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No, I'm not talking about Carl Jung's "Red Book," the Holy Grail of the unconscious; or Federico Fellini's "Book of Dreams," - nor even the infamous and ancient "Necronomicon" authored by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred.
British juvenile author Francis Spufford described the book I'm referring to as "one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger."
I am of course talking about "Where the Wild things Are," a 1963 children's book by Maurice Sendak.
The book opens with a wolf-costumed Max running amok in the house, chasing the dog with a fork and growling at his mother. He is sent to bed without any supper, where an imaginative dream magically transforms his room into a jungle. A boat just as magically appears and takes him to the land of the Wild Things. Rather than being cowed by the motley, horned beasts, Max becomes the King of All the Wild Things by "staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once."
My two sons loved the book and now I read it to my two granddaughters, who enjoy it just as much. Because of this, we're taking a three-generational outing - with Opah and Grammy, our two sons, daughter-in-law and both granddaughters going to the movie when it opens.
I look at Max as the archetypal bad boy/hero. Carl Jung described archetypes as reappearing again and again across time, cultures and continents. Max, like the Sundance Kid or Robin Hood, appeals to the mischievous side of us all, no matter what our age.
Jung believed the deepest layers of dreams were part of the collective unconsciousness that all humans share. They are from mankind's earliest memories and experiences, much like our genes still carry traces of our earliest physical makeup. These primal dreams are expressed in cultures as myths and even children's fairy tales.
"As the Hebrew Talmud reads, 'A dream not interpreted is like a letter to the self unread,' " I advise my almost-6 and almost 4-year-old granddaughters. Each time I see them, I ask what they've been dreaming about.
"Dreams have puzzled humans since man first climbed out of the trees," I'll explain to Amira and Shay. "There are a series of 'Dream Books' written by the Assyrians on clay tablets in the fifth or sixth millennium B.C. They deal with dreams about death, the loss of teeth and even about finding oneself naked in public."
That last part still doesn't bother Shay much, who'd as soon run around as naked as a jaybird as be dressed.
It's never too early to discuss philosophy with children.
"Chuang Chou, a 4th Century B.C. Chinese philosopher, once dreamed he was a butterfly idly fluttering around flowers," I'll explain over tea, me sitting on the floor and they on their tiny chairs. "When he woke up a man, he wondered if he was Chuang Chou who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man."
"He was a man," Amira concluded, sometimes not prone to wild flights of fancy.
It was my own mother's bits of dream wisdom that first interested me in this twilight life.
"If you dream you're falling and actually hit the ground, you'll wake up dead," she advised me one evening. This started me quandering - how does one wake up dead?
It was in the fourth grade that a fellow student advised me how to know when I was only dreaming I was in a bathroom and not actually standing at a urinal - a handy thing to know.
"Try reading something, like a 'Reader's Digest,'" he explained in an era when almost every American lavatory boasted the magazine. "If you're dreaming, you might make out a headline, but you won't be able to read small print."
Pouring the girls a bit more tea from their china set, I continued, "The poet Coleridge's most famous poem was 'Kublai Khan.' He was smoking opium and reading about the Khan in 1797 in an isolated farmhouse when he fell asleep and dreamed he composed a poem 200 to 300 lines long. Coleridge awoke and immediately began writing it down until he was interrupted at line 54 by a bill collector. But by the time he got rid of the fellow, he'd forgotten the rest of the poem.
"The same thing almost happened to Otto Loewi, the German pharmacologist, while investigating the transmission of nerve impulses in frog muscles. He was stuck at one point until he woke from a dream in which both the theory and experiment to test it were revealed to him. He jotted down some notes and went happily back to sleep. But in the morning he couldn't read his writing or remember the dream.
"The next night the same dream came to Otto and this time he leaped out of bed, rushed to his laboratory and by daybreak had discovered the chemical transmission of nerve impulses, which later won him the 1936 Nobel Prize in medicine."
I must admit that as even a keen of minds that my granddaughters are, their attention sometimes drifts with the more abstract discussions - so I often interject a bit of frivolity.
"You know your great-uncle Heinie would continually dream about being a chicken," I recently highlighted some of their family history. "It got to the point that he was a nervous wreck. He'd wake up perched on the dresser in a nest of shredded sheets and blankets. It got so he was afraid to fall asleep."
I again had their attention.
"I was quite the reader as a child and my Aunt Hilda finally asked if I could find a way to cure him. It took a summer of research at the public library and scrounging through boxes of old books at garage sales, but I finally found a mildewed tome written by an obscure doctor who'd fled Albania for practicing an eccentric sect of the Ottoman Empire, I believe it was Bektashism," I continued. "I was just beginning treatment when my aunt changed her mind and asked me to stop."
'Why would she do that?" Amira wanted to know, her eyes big and round.
I paused for effect and then answered, "She said they needed the eggs."
