Few bedrooms are more recognizable than that in Goodnight Moon. The green walls, red furniture, and green-and-yellow striped curtains are as iconic as the words themselves:

But there are some odd details about the room as well: the tiger-skin rug on the floor. Or the black telephone on the nightstand that seems so out of place in a child's bedroom. It almost feels like a dreamscape, in which reality has shifted ever so slightly.

The poem was based on Brown's own childhood experiences. Both her nightly ritual of bidding favorite objects goodnight, and her own moves from one place to the next.

That night, Brown dreamt she was in her own room, but it was decorated in the colors of her downstairs neighbor's apartment--green walls and red furniture with yellow trim. In the dream, Brown said goodnight to objects she owned. Not her childhood possessions, but things she had in her apartment presently at the age of thirty-seven. Cue the black telephone, comb, and brush.

When she woke up, Brown wrote everything down and immediately called her editor Ursula Nordstrom... no surprises, Nordstrom loved it.

Brown wanted her book's illustrations to show the room just as it had looked in her dream. Thus, she included lots of notes in the manuscript, down to the size of the window and the use of light throughout. She wanted the child's room to become dimmer as the story went on, and she wanted the moon to loom largely in the window outside, moving across the sky.

In the end, Nordstrom made just a few changes to Brown's vision for Goodnight Moon. Brown, who had an interesting sense of humor, originally included a cucumber and a fly at the end of her story (Goodnight, cucumber!). Both were nixed from the final copy...

By the time Goodnight Moon was published in 1947, Brown had done a real-life remodel of her own bedroom. It looked very similar to how it does in Clement Hurd's illustrations, down to the green and yellow walls, rocking chair, table, red velvet bedspread, and yes... the black telephone.

SOURCE: The Stories Behind the Stories: the remarkable true tales behind your favorite children's books by Danielle Higley, pp.34-6.

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