Blogging since 2002
For once, I haven’t forgot to wear the little armband that comes with my sleep phase tracking alarm clock (I’ll write a review of it soonish) and everything worked perfectly: I was woken up right after a dream (and thus REM phase) was ending, well-rested and alert.
This also made me remember the dream that I was seeing. Believe it or not, all I did in that dream was look at modern art at the Guggenheim museum (the one in New York).
Dreams are fascinating. Yet it is very hard to listen to or read other people’s dream narratives. Irrational, disjointed nature of dreams requires a special skill to translate them into words. Also, dream narratives are often bogged down with unnecessary details. Of course dreams helped Mendeleyev and Kekulé, Joseph, Dali and other notables, but it is still very hard to listen to somebody rambling about a weird dream he or she had that morning. “And you were there, and the cat was there .. and we all were running .. oh but wait, you weren’t there. Oh it wasn’t the cat. You were the cat. Hmm, can’t remember.”
Of course, some people have very interesting dreams and can even put them into interesting stories. But the master of the genre is Jesse Reclaw, an online cartoonist. His motto is “Your dreams I will draw”. He takes dream narrative submissions, chooses the most interesting ones, edits them and makes a four panel cartoon out of each. You can read a fresh one every week at his website, http://www.slowwave.com/. Here are some of my favorites.You can find a full archive here.
I strongly recommend paper version of his comics, Concave Up, his book Dreamtoons (if you order from Jesse directly, he’ll autograph and draw a little picture on the title page.) and an absolutely hilarious little xeroxed pamphlet Applicant. It would not hurt if you wrote to the editor of your favorite paper, and ask for Slow Wave to be in it.
