With The Bone Orchard Mythos, Lemire and Sorrentino are embarking on something potentially very vast - a horror universe of their own design. I am untethered and guessing, is this a nightmare? A hallucination? Or is this reality with all the pretense peeled back, and the painful bits exposed? The feeling is familiar and unsettling. Their characters, wrecked with personal tragedy and existential dread, are sent tumbling through Sorrentino’s broken panels of free-associated, angst ridden imagery. What compels me to return to the stories of Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino is their uncanny evocations of dream logic in both Gideon Falls and Primordial. The function of our dreams, then, must be related to the way they make us feel. It’s as if, to our brains, the content of our dreams and their relationship to our literal experience is not important. It starts with the more accurate content of our memories and then extrapolates, continuously tweaking the variables until the scenario is many interactions removed from reality. I heard once that dreams are our brains’ way of processing emotionally intense situations without the constant distraction of our waking senses. As I come to, I slowly sort out what is real and what was just an imagined experience. Many mornings, I wake on the tail end of a dream agitated, having dreamt that I am missing a final exam for a class I never attended or that my teeth had crumbled in my mouth.

By Lisa Gullickson - I have always been a vivid dreamer - mostly mundane, always anxiety inducing, with that soupçon of surrealism.

The Passageway by Jeff Lemire