About the book

	The book is an intriguing series of observations and self-investigations of personal individuality. Wise questions with and without answers about life and her place within it. Spontaneous revelations about all matters which arouse her curious and playful attention. But the crowning glory of her unique and far-from-childish analyses, self-analysis and lyrical diversions — are the wonderful flashes of a multifaceted poetic talent. The inner world of a child, “documented” from her seventh to her fourteenth year. An independent and morally refined territory. The kingdom of her freedom. Place for relaxation and thought, for the clarification of the disorder of thoughts and feelings.   A time for creation and the hyper-active maintaining of friendships with her school friends. Suffering, joy, excitement. And last but not least, a place and time for laughter and entertainment. We learn about everything which has touched her artistic nature
	Uliya Ognyanova

Dafi possessed the gift of amazing perception and penetration. A childish feeling for the world with the playfulness of naivety, amusing and curious images mixed with revelations, achieved usually at a more mature age (if at all) with the accumulation of experience and wounds.

Professor Elka Konstantinova said:

	What Dafi has created will remain in our national culture as a bright document of the spirituality of a talented child from our anxious age.   The drawings and texts in the book radiate shards of light from a bright childish soul which reveals itself to us in its entirety. The author talks to us without any pretence or pose; she talks openly, directly as dictated by her inner voice. It resembles nothing written specially for children. Dafi is like Alice in Wonderland and like Alice, she is not surprised by the inexplicable and improbably, because she accepts that everything is possible.   Her entire essence is suffused with dreams, love and with a strange sense of sadness. In Dafi’s work there is an intense intellectual life – both real and imaginary but crystal clear. Her freely expressed and heartfelt confessions and her wise revelations are a result of a childish game of imagination but also really experienced feelings. She is not looking for images in her words; they appear spontaneously and inexplicably even to herself and are expressed in an inimitable and touching manner.

The great Bulgarian poet, Valeri Petrov, remarked:

	Indeed, the young author has created her own unusualness. And the world really is wonderful for her and she does want “to be a part of it, a bright spot amongst the greyness of the day, and to warm us like the sun, to shine like a rainbow and sparkle like a diamond!” She frequently expresses her desire to bring joy to people and in one particular place writes, “when you make someone happy you feel like you are a balloon about to burst with joy!” Another revelation she achieves is worthy of a Greek poet, “It is not the butterfly which is joy, but the journey I have made to reach it…

Art historian Petar Zmiicharov commented on Dafi’s drawings:

	I was quite astonished that everything written and drawn by Dafina is “pro domo sua”. It is a world which we given permission to enter not by Dafina but by circumstances. And she wrote in her diary that if it wasn’t for circumstances there would not have been a diary by Anne Frank.   When I read that (something which not a single influential critic has not dared to speak out loud) I shivered. Not because of the anxiety of a “fatal premonition” but the amazing, mature, self-irony of this thirteen-year old child. Because every drawing which accompanies, or precedes, the essays and verses might shame even a sixteen-year old, mature and wise Matisse. Because she achieved the expressiveness of her profound and deep black eyes at the tender age of thirteen. I hope that they have met and are together painting the divine-made chapels of the clouds.

She had not reached the age of thirteen and she was impatient to know the replies to the most fateful questions for man and mankind:

“What is the meaning of human life?

What is the soul made of?

What is it worth living for

And what is worth dying for?”

About Dafi and Dafi's book:		How did “I am a Dream” appear?
About the book		Reactions to the book in Bulgaria