Hobbes (of Calvin and Hobbes) says - I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each others dreams, we can be together all the time.
Calvin always lives in his dreams or his dreams and real life overlap so much that there is hardly any demarcation between them. Calvin lives in a surrealistic world. Who knows? May be most of our kids live in a surreal world where their real life and dream life merge and intermingle. May be, we were like that during our young days and slowly lost ourselves completely to the real world.
A young boy falls asleep reading a book and drifts slowly and silently into the book. The book draws him into a glorious world as it travels through wide and varied landscape. Each page of the book takes him through one adventure after another. As he glides through the wide fields, he meets some the members of his chess game. The bishop comes out to greet him; while the rook and the knight keep a safe distance watching him. The bishop leads him to a gigantic castle guarded by iron-clad knights. The castle is a maze of steps and circles that could lead to anywhere. He goes along to greet the knight only to realise that one of the knights have turned into beautiful sea-birds. The pillars of the castle turn into massive trees and walls of the castle turn into dragon's sharp back. and so on.. goes the dream!
Well, so goes on the wonderful picture book called Free Fall by David Weisner. Another great wordless book; as he demonstrates the amazing creativity and boundary less nature of dreams. David Weisner depicts the fluid nature of the dreams with one dream after another merging in his wonderful paintings. There is so much of activity going on in each page of the book that one needs to spend at least a few minutes going through the minute details. Every page is a potential for the kid to make up his own story. Every time we browse through the illustrations, I end up finding something interesting.
It is a great reminder for us about the tremendous power of creativity and dreams - something that we tend to forget during our mundane day to day work.
As Marcel Proust says - "If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time."
Dream on! and let your kids free to dream their own dreams!
5 comments:
Seems like you really like David Weisner and his wordless books! May be we should write to him about our blog?:-)
My daughter, K, often tells me about her science fiction dreams/imagination - celebrating birthday in Jupiter, skating around the saturn ring, a man floating in Mars...she has always been fascinated about planets and the solar system..I find her imaginations fascinating ...
I really dont know if they are dreams or just her imaginations.. (When she was two, she asked a friend who had come to visit, What is a dream? That was one of her first questions..)
And I don't know the difference between dreams and imagination in a child's world, and whether or not they intersect..
What do you think?
ANyways - nice pick. I will check it out this summer - lots of David Weisner's
Wow...I am enchanted to learn about how one drea, flows into another, wordlessly. Wow. That shud be something.
We just got Tuesday and Akhil's fallen head over heels into it. And he likes having different people in the house read it, cos he gets such different interpretations from each of us. But he likes mine the best! :)
Thanks for yet another peep into Weisner's work!
Dear Saffron Tree blogger,
I stumbled upon this wonderful blog site thru Desi Momz club. Your site is just fabulous. Both my kids (son 9 yrs and daughter 4 1/2 yrs) are book worms.
I really appreciate your work and all the effort you guys have put in, good job!
gawd, i am just catching up - i just bought Tuesday on an impulse after reading your review!
we try some visual illusions books and pictures sort of like the ink-blot-test ones on Ana every now and then - just to see what she says, what she thinks - and am always amazed - she sees an elephant in what looks like beach sand to me!!
hi guys, glad to hear that the earlier review on tuesday was helpful..
saheli, do visit us regularly..
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