HEAD FULL OF CLOUDS

Dreams have the power to take you places you’ve never been before.

A pale-skinned child wakes up one morning with “a little leftover piece of a dream floating around.” As the day begins, the protagonist’s senses are heightened, and the youngster notices little details of everyday life. Ripples in the puddles from the previous night’s storm become oceans teeming with life. The taste of an apple is so delicious that the child writes a poem in its honor. A vast network of sidewalk cracks contain “roots winding down, down into the earth below,” and “a fiddler plays a tune” whose “music is carried along on the breeze.” The embrace of a trusted friend completes the child’s day, making the youngster feel one with the surroundings and a part of a greater whole. Schwartz’s lyrical text effectively uses second-person narration to place readers firmly in the driver’s seat, empowering them to notice quotidian details. Sanei’s digitally finished, acrylic gouache and colored pencil illustrations beautifully capture the feeling of trying to recall fragments of one’s dreams as they swiftly vanish from memory. As the story progresses, the art becomes less and less surreal, but the emotions behind these nighttime visions remain. Together, they portray a setting where one’s presence is small but mighty: “You’re one little bit in this great, wide world.”

A grounded yet dreamy look at how we occupy our place in this vast world.