Alora’s Dreams is little book about big dreams and even bigger lessons. Based loosely on the shadow work of Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung, it tells the story of a little girl, Alora, who dreams fantastic dreams and learns positive lessons from their outcomes. When she starts to experience a recurring nightmare about a dark and terrifying monster, Alora must learn to face her demons. Her attempts to either fight the beast or flee its presence are repeatedly thwarted, and so she must learn to face and accept her fear in order to properly integrate it into her whole self and move on in life.
The rhyme and phrasing, together with the cartoon-style illustrations, have appeal to younger readers, and the darkness of the section of the story representing Alora’s turmoil serves as just unsettling enough to be irksome, but not quite so drastic as to be intolerable, and therefore serves the very function covered in the story- for the young reader to feel some fear, but learn to persist in spite of it. And the deeper and more abstract theme, and its real life applicability, makes the story appealing and relatable to a more mature audience at the same time.
