Night Of Your Life back

A very pleasant dose of otherworldly weirdness. A most definitely peculiar but very entertaining and at times laugh-out-loud book about other peoples' dreams.

Since 1995 Jesse Reklaw has been illustrating other peoples' dreams in his Slow Wave strip. Indeed you can submit your own dreams for consideration but be advised that unless they're pretty bizarre you're probably not going to be immortalised in print any time soon. Strangely enough what actually turns the book into a fairly compulsive page-turner is the strict format. One amusing title, one page per dream, four panels per page, each panel with a heading trying to explain what on earth is going on in the artwork below. You just want to keep reading to see how much more bizarre things can possibly get. I would certainly defy any psychiatrist to derive much meaning from most of the dreams in this book.

The panel headings of a particular favourite of mine "Dinner Faux Pas" will probably give you a flavour of what the book is like. Panel 1: She had invited her boyfriend for dinner and Dad wasn't happy. Panel 2: The boy had brought his sergeant along to practice amphibious manoeuvres in a barrel out back. Panel 3: It was quite a faux pas. Panel 4: As a form of revenge, they planned to serve him bad food at dinner.

No matter how many weird comics you've actually read you'll never guess what is coming next. There's something perversely pleasurable about the fact the average sleeping human mind is apparently capable of producing abstract weirdness that even Grant Morrison would be proud of.