science or whatever and everything gets reversed. We jump back in time, but things go a little screwy when you mess with time travel. Briefly we end up way before Vessel ever met Sleep and he was living a regular 9-5 life and dealing with depression.
We then jump to where we were in track one on this album “Chokehold” where Vessel had just arrived in the nightmare world.
Track 12) “Euclid”
We continue to jump through time, going back to “When the Bough breaks” from their very first EP. (This was Vessel’s incubation period, right before he was reborn as Sleep’s Vessel.)
We are then thrown into “The night does not belong to god” which is the first track off their first full album Sundowning and where Vessel first began teaching others to worship through the band Sleep Token.
And This is where the time stabilizes.
Vessel, now back in his disembodied human form, is reeling from the snap back and forth in time and body hopping.
He takes some time to reflect on all that has happened. He has now seen a few years into the future and knows how things play out between him and Sleep. He is still hopelessly in love with her but now he knows that in the end, try as he might, she will never truly be his. And he must live with this knowledge and make peace with it.
This whole experience has shifted things inside Vessel, and he takes time to mourn the death of this idea of what he wanted things to be between him and Sleep. He realizes it was a fantasy, one that is dead and now needs to be laid to rest. He accepts that he is in love with someone who will always be just out of reach. This seems a tragic destiny but one that he takes on with pleasure.
