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In Praise of My Bed

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Another “it’s been a while”…

Check out the other entries at Illustration Friday.

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Creepy Monsters, Sleepy Monsters. Jane Yolen. Illustrated by Kelly Murphy. 2011. Candlewick Press. 32 pages.

Monsters creep, monsters crawl,
Over the meadow and up the wall.
Monsters run, monsters stumble,
Monsters hip-hop, Monsters tumble,
Monsters slither, monsters wave,
All in a hurry to get to their cave...

It is time for these monsters to go to bed...but are they ready to go to bed without a fight?!

I like this one. It was fun. It is definitely not your cute-little-bunnies-getting-all-ready-for-bed bedtime story book. Which is a nice change! Is it my favorite bedtime book ever? Of course not. But I think it's a fun little book that you and your little ones might enjoy!

Text: 3 out of 5
Illustrations: 3 out of 5
Total: 6 out of 10

© 2011 Becky Laney of Young Readers

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“With sensitive and humorous prose, J.R. McRae tells a story of family life, love, and acceptance with beautiful illustrations by Linda Gunn. When Pete finds a furry hero, Ink, to solve his dinnertime woes, a nosey neighbor jumps to conclusions that enlarge as Pete’s grandpa comes to visit. When Mrs. Allan’s mother-in-law, Nanny, and Pete’s grandpa take off for an early-morning drive, the assumptions increase until Ink and Grandpa solve the mystery. Perfect for young readers, this book speaks of a boy and his grandpa, a mother defending her son from gossip, and the surprise of love at any age.”  ~Janice Phelps Williams, author, illustrator www.janicephelps.com

Promotional poster, by Tara Hale, for “All in the Woods”, Pixiefoot Press, 2011

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It seems I've got myself in a bit of a 'cat rut' due to Illustration Friday. I thought this page from my book dummy worked well for this week's theme:Hope everyone's having a great holiday weekend!

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I’ve been itching to review The Beasties by Jenny Nimmo, illustrated by Gwen Millward ever since we discovered it at the start of the year. It’s one of those books that we’ve renewed the maximum times possible from the library because we just can’t let it go.

Daisy has moved house and is finding it hard to fall asleep in her new room. She lies awake listening to unfamiliar noises.

What was that?
Daisy’s heart went pit-a-pat.

Was it a truck in the street?

No.
It sounded like…

… a story!

From out of the darkness a growly voice tells Daisy an exciting story about a faraway king and his ring.

Daisy wondered about that ring.
Was it gold or silver
or studded with jewels?
She wondered
and wondered until
she fell asleep.

The next night again there are again strange noises Daisy is not yet used to. But this time a clickety voice cuts through the darkness to tell a captivating story about a beautiful bird. Before Daisy knows it she’s transported, and happily dreaming.

The third night it’s a musical voice with a sing-song story that lulls Daisy to sleep, but on the fourth night everything is silent. Daisy can’t sleep and longs for a story.

And then there is the faintest of growls. Daisy summons up all her courage and looks under her bed and almost screams – there are The Beasties.

But the Beasties are so very small and so very friendly and it turns out that they are the secretive storytellers who have been visiting Daisy each night, leaving treasures under her bed to inspire stories.

And when Daisy asks for another story, Floot (the Beastie with the musical voice) insists that Daisy tell her own story and hands her a shell. At first Daisy doesn’t know what to do but she thinks hard, and slowly begins to weave a story around the shell. As her story ends Daisy smiles, hugs the shell tight and drifts off to sleep imagining herself in her own story.

The Beasties sneak out of Daisy’s room knowing her bed won’t seem so big and her room won’t seem so strange now she can tell her own stories. Their work is done.

A book about how stories can comfort, reassure us and makes us feel at home – this is a fabulous read. Perfect for bedtime, ideal if coming to terms with moving house or rooms, I love how the story acknowledges worries, but turns them round. The girls love joining in with the repeated refrain “What was that? Daisy’s heart went pit-a-pat” and they adore the pictures of trinkets and knick-knacks littering the floor under Daisy’s bed – they know this sort of treasure only too well as it’s exactly the stuff they are always collecting; a feather from here, a round stone from there, a button, a ribbon, a broken earring.

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In her new book, “Mirror”, Jeannie celebrates the  differences that makes up the diversity of world cultures and the elements that unite us, the bonds of family and the mundanities of every day life.

Even the presentation, as two books united within one cover, highlights  ’same and different’, but highlights it in a way that draws us closer to both families, the traditional Moroccan family and the modern Australian family.

