Cornelia Funke

But overall, I felt like this was incredibly reminiscent of older fantasy movies.

Like the Chronicles of Narnia, it kind of reminded me of those older stories or even Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.

I absolutely loved this.

And it's such a happy place for me to go back into either young adult or middle grade fantasy.

So for example, we presented a fantasy book that is called Inkheart.

It's by German writer Cornelia Funke.

In this fantasy world, there's people, they are called readers, and they can read people into stories of the books they are reading, and then they basically get transported into this book, and then they have to live their lives in the story of this book.

And then there was, for example, one person who dreamt that they were at a reading in a library and something happened.

It knows it is a story, and it uses that self-awareness to explore themes of autonomy and coming of age in a much more nuanced way than early portal fantasies.

But if Valente plays with the rules of the story, Cornelia Funke's 2003 book Inkheart makes the story physically dangerous.

Oh, this one is terrifying for a book lover.

This is a concept that haunts every avid reader.

Who's that by again?

Cornelia Funke.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm very pleased.

What makes me bring that up now is that I've also started my next big tattoo project, which is something for my love of Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, one of my favorite, favorite childhood books.

Ever since I knew I wanted tattoos, I knew I wanted to get a tattoo of a horned marten.

So if anyone who hasn't read Inkheart, it is a, I'm gonna call it a portal fantasy kind of, um, book, and in the fantasy world, this, uh, important character has a pet marten, which are real animals.

What did the experiment consist of? The researchers recruited 20 participants aged between 20 and 30.

As part of the experiment, those participants had one of four audiobooks played to them randomly before going to sleep, with the selection including Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, The Blue Train by Agatha Christie, Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, and Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.

The participants wore special headsets to monitor electrical activity in their brains.

They were also woken up five times during the night and questioned about their dreams.