Long Dream

[cyberghostface]

Here's a story courtesy of Japan's master of horror Junji Ito. Remember to read from right to left. Also, this is 1/3 of a 34 page story.





It turns out the patient that was walking through the halls is Tetsuro Mukodo, who's been suffering from "long dreams".



He goes on to say that the dreams have increased in length, now lasting years at a time. The doctor thinks he's lying or is suffering from a mental disorder that makes him believe the lie. He decides to observe the man's sleeping patterns.



The man's dreams grow increasingly longer--now he's dreaming for ten years at a time. One dream is him spending years studying for an exam, the other is ten years in the jungle fighting a war.




Soon his body begins to physically change as if he is evolving over an extended period of time:




He believes that he's been married to Mami (the girl from the opening scene) for thousands of years. When she sees him, she screams, thinking that it's death come back to claim her.




Later:




Soon his body begins to crystallize and break down.




From the crumbled remains of his brain, they discover small crystals of unknown properties. They attempt to analyze them to discover the link between the long dreams but to no avail.

Soon the girl, Mami, tells the doctors that she is experiencing long dreams of her own--dreams that last months at a time.

Comments

[leikomgwtfbbq]

I've seen that, too.

It weirds me out that apparently this massive racist creeper had a soft spot for cats and could write an actually hilarious comedy (I fuckin' love Sweet Ermengarde). Guess everyone's human to some degree, hahaha XD

[espanolbot]

I thought that it was funny how he'd apparently go on rants about Jewis people, only for his wife to remind him who he was sleeping with.

Lovecraft was a pretty ridiculous human being in a lot of ways, but a lot of the Pulp crowd were interesting in one way or another. The bloke that invented the Shadow, for example, was a stage magician, while the man who created Conan the Barbarian was a kind of sheltered man who lived with his mother.

There's actually a really good book, the Chinatown Deathcloud Peril, which basically takes all these people like the creators of the Shadow and Doc Savage, and puts them in a story that has a lot of parallels with the plots of their stories. While they're assisted by a young Ron Hubbard, whoamongst other things, tells two teenagers called Siegel and Schuster that their idea of a man in a bodybuilding outfit with superpowers will never sell.

[leikomgwtfbbq]

My boyfriend's probably got that book somewhere--he's a huge huge huge fan of the pulp stories, and he's been getting me into 'em lately, too. :D We even went to a pulp show at the Toronto library last year. There's another one coming up this weekend, but sadly, I won't be there this time.