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If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can, even now, hear my mother's voice as she read to me each evening when I was a child—both picture books and poetry. I remember the cadences and inflections, the lilt and verve, of her special reading voice. Nuanced and expressive, it pronounced each word more slowly and distincdy than at other times and lingered lovingly over syllables or phrases. Not at all like her normal “hurry-up” voice, this one had the capacity to transport me to faraway times and places, to send tremors through my spine, to conjure exotic pictures in my mind even as her fingers pointed to details of images on the pages of a book, and, best of all, it embraced me with an auditory ambience of coziness and warmth. In those evening hours, we stretched and grew together. We could be anywhere, with anyone; it was anytime; I could do, or have, or feel anything; and then, when it was over and all the clouds of make-believe had dissolved, the safety of her presence remained to hold me.
Unlike my mother, my father did not read at bedtime; he came in quietly, sat down beside me, and sang a lullabye. “Sweet and low, sweet and low, wind of the western sea…” The quality of his voice seemed to match the words, as I lay under the covers with my eyes closed, imagining blue waves, smelling salt air, waiting for the special kiss I knew would come when the last notes faded.
In early childhood, the differences among spheres of functioning are not yet firmly established, and because young children come only gradually to distinguish clearly between dream, fantasy and waking states, between self and other,