The Dreaming (1996 series): Day's Work, Night's Rest

[alicemacher]

The tale of a man's desperate attempt to escape the mundane horrors of the corporate world, for a dream of blue-collar paradise. It was a 1998 Eisner nominee for Best Single Issue or One-Shot.

Warning for suicidal ideation.


From The Dreaming vol. 1 #15 (Aug. 1997). Story and art by Jeff Nicholson.

Meet Robert, co-founder of a business that, however successful, he's come to loathe. The stress and long hours have given him a chronic sleep deficit, but he manages to stay in the game thanks to amphetamine diet pills and coffee. (His partner wasn't so fortunate, and is now in company-subsidized rehab.) Nonetheless, the office building itself feels to him like Hell.







Robert finds himself drawn to the blue-collar workers -- landscaping, renovation and such -- often found inside and outside the office. He reflects on how they, unlike he and his white-collar staff, produce things that are tangible and thus, he feels, more satisfying. Sometimes, while watching them at work, he nods off, and...







Not content with admiring labourers at work, Robert sometimes spends the evening driving out to bars so he can also observe them at play. He always stays in his car while doing so, fearing they wouldn't accept him as one of the "tribe." One evening, parked outside the Buckhorn, he nods off again... and abruptly finds that his "visions [have] become a visitation": somehow he's the newest member of the Dreaming's maintenance crew, headed by Mervyn Pumpkinhead.

Matthew the Raven pops by and points out to Mervyn that the new guy isn't one of the usual fantastic inhabitants of the Dreaming, but a mortal dreamer. Both comment that this has never happened before.





Mervyn claims (falsely, of course) to be lord of the realm in which Robert now finds himself employed. Or, rather, Bob, which his coworkers encourage him to go by. He tells Bob that before he can get to work he needs to get "pumped up."





Dream-grass: all the benefits and more of Evangelion's LCL, without the yukky taste when you breathe it!

Anyway. As he enthusiastically mows, Bob wonders how he got here and speculates that a drunk driver may have plowed into his car outside the pub, sending him to the afterlife.





Mervyn's "This is heaven" comment unwittingly reinforces Bob's assumption that he's dead and that his miserable white-collar days are behind him forever. Bob enjoys the rest of his first work day, even the scary bits with an unruly, overly-hungry trash compactor. When the "quitting time" whistle blows, everyone drops through a trap door into a bar for after-work funtimes. Bob tells Mervyn he wishes he could tell people from back home there's a "bar in Nirvana."

"Well," says Mervyn, "I was kinda hopin' you'd tell 'em when you got back."

Bob, still unaware of his situation, is crestfallen. "There isn't supposed to be any 'going back.'"





Bob wakes up in his car, outside the Buckhorn, at dawn. Driving home, he thinks that Western society has had the wrong idea about Heaven all along, in terms of who runs it... and what one must do to get there.

Comments

[lego_joker]

... huh. I'd heard The Dreaming was dogged by "NOT MUH SANDMAN" reviews from both fans and critics throughout its entire run, but this doesn't seem bad at all. Granted, in tone and such it feels a little closer to Moore than Gaiman, but that's hardly a bad thing.