Turning pages of each book simultaneously, reveals parallel aspects of the daily lives of these very different families.  We see them with the intimacy and immediacy of a fly on the wall. They are at work,  at meals, settling for the night, shopping and sharing. The colours are luminous and the details absorptive. Words are superfluous!

I have always been a fan of Jeannie Baker’s beautiful, evocative, detailed collages. This latest book is a treasure!

“Mirror” by Jeannie Baker, Walker Books, ISBN 978-1-4063-0914-0.

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Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

It starts with a simple question: Did the totem fall? And then turns into a mind warping exercise of  “who incepted who whom?” and “how much was a dream? Am I dreaming?” Christopher Nolan’s Inception has given us hypothesizing hemophilia, for the moment at least. But for some people our real, sans IMAX dreams are enough to sustain a lifetime of “what ifs.”

Dr. Rosalind Cartwright has dedicated her entire career’s work to studying sleep, and in her new book The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives she proposes a new theory on the confluence of our dreaming and waking selves. Here Cartwright reveals the scientific truths behind Inception and why, once we resolve Leo’s unconscious self, we should start tending to our own.

1.) In Inception, Ellen Page plays a “dream architect.” Can we actually influence what people dream about?

That answer is: A little. If I drip water on you while you are in REM sleep (when most dreaming happens), you may tell me you dreamt it was raining. You would already have a dream story of your own creation going on but the water can be added to that dream as “Suddenly as I was trying to escape from this guy it started raining.” If I play a tape with the name of the love of your life over and over, you may begin to dream of that person. But what you dream of that person is what your unconscious needs to express about them. Dreams have an imperative of their own and resist our meddling.

2.) In the film, dream death automatically brings the dreamer back to consciousness. I’ve heard that we always have to wake up before that moment of death in a dream. Is that true, can we not “die” in our dreams?

Death is not a common theme in dreams—unless you are elderly or very ill when death is a topic on your waking mind—and we do not often dream our death occurs even when we are falling from a height. We typically wake ourselves up before we hit the ground because our unconscious memory bank has no helpful images stored to handle the emotion in the dream. But others do dream of their own funeral or see themselves dead in the hospital. These dreams are rehearsals in fantasy for what is to come.

3.) The Inception crew can only escape from a multi-layered dream (dream within a dream, within a dream…) through a carefully engineered “kick” or that leg jerk that wakes us up when we are dream free falling. Why is the “kick” so common an experience in sleep?

This is very common especially as we are falling asleep and the muscles relax. We often experience the need to resist that falling sensation and “save ourselves” by abruptly tightening the muscles again. This is called the hypnic jerk. It is a normal response and benign, except that we have to start over to fall asleep again and another hypnic jerk may happen again.

4.) Through a special machine the crew can enter one subject’s unconscious together. Is this something that people actually think could be possible? Has there ever been any record of people sharing dreams?

Very occasionally identical twins who share so much common experience will have dreams that are very similar. Also people who share their waking experiences and tell each other about how they feel about it will have similar dreams on the same night. The next day one can finish the dream story the other is telling because they have had the same dream. None of this is magic or even science. We can know WHEN y

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The Napping House. Audrey Wood. Illustrated by Don Wood. 1984/2010. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 32 pages.

There is a house,
a napping house,
where everyone is sleeping.
And in that house
there is a bed,
a cozy bed
in a napping house,
where everyone is sleeping.
And on that bed
there is a granny,
a snoring granny
on a cozy bed
in a napping house,
where everyone is sleeping.

Do you know about The Napping House? I didn't discover this gem of a book until I was an adult. But it sure is a fun title! I'm glad to see it being reprinted this year. It is available both as a picture book (with CD) and a padded board book.

If you're not familiar with this one, you should definitely seek it out. It stars a snoring granny, a dreaming child, a dozing dog, a snoozing cat, a slumbering mouse, and one more not-so-special 'special' guest that makes this one so much fun! I loved the predictability and repetition.

The Napping House is a great choice for reading aloud!

© Becky Laney of Young Readers

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Rosalind D. Cartwright is Professor Emeritus of Rush University Medical Center’s Graduate College Neuroscience Division, and was chair of the College’s Department of Behavioral Sciences until 2008.  In her new book, The Twenty-Four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, Cartwright brings together decades of research into the bizarre sleep disorders known as parasomnias to propose a new theory of how the human mind works consistently throughout waking and sleeping hours.  In the excerpt below we learn how important it is to slow down and get the appropriate amount of sleep.

