Hello, friends.
Before we begin, there's a quick ad, and then we'll get right to the story.
What exactly do you learn at a school for royal magic, Sophia?
I can't wait to find out.
Join Sophia.
Welcome to Charm's Well.
Don't just stand there.
We've got spells to learn.
In her most magical adventure ever.
My emu looks giving me new powers.
Leo!
It's a good thing I'm at a school for royal magic.
Sophia the First, Royal Magic.
Now available on Disney Junior and Disney+.
Learn more at disneyplus.com forward slash what's dash on.
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Follow me!
All of your family favorites are available on Disney+.
I love it!
Share the stories you grew up with with your kids, like Bear and the Big Blue House and Roly-Poly-Oly.
That sounds like fun!
Then discover new stories together.
The more the merrier.
Like sophia, the first royal magic, bluey and spidey and his amazing friends.
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Hi friends, it's Cheryl, and welcome to Sleep Tight Relax.
Find your comfortable spot and get cozy.
Tonight's story features our home, Prince Edward Island, a small red-soiled island where Lucy Maud Montgomery lived and wrote.
And where it seems the summers are so good and the friends so dear that even the end of August feels like something worth remembering.
The children in this story have come up with a wonderful idea.
They're going to write down their dreams.
Every one.
In exercise books with careful spelling in case someone reads them someday.
They sit together in the orchard and the spruce wood, eating plums from an old reverend's tree, watching clouds drift over the harvest hills, telling stories and arguing about apple varieties and wondering what their dreams might be made of.
It's a story about imagination.
About afternoons that you don't remember ending.
About a girl called the story girl, who loves words the way some people love pretty things, and who can tell a dream so well that everyone listening feels like they dreamed it too.
Dream Deer is here tonight as well, with a little something to help you find your way in.
So close your eyes, if you like, as we first revisit something we learned from Dream Deer, one of our relaxation rangers.
You know, before a dream can find you, you have to make a little room for it.
That's the thing most people don't know.
Dreams are shy.
They don't push their way in.
They wait at the edge until there's a quiet spot and then they slip through.
So let's make that quiet spot together.
Close your eyes if you like.
Picture a color, any color you love.
Let it fill right up behind your eyelids, soft and warm and steady.
Just that color, nothing else.
Let it sit there.
Good.
Good.
Now your hands.
Let them go heavy, like they're holding smooth stones that have been sitting in the sun all afternoon.
Not tight, just resting.
Just warm.
And your feet.
Let them go heavy too, like they've walked a good long way today through orchards and spruce woods and long green lanes.
And they're very, very glad to stop.
Take a slow breath in and let it out.
You see that pink cloud up there?
The one drifting over the apple trees?
The story girl thinks it's a dream, getting ready to float down into someone's sleep tonight.
I think she might be right, and I think it might be looking for you.
Dreamers of Dreams August went out and September came in.
Harvest was done and summer was starting to turn.
Asters bloomed along the lanes in purple clusters.
A faint blue haze hung over the hills in the mornings.
The apples were going red on the boughs.
Crickets sang all day and into the night.
The sunshine came down thick and golden, and school had started up again.
We were busy and happy, and at night we slept deep under the stars.
At least, we slept deep and undisturbed until our wild dreaming began.
I'd really like to know what deviltry you young ones are up to this time, said Uncle Roger one evening passing through the orchard heading for the swamp.
We were sitting in a circle before the pulpit stone, each writing in an exercise book, eating plums from the old Reverend Scott's tree.
He'd been dead and gone for years, but those plums golden, green and juicy, with a soft blue bloom on the skin, kept his memory alive better than any sermon ever could have.
Uncle Roger swore, said Felicity in a shocked voice, when he had passed out of earshot.
No, he didn't, said the story girl.
Deviltry isn't swearing.
It just means very bad mischief.
Well, it's not a very nice word, said Felicity.
No, it isn't, agreed the story girl a little sadly.
It's wonderfully expressive, but it isn't nice.
That's the trouble with so many words.
The story girl loved expressive words the way some girls love pretty things.
When she found a new one, she'd say it over to herself, turning it around, listening to the sound of it, making it her own.
And anyway, said Felicity, it doesn't even apply.
Writing down your dreams isn't bad mischief at all.
It certainly wasn't.
We had been at it for two weeks, and in that time we lived for nothing else, only to have dreams and write them down.
We wrote carefully, with an eye for spelling and composition, because who knew that someday someone else might read them?
It had been the story girl's idea on an evening in the spruce wood when we were picking gum after a day of showers.
When we'd collected enough, we sat down on the mossy stones at the end of the long aisle of trees, looking out over the harvest golden valley below jaws working steadily.
We were never allowed to chew gum at school or in company, but in the woods and fields it was a different matter entirely.
My Aunt Jane used to say it wasn't polite to chew gum anywhere, said Peter.
I don't suppose your Aunt Jane knew all the rules of etiquette, said Felicity.
Peter was not so easily put down.
She did too.
My Aunt Jane was a real lady.
She kept all the rules even when nobody was watching.
And she was smart.
If my father had had half her get up and go, I wouldn't be a hired boy today.
Do you have any idea where your father is? asked Dan.
No, said Peter.
Last we heard, he was up in Maine Lumber Woods.
That was three years ago.
He took his gum out of his mouth to make his next statement perfectly clear.
I don't know where he is now, and I don't care.
Oh, Peter, said Cecily, your own father?
If your own father had run away when you were a baby, said Peter, and left your mother to earn her living by washing and working out, I guess you wouldn't care much either.
Nobody said anything to that.
Maybe he'll come home one day with a fortune, offered the story girl.
Maybe pigs will whistle, said Peter, but they've poor mouths for it.
