“Every night Corliss snuggled with the jar and dreamt of going on adventures in the miniature city, and every morning when she woke up she closed the jar up tight and hid it under her bed. She began to write down the stories of her dreams every morning, in a journal that she kept next to her bed. And when she grew up she put some of those stories in a book with a pretty cover, for parents to read to their kids at sleeptime, and the stories in these pages are those.”

During those magical years when my daughter was small, I would make up stories to help her fall asleep. Often, snuggled down in the covers inventing these tales, the sound of my own slow voice would send me into a state of drowsy half-awakeness. It was during these hypnogogic conditions that the best stream-of-consciousness stories emerged. I would drift into that liminal state where the narratives grew more abstract, meandering from their origins, losing their linearity, and my words would begin to slur, until my daughter would tap me and say, “Dad, stay awake! What happens next?”
Some fraction of these stories made their way into my journals, and these have been reproduced here, each read aloud by a different voice, to soothe your own small miraculous child when they need a nap-time tale. Perhaps some will inspire your own improvisation; children love a spontaneous yarn, the more random the better— and it is really the being together, the loving voice, the sharing of time that matters.