Last night I dreamt I was meeting a friend that I had not seen in a while, and was trying to make a good impression, but was totally blowing it. It started with everyone at the gathering was wearing a costume, and I was just in regular clothes. And then later in an enclosed space i was talking to some woman at length and realized I wasn’t wearing a face mask and everyone else was. The look of horror on this woman’s face as I was speaking loud was amazing.
So I decided for some reason to show this woman a magic trick. Mind you, I don’t know any magic tricks, but that didn’t stop me. I knew I needed to make a good impression. So I took a book and started ripping pages out of it. At first I was pretending to rip the pages, but pretty soon I was taking out whole pages, and then clumps of pages, and then shaking the book upside-down and having confetti and small pieces of paper fall out.
The magic trick was I was going to make the book whole again, and it worked, the book was made whole, except…. Page 17 and 18 didn’t want to go to the right place. Page 15-16 was full of violent language, and page 19-20 was almost a war. The poor page just didn’t feel right being between those two, so it asked about and traded with page 57-58 who was bored of the staid and sedate place it was in, and was looking for more adventure.
And when I woke for the last time (for this dream was more like several dreams that worked together with me waking sometimes in-between) I thought to write a children’s book where one could rearrange the pages in different ways. So the story could be easily changed many time the child got bored. They could put all the exciting stuff right next to each other, or put all the stilly parts in the back, or whatever.
It should be an interesting project.
Sounds like an English Teacher’s nightmare when it seems a large chunk of early learning deals with beginnning, middle, and end of stories, lol.
Yeah, but it could also be such a great reinforcement tool for the same. Did you ever change a story when reading to your boys? If I made even the smallest change, Trevor was aware of it. Other children, especially under 6 have shown similar responses. A book like this would allow them to explore that sense of wrongness. They could switch a single page and see how it works.
Part of my idea was to have the book be in a small binder with a key that unlocked it. That way the kid could be in control of it, and change it back.
Well okay I guess that counts as “strange” but freak’n awesome and intriguing too. I don’t know what the woman thought in the end but your magic trick impressed me so much the interesting project book has been added to my reading list.
Yeah, now all I have to do is write it.
My friend, this is the poet’s task,
His dreams to mark, their sense to ask.
Man’s truest rapture, so I teach,
In dream is opened to his speech.
All poetic inspiration
Is but dream interpretation.
~ Hans Sachs, The Meistersinger
Just something I read after commenting last night and thought
“OH I’ve gotta share this with that strange dream guy!”
So there ya go!