There was a long, comfortable silence.
Down the road, Mr. Campbell drove past in his buggy behind a new black mare with a coat like satin.
He calls her Betty Sherman, said Dan.
I don't think it's very nice to name a horse after your own grandmother, said Felicity.
Betty Sherman would have thought it was a compliment, said the story girl.
Maybe, but she couldn't have been very nice herself or she would never have gone and asked a man to marry her.
Why not?
Goodness me, it was dreadful.
Would you ever do such a thing?
I don't know, said the story girl, her eyes full of mischief.
If I wanted him terribly and he wouldn't do the asking, maybe I would.
I'd rather die an old maid forty times over, said Felicity.
I don't suppose the family guide would agree with that strategy either, said the story girl.
Felicity and Cecily set great store by the family guide.
They read the etiquette column every week without fail and could tell you on the spot what gloves to wear to a wedding, how to make a proper introduction and exactly how you ought to look when your best young man came to call.
They say Mrs. Richard Cook asked her husband to marry her, said Dan.
Uncle Roger says she didn't exactly ask him, said the story girl, but she helped the lame dog over the stile so smoothly that Richard was engaged before he knew what had happened.
I know a story about Mrs. Richard Cook's grandmother.
She was one of those women who were always saying, I told you so.
Take notice, Felicity, said Dan aside, and she was very stubborn.
Soon after she was married, she and her husband quarreled about an apple tree in the orchard.
The label was lost.
He said it was a Femuse, and she declared it was a yellow transparent.
They argued about it until the neighbors came out to listen.
Finally, he got so angry, he told her to shut up.
And would you believe it?
She did.
She shut up and never spoke one single word to her husband for five years.
And then, in five years, the tree bore apples, and they were yellow transparents.
And then she spoke at last.
She said, I told you so.
Did she talk to him after that? asked Sarah Ray.
Oh, yes, just the same as before, said the story girl.
But that doesn't belong to the story, Sarah Ray.
The story ends when she speaks at last.
I always want to know what happens afterward, said Sarah Ray.
I know you do, said the story girl.
The afternoon settled around us, warm and buzzing with the last of the summer insects.
Up in the sky over the southwest, a long thin drift of pale cloud floated in the blue.
The wedding veil of a proud princess, said Cecily, pointing.
And look at that little pink cloud below it, said Felicity.
Maybe that pink cloud is a dream, said the story girl, getting ready to float down into somebody's sleep tonight.
I had a perfectly awful dream last night, said Cecily with a shudder.
I was on a desert island with tigers and two-headed warriors.
Oh, said the story girl, half reproachfully.
Why couldn't you tell it better than that?
If I had a dream, I could tell it, so that everyone listening would feel as if they had dreamed it too.
Well, I'm not you, said Cecily, and I wouldn't want to frighten anyone the way I was frightened.
But it was kind of interesting too.
I've had some really interesting dreams, said Peter.
I just can't hold on to them long enough to tell them.
Why don't you write them down, said the story girl.
She looked around at all of us with a sudden bright idea in her eyes.
Let's all get exercise books and write down every dream, just as we dream it.
We'll see who has the most interesting collection and we'll have them to read when we're old and gray.
For a moment we each saw ourselves old and gray, slow moving and white haired, sitting somewhere far from this orchard, reading back through all our old dreams, all but the story girl.
None of us could picture her old, no matter how far we tried to imagine it.
She still had her smooth, dark curls, her voice that could make anything sound worth hearing, and those eyes that seemed to belong to someone who would always be young.
If you are still awake, try to gently close your eyes and use your imagination for a moment.
It's night.
Late summer night.
The kind that still holds a little warmth from the day.
Not hot, just nice. the kind of night you want to stay outside in as long as you're allowed.
The apple trees are dark shapes against a dark sky, but you know them.
You've been here all day.
The apples are still on the boughs, just beginning to go red, just beginning to give off that particular sweet, faint smell that means the season is turning.
One of them drops somewhere nearby with a soft thud into the long grass.
Then, quiet again.
The crickets are everywhere.
Not loud, just constant.
The way crickets are at the end of summer.
That steady sound underneath everything, like the night is breathing.
Are you taking deep breaths now?
You're lying on your back in the grass between the trees.
The ground is cool and the grass is soft and overhead between the branches, in all the gaps, the stars are out.
So many stars, more than you usually notice.
This is the kind of night sky that happens on clear nights in places far from any city, on small red-soiled islands where the summers go on a little longer than you think they will.
The pulpit stone is somewhere nearby.
The exercise books are put away for the night.
The plums are all eaten.
Your color is still there, somewhere behind your eyes, warm and steady.
The apple boughs shift a little in the breeze you barely feel.
The stars don't move, but they seem to lean in slightly, the way things do when the night gets very quiet.
Somewhere down the lane, Mr. Campbell's new mare is probably asleep in her stall.
The spruce wood is dark and still on the far side of the hill.
The harvest valley below it is just a faint pale shape, the fields all gathered in.
The cricket song rises and falls and rises again.
A pink cloud drifts somewhere very high above you.
You can just barely see it.
Soft as a dream not yet dreamed.
Moving slowly east in the dark.
You watch it go.
Your hands are heavy in the cool grass.
Your feet have stopped noticing they have anywhere to be.
The night holds you the way a good night does, without asking anything.
The story girl could tell this dream so that everyone listening would feel they'd dreamed it too.
Maybe you'll write it down in the morning.
For now it's just the stars and the apples and the crickets anymore, and the long late summer dark, warm and soft, and going on and on.
Take another slow, deep breath in if you like.
You are calm, relaxed. and peaceful.
Goodnight.
Sleep tight.