We live in a culture that values speed; fast foods, fast cars, fast service, and fast decisions.  All of this takes a toll.  Fast food is blamed for the epidemic of obesity, fast cars for motor vehicle accidents, and the wish for fast service and decisions for an increase in the general level of frustration when we are inevitably put on hold.  This “hurry up” lifestyle also has an impact on sleep – it has notably shortened the number of hours we as a society devote to it.  When sleep experts speak to general audiences, one question they are often asked is, “How can I spend less time sleeping?”  Those who ask this question tell us that sleep is a waste of time.  Not only is that notion wrong, but the attitude behind it is largely responsible for the increase of several major public health problems.

We now turn to those whose short number of sleep hours is troubling enough for them that they seek professional help.  This is not the case for all short sleepers; some manage to live productive lives and make significant contributions to society.  These are the ones who occupy the extreme left-hand tail of a normal distribution of average hours of sleep needed to feel rested.  Most of us will fall in the middle of that curve, needing between 7 and 9 hours, with an average close to 8.  Short sleepers average 5.5 hours.  Very few people are truly physiologically and psychologically healthy with only 5 hours of sleep on a nightly basis.  Those who, as adults, were 8-hour sleepers but can no longer get that much sleep are in trouble.  Some cannot get to sleep without a prolonged struggle, while others get to sleep but wake repeatedly.  Then there are those who wake too early and cannot get back to sleep.  Insomnia is a useful model to test the contribution of sleep to keeping us healthy in mind and body.

…

What is the definition of “short sleep”?  Sleep experts are reluctant to answer this question by giving a specific number of hours.  As noted, there is just too much variability among individuals in the amount of sleep it takes for them to accomplish the “rest and restoration” functions of sleep.  When we are getting “enough” sleep, we wake up feeling physically refreshed, in a reasonably good mood, and able to function well throughout the day without undue sleepiness.  All of us experience a down time around mid-afternoon, called the “circadian dip,” or sometimes known by the more colorful name, “circadian slump.”  This is when our internal body temperature drops, bringing on a natural tendency to feel sleepy enough for a midday siesta.  If you can get through this without falling asleep at your desk or in your car and then feel all right for the rest of the day, your number of sleep hours is right for you.

Another indicator of how much sleep is enough is the number of hours we sleep when sleep is unscheduled – that is, when we need not wake up at a set time, like on weekends and vacations.  Since we tend to go to bed later under these ci

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Happy Friday to all!  The sun is out, spring is in full force and the weekend is almost upon us.  Get busy procrastinating with the links below and before you know it the day will be over.

There are dancers among us.

How I’d like to spend the month of June.

You can make a difference.

Coming soon to Thailand, Professors Without Borders.

How long can you go without sleep?

The Supreme Court may be coming to a television near you.

Watch the sky reboot.

Apple vs. Gizmodo.

Confessions of a poet laureate.

For the love of homemade maps.

Saving the world’s languages.

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Scarlett hates going to bed. She can be an eye-rubbing, falling-down exhausted, emotion-spewing mess and still fight sleep like a rabid little tiger. What’s up with that? I spend most of my life either fervently hoping I can fall asleep or desperately wishing I could stay asleep, and Scarlett, like every kid ever known, avoids it like the plague. We just don’t appreciate what we’ve got until it’s gone, I guess. Sleeping has reached such mythic proportions in my life that I have actually dreamed about sleeping. Sad, but true. I saw a snippet of poem waxing rhapsodic about sleep on a half-torn magazine page once and it captivated me so completely that I had to track down its origin and author. When I finally found all of 19th century poet and humorist Thomas Hood’s ode--”O bed! O bed! delicious bed! That heaven upon earth to the weary head!--I realized that I love him almost as much as I covet naps. He just gets it. The authors of kid books must get it, too, because it seems that time-to-go-to-bed stories are rivaled only by time-to-use-the-potty tales for sheer numbers. In Leigh Hope Wood’s Sleep Tight, Roosevelt Rhino, the two-horned little protagonist gets very tired during his busy day of trains and teddy bears but, in true kid fashion, needs routine and his parents to find his way to the Land of Nod. O bed, I’m sorry for those childhood years of playing hard to get! Can you ever forgive me?


http://openlibrary.org/b/OL12327020M/Sleep_Tight_Roosevelt_Rhino


http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/315582.Leigh_Hope_Wood

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By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

We’ve all heard people talk of needing their ‘beauty sleep’, but is there really such a thing? Professor Jim Horne is the Director of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, UK, as well as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sleep Research. His book, Sleepfaring: A journey through the science of sleep, reveals what happens in our brains and in our bodies when we sleep. In the short excerpt below he reveals whether we really can get that beauty sleep we all talk about.

