Whenever the subject of dreams comes up, I find myself recommending Junji Ito’s short horror manga Long Dream yet again. There are quite a few masterpieces among Ito’s short works, but this is the one I’m especially fond of.
The story is built on one of the strangest and most baffling things about dreams: subjectively, time seems to pass more slowly in a dream.
I’m sure everyone has had this experience, right? You wake up in the morning, doze off again for what was objectively only 10 minutes, and the dream you have feels like it lasted at least an hour.
Whether this phenomenon actually exists, and what causes it, are still hotly debated in science (we’ll get into that in the next post). Artists, however, have already gotten plenty of mileage out of it. The best-known example is probably the rule in Inception that the deeper you go into a dream, the slower time passes—by several times over.
It’s a little unfortunate that this is merely one of Inception‘s many ideas about dreams. The director mostly uses it as a tool for creating dramatic tension, without spending much time digging into what it might really mean.
On this point, Long Dream is the work that truly takes the idea of dream time slowing down to its extreme. In this manga, Junji Ito shows an unusually sharp awareness that slowing time is actually closely tied to one of humanity’s deepest fears.
That’s all I can say without spoiling it. Go find it and read it for yourself. I guarantee you’ll finish with a spine-chilling ^_^
p.s. Junji Ito’s manga can be seriously twisted and downright sick, so think twice before you read it O(∩_∩)O
Note
- This series, “Psychology New Knowledge Course,” consisted of short popular-psychology essays and rambling notes written back then to accompany the related content of Zhichao Wei: Psychology New Knowledge Course. They were published on the now-defunct platform Fanfan, and the original link no longer exists.
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