Dreams are weird. We all know this. But it takes some discipline to recreate their weirdness in the light of day. The successfully unabashed surreality of the dreamscape in Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen is one of the many delightful things about it.

But be warned, oh faint of heart: it contains drawings of a naked kid.

The story, for those who haven’t seen it, goes something like this: Little Mickey imagines that the scary noises he hears at night are coming from a mythic “Night Kitchen.” He falls through the air, out of his pajamas, and into a cake being mixed by three bakers on the streets of a baking-themed city. The buildings are topped with funnels and sieves and the elevated train cars are made of bread. Mickey nearly gets baked into the cake, but makes his escape, fashions an airplane out of bread dough, soars up to the top of a skyscraper-high milk bottle, and dives in to fetch milk for the bakers.

Throughout, the characters tend to speak in chants. “I’m not the milk, and the milk’s not me!” exclaims Mickey as he bursts out of the cake. “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake and nothing’s the matter!” recite the bakers joyfully after Mickey provides their missing ingrediant.

Like I said, weird. But fun. At least one reviewer has said she thinks adults have a harder time enjoying it than kids, who are less likely to overthink and try to find the logic in it all.

Kids also are not freaked out by a tiny little illustrated toddler penis. But that, of course, is generally what gets this book challenged or banned. That, and reportedly sometimes “offensive language,” which is baffling, unless “Cock a doodle doo” becomes offensive when spoken by a triumphant naked little boy instead of a proper rooster.

If I put on the perennially in-the-gutter lens worn by our modern day Puritans, I’m sure I could read some sort of unsettling, improper vibe into the whole thing. (It’s a naked boy! Pouring milk for pudgy adult men he doesn’t know! Out of a phallic milk bottle! And then crowing!) And I’m sure that Sendak’s coming out has only reinforced whatever twisted reflections of their own fantasies the book banners have projected onto Mickey’s dream. (Confidential to them: It’s completely irrelevant.)

The fact is, suspicious, nervous adults can imagine such things anywhere they look, and the only reason they feel like they can make it stick to In the Night Kitchen is because of the nudity. How sad.

Happily, children’s innocent love for In the Night Kitchen and its message of facing and conquering things that go bump (and sift and sizzle) in the night has made the four-decade-old comics-style book a classic and kept it in print and widely available. Given that my daughter is starting to have a little trouble with nightmares, I think we might read it tonight.

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