I think this would be a good books for all elementary school ages. Everyone has bad dreams. It teaches kids that they do not need to be afriad of their bad dreams. It also teaches them that some things that are in your dreams are not real. Kids just need to remember that they are safe at home in their beds.

You can stock your library with Berenstain Bears books, they're that cheap. And we all remember them from our own childhoods.

Unfortunately, they're really pretty wordy books. A lot of children in the age range for these books simply can't sit still through them.

This book takes it a bit further in that most of it is not about the bad dream at all, but about the events leading *up* to the bad dream. Which is great and realistic, but which may lead a small child (or a grown-up) to wonder what the point is? The story could easily have been told in half the pages and - and this I *know* because I self-edit as I read - a third of the words. ( )

This book is very appealing in the way that it portrays the children's characters in a true-to-life way: they disagree, and they try to act smart with each other when they are just parroting what their parents have told them. You can see the adult characters winking in the pictures, and this gives the story a nice age-transcendent quality. I did think, however, that the "moral" of the story oversimplified the science of dreams in a way that undermined their more imaginative and positive qualities. The gist of the book is basically that dreams are just a culmination of things we have thought about during the day. This may not be enough to calm a younger child who can't see any relation between the bad dream and the more concrete events of the day, and the reading level is geared to a slightly older age who may already know that "big boys and girls" don't need to be scared of dreams. Still, there are other character issues under the surface of the main plot here that can be learned from. ( )