What inspired you to write Dream? 

I collect picture books, optical illusions, and quotations. There's a great quotation from Mozart that helps describe how Dream came to be:

"First bits and crumbs of the piece come and gradually join together in my mind; then, the soul getting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and more, and I spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my head."
~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Dream came together from a number of "bits and crumbs." There was a talk I had with my mother one evening about how the mysteries of the stars had always fascinated her. She told me she had made wishes on stars from the time she was little, but that her wishes had changed over the years. That's why I dedicated the book to her. In the workshops I do with children and adults, we often talk about wishing on stars -- about all the big and wonderful dreams children have, and about how sometimes as an adult you can lose sight of your dreams. Then I remember having a dream about my grandmother who lived to be 102 years old. In the dream, I got glimpses of parts of her life from her vantage point as a very old woman. And finally there was looking through my shelves of picture books and thinking how wonderful it would be to work with some of the illustrators I admired so much. I wondered about their dreams throughout their lives, and about bringing their creative energy to an exploration of hopes and dreams across a lifetime. All these pieces came together for Dream. 

In Dream, there's the green page with the line, "Dreams grow like seeds." I'll always remember my thesis supervisor telling me that ideas are like sperm (which is certainly a kind of seed!). He said there are millions of them out there and it's a long way from a sperm to a fully-grown human being. Dreams are like that, and creating Dream was like that -- it was a long way from the initial ideas, the seeds, to the final book. 

The book took five years from start to finish. There's the initial inspiration, and then there's the slogging away to get it done. My inspiration for the slogging part was Lord of the Rings. The trilogy of movies came out during the time I was working on Dream. In many ways, the themes of those movies are similar to the themes of Dream -- hope, possibility, courage, determination. I remember marveling at director Peter Jackson's achievement. I see a picture book rather like a little movie between two covers. Working on Dream, I saw myself as the director, pulling everything together into a whole that reflected my vision for the book. And now that it's done? Sometimes your dreams are more glorious than the reality can ever be. In the case of Dream, the final book has lived up to the dream.