Dream Days (Kenneth Grahame, 1898) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 2/3)

There's something to be said for sequels.  While they might be seen by some as derivative, and there's always the sideways glance and comment that "it's not as good as the first one", the best sequels build on the groundwork laid by their predecessors and use it as a springboard to explore different grounds.

Kenneth Grahame's first 'big hit' work, The Golden Age, was a meditation on his own childhood, raised by "The Olympians" who took him and his siblings in after his mother's death.  It explored the childhood mindsets and world that he had grown up in, giving anecdotes of how that childhood life of whimsy and indifference toward adult concerns manifested itself, though without any particular degree of sentimentality; the narrator is quite aware of the things he does that get him in trouble, he simply didn't understand at the time that they were going to be problems.

The second of the pieces collected in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame is the follow-up, Dream Days.  This work shares the setting and characters with its predecessor (though the oldest brother, sent off to boarding school at the end of the previous work, only appears from afar, mentioned in flashback and in the form of letters sent home from school), but takes an altogether different approach to the childhood events, for much of the piece.

This work has longer chapters than The Golden Age, allowing each flight of fancy to be given more room to breathe, and Grahame uses this space to engage in a rather focused way on the realm of daydreams.  This brings along with it an entirely different sense to the work, where each story, rather than being about the little encroachments of whimsy on the reality of a child's life, instead goes so far as to override everything about the world, and engage entirely in that fantasy world.  Several stories actively seek to ignore the world outside of this imaginary space entirely, building to a chapter featuring an entire original fairy-tale, not featuring any of the known characters at all, before coming back to harsh reality in the final story.

The largest theme, then, is the place of imaginary landscapes and settings in the child's world.  The second chapter, for example, begins within reality; the narrator explains how, on this particular day, everyone around him was in a bad mood and that put him in a bad mood as well, so he decided to just start walking outside and let his mind wander.  From there, it jumps into a series of brief fantasies, where the narrator is considering what he might run away and do to make those around him realize how much he means, through his absence.  These are all examples of the sort of adventure yarns that might be seen in children's adventure stories; he imagines running off to join the army and become a great general, or becoming a cabin boy and working his way up to be a pirate captain, or even going to a monastery and becoming a monk, just to spite them.  This obviously misses the deeper, more spiritual reasons behind someone taking up the monastic life, but much of the depth involved in these fantasy-minded escapes is missed in the childhood whims, shaped as they are by what books he has read and stories he has heard but little else besides.

From this establishment of the realms of imagination as a focus, Grahame begins to explore the various ways that the imagination can be shaped, used as both a way to bridge two minds together and to simply add to what one has at their disposal, and how it can serve as an escape when necessary.  The following chapter features the narrator discovering the dangers of inviting someone you don't know into your imaginary world without considering how their own imagination and desires might shape that world.  While some of the daydreamscapes explored in Dream Days are shared with the narrator's siblings, this one instance where an outsider is invited in is almost devastating, given just how different the thought processes of the girl in question are.

Each chapter, then, focuses on a new sort of exploration of this general theme.  One chapter features the thought of using artwork as a window into a whole imaginary world of what happens in the background, then leads from there into the narrator encountering an illuminated manuscript with new wonders on every page, allowing him to venture deeper and deeper into an imagined setting.  Another details an instance where, after offending a guest with his childish behavior, he is sent into the nursery to keep out of everyone's hair, and imagines an entire high-seas adventure for himself while sitting in a child's bath placed atop a towel-horse (thus able to emulate the sense of swaying on the seas as it wobbles).

The longest chapter, and perhaps the best-known piece out of these two books about this somewhat-idealized English childhood, is the aforementioned fairy tale, "The Reluctant Dragon," perhaps best-known now for the short-subject contained within the same-titled Disney 'behind the scenes' film from the 1940s.  This chapter starts out looking much like any other, firmly within reality; the children are playing in the garden, find what one of them is sure must be dragon tracks, and they follow the tracks until they end in a neighbor's garden.  Upon explaining their intrusion to the neighbor, he offers to walk them back home, and tells them the fairy tale during their walk.

And what a delightful fairy tale it is, too!  Written with the same combination of childish whimsy and erudite sensibility that is displayed elsewhere in this pair of books, the story turns everything that might be understood about the typical tale of an English dragon in the countryside, complete with St. George on hand to fight it, on its head.  The dragon has never been in a fight in his life, always letting the other dragons do that; he's rather more an aesthete, preferring to laze about and compose poetry and appreciate the countryside for what it is.  Of course, the nearby townsfolk, with the exception of one boy who befriends the dragon, don't want to have anything to do with it; after all, dragons are "a pestilential scourge" and don't belong near civilized towns at all, so they send for help to remove it, in the form of St. George himself.  It comes down to the boy to act as a negotiator and talk some sense into both sides of the impending fight, and reach an end result that makes everyone happy without any particular bloodshed.

All good things must eventually end, though, and the final story in the book, after the particular high point of the dragon's mock battle with the knight, seems almost more of a eulogy to childhood than anything else.  This story deals with the day where the youngest of the children is deemed by The Olympians to be 'too big for those kind of toys any longer', and the resultant nighttime mission by the two youngest, along with the narrator, to recover just a few particularly cherished keepsakes from the crate due to be shipped to a children's hospital in faraway London.

Even after the rescue goes without a hitch, though, the children have an altogether different intention than keeping the toys for themselves.  Rather than bringing the toys back to the house, where they would likely be quickly found and subjected to the same fate they were rescued from, the three children instead go to a spot they're particularly fond of escaping to when they need some time to just be children, and dig a grave to bury the toys, acknowledging that their days of being played with are over, but also feeling that it's better for their most cherished toys to have never ended up in the hands of children who wouldn't have the same built-up sense of value for them, and that their continued future play on the same spot would let those toys remain as part of the proceedings in spirit, if not as participants.

This ends up being the note on which we leave Grahame's childhood memories and meditations; after Dream Days, he didn't return to these characters, instead moving to other topics.  And so, we must also move on from these children being raised in their Arcadian surroundings, but even in this final act of solemnity, so different from the rest of these two books, there's something important being stated.  Even when we grow up, it's important to hang onto those fragments of innocence and fancy, lest we become as ill-humored and unable to engage with anything but the most serious and purely rational topics as The Olympians; we have to keep that little bit of childhood whimsy buried inside ourselves, always there to draw on, even into adulthood, to help us to take a step back from the real world when we need it.