dreams – Jason Hook Books

When Grandpa Walter opened the door,
he was wearing a green suit that looked
just like his garden. ‘Welcome to my world
of wonderful wallpapers!’ said Walter.
‘I wonder which room will be your favourite…’

When I wrote Wendy and the Wallpaper Cat for V&A Publishing a few years ago, my idea was that a picture book about a magical house in which the wallpapers come alive might in turn bring fresh life to the wallpapers in the V&A collection by inviting young visitors to the museum to look at the patterns and pictures not just with their eyes but with their imaginations. Grandpa Walter was named after Walter Crane, whose wallpaper designs form the backdrops in the book, and the artist Ilaria Demonti breathed life into the characters of Walter, his sleepless grand-daughter Wendy, and the fiddle-playing Wallpaper Cat with her fabulous illustrations.

We published the book, we celebrated, and that might well have been that. But if cats have nine lives, then it seems wallpaper cats have at least two. Last week, I had the thrill of watching Lisa O’Hanlon and Dan Willis perform Wendy and the Wallpaper Cat at the V&A theatre to row upon row of young, wide-eyed, shrieking spectators. Now the wallpapers, and the book itself, really did come to life. Butterflies flitted over Walter’s wallpaper garden; rose petals tumbled from the sky; sea-shells carried the sound of the ocean to a hundred eager ears; a giant orange was bounced from hand to hand; and, wonder of wonderful wonders, children gasped at nothing more, nothing less, than projections of Victorian wallpapers as Wendy dashed from room to room.

When the electric-blue Wallpaper Cat leapt from the walls to play enchanted fiddle music, not just Wendy but all the children in the audience ran through the midnight garden and danced. And so the Wallpaper Cat lives on, summoned from the wall to play for any child struggling to get to sleep.

Many thanks to Lisa and Dan for their wonderful work, to Ilaria, and to everyone at the V&A including Astrid, Harriet and Tom.

“Wendy looked up at the roses on the walls.
When she reached up to touch them,
a red petal fluttered down.”

“And when at last she caught up with the cat,
he played his fiddle and they danced together
the whole night long.”

There is something both thrilling and terrifying about that moment when waking slips into sleeping, when watching drifts into dreaming, and when the veil that separates the imagined from the real blows aside so that we suddenly cannot tell one from the other.
If a spider happens to be dropping from the ceiling on a long, black thread of silk at that magical instant, who knows what we might dream…

The Dream Weaver

Tonight, as you snuggle up warm in your bed
With your eyes nearly closed, cotton wool in your head,
A spider drops down from the ceiling above…
He’s wearing a top hat, striped socks and one glove!

Crawling over your pillow, the spider creeps near,
And whispers what sounds like a spell in your ear:
‘I am the Dream Weaver, as strange as it seems,
Not spinning my webs now, but weaving your dreams!’

Your blankets grow cobwebs, your bed legs grow roots,
And your curtains sprout mistletoe, thistles and shoots,
As the spider swings by in his gold-buckled shoes,
Shouting: ‘Quick! Follow me! We have no time to lose!’

Your head starts to spin and you slip from your pillow
And fall through the leaves of a sad weeping willow,
Who weeps as his whiskers are hooked on the reel
Of a hunch-backed old toad at an old spinning-wheel.

With whirrs of her wheel, and a nod of her head,
The old toad spins a waterfall wave of white thread,
Which coils like spaghetti on trays held by waiters –
Who look just like beetles in tailcoats and gaiters.

With trays piled high from the white-cotton fountain,
The beetles climb over a tortoise-shell mountain,
To bright-coloured rivers where rainbow trout lie
And chameleons’ tails stir up ponds filled with dye.

Each beetle dives into the pool of its choosing,
In which a chameleon keeps the dye oozing,
Selecting its pattern by changing its skin
From zig-zags to polka-dots, thick stripes to thin.

In one pool, a rubber-gloved frog feeds a tangle
Of nettles and weeds through the jaws of a mangle,
While crickets with nutcrackers squeeze a French bean,
And the thread turns from snow-white to gooseberry-green.

In the next pool, a hairy-legged bluebottle settles,
And tears up a heap of forget-me-knot petals.
He wrings them together and gives them a chew,
And the thread turns from milk-white to blueberry-blue.

Purple plums dropped like bombs by fat moths in fur capes
Stir a pool where a centipede slowly treads grapes
On a waterwheel turned by his one hundred shoes,
And the thread turns the shade of a freshly made bruise.

The threads are now lifted on dragonflies’ tails,
Silhouetted like bi-planes with long vapour trails.
Into clouds made of dandelion flowers they swoop,
Tying knots in the threads while they’re looping the loop.

Flying up from the dye-ponds, past mushrooms and weeds,
Diving down through a storm cloud of sycamore seeds,
Taking turns through the creepers, the vines and the brambles,
The rainbow-tailed, dragonfly flying squad scrambles…

—Excerpt from The Dream Weaver, unpublished 32-page picture book

Jason Hook Books

Writing, commissioning and creating illustrated books

Tag: dreams

Wendy and the Wallpaper Cat: the show

The Dream Weaver