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Dream a little dream for me

December 4th, 2008 Dennis - Central

Did I ever tell you about my dream?

Not the life’s purpose sort.  I mean the kind of dream you have when you’re asleep.  This one I remember, I was hanging out at Paul Shaffer’s house, and I think we were waiting for his mother to show up.  Dave may have been there, but he didn’t do anything.  I went into the kitchen and looked into this big pot that was on the stove.  Katherine Ross, the actress from The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the original Stepford Wives movie was in the pot.  It was filled with a sort of tomato-ey stew and just her face was visible, surrounded by the red liquid, like she was looking up at the ceiling.  Well that didn’t seem right that she could be in that pot, her being normal sized and everything and the pot was only pot sized.  So I opened the door to the oven below the stovetop and saw her torso inside.  Which explained how she was able to get her head into the pot of stew that was sitting on top of the stove.  I did reach in to tickle her ribs, just to make sure she was actually attached to her head floating in the pot of stew.  She was startled to be tickled like that and thrashed around a little bit in the pot, getting the tomato-ey stuff on her face and some started to cover her mouth causing her to sputter a little bit.  I realized I probably shouldn’t do that again or she might drown.

That’s when I woke up.  And I wrote that dream down.  I thought briefly about sending it in to Late Night with David Letterman, on the off-chance that he might read it on the air and I’d finally get my fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol has promised everyone would get eventually.  But I never sent it in.

It turns out there’s a place where you can send your dreams.  There’s a web site called slowwave.com where people send descriptions of their dreams– that is, dreams they’ve dreamt while sleeping, not their longings and desires– and the guy that runs the site, Jesse Reklaw, will turn your dream into a four-panel comic strip that’s syndicated to various newpapers (mostly alternative weeklies) around the country.  He’s collected a bunch of them and published them in a book called The night of your life.

And I dare you not to laugh at some of this stuff.  Like the guy who took a bath in melted butter, then forgot to dry off so he kept sliding off the vinyl seats on the bus, and he left streaks and globs of butter wherever he went, and people on the street kept pressing their toast and bagels against his arms.  Or the woman who’s interviewing for a job at a library but finds herself talking in valley-girl speak “Like, ohmigod! Technology will be, like, so important!” so she doesn’t get the job.  Or the couple who answer an ad in the newspaper offering to pay people to adopt baby gorillas and find out that Martha Stewart is the one who placed the ad.

I’ve gotta tell you, the art is pretty good for depicting the bizarre situations that people dream up, but you’d never recognize most of these celebrities from the way they’re drawn in this strip.  I suppose there are some (copy)rights issues involved with that sort of thing.  Still, I never would have recognized Charlton Heston from that drawing.  Or Gary Coleman.  Or Prince.  Madonna, I could recognize, but that was mostly because of the costume.

The dreams themselves are pretty bizarre.  You’ll see centaurs shopping for food, or people living with tribes of apes, or free-falling without parachutes and worrying about how much the plastic surgery will cost to repair the facial damages once they land.  Or shopping with Yoda.  Or stopping by Sophia Loren’s where she’s entertaining some diplomats until a hockey game breaks out in the living room.  The diplomats play pretty good “but your team is kicking ass.”

There aren’t any psychological insights “drawn” from these dreams.  Other books or even web sites might search for meaning behind what happens in your dreams.  In Reklaw’s book, dreams are all played for laughs.

I am curious about how much the artist adds to the dream descriptions, like the conversational asides between the two superheroes who ride the subway to the scene of the crime: “Is this our stop?” “No.  It’s the next one” or the woman who discovers in the last panel that her two missing dogs have been making money by trading stocks and is told by one of them “We didn’t want you to have to work.”  “Oh, how thoughtful,” she replies.  I imagine Reklaw’s probably embellished the original dreamers descriptions quite a lot.  All I can say is, it really worked for me.  Every fourth panel would deliver a punch line that was set up in the preceeding three.  And it’s quite a gift for anyone to be able to tease out the humor from the ridiculous, surreal, or just plain weird stuff that people dream up.  Give yourself a little holiday treat and lighten your stress with a few laughs at other people’s dreams.

Entry Filed under: Graphic Novel, Nonfiction