An unreasonably deep analysis of Goodnight Moon

On finding (or creating) meaning in dreams

My daughter used to fight sleep like grim death. Every night as she was dozing off, she would suddenly recoil, bouncing back from that hypnagogic state with flailing arms and banshee screams. It was as if she saw what lay on the other side of sleep and what she saw was death. Oblivion. I don’t think the analogy is too dramatic. To a baby, bedtime really is a little death. Her sense of self is tenuous, her dreams not so easily distinguished from reality, and her mind freighted with new experiences that some psychologists say have the effect of slowing time. As it was, my daughter came to recognize those grim portents of sleep, and one of them was Goodnight Moon.

It’s a wonder Margaret Wise Brown’s masterpiece isn’t celebrated as a work of existentialist horror, one which plays on the belief that things exist regardless of our awareness of them. Combs, chairs, bowls full of mush—these things are lifeless, objective, impervious to introspection, and wholly beyond the mind which observes them. We believe the world is made of “things,” and those who experience them are merely privileged with the senses to do so. Even the act of experience is understood to be an object of complex neurosensory activity in the brain, and subjectivity is only a particularly convincing illusion of emergent neural phenomena. Our consensus model of reality, as it were, speaks in the passive voice: object begets subject.

Not so the voice in Goodnight Moon, whose steady itemization of stars and balloons and little toy houses serve like rosary beads for the flighty spirit-voice, whose accruing mantra of “goodnight” foretells the end of all experience, even as it clings to the objects that define it. Do these things persist when we close the book? What about when we close our eyes? To crib a famous thought experiment, if a quiet old lady is whispering hush and there’s nobody around to hear it, does she even make a sound? I think about this while rocking my daughter to sleep.

First published in 1947, Goodnight Moon was nothing if not a break from convention. Without any characters or coherent narrative, it was more like a lyrical stage set than a children’s story. Brown herself got the idea from a dream, having jotted down the words as soon as she woke up. The lack of plot could not have troubled her less. As an educator, she championed the philosophy of author Lucy Sprague Mitchell, whose “here and now” approach to children’s literature sought to harmonize storytelling with the raw, sensory-laden experience of being a kid. Plot, character, morality—these were only incidental to a good story. More important is to reflect the child’s reality by heightening her experience of it. Such is the mandate, Brown believed, of all “sincere art.”

Margaret Wise Brown

Today, Goodnight Moon is a classic, but in 1947 its charms were hardly assured. Early sales were slow. Anne Carroll Moore, the esteemed children’s librarian at the New York Public Library, famously called it an “unbearably sentimental piece of work,” going so far as to help blacklist the book for nearly 25 years—a draconian measure that might have stunted its popularity. (In one revealing incident in 1951, Brown was blocked from a book ceremony at the very library that had so excoriated her work.)

What exactly was Moore’s beef with Goodnight Moon? In a word, it was too realist, which is a shame because most kids who grew up with the book will attest to its profound strangeness. Rather than tantalizing children with a daytime odyssey to Oz or Neverland, Goodnight Moon lulls them to sleep with a gloomy portrait of a “great green room.” Here, everything fantastical—three bears sitting in chairs, a cow jumping over the moon—is confined to picture frames hung on the wall. The only exception is in illustrator Clement Hurd’s decision to depict the story’s only characters—the bedridden child and the quiet old lady—as fluffy-tailed rabbits. The effect is soporific, and a little uncanny. The Great Green Room’s true purpose, it seems, is not to lull juvenile rabbits to sleep but to simulate an underworld for them, an underworld where subjectivity obtains. Here, in this dreamy, second-person purgatory, all meaning that belongs to the world of the day has been cut loose. Here, in the night world, objects are only their appearances—a parody of the reader’s waking life, dependent as it is on dichotomies and boundaries and the unexamined assumption that the universe is devoid of meaning. For just such an outlook, Goodnight Moon tells a story about falling asleep in order to wake up.

When my daughter was two months old, I had a dream of a creature perched atop her crib, peering down at her. Silent and serene, its knees were folded into its chest like a gargoyle. I knew the vision was only a figment of my imagination because I knew I was dreaming. But I still couldn’t move, and the thought was already gnawing at me that this gargoyle was, in some transcendent sense, real. Why else would dreams take symbolic form if not to condense meaning too vast and complicated for our waking, literal minds to unpack? So I tried to scream myself awake, alert my wife lying beside me, unstick myself from the throes of sleep paralysis. Something stirred, my wife rolled over and shook me awake, and the transition was like a dive into cold water. A little birth.

