Strange World of Your Dreams, The
Entry updated 16 September 2024. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1952-1953). 4 issues. Headline Publications Inc. "Produced by Simon & Kirby. Morton Meskin Associate Editor." Artists include Jack Kirby, Bob McCarthy, Mort Meskin, Ben Oda and Joe Simon. Scriptwriters include Jack Kirby and Jack Oleck. 36 pages. Each issue would have 2-3 "Richard Temple" dream analysis features, as well as 2-3 other strips and 2 short text stories; #3 also had one-page on "How the Stars Affect Your Job", a precursor to #4's 3 "special horoscope" featurettes. The comic is subtitled "What do they mean – the messages received in sleep?"
In his featurettes the pipe-smoking Richard Temple analyses readers' dreams (see Psychology): "You will receive $25 if your dream is chosen." Temple's interpretations are usually straightforward: a woman's fiancée is faceless in her dreams, because she finds him uninteresting as a person. Those in #2 and a couple in #4 are accompanied by a statement that a similar dream might have a different meaning for someone else. Occasionally there are sf elements such as a man stranded on a highway with futuristic cars (see Transportation) rushing by.
Temple often turns up in the other strips: #1's opening story is "I Talked With My Dead Wife!": when a man's daughter lies dying and his dead wife appears to him in dreams he asks Temple for help (who on arriving rather melodramatically describes the atmosphere: "time has stopped here and was waiting – at the brink of eternity"). The dream involves the wife, face in shadow in an unfurnished room, telling him Jim Villier can help. Villier turns out to be a doctor who specializes in the daughter's ailment – who was having a similar dream. Temple describes this as "chance", and that "strange laws govern this undiscovered force which can pay off in miracles", adding "some day men will nail down its basic principle in cold, logical equations. Miracles will become a matter of production" (see Metaphysics). Another tale, "Don't Wake the Sleeper! Or You'll Vanish Forever", has a young injured bum wandering into an empty house and falling asleep on a bed. He wakes, healthy and content, in a splendid house; wandering, he sees a man sleeping in another room – but before he can get proper look a beautiful woman warns him not to wake them. The pair wander the idyllic grounds and she explains they are both being dreamt by the sleeper. Despite her warnings the bum goes back to the sleeper's room, to discover it is himself. This unsettles the sleeper and the dream turns darker, so that he has to be awoken; injuries received the dream persist in the waking world.
"I Lived 200 Years Ago!" in #2 has a contemporary businessman dreaming of his life 200 years ago whose events parallel his present one (see Reincarnation); initially unsettling, it worsens when he dreams his past self murdered their business partner – who looks like his current one, George. He comforts himself with the thought that they are best friends, so he would never kill him. Then he learns George has been embezzling from their company. "A Dream Saved His Life!" has a man dreaming of wandering a strange forest and seeing a demon watching him. Shortly after he goes to fight in the Korean War, the landscape there echoes his dream, its familiarity enabling him to find a sniper before they start shooting (see Precognition). #3 has some nice Kirby imagery in "The Woman in the Tower!" (about a woman trapped in a tower) and the first of its "Send us your dreams" strips (having trees with tentacled branches and a garden where the flowers have eyes). #4 is uninteresting, particularly the horoscope strips: apart from a below-par cover, there appears to no Kirby input.
Though there are a few reasonably good pieces, The Strange World of Your Dreams is a disappointment, given the opportunity dreams provide for imaginative art and storylines (most famously, Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland); there is some nice Kirby artwork, such as the covers for #1-#3 and some good strip panels; but the other art is mostly unremarkable. Meskin had an interest in psychology – the comic seems to have been his idea – so there might have some serious intent, limiting the opportunity for flights of fancy: nonetheless, communication with the dead (see Eschatology) and Psi Powers are implied. At one point Richard Temple is described as a "Dream Detective", but this is not dramatically enough portrayed and he hamstrings many stories: resolutions focused on a pipe-smoking, brown-suited man pontificating tend to be anticlimactic, though variety is occasionally introduced by giving him a blue suit. Temple's dullness may account for the comic's short lifespan and the desperate change in tack towards astrology (see Pseudoscience) at the end. [SP]
further reading
- Classic Horror Comics – Volume 5 (Hornsea, East Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2023) [graph: collects issues #1-#4 of The Strange World of Your Dreams and issue #6 of Ace – Challenge of the Unknown: illus/various: in the publisher's PS Artbooks series: hb/Jack Kirby]
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