Our region has been experiencing a heat wave the last few days. This morning, my two-year-old and I have been holed up in his bedroom, trying to keep cool in the only air-conditioned room in our house.
While I was folding clothes, he played with his toys. He kept up a running dialogue with me as we worked at our own tasks. I love how much he reveals about his inner life as he plays. He was playing with his train Spencer, when this little story emerged from our dialogue:
This “dream” was essentially my son’s imagination leading him to put some normally unrelated images together into one story.
It seems that with children there isn’t a rigid divide between their dream lives and their waking lives. Bad dreams seem very real and scary, and they get worked out through their imaginative play. As children get older, this distinction slowly becomes clearer.
My eight-year-old is in a middle phase in this process. A nightmare woke him up last night shaking, and he needed my company to help him get back to sleep. Usually his dreams are more pleasant. One morning at breakfast he commented out of the blue, “The real world interferes with my dream world.”
That seemed so adult of him, and I identify with his sentiment. There are many mornings when I wake up and want to hang on to the wisps of a happy dream, full of music and color and people and places to explore. I have had some powerful dreams that have inspired the beginnings of stories. My 12-year-old is in the same place now and often uses her dreams as fodder for her writing.
Because they can blend fantasy and reality so well, children can create the most imaginative and spontaneous stories and art. I’ve been trying to be open to letting more of my dream life leak into my crafting and writing. Lately I have even had images of lovely things that I want to create pop into my head while I’m just about to fall asleep (a result of late-night Flickr browsing?). I try to sketch them as soon as I wake up, though they don’t look as fully realized as in my dreams.
How does your dream world inspire what you create?
While I was folding clothes, he played with his toys. He kept up a running dialogue with me as we worked at our own tasks. I love how much he reveals about his inner life as he plays. He was playing with his train Spencer, when this little story emerged from our dialogue:
Spencer had a dream. He dreamed of an octopus. The octopus was on the track.
Spencer stopped. He put the octopus back in the ocean. He saved the octopus.
This “dream” was essentially my son’s imagination leading him to put some normally unrelated images together into one story.
It seems that with children there isn’t a rigid divide between their dream lives and their waking lives. Bad dreams seem very real and scary, and they get worked out through their imaginative play. As children get older, this distinction slowly becomes clearer.
My eight-year-old is in a middle phase in this process. A nightmare woke him up last night shaking, and he needed my company to help him get back to sleep. Usually his dreams are more pleasant. One morning at breakfast he commented out of the blue, “The real world interferes with my dream world.”
That seemed so adult of him, and I identify with his sentiment. There are many mornings when I wake up and want to hang on to the wisps of a happy dream, full of music and color and people and places to explore. I have had some powerful dreams that have inspired the beginnings of stories. My 12-year-old is in the same place now and often uses her dreams as fodder for her writing.
Because they can blend fantasy and reality so well, children can create the most imaginative and spontaneous stories and art. I’ve been trying to be open to letting more of my dream life leak into my crafting and writing. Lately I have even had images of lovely things that I want to create pop into my head while I’m just about to fall asleep (a result of late-night Flickr browsing?). I try to sketch them as soon as I wake up, though they don’t look as fully realized as in my dreams.
How does your dream world inspire what you create?
2 comments:
I hope that he will feel free to write these stories down when he starts putting words to paper.
I love your son's story. I's wild listening to them when they are in that quiet fantasy world!
I've been getting so little sleep these days that my dream world has been seeping into my awake spaces! It hasn't been such a bad thing...my creativity seems to be heightened by sleep deprivation...doesn't seem logical, but neither do dreams.
I'm going to be thinking about this post for a while, I can tell...and I am going to put one of my little idea books back by the side of my bed!
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