Do you ever wake up wondering why you just had a dream in which you were standing in the middle of a swimming pool listening to an Armenian heavy metal singer deliver a lecture on Dr Who? Or wish you could figure out why you dreamt you were passing bottles of Bacardi Breezer to a cat through a letter box?
Dream Solver is a two-volume graphic novel about the mysteries of dreams and the secrets we might uncover if we were able to decipher their meaning. Written by
Luke Foster with art by
Chris Wildgoose and lettering by
Lauren Anne Sharp, it tells the story of Ione-Rose Young, a 22 year old picture researcher and aspiring photographer, who after having a disturbing, recurring dream about seeing her own death, doesn’t know whether to dismiss it as just another weird dream, or worry that it’s about to come true.
Unable to shake the dream from her mind, she sets out to decipher its meaning, and discovers that by deducing the hidden meaning of her dreams, she can uncover shocking secrets about her family, her friends, and herself.
Volume One of Dream Solver contains four self-contained, but inter-connecting stories: Dying, Friends and Family, Childhood and Buried. In each story, Ione-Rose investigates a different type of commonly-experienced dream, with the help of psychoanalysis student and shoe sales assistant Danielle Carter. Like detectives trying to crack a murder case, Ione-Rose and Danielle hunt for clues that point to the dream’s meaning, follow up leads and even get led astray by the odd red herring or two.
Each time she correctly interprets one of her dreams, Ione-Rose unearths a secret from her past; building to her ultimately discovering why it is that she’s been having such vivid and meaningful dreams, while her twin brother Jacob never dreams at all.
The main characters are:
22 year old, tomboy-ish protagonist who lives in Canterbury with her twin brother Jacob and cat Phoebe. She wants to be a professional photographer and has recently taken a job as a picture researcher at Oberon Publishing, in the hope of getting some of her own photographs published in the company’s consumer and trade magazines. But her boss has dismissed her pictures as “holiday snaps” and is trying to get her to take a tedious editorial job on Cooking and Cuisine World.
She’s had vivid dreams since she was a child and has always been able to remember them in picture-perfect detail. As well as 100% dream recall, she has the ability to move lucidly through different levels of recurring dreams and pick up different clues about their meaning.
24. Dream Solver’s resident dream expert and boffin; think Giles from Buffy The Vampire Slayer except she’s an Essex girl who works in a shoe shop. She can usually be found in The Shoe Shrine in Canterbury city centre, where she helps Ione-Rose investigate and analyse her dreams, while getting her to try on shoes to make it look like she’s working.
Currently undertaking a part-time Masters degree in Psychoanalysis at the University of Kent, she does her course work on her boss’s computer during her breaks at The Shoe Shrine and keeps her dream theory books stashed in a shoe box in the storeroom, which becomes Ione-Rose and Danielle’s unofficial base of operations
22. Ione-Rose’s twin brother. He’s highly-sceptical about his sister’s belief that she can find secrets buried in her dreams, but is willing to help her and Danielle investigate the dreams anyway; vigorously denying that this is because he has a crush on Danielle. Training to be a Chartered Accountant, he contributes to the dream analysis with a healthy dose of pragmatism and an ability to spot and decipher numerical patterns.
That’s it for now. We’ll be updating this blog with more news about Dream Solver and artwork from volume one as it progresses, so check back for more.
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