25 bedtime story ideas for when you're all out of ideas

It's late, your child wants a story, and your mind has gone completely blank. You're not lazy and you're not out of love. You've just told the dragon story forty times and your imagination clocked out around dinner.

So here are 25 starting points you can use tonight, with no prep. None of them need to be good, by the way. A made-up story told badly by someone who loves you beats a perfect one every time. Pick a line below, say it out loud, and follow it wherever your child takes it.

Adventure and quests

1. A treasure map falls out of a library book, and the X marks a spot somewhere on your own street.
2. The smallest dragon in the valley is the only one small enough to reach the lost key.
3. A door appears at the back of the garden shed that absolutely was not there yesterday.
4. A paper boat sets off down the gutter after the rain, and it has somewhere very important to be.
5. The last star won't come out tonight, and someone has to climb up and ask it why.

Cozy and calm

These are good for the home stretch, when you actually want them to wind down.

6. A lighthouse keeper who is scared of the dark discovers the lighthouse is a little scared too.
7. A cloud that has been busy all day finally finds a quiet hill to nap on.
8. Every blanket in the house is holding onto a warm memory, and tonight one of them shares it.
9. A snail carries its house up a hill so slowly that it gets to watch the entire sunset on the way.
10. The moon takes the long way home so it can say goodnight to everyone it passed during the day.

Your child as the hero

Swap your child's name straight into these. It changes everything about how they land.

11. Your child wakes up one morning able to understand exactly what the family pet is thinking.
12. Your child wakes up to discover that anything they draw that day quietly comes true.
13. Your child discovers a staircase that only appears after dark, and the door at the top opens somewhere different every night.
14. Your child plants a single seed before bed, and by morning it has grown into something that needs a name.
15. Your child learns their shadow has been having small adventures while they sleep.

Silly and giggly

16. Someone keeps stealing the left sock, and the investigation leads straight under the bed.
17. Breakfast starts talking back, and the toast turns out to have very strong opinions.
18. A penguin moves in next door and insists everything is better when it's slippery.
19. The vacuum cleaner has secretly been writing poetry about everything it finds.
20. Gravity takes the day off, and getting to bed becomes surprisingly complicated.

Gentle lessons, woven in lightly

The trick here is to never say the lesson out loud. Just let it happen.

21. A young fox is too shy to join the others, until everyone realizes it's the best listener in the woods.
22. Two friends both want the last apple and invent something better than cutting it in half.
23. A small bird is terrified of its first flight and discovers that brave and scared can live in the same chest at once.
24. Someone new moves into the forest, and everyone has to work out how to make room.
25. A child finds out that saying sorry is its own small kind of magic.

How to keep one going when you stall

You will run out of plot halfway through. Everyone does. The fix is to hand the wheel to your child: whenever you get stuck, ask them a question instead of inventing the answer. "And then who came around the corner?" "What do you think was inside?" "Should they open it or run?" They will take the story somewhere you never could have, and the stalling becomes the best part.

And on the nights even a list won't do

Some evenings the tank is just empty, and that's allowed. That's the exact moment I built Träumli for: it writes a fresh story with your child as the hero in a few seconds, so you can skip straight to the reading-aloud part. If you're curious why a bedtime story should star your own child in the first place, I wrote about that here.

But tonight, you don't need any of that. You just need a first line. Pick one from above and see where it goes.