What about beauty sleep and those wrinkles that are supposed to vanish with sleep overnight? Indeed, they may disappear, because sleep (rather than just lying down) causes the face and forehead to perspire more than usual, with more water being retained within the skin to puff it up and flatten those wrinkles. Alas, morning arising and greater exposure to the air dry the skin out and the wrinkles pop back. Many so-called anti-wrinkle creams applied at night simply allow the skin to retain more of this water and help keep it puffed up for longer in the morning, but do not actually remove or prevent wrinkles. By the way, the skin just below the eyes is particularly thin and more vulnerable to being puffed up like this during sleep, causing some people to wake up with noticeable bags under their eyes, which soon flatten out next morning. The problem is that all this stretching and contraction of the skin will eventually produce all too many wrinkles under the eyes.

When we sleep, and even when we are awake, it is usually the face that is most exposed to the air, and because of this we can lose a surprisingly large amount of heat from our faces. That is why, when we become hot and need to cool down, the cheeks and forehead easily become red, because the skin here contains a rich supply of tiny blood vessels (capillaries) that expand with warm blood—hence the flushing. Heat from the blood in the cheeks radiates through the thin layer of skin above and is lost to the outside. Even more heat can be lost through perspiration or, rather, from the evaporation of the perspired water (called ‘latent heat loss’), especially from the cheeks and forehead. The body continually produces heat during sleep, as it does in wakefulness, and to stop overheating it has to lose excess heat, which it can do fairly effectively from the exposed face, because the rest of the body is usually too well insulated by clothes or bedding.

Blood moves heat around the body (just like hot water in central heating and car cooling systems) and dumps it through its cheek radiators. Losing heat just before sleep is important because the body likes to cool down a little (by about 0.3°C) then, as this helps the process of falling asleep. It is the reason why our cheeks are often flushed at bedtime. To be more precise, it is the brain that likes to be cooler at this time, and facial flushing is particularly good at doing this through a rather amazing process—the cooled blood from the flushed cheeks drains into a special vein, which can just be seen as that blue patch close to the skin surface in the inside corners of each eye. From there

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I know. I'm really behind. Right now I ought to settle down and do a solid big blog entry.(Her speech, had she won, was "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!" I could have done that.)

And then there's this. Which deserves its own blog entry too.

UCSB was great. UCLA was harder, as I was reeling a little from lack of sleep from the signing the night before, but the people there enjoyed it.

(Also, the Nexus 1 phone is wonderful, especially with the lastest update, allowing us to make things bigger or small by pulling them apart or squeezing them, which was the one thing that iPhones did I envied.)

Also LOTS of questions to answer and comments to post.

But first, sleep.

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Happy New Year. My intention (less unforgivingly binding than a resolution) is to post twice a week as briefly as possible: to float lightly through the Kidlitosphere without compromising the Charterschoolapposphere.

Today's Poetry Stretch at The Miss Rumphius Effect is to write a shadorma, a six-line form with a prescribed syllable count of 3.5.3.3.7.5. The word "shadorma" made me hungry.
And sleepy.

shadorma

sleep sizzles
aromatically
on the spit
of night. carve
juicy slices onto white
sheets of pita bed.

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Snore, Dinosaur, Snore! by John Bendall-Brunello

Three little dinosaurs wake up from sleeping on their mother’s spiny back.  But their mother is still asleep.  She doesn’t move when they prod and pinch her.  She just continues to snore.  They try tickling, clawing and elbowing her.  More snores.  Then they roll her over and slide her down a hill!  Snores.  After rolling down and splashing into a muddy puddle, she just might be waking up.  But they won’t be sure until those snores turn into ROARS!

Simple and perfectly paced for a toddler audience, this book has the appeal of dinosaurs mixed with silliness and giggles.  The little dinosaurs are mischievous.  Children will delight in the thought of rolling a mother down a hill and into mud.  And the reaction at the end is just loud and surprising enough to cap off this fun romp of a book. 

Appropriate for ages 2-4, this book will be welcomed by young dinosaur enthusiasts and should not snore for long on any library shelf.  Not with little dinosaurs around! 

Reviewed from copy received from publisher.

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A Book of Sleep by Il Sung Na

The simple prose of this night-time picture book is made magnificent by its illustrations.  Owl is awake alone all night and watches all sorts of beasts sleep through the darkness.  Every creature sleeps differently even though they are all asleep at night.  Then when dawn comes, everyone else wakes up while owl falls asleep. 

According to the blurb in the book, the illustrations are a combination of handmade painterly textures with digitally generated layers compiled in Adobe Photoshop.  The result is complex and lovely.  The illustrations are filled with repeating motifs, patterns used as shadows, grass and skies.  They are large and while not bright-colored, they will project well for use with a group of children. 

