Creating a World Where Carpets Fly
Bedtime is a thing in our family — We do matching jammies, foot rubs, bedtime books, singing and after lights out, stories. So many stories. At first we usually did the story of the day: starting with waking up in the morning, we’d recount all the things that happened that day. We figured it would help the children integrate their memories, and help us not get Alzheimer’s. We also told make-believe stories, especially Hannah at first. She had recurring characters: Ollie and Oscar the otters. Grandma and Grandpa Kablablah and her friend Jamila, who lived in a portal between a real and an imaginary world.
When our second child arrived as our first child turned two, I started to pitch in more with bedtime, and with telling stories too. At some point in the mostly forgotten prehistory of our family bedtimes I imagined up the Magic Carpet stories, and they evolved into a world I could return to each time I told a bedtime story. For me, it was comforting to have a familiar template to work with, and I imagine it was comforting for the kids too.
Knowing that repetition creates comfort, one of the three pillars of communications theory along with surprise and completion, I began each Magic Carpet story the same way — “Once upon a time, there was a big blue castle on the side of a mountain, where Daniel and Ruby lived with their mom and dad.” The kids would zip around on their flying carpets, meeting bears, elves, magic tigers, dwarves, more elves, a sailor named Bluebeard, his brothers Redbeard and Purplebeard, and many others.
I’m not sure where the idea of carpets came from — now that the world and characters are so developed it’s like they’ve always existed, and it’s difficult to remember the moments and specific stories when they were created. At some point the world kind of took on a life of its own, to the point that my son would sometimes remind me of details from earlier stories that I’d forgotten, or point out discrepancies in my storytelling. We want to preserve the world for posterity — for our kids, but also for anyone else who might take pleasure in reading these stories or sharing them with their children and feeling some of the magic we felt exploring the kids’ realm at bedtime.