Unlike the rest of the parent album, which leans towards Adult contemporary, "Bedtime Story" is an electronic song with ambient, dance, acid house and new-age tones.

For her sixth studio album Bedtime Stories (1994), Madonna decided to venture in the R&B and hip hop mania that was dominating the charts in the early-to-mid 1990s.

[3] According to author Lucy O'Brien, although Madonna was "anxious" to make an impact in the R&B market, "her voice just wasn't powerful enough to hold and bend those deep, soulful notes".

[7] A demo was put together in London by Björk, Hooper and his assistant Marius De Vries, and then sent to Madonna, who "immediately fell in love with the words".

[14] Phrases such as honey, longing and yearning, and the sexual connotations of being wet on the inside, do not relate to "secular" love, but to "ecstatic" Sufi poetry.

[14] The author concluded that the lyrics to "Bedtime Story" allude to concepts of movement which are "central" to Sufi philosophy: Achieving fana through sema.

[26] Twenty years later, "rare" remixes of the track, such as the "Lush vocal", dub, "Percapella" and "Unconscious in the Jungle" mixes, were made available for digital download and streaming.

[10] "[T]he title track from La M's latest opus [...] is easily among her boldest and most experimental pop singles to date, with its trippy and cutting-edge trance dance rhythms, masterfully crafted by the artist with producer Nellee Hooper.

[24] Writing for Idolator, Bianca Gracie referred to "Bedtime Story" as a "truly hypnotizing" highlight, and applauded its "trippy vibe that separates itself from the rest [of the album]".

[14] For Matthew Rettenmund, author of Encyclopedia Madonnica, "Bedtime Story" is one of the singer's "most delicious, if uncharacteristic, songs [...] a hypnotic, almost hallucinogenic ride through an idealized unconscious state of mind".

[39] Pitchfork's Owen Pallett panned "Bedtime Story" as an "unimaginably disappointing—sterile and static, less-daring second cousin" to Björk's "Violently Happy", and said it was Madonna's "first truly embarrassing flop".

[45] Furhtermore, "Bedtime Story" has been noted as the song that foretold Madonna's work with electronic dance music in the late 1990s and early 2000s, specifically Ray of Light (1998), her seventh studio album.

[26] "Bedtime Story" was, according to Entertainment Weekly's Chuck Arnold, the "jumping-off point for the avant-garde electronica of Ray of Light", an opinion that was shared by Owen Pallett, and Albumism's Quentin Harrison.

[63] The music video for "Bedtime Story" was directed by American filmmaker Mark Romanek —with whom Madonna had previously worked on "Rain" (1993)— and produced by Propaganda Films' Larry Perel.

[67] For the visual, Romanek wanted a "very feminine attitude towards these artistic images", and thus began delving into the lives of female surrealist painters like Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo.

[64][67] He also drew inspiration from male painter René Magritte, British artist Lucian Freud, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, and Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (1969).

[69] They met at a café in Venice Beach, where the director had Shaffer listen to the song, and showed him a batch of surrealism-inspired pictures of a "mystical-looking" Madonna with long white hair —a look Romanek wanted to capture on video.

[70] She dons a "particularly unattractive" combination of pale-blue eyeshadow and frosted lipstick, while a blue liquid dripping from a funnel is seemingly injected into her arm.

[65] By his part, Odeon VP Freeman Fisher added that, since it was a slow theatrical season, partnering with a high-profile artist like Madonna enabled them to sell more tickets; "[It's] a great way to inject some fun into going to the movies [...] for four minutes the audience sees astounding cinematic images in a first class feature-like production.

"[65] Madonna's Pajama Party was an event done to promote the video's release, that took place at New York Webster Hall on March 18, and was broadcast on MTV.

[83] "Bedtime Story" is one of the singer's most underrated music videos according to VH1's Christopher Rosa, who described it as her "weirdest to date [...] psychedelic —and at times downright disturbing [...] this avant-garde clip is serious foreshadowing for Lady Gaga's strange brand of pop art".

[84] Jake Hall from Dazed magazine declared "Bedtime Story" the blueprint for the "90s brand of futurism", adding that the video "eschews the obvious and instead relies on undulating CGI".

Both "Bedtime Story" and the The Cell share Christian symbolism and imagery based on Metatron's cube, and represent a "journey through the unconscious mind".

[87] James Steffen, author of The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, pointed out that some of the imagery in the video —a scene showing a bare foot crushing grapes over a slab inscribed with Arabic, and the shot of a bishop's croziers falling into hand― was "directly lifted" from The Color of Pomegranates.

[88] In the book Madonna's Drowned Worlds, Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Freya Jarman-Ivens wrote that the video took the concepts of new age and adapted them "through the recurrence of androgyny.

[73] "Bedtime Story" was further compared to "Open Your Heart" (1986) —which features Art Deco influences and imagery; both videos are a key to the singer's "world of images", as noted by the authors.

[70] Stewart Mason from Slant Magazine added that, "[the video] offers innumerable images to pluck and peel back, revealing not only reference points, but also an embrace of the spiritual transcendence of the nonverbal depicted in the lyrics [...] a monument to the unexplainable sway of human connection".

[90] She was joined by three satin-clad male dancers, and sang between two wind machines that turned "her waist-length blond extensions into flames, and her diaphanous Versace gown into a parachute", as noted by Mary Gabriel.

[93] On the Celebration Tour (2023—2024), Madonna performed "Bedtime Story" on top of a cube that rose from the front stage, donning a silver mirrored catsuit with oversized shoulders confectioned by Versace, and a long flowing pink wig.

[97] Inspired by the song's video, Massan's visual depicted "dreamy" landscapes, while Madonna's movements were recorded in real time and linked to an avatar that emulated them.