Art perverts might recognize a parallel to Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare, which depicts some kind of imp or incubus crouched atop a sleeping woman. When I saw this painting only a few days later in a documentary about sleep paralysis, I recalled the menacing equanimity of the gargoyle as it loomed over my newborn daughter.

“The Nightmare,” Henry Fuseli

The coincidence led me down a rabbit hole to another painting: a 1795 monotyope satirizing one of history’s greatest geniuses as a hunchbacked sophist with big muscles.

Far from the periwigged daydreamer of popular imagination, William Blake’s Isaac Newton is a statuesque David slouched over a compass diagram of clean lines and simple shapes. Behind him, a resplendent farrago of aqueous life shimmers away, unseen to the father of physics with his calculus and his atomism. The contrast is stark, dramatic, and quintessentially Romantic. Like other Romantics, Blake had major beef with the scientific revolution. He thought its reliance on empiricism a kind of blasphemy for its banishment of everything that made life beautiful and mysterious and sexy—as well, a suspect methodology for its presumption of objectivity. From his poem Jerusalem:

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth,

And all you behold, though it appears without,

It is within, in your imagination,

Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.

Only through imagination, Blake believed, do things take form. And so the popular refrain, at home among mystics and chaos theorists alike, that nature is more than the sum of its parts may actually be a category error. Since nature has no parts, no independent things or lines of demarcation separating one object from another, it cannot be said to “have” anything. It simply is, and what it is already contains our perception of it. To quote the most annoying person you know, “all is one.”

“Newton,” William Blake

Some critics have characterized Blake’s position as anti-science, and an oft-cited quote doesn’t afford his position much nuance: “Art is the tree of life, science is the tree of death.” But is it fair to take the words of a Romantic so literally? Isn’t literalism the thing Blake was putting on trial? Others have argued Blake’s contempt was not for science but for reductionism—the belief that all phenomena can be understood and explained by the properties of their constituent parts. Logic, positivism, rationalism—these Blake believed to be abstractions of the imagination and, thus, ultimately, beholden to it. But their undisputed value as tools for predicting how nature behaves both relies upon and perpetuates a habit of enumeration and objectification that puts the cart before the horse, so to speak, slanting reality into the passive grammar (object → subject) we speak today.

This error is not without consequence. It disguises a world that is fundamentally imaginal, even in the strictly materialist sense, as one that is numeral and compartmental, deadening it to an “eternal truth” that is only penetrable to divine inspiration. We don’t think of the world as contained within our minds, but rather of our minds as being contained within the world. I like how historian Richard Tarnas put it in The Passion of the Western Mind:

“Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature.”

But the truth Blake was alluding to can be simply put that facts have no independent existence. For Blake, the role of the artist is thus critical. It is to shine the light of imagination on this fallen world of material things, and to blur and mystify the methods of reduction. Is that what Margaret Wise Brown was doing with her vesperal farewells to the objects of the dayworld, like some kind of neo-Gnostic admonition of the material plane? Doubtful. But as a patron of many seances and mediums, Brown’s metaphysical beliefs could hardly be described as materialist. Blake might well have admired the pedagogy of the “here and now,” at the very least for insisting on experience as square one. I wonder about this as my daughter drifts off, imagining the nature of dreams in a mind not yet compromised by language.

“Job's Evil Dreams,” William Blake

It’s too bad that in the modern era science has been set in opposition to the arts, another unfortunate side-effect of our ontological passive grammar. Our camps just speak different languages: one literal, the other symbolic; one reductive, the other holistic; one quantifiable, the other qualitative. This struggle isn’t new. You can trace it back to the mythological vessels of Apollo and Dionysus, with only the balance of the two shifting with the times. But adversity makes strange bedfellows. Chastened by the predictive marvels of science, the arts seem to have made common cause with religion as a safe harbor for imaginal enterprise. Marilynne Robinson articulated the stakes of the schism in her book Absence of Mind:

“The thing lost in this kind of thinking… is the self, the solitary, perceiving, and interpreting of anything that can be called experience. It may have been perverse of destiny to array perception across billions of subjectivities, but the fact is central to human life and language and culture, and no philosophy or cognitive science should be allowed to evade it.”

