INTRODUCTION

This is from Veitch's book Rabid Eye, a collection of (mostly one-page) dream-comics. Page 115, left, is such a dream. Page 194, right, is from the appendix on dreamwork, narrated by Rick's dreamself, who talks of waking-world Rick in the third person. Here it turns out the dream may be diagnostic--not obvious if read in isolation, but dream-scholar Jeremy Taylor sees a pattern...

I posted over a dozen examples of Veitch's art on the World Dream Bank, but I'm biased toward the transcendent not the gory, and the pattern's just not there--in the ones I chose! But when I reread the hundreds (not dozens) of dreams in Veitch's book Rabid Eye as a whole, Jeremy Taylor was right; they do show a recurring pattern of fingers hurt, mutilated, even lost.

We see what we look for.

I (like many San Franciscans) focus on gender issues, so what jumped out at me was the horde of men and near-total absence of women in Veitch's dreams--his wife is the only frequent female presence. Yet neither Veitch nor Taylor note the dearth. There's a reason. A male dreamworld is common... in men. Women's dreams, on average, are a realistic mix of men & women. But dreambooks by Veitch, Jack Kerouac, Jim Shaw, and Georges Perec, the four largest men's published dreamjournals I've found, each with hundreds of dreams, all largely concern men. My dreams don't, so the anomaly stands out.

We see what we look for...

--Chris Wayan

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