Dreams in mid-century children's books, and what they were really about
From Maurice Sendak to Mitsumasa Anno, the dream sequence became a small philosophical lever in 20th-century picture books. A walk through six dreams and what they were doing.
The dream sequence in mid-century children’s literature has been read, almost universally, as psychological. The child dreams; the dream is the child’s interior; the dream is a metaphor for emotion or fear or growth. This is the dominant Freudian-inflected reading and it is not wrong.
It is, however, incomplete. The dream sequences in the best children’s books of the mid-20th century — Where the Wild Things Are, Anno’s Journey, In the Night Kitchen, The Lion and the Bird, Doctor De Soto — are doing something more interesting than depicting interior states. They are doing epistemology. They are asking what kind of knowing happens in a child’s sleep that doesn’t happen anywhere else.
Six dreams, briefly
1. Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (1963). The forest grows in Max’s room. The room becomes the world. Max is king. Max returns. The dream’s function: rehearsal of mastery. Max is learning, in sleep, how to be the one in charge of his own anger. The dream does not represent his anger. The dream teaches him what to do with it.
2. Anno, Anno’s Journey (1977). Not strictly a dream — the book is wordless and ambiguous — but it operates as a dream. A small traveler crosses a European landscape that contains, hidden in every spread, references to art history, literature, music. The book is a dream of Europe itself. The function: it asks the child to know the world by finding it, not by being told about it. Anno’s dream is a pedagogy of recognition.
3. Sendak, In the Night Kitchen (1970). Mickey falls through the floor into the bakery of the cooks. The dream is sensory — bakery smells, dough, milk, falling. The function: rehearsal of the child’s first awareness that adults work at night, that there are realms of the house and the city the child has not yet seen. The dream is a window into the adult world, encountered safely through sleep.
4. Marianne Dubuc, The Lion and the Bird (2014). Slightly later, but in the tradition. A wounded bird stays with a lion through a winter, then leaves in spring. The dream of the lion remembering the bird, in a single quiet spread, is one of the most affecting moments in 21st-century children’s literature. The function: rehearsal of loss as compatible with love.
5. Steig, Doctor De Soto (1982). Doctor De Soto, a mouse-dentist, treats a fox. The fox plans to eat him. De Soto plans to outwit the fox. The fox’s dream of eating De Soto — shown in a single panel — is one of the strangest moments in mid-century children’s literature. The function: it makes the reader see, briefly, the predator’s point of view, then withdraws. The dream produces ethical complexity in a book that could have been a simple trickster tale.
6. Klassen, The Dark (2013, text by Snicket). A young boy meets the personified Dark of his house. The book is dream-adjacent rather than strictly a dream. The function: rehearsal of befriending the unfamiliar. The dream teaches the child that the things they fear in the night are sometimes the things they will, eventually, become comfortable with.
What the dream sequence is for
Across all six examples, the dream sequence is doing the same structural thing: it is the only narrative move in the picture book that allows the child to safely encounter something that could not be safely encountered while awake.
In a fully-realistic picture book, Max cannot meet the wild things. Mickey cannot fall into a bakery. The lion cannot remember the bird in winter. The fox cannot show his predatory point of view. The boy cannot speak with the dark. None of these encounters are possible in the waking world. The dream sequence opens the door.
This is why the dream is, in mid-century picture books, almost never psychological in the simple sense. The dream is a different epistemology — a different way of knowing — that the picture book can stage and the realistic narrative cannot. The child is being shown that some knowledge requires the night.
A small contemporary worry
The dream sequence has, in our reading of the 2020s picture book, become rare. Contemporary picture books are more often grounded in waking realism: a child going to school, a child losing a tooth, a child dealing with a sibling’s birth. These books are valuable. They are not what we are talking about.
What we miss is the dream-book — the book in which the child encounters something impossible, encounters it safely, returns. This is what the form does best. The contemporary commercial pressure for “realistic” or “relatable” children’s books has pushed against the dream. We think this is a loss.
The picture book is, at its best, the form most suited to staging dreams for children. The form should remember that.
— Sasha Lim. Sources: Cech, J., Angels and Wild Things, Penn State Press, 1995; the Anno catalog raisonné published by Fukuinkan Shoten, 2008.