Robinson is one of the best equipped to mount a defense of subjectivity, which is irreducible, against the vanguard of reductionism. A Christian, her metaphysics do not square perfectly with Blake’s, and the locus of her ire is not the same. Robinson’s critique has more to do with the flippant, imprecise characterization of the “self,” which too many scientific communicators dismiss as so much Cartesian residue. But she rebukes a tendency among “sociologists and evolutionary psychologists and philosophers” to claim the mantle of positivism as a way to spurn questions that are intransigently metaphysical:

“Assuming that there is indeed a modern malaise, one contributing factor might be the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature that has long associated itself with intellectual progress, and the exclusion of felt life from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts.”

Nor are the consequences of our ontological passive grammar strictly epistemological. Robinson goes on to lament the marginalization of the arts. History, for her, has become a project of identifying failures, for which science alone may provide solutions. Even human nature, insofar as it can be defined, is to be studied through models that blunt the idiosyncrasies and aberrations of culture. Is it any wonder dreams have become conversational taboo, a gauche subject among writers from Martin Amis to Michael Chabon? The latter laid it on thick in an article for The New York Review of Books called, “Why I Hate Dreams:”

“I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.”

If the understanding prevails that dreams are nothing but random synaptic firings—or, as Chabon delightfully put it, an “oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand”—then what reason do we have to assign meaning to them? Ask the same of any literary font of chaos—Borges’ library, Camus’ stranger, McCarthy’s Chigurh. What is random cannot be said to contain meaning, or at least not much. Thus, when encountering gradations from chaos to order, the reductionist will parameterize the dichotomy with words like “complexity” and “emergent,” relegating any consideration of order, however defined, to the ignominious field of metaphysics. Descartes would be proud.

Should we be so quick to dismiss dreams when, clearly, they have inspired so much genius, from Goodnight Moon to the paintings of Salvador Dali to the mapping of the benzene molecule? A storytelling cliche the dream most certainly is, but its reputation as narrative poison hardly deterred the pens of Katherine Mansfield, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Emily Dickinson, and Zora Neale Hurston, all of whom took diligent care to record their dreams. Mary Shelley’s inspiration for Frankenstein might have come from a traumatic dream where she revived her dead child by holding it near a fire. Little surprise that William Blake, too, credited his dreams with the genesis of much of his work.

“Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening,” Salvador Dali

I don’t imagine even the most staunch positivist would criticize the artist for taking inspiration from dreams. At worst, she would belittle the arts as religion’s flighty cousin. But I would agree with Marilynne Robinson that the nullification of individual experience is “perhaps as much a motive as a consequence of [positivist] rigor.”

Something is lost in this account, and it may not fall to language to articulate exactly what “it” is. The best I can offer is another positivist taboo: an appeal to authority. As a philosophy, Blake’s idealism has kinship well beyond the Romantics. It’s in Plato’s forms, in Kant’s noumena, in Schopenhauer’s subterranean “will,” in Indian non-dual philosophies like Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana. And it has echoes in mainstream science, too—in cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman’s notion of conscious realism, in philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism, in physicist John Wheeler’s notion of a participatory universe, and in some (some) interpretations of quantum mechanics that posit the role of a conscious observer in the collapse of the wave function. All these schools of thought voice some variation on the idea that the world is subjective, not objective.

So what to make of the numinous objects in Goodnight Moon? Or in Brown’s dream of the Great Green Room? Or in my dream of the leering gargoyle and the world which we presume to comprise of things and agents with only a vague distinction between the two? What is a dream anyway?

For that, we have Jung and Freud. Jungian analysis concerns itself with symbols and archetypes and would probably say my gargoyle represents nascent fears of becoming a father. The dream, in this context, asks to be interpreted so as to awaken the unconscious, to bring it into daylight. A Freudian, meanwhile, would sift through memories or “day residues” to draft a more prosaic account, one that blames the tragedy of the civilized mind in its attempts to reconcile its primordial instincts. Rather than an archetypal representation of the collective unconscious, the gargoyle might represent some repressed, “primitive” urge, and the word “Oedipal” would get tossed around like confetti. I don’t love it.

