FROM LULLABY TO LULLABY

From Geras (Beauty and the Beast and Other Stories, 1996, etc.), a lyrical answer for children who wonder ``what everybody's dream might be;/And when they close their eyes at night,/what do they see?'' A mother sits by the bed knitting ``dreams and lullabies'' as a child falls asleep: ``Follow the yarns/as the yarns unwind./What do you find?/What do you find?'' At first the daughter finds her toys, a doll walking to a tea party, a small brown bear, and a large yellow rabbit. But her wanderings expand outward to include the dreams of a real bears, a kitten chasing butterflies in a meadow, even the dream of the moon: ``What the moon would love/is a mile of space/and no thin clouds to cover her face.'' With a singsong rhythm, occasional rhyme, and gently meandering path, the text recreates the indistinct place between wakefulness and sleep. Brown's soft, whimsical watercolors of the child and her toys have the innocent look of another era, reminiscent of Gustaf Tenggren's work of the 1940s and '50s. A perfect bedtime book, both dreamily imaginative and warmly reassuring. (Picture book. 3-8)