A Dreamer's Dream; A Story of Mo(rpheus) Willems

You may not be familiar with creative-type Mo Willems. The Emmy-winning Seasame Street writer/animator created Cartoon Network's Sheep in the Big City and wrote plenny episodes of Codename: Kids Next Door. Nowadays, he is rightly recognized in connection with his excellent award-wining children stories, including Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and the Elephant and Piggie series. 

Willems is obviously the love child of Doctor Suess and Genndy Tartakovsky. However, he is also far more than a mere children's media auteur. A post-modern metaphysical radical whose work not only frequently comments on itself, breaks the forth wall, and implicates the viewer/reader in the action - he is also a freer of minds. His work subtly and elegantly puts forth theories of reality that forever open people to thoughts previously unthinkable (again, this is the guy who did Sheep in the Big City).

It's not hard to imagine that, somewhere out there, some anal-retentive white dude in a suite, wearing sunglasses indoors, is assuring an aspiring cartoonist that Willems is not an upstanding role model, but in fact an author thought by many to be the most dangerous man in the world.

To illustrate this, at the risk of waking up with a robotic worm swimming beneath my belly button and broadcasting to our robot overlords my every move, I point you to the book I Will Take a Nap:

An entry in the prescient Existential commentary known as the Elephant and Piggie books, this issue of the series waxes more metaphysical than it's Dialectically-historical predecessors.


In it, our protagonist Elephant lay down to a much-wanted nap. On one layer, the book is a simple tale about the importance of good rest to avoid being cranky, irritable, and too weak to defend yourself from fascist A.I.

Elephant with glasses, eerily wide-eyed bunny; nothing too crazy yet...

Spoiler alert:

As the tale meanders on, Piggie shows up and, trying to be friendly, makes it impossible for Elephant to get his rest.

Classic straight-man versus lovable clown set up - the story does not fail to deliver humor with pathos through tried and true forms of Western comedy.

The narrative screws start to loosen, though, as fantastic and impossible things begin to happen. Elephant realizes it was all a dream (ALL a dream?) - a dream about being unable to fall asleep!

Inception - now Elephant will never be able to fall asleep in the company of turnips.

And that's how the book reads on the surface: try to sleep, can't sleep because of an annoying friend, oh wait! I did sleep, it was all just a dream. It's basically the Wizard of Oz with a Pig in place of the Munchkins, Witches, and smoke+projector+curtain style tyrant.

But, if you're anything like the internet after the release of Inception, this story will only beg more questions. Was Elephant sleeping the whole time? How can we tell the difference between reality and dreams? Are we to die in our sleep, Haggar?

Happily this is no mortal author, but Mo Willems we're talking about. Mo, like Nature eirself, ciphers systematic clues into the fabric of his narrative. Check it:

Note the thought bubble...and the adorable wagging tail

When our enervated hero first lay his titanic form down in pursuit of long-sought respite, a thought bubble floats comically from his noggin. What might first read as a dramatically ironic announcement of the no-sleep-here conceit of what is to come is also an albatross of the dream-reality theme. Look at the picture again and notice that the world in which Elephant is sleeping has a white background, whereas the inside of the thought balloon is a dull green.

Now look carefully at the following page:

See the white at the corners of the page? That's reality, flying away as it does with the onset of a gnarly acid trip.

Here, the dull green of the thought-balloon from the previous page have taken over all the page, and the outside world, the real world, can only be seen at the distant edges. We have stepped into a world between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge, a world where madcaps and whatsits breathe half-truths and gorilla dust - THE DREAM WORLD!

The following pages of the book are entirely dull green, indicating clearly what portion of the beginning of the book is real, and when the dream commences. The elegant use of color in this way shames every earlier entry into the cannon of Western visual art.

The boundary between dream and reality is indicated again at the end of the dream sequence, first when Elephant finally realizes that it is a dream:

Here, the boarder between pristine white reality and dull green madness are pleasantly crisp. Outside children's books, of course, they constantly intermix and overlap, until finally we embrace the blurred malaise we name adulthood

And again when Elephant finally shakes off his chilling vegetable reverie:

Thinks the bunny: will I ever be loved again?

Here, we see little bubbles of dull green - dream-green, if you will - around Elephant's wakening yawn. These seem to indicate that the dream bubble has "burst" at his dream's end. The dream world, along with everything in it - is immediately dead.

Now most casual one-read-through readers will not notice the almost imperceptibly subtle visual cues of white meaning reality and dull green meaning dreamland. Out of those, fewer still from the plebian hordes will be alive and sensitive enough to care.

Still, at the heights of human perfection (in which this author rightly includes herself), the rarefied consciousnesses of those nearer to the ungraspable but ever-burning Truth, will see the evanescent keystone of this literary parallel to the Doors of Durin:

When Piggie - DREAM Piggie - yawns and wakes up from her sleep WITHIN Elephants dream, we see white bubbles. WHITE BUBBLES!

WHITE. FUCKING. BUBBLES!

Recall, dear readers, that white is the color of reality, and dull green the essential shade of dreamland. Whither, then, these little white bubbles, hurtling out from a dreamed "YAWN!" like so many fetal galaxies from the womb of our Universes' tempestuous dawn?

Harken back, my no-doubt-shaken sibsters of the Interweb Pits, to Elephant's waking yawn:

Here, the dull green bubbles uncontroversially indicate the bursting of a dream upon the waking of its dreamer; the barely-remembered fragments of a nap-time trance drift forever away from the vaults of consciousness and memory, and into oblivion.

So, when dream-Piggie awakens within Elephant's dream, and we see white bubbles burst around HER waking yawn, what else is there to assume? Only this: that the dream being was dreaming of reality.

And here's where the dam of speculation cannot but break wide and spill the polychrome ink of imagination over the brain of any reader who isn't some heartless clone of the mean neighbor from Denis the Menace. If the dream-Piggie was dreaming of white-backgrounded reality, then mustn't it have been bound by the same rules as the white-background reality that Elephant lives in? Rules of physics, of logical and sequential connection, of causal connection through time? The very rules - of our reality? After all, would such a world not seem dream-like and surreal to a dream-being, who can float and turn its head into a turnip, whose childhood toys alternate between limp un-life and a chorus dance of animation? Is our waking life perhaps the dream of a dreamer? And when that dreamer awakens, may we not die? Or may time for us not freeze, until once again our dream is dreamed?

Clearly, Mo(rpheus) Willems wants us to consider this reality, to explore it, at least as much as Christopher Nolan invites us to explore the world of his popular Inception. But whereas the reductio-ad-absurdum of Inception entails an improbably predictable stretching of dream time relative to real time, as well as an unsatisfying Limbo, or "unstructured dream space" of "infinite raw subconscious" - I Will Take A Nap! offers an elegant and infinitely more interesting dream-reality theory.

There is no "dream bedrock Morty" in I Will Take A Nap!  Instead, there are simply two layers, two worlds - that of the dream, and that of reality. Real beings dream up the dream world, and dream beings - they dream up the real world. Dream worlds only exist because real dreamers dream them. And real worlds - like the one in which we live - they only exist, because dream dreamers dream them.

This is the greatest take away from the literary giant Willems's magnum opus: our reality is only a dreamer's dream. Very probably, the dream of a pig who is herself the dream of a real elephant, who is himself the dream of a man named Mo, who could not exist if it weren't for the dream of his dream.