A third avenue exists in the oft-overlooked analysis of psychologist James Hillman, who argued that even the symbolic decoding of dream objects betrays their ontology. Far from a substrate of metaphors waiting to be translated into the “ego’s language,” dreams are of their own ontological nature, neither subjective nor objective. From The Dream and the Underworld:

“Here precisely is the inconsistency in most dream interpretation: All figures are taken on the subjective level, but the ego remains on the objective level… The “I” remains literal and intact, never truly resolved into its own image.”

For Hillman, ideal subjectivity means breaching the last vestige of objectivity, the dream-ego, and dissolving it into the dream, “by showing that everything done and felt and said by the ego reflects its situation in the image, i.e., that this ego is wholly imaginal.”

Blake would positively climax as this.

It’s strange how our ontological passive voice doesn’t prevail in the world of dreams, where we have no reason to infer the local, objective reality of other beings or things, where all is a reflection of our psyche in its most private state. But isn’t that the world of Goodnight Moon, too, where the story’s only characters function as fluffy-tailed reflections of the real-life parent-child dyad?

Maybe now we should ask the first question of every fiction workshop: Who is the protagonist? Recall that the snuggly child rabbit does not exist in the text of Goodnight Moon, only in the illustrations of Clement Hurd. So what about the quiet old lady whispering “hush?” Is she the protagonist? Doubtful. Her agency is bound to a kind of mournful observance—reverent yet immobilized in her rocking chair, repeating her mantra sotto voce.

Narratology abhors a vacuum. Without a tangible subject, it is the reader who must take the seat of the protagonist. Hurd emphasizes this point by locking the illustrations within a single vantage point. From the first page to the last, the perspective of the Great Green Room is fixed, only changing its focus as the room gets progressively darker. Neither first- nor third-person, this unusual perspective is that of the reader’s—a kind of second-person omniscience where dualities blur in proximity to the dreamworld, where even the sense of self seems to dissolve in that most chilling page: a blank white nothingness with only the line, “Goodnight nobody.”

Are we in the underworld here? Purgatory? Is the quiet old lady some kind of matriarchal psychopomp presiding over the passage of souls? What is her role other than to whisper “hush” like Charon, ferryman of the dead? Or is the storied katabasis an illusion of dayworld dichotomies—the habit of the waking mind to separate and divide (enantiodromia)—and all that is asked of our heroic subjectivity is to dissolve fully into “nobody?” To go gentle into that good night? To become death?

“Souls on the Banks of the Acheron,” Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl

We can wonder if Goodnight Moon’s subterranean narrative is considerably darker than it at first appears. Maybe the wispy protagonist is not departing the world of the day but the world of the living. Alas, the story becomes a malicious inversion of the egoic hero’s journey, where instead of departing from the realm of the ordinary and returning a changed person, the protagonist must remain fixed in the realm of changeless forms, that they might pierce the illusion of death, the cloud of unknowing; that they might suspend the instinct to objectify and transcend the dichotomy between seer and seen. The goal now isn’t to reconcile the mortality of the Self but rather that of the ego, which exists only to discern and divide and give witness to the Great Green Room. Here, the call to adventure resides in the dimming consciousness of its vacuous subject. That’s you. That’s me. That’s the child. And that’s my daughter, kicking and screaming as she departs the waking world, only to discover in her dreams a world of pre-lingual ideas that William Blake and so many others claim to be the ultimate reality. And how tempting is it to believe that ideas are all there is? Wouldn’t that echo the very source of the joy we derive from storytelling? You know, meaning. Maybe the meaning we cling to in stories is equally diffuse, and all it needs is a mind to latch onto it, a perspective to give it form.

When I see my daughter, asleep in her crib, cataloging the objects of the day, ossifying babble into a native tongue, I’m gripped by a tension between love and fear—love for this separate soul too divine for language, and fear for a world whose claws are out. The Vedantists would say my fear is a manifestation of Ahaṁkāra, or egoic attachment. Buddhists would blame a kind of metaphysical ignorance known as Avidyā. But the lesson is more or less the same: Let go of the ego and fear will scatter. (Or, if you prefer the stylings of Frank Herbert: “Fear is the mind killer.”) What remains is the very bridge between subjects, that which expands over a vast and illusory sea of things. That’s love. Pure and simple. And it seems Clement Hurd might have had this in mind. As his son Thacher told NPR in 2022, Goodnight Moon “mirrors what's happening for the child, but it also gives them a feeling of some other world, something else that's sort of a larger, more peaceful world.”

What would you call such a place? Maybe you should ask your dreams.