10 of the best ‘Wishes’ from the Dalí Museum’s new wish tree book

St. Petersburg’s Dalí museum has a new book featuring wishes that visitors have written and tied to the museum’s ficus “Wish Tree” in the Avant-garden.

The wishes run the gamut from innocent (“I wish to get a kitten”) to desperate (“I need my job back”), heartbreaking (“I hope I won’t be alone when I grow old) and simultaneously altruistic and self-care-centric (“I wish for world peace & to fit in to 34” jeans).

All told, the book—available starting Thursday, Dec. 9 at the museum gift shop—features 250 wishes from the tree.

Beth Bell, Marketing Director at the Dalí, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay the museum has received around 20,000 wishes over the last 10 years.

“We tend to remove the wristbands with wishes on them monthly, depending on how much the strands fill up, then put out new streamers up for visitors to tie their wishes to,” Bell added. Once removed, we have several volunteers transcribe the wishes to keep on file for our annual wish reading ceremony (and in this case, the book as well).”

To mark the book release, the Dalí is having a celebration outside, at 11:11 a.m. The festivities will include wish readings, kid’s activities and an opportunity for visitors to submit more wishes at wish writing stations. History lessons, tours and photos are also on tap.

At 5 p.m., the Dalí will illuminate the Wish Tree as tarot card readers and the St. Pete Jazz quartet entertain guests. Entrance to the festivities is included with admission.

To mark the occasion, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay pulled 10 of our favorite wishes from the book. Have a look, and get more information on the event below.

• I hope my mom will show up at my graduation
• I wish I could stop drinking coffee
• My children outlive me
• I wish I could ignore you but I can’t
• I wish that dragons were real
• I wish everyone had a safe place to sleep at night
• I wish to marry food
• I wish for us to work together & end global warming
• Wish my dad accepted me
• I wish I could stop sitting & wishing and start doing

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