JB Online - Delirium in cybercomics

Almost everyone has awoken from a curious dream with the certainty that the manifestation of the unconsciousness would make a nice David Lynch script. The transposition for the big screen rarely overcomes the oneiric limits, but at the website Slowwave, the sleep narratives transform into virtual comics. For 10 years now, Jesse Reklaw receives e-mails from visitors and feeds the page with weekly strips. The selection criteria isn't related to the quality of the text or to meanings hidden in the symbols. The chosen dreams have to be nonsensical enough to yield good images and they have to provoke identification from the readers.

Jesse, a 33-years-old American who currently lives in San Francisco, created the site in November 1995 with the intention of developing his drawing abilities. The cartoonist was writing his own stories when he had the idea of asking his friends to tell him their dreams. The e-mails were so many that he decided to explore the web - still a new tool at the time - in order to gather the comics.

"I realized that many dreams had strong narrative elements and yielded good comics. I started to pick the stories that had a varied appeal, like the dreams that mention celebrities, politicians and animals. Or the ones everybody has, like falling teeth or being naked in public, prosaic themes which are fragmented in our unconsciousness," the artist told JB.

Currently, Jesse receives around 30 e-mails a week, among which he chooses the cartoon to draw. In these 10 years, the author has made practically no changes in the site's design, but the attentions gathered by the curious project have granted him invitations to publish in a dozen american newspapers. The drawing of the dreams is free, but the original artworks are for sale. The most recent ones, made by ink, cost US$50, the previous, by pencil, US$20.

Surfing on the website yields hilarious moments to any English-speaking user. The themes of the stories range from dreams with mythical figures such as master Yoda to nightmares with World War II ghosts, plus incredible missions such as urinating in Morse code to save Titanic victims. The submitting process is simple, all it takes is filling a form at the website and send, if there are any, pictures of the mentioned characters. After all these years and many rejected dreams, Jesse says there's no point in insisting in "big moral narratives" or in stories that border on bizarre:

"Sometimes people tell me overly intimate dreams, details of their sexual lives and fantasies, but I rarely draw that kind of stuff. There are frequent visitors who I end up knowing through the dreams, a fun way of meeting people from 'the inside out'. But there are also those who send uninteresting cases several times. Like the narrative of the man who transformed into Britney Spears and marveled at details of the female body. Storming me with pictures of the singer didn't help."