by Scott Parrino, 13 October 2025
There is a quote that I have heard around on the Internet that at this stage of fatherhood really takes hold. “There will come a time when you pick up your child and put them down for the last time.” When I first heard that in my younger years, I laughed at the situation – but now that I have two sons, one nearing five and another just barely two months old, now that quote lives rent-free in my head. It will be something that I will have to eventually endure, and it won’t be for something simple where I will pick up and put down each of my sons for the last time. One that I know that will come will be the last time I read a bedtime story.
Until that time comes, my oldest currently loves any and all books that come his way – appropriate ones for his age group for sure. Lots of pictures, low on text. He’s got a pretty active imagination as any young kid does, and it’s not out of the ordinary for him to talk about the books he’s heard from my wife and I during his playtimes. He is also a fan of the hobbies that I am into, like Dungeons & Dragons, and has “played” a game or two with my group and I. This is relevant as my son loves the ideas of going on adventures, especially ones that he can be a part of. This is where A Guide to Dream Travel comes in and shines brightly.
I’ll be referring to A Guide to Dream Travel as GDT throughout this review. GDT is known as a “fantastical bedtime story generator”, and uses simple prompts and categories to help create stories and adventures for children for bedtime. The book also comes with a cute little sealed letter envelope that you can read out loud for you and your children that explains how to use the book. If you’ve played RPGs that have tables for creating encounters/towns/characters, then you’ll be familiar with the process that GDT uses. The prompts throughout the story generator are numbered 1 – 20 with random numbers along the borders of the pages itself. This is where the fun begins with the kiddos – while the book says that you can have the kids close their eyes while you move their hands around the numbered border and have them call out “stop” for a randomly-generated number, you can also use the infamous 20-sided die to roll for the number. My son prefers this method as it reminds him of the D&D game and let’s face it, kids love to roll dice when presented with them.
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An example of how this would play out: the first chapter is “Where shall we go tonight?” with a text of “As slumber carries us over into the dream realms, we are floating towards a most fantastical place…we visit a strange…” and from there we have a list of numbered locations that can be randomly-picked via the dice roll or numbered border around the page. This isn’t just some quick story-telling to fly through, though. As the parent reading this out for the kids, you take on the role almost akin to a Game Master – and going back and forth with the kids to describe the result. At the most recent reading during bedtime, my son rolled a D20 we had handy and got the result of 5 – “Middle Eastern Marketplace”. I described it as a busy bustling location with shoppers on dusty, sun-blasted streets. I asked my son “what are they selling there, what is everyone wearing?” As he is his father’s son, he went on a rambling thread that all the shops were selling carrots, and only carrots. Everyone was wearing “really big hats” because “that’s where the carrots would go.” I don’t correct him on this at all, this is his story to detail and to explain.
Now for some parents that may be new to this sort of storytelling and may have struggles, GDT does give some help through the use of “Wayfinders”. These are leading questions you can ask the kids to expand more on story as it unfurls, like “tell me more about…”, “how do we feel about it?”, along with simpler prompts asking about the landscape, sounds, buildings, etc. In the back of the book itself, there are even more prompts and words to help flesh out stories and threads that get woven.
In total there are five chapters, each with two randomly-generated prompts and then a single final open-ended prompt to help further the “plot”, such as with a “how do we first meet our new friend?” As mentioned, my son is nearing the age of five, and with his imagination skills, we can get through a bedtime adventure between ten to fifteen minutes, which is the right amount of time to keep his attention focused and the right amount of time so that it doesn’t eat up a lot of the lead-up time for bed.
The GDT book is adorned with some appropriate art that captures the “generator” theme, with fantastical elven creatures littered about the cover and pages within the book “constructing” things here and there with gears and puzzle pieces. Don’t feel the need to utilize these creatures as part of your kids’ stories, but as “helpers” that help create their own unique stories. The imagery for the story is all created in your mind and your kids’ minds – but don’t be surprised if those images find their ways to drawings and buildings with their toys, let alone the characters and stories!
Now, for parents that play D&D (or any other RPG) with your kids and looking for a fun way to generate an adventure, the GDT does fulfill that task quite nicely. There were times where my son and I were going through a bedtime story and in the back of my mind I was cataloging some of the adventure situations in my head for later use. While it won’t generate monsters and weapons, it can definitely handle creating a simple easy adventure that you can fill in with necessary other points of conflict for a quick one-shot.
Would I recommend this book? Yes, very much so! There is something to be said about the bountiful and boundless imagination of child, and fostering it through works such as these will certainly help break up the monotony of reading the same bedtime stories night after night. This book is in our weekly rotation of titles for bedtime, although it is exclusively read by me (my wife says my imagination and story-telling skills are better). I also believe the added bonus to these sorts of books where kids’ imaginations are allowed to run wild and develop will allow the same kids to be able to handle bouts of boredom throughout their days. Where it seems entirely too easy to shove a tablet into a bored kid’s hands, lets help create a rich skill that will get our kids to handle those moments “offline”.
I know there will come a time where I will read the last bedtime story to my sons and I feel that it will devastate me. Until that time comes, I am going to enjoy each bedtime story that I read, no matter how repetitive.
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