Wouldn’t it be good if we could get rid of nightmares? That is the idea behind Shō And The Demons Of The Deep, a children’s picture book by the Montreal author and illustrator Annouchka Gravel Galouchko.
Published in 1995 as Shō Et Les Dragons D’Eau, it is about the inhabitants of a Japanese village who choose to throw their bad dreams into the sea. Seems like a good idea until the ocean becomes alive with scary demons. It takes a girl called Shō to redirect the creatures into the sky – inventing the kite as she does so.
Zoë Bullock was given the book by her Japanese grandmother when she was six and the memory stayed with her. Now a playwright, she saw its potential to work as a theatrical metaphor for all our anxieties.
“Recurring nightmares are what happens when the brain is trying to work through a problem and can’t,” she says. “It keeps getting stuck. It is trying to heal you but it manifests in horrible ways.” [READ MORE]