Inspiring art in a simple picture book, this book is perfect bedtime reading for toddlers where the adults will enjoy lingering on each page just as much as the child.  Appropriate for ages 2-5.

Reviewed from copy received from publisher.

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Good morning world.

If you want to watch selected highlights of the me-and-Amanda HousingWorks gig last week (which raised 10K for HousingWorks, hurrah), Spin has them up at http://www.spin.com/articles/watch-amanda-palmer-neil-gaiman-live-nyc. (I read "Feminine Endings" aloud for the first time, and I think it works aloud, which makes me happy.)(Also one of my favourite "I Google You"s)

So the last two weeks of madness is over and I am starting to look around and hoping one day to catch up.

Chicago was fun, in a strange, sleepless sort of a way. I got in on an early in the morning plane, sleepily left my garment-bag behind on the plane (my assistant and Maure Luke made this better), had planned to spend several hours working in my hotel room on the speech. But the hotel room, when I got there, was already occupied, and the morning got stranger from there, which meant that my acceptance speech was rather more impromptu than I had hoped, but people liked it.

It had been Decided that I wasn't doing a signing afterwards, something I thought was a bit disappointing when I learned about it. But I crashed shortly after, slept through both the Chip Kidd and Ivan Brunetti panel and the Chris Ware and Lynda Barry one that followed it, woke in time to have dinner with Jill Thompson and her husband, Brian Azzarello, at Katsu.

Breakfast with Chip Kidd, who got to look at the first copy of Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and said nice things, and then to the airport and off to Toronto.

I dined with Mark Askwith, who I have known for 22 years. We met in Gotham City -- literally, on the set of the first Tim Burton Batman movie -- and I would like to say that we have not changed, but we're both mellower and more contented and less spiky than we were then. We were both journalist-explainer-connectory people who loved comics and wanted to write them, and although he would write some comics he went one way, into television production, and I went the other.

Next morning I went off to CBC to record The Hour. In the car on the way I was told that they'd decided the night before not to do an interview but instead to have me read off a list of 5 Crap Superheroes. I looked them over. They weren't funny. I asked the producer about it, when I got there, and wound up rewriting them, very fast, so they weren't quite as not-funny as they had been, but I'm not sure they ever made it all the way to funny. Then up from the deep basement to a radio studio where Sook-Yin Lee interviewed me for Definitely Not The Opera about fathers and sons, and it wound up being one of the most real and personal interviews I've ever done.

The downside of being interviewed a lot is that people ask you the same questions a lot, and you wind up saying the same things over and over. Sook-Yin wanted to know things nobody had ever asked, and that I was happy to talk about. It goes out on the 20th of June.

The Luminato event was really fun and fine. Mark Askwith introduced me. (A quick google found a review of the event here , another with more photos here, and Mark Askwith's blog, with his introduction, here.)

My favourite event was the next morning: I went to Nelson Mandela Park school. I read to the kids and answered their questions, then I was shown around the school and finally was taken to a room where thirteen small actors portrayed scenes from the first chapter of The Graveyard Book. It was delightful.

In other news: Duncan Jones's film MOON opens tonight in LA and New York. I saw a preview back in February and loved it. Really good SF movie of the kind nobody makes any longer.

I have been nagging Mitch Benn to set up an internetty sort of place to sell his songs directly for a year or so, and he now has it at http://www.corporationrecords.com/store/index/104. Please buy music from him, so he does not feel it has been a waste of time.

The Graveyard Book -- and this Blog! -- have been nominated for British Fantasy Society Awards: http://www.locusmag.com/News/2009/06/british-fantasy-award-finalists.html

Here's a New York Times article about the CORALINE musical and the way it uses diferent kinds of pianos. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/theater/07Blan.html

This came in from Mike Berry:

Neil -- Congratulations on the "Coraline" musical. Thought you might be interested in this video of Schuyler Rummel-Hudson retelling the story of "Coraline." Schuyler has a brain malformation that inhibits her ability to speak, as recounted in her father Robert's excellent memoir, "Schuyler's Monster." Still, she's a remarkable storyteller in her own right.

Here's the link:

http://www.schuylersmonsterblog.com/2009/06/storyteller.html

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I slept past 3 AM for the first time this year, and I credit the snow, which fell like a hush through the night and changed the shape of the coming day. The snow, which insisted on dreams.

Every once in a while I see the world through clearer eyes. The first virtue is patience. Sleep grants it.

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Just recently finished up this logo for a company. Overall, I think it came out looking pretty good, and I thought I'd share.

No real news to report beyond that. A lot of the same really.

Work, sleep, wife, work, sleep, wife, work, sleep, wife, etc.

It's painfully boring being me.

Steve

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