Dream Days

Dream Days is a collection of short stories by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1898 as a companion to The Golden Age.

Set in late Victorian England, Dream Days offers a tender, humorous portrait of childhood seen from just the right distance: close enough to feel the wonder, far enough to catch the irony.

The tales follow a small band of siblings whose everyday lanes, fields, and attics become kingdoms of make-believe. Ordinary errands turn into quests, rainy afternoons into sieges and treasure hunts, and one memorable fable—“The Reluctant Dragon”—folds a gentle fantasy into the book’s world of play.

Across the episodes, Grahame contrasts imagination with the rules of the adult world, finding both comedy and pathos in the gap between what children dream and what grown-ups decree. His prose glows with pastoral detail and wistful nostalgia, capturing fleeting moments when games feel truer than reality.

Beloved for its lightness of touch and musical sentences, Dream Days remains a classic of family reading, celebrating the creative courage of childhood and the quiet magic in ordinary days.

Dream Days contains the following stories:

• The Twenty-first of October
• Dies Irae
• Mutabile Semper
• The Magic Ring
• Its Walls Were as of Jasper
• A Saga of the Seas
• The Reluctant Dragon
• A Departure

"Those memorable days that move in procession, their heads just out of the mist of years long dead—the most of them are full-eyed as the dandelion that from dawn to shade has steeped itself in sunlight. "