Bedtime Stories is a series of twelve staged colour photographs in which each scene depicts a child’s nightmare; the hand-written children’s rhymes underneath the photographs ironically capture the content of the image. Bratkov drew inspiration from darkly humorous folkloric poetry from Russia, which portrays children as adults and adults as children. At the same time, these pictures contain a clear reference to the everyday reality of mafia violence, which plagued Russia in the early 1990s.