Several years ago I picked up one of those tiny, decorative journals, the kind you buy in a little bookshop when you’re on vacation, and started using it as a dream journal. The practice was a revelatory and often surprising experience — trying to scribble down some of the essence of what went on in that other land, the world of dreams, in those few moments of semi-wakefulness before the new day takes its full hold.
One night I dreamed of a strange far future. In this future someone had made a clone using the DNA of Leonardo da Vinci, and the clone was played by a young Robin Williams. I woke up thinking, “Robin Williams playing Leonardo da Vinci! What an idea! I would never have thought of that!”
But of course I did think of it. My mind thought it up, in secret, and then surprised me by telling it to me while I slept.
Sleep is life and dreams are magic. We’ve always known it. But magic is rarely safe and often scary. The young know this best of all.
My littlest went through a time when she would say, “I don’t want to go to sleep because … I don’t want to have dreams!”
She knew. And so we’d sit with our picture books, until sleep came for us both.
Here are four new picture books about sleep and dreaming that are well worth including at bedtime, and could happily be read as a set.
In HELLO SLEEP (NYRB Kids, 32 pp., $18.95, ages 3 to 7), by the French-Korean Saehan Parc, translated from the French by Selene Bright, the little character of Sleep visits everyone, but wonders, “How come I never get any sleep?”
Oh, Sleep tries! Pictured as an inky black creature, not unlike Hayao Miyazaki’s soot sprites, with soulful eyes, Sleep lies down in every strange place — with some fluffy chicks, on Santa Claus’s beard, on a plume of smoke, on the “cushy and bouncy” top of a hot-air balloon. But nothing seems to work. “All you want to do is cry,” the child narrator tells us.
“Hello Sleep” is gently melancholy (in the lineage of “Goodnight Moon”). The flat, geometric art isn’t pixilated but somehow (for me) calls to mind old Nintendo side-scrolling games, and the kind of early computer art that elicits an aura of nostalgia.
I FORGOT HOW TO SLEEP (Enchanted Lion, 48 pp., $17.99, ages 5 to 7), by Bruno Zocca, translated from the Italian by Debbie Bibo, is about how sometimes, despite our best intentions, our bedtime routines don’t do the trick and we sit in unwelcome wakefulness.
Where “Hello Sleep” recalls retro digital art, “I Forgot How to Sleep” (for me) carries a hint of newspaper comics. The story is familiar to us all: No matter how hard we try, we can’t fall asleep; and the harder we try, the worse it gets.
The child goes through her routine a second time. No dice. The father snores away in his bed.
On one page the child simply walks down the stairs as the text reads, “What a terrible night.” We all nod. We know.
It is only by helping someone else sleep (a huge insomniac bear sitting just outside the house) that the child herself finally succumbs to sleep. Like happiness, sleep can’t be approached directly.
IF THE MOON (Stonefruit Studio, 40 pp., $19.99, ages 3 to 7), by Matthew Burgess, illustrated by Matthew Forsythe, is a meditation on the uncertainty of what dreams may hold. Its young protagonist seems acutely aware of the risk involved in this nightly gamble, contemplating the word “if” as he steps through a square of his patchwork quilt and plunges into a gem-colored dreamscape.
The spare, open-ended text itself flows like a dream, wafting from one question to the next and inviting the reader’s imagination to answer. As for the art, I should say that I’ve been a fan of Forsythe’s work since “Ojingogo” (a wordless comic that also relies on dream logic). His illustrations in “If the Moon” are masterly, and fairly glow with wonder. This is one for the home shelf.
As we enter the very heart of dreamland we come to THE GOD OF SLEEP (Little, Brown, 32 pp., $18.99, ages 4 to 8), by Lev Grossman (of “The Magicians” and “The Bright Sword” fame), illustrated by Huỳnh Kim Liên.
Where “If the Moon” is intimate, “The God of Sleep” is expansive and mythic. Sweeping vistas are populated by a whole nighttime pantheon. New gods who feel familiar, yet fresh, burst from all corners.
The god of the sun with her golden hair and dashing red cloak has finished the duties of her day and it’s time for a rest. But where is the god of sleep?
Yes, we’ve come full circle. Here in the land of dreams we are once again searching for sleep.
And what a search it is. As the god of the sun travels far and wide looking for the god of sleep, we are treated to a parade of cleverly contrived deities: “The god of fates is choosing./The god of games is losing./But till the god of sleep shows up,/There won’t be any snoozing.” They are a diverse crowd. The god of jokes! The faun god! The god of math! The mystery god (replete with deerstalker cap and Inverness cape)!
At long last, the god of sleep is found, running late because the world is full of little ones struggling to drift off (perhaps she was even helping the characters in our other books). And we are rewarded with a final spread: a jumbled rainbow of sleeping gods.
Sweet dreams, everyone.
The post Sleeping Beauties: 4 Picture Books Inspired by Bedtime appeared first on New York Times.
