It’s too hot to sleep, and Pip wishes she could be somewhere cool. Her cousin Joseph once told her that if she closed her eyes and thought about wooden horses prancing backwards, she would find her way to a magical shop where you could buy dreams. She decides to give it a try, never imagining what would happen next.
She finds herself in a wonderful store filled with magical things. Anything she put in her cart, she would dream about. She picks out a baby pig and is making her next selection when she sees Joseph in the store too. He laughs at her tame selection. He wants to dream about exciting things, he tells her. Sure enough, his cart has a lion riding in a submarine and all kinds of other thrilling things inside.
Pip decides she can be adventurous too, so she puts the pig back and goes with Joseph to the back of the store, where things from good dreams and things from bad dreams are all jumbled up together on the shelves. She passes over some snakes and some bad report cards to pick up a mud statue. Joseph finds a map that claims to lead to dragons.
But then Pip finds a barrel with a real dragon in it, a very small one. She picks it up but it scampers free, running through the shop. It knocks over jars and bottles, runs into people and causes all sorts of havoc. Pip finally catches it and tosses it toward Joseph, who is holding the dragon map. The dragon is sucked into the map, and everything grows quiet again.
That’s enough adventure for one night! Joseph tells Pip how to return to her own bed, and she decides to dream about a baby pig after all.
I liked this fanciful look into the world of dreams. Where do those strange dreams come from, if not a store?
(This book was published in 2002 by HarperCollins and was illustrated by Peter Catalanotto.)
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