After days of intensive work, I'm glad to announce that Dream Syntax the Book is almost complete and ready for preorder! NOW WITH 102 MAPS FOR EACH OF THE DREAMS - the most time consuming part of this project ever. And I've even made a mockup of what it might look up above there, in case you can't imagine how the book will look like. Yes, I was so excited about it that I even photoshopped an image of what I imagined the book should look like.
Dream Syntax is the first book by Debbie Ding, containing maps and stories of Debbie's dreams, 102 of them, from the last 6 years. It is written, illustrated, designed, and self-published by Debbie. I'm only doing a small limited edition of 500, which will be individually hand-numbered, and it should arrive on 5 Sept 2013, just in time for my solo exhibiton on the 6th at Galerie Steph (MORE ABOUT THAT COMING SOON).
If you're in Singapore, you can even place a preorder for the book now at http://dreamsyntax.bigcartel.com/. You can self-collect or add a little bit more for local postage within Singapore. I should be figuring out the postage rates for International postage in the next few days, so stay tuned. Please support Debbie's first book!
Here's a peek at the wet proof from my printer (First Printers):
So how did this book come about? Well, 6 years ago I began collecting my dreams in map form, over various notebooks and papers. Eventually I realised this could take the form of a book. The book became a never-ending project. Eventually, a line had to be drawn! I decided to arbitarily stop at 100 entries for this book. But in the course of working on the book I had two more dreams. So I added them in. And then there were 102 dreams in the book. So that was the final cap for this book. But of course, the dreaming still goes on and on and on...
This is what the first notebook looked like from 2008:
When I was hard at work laying out the entire book at breakneck speed, I had another peculiar dream about numbers. Obviously, it did not make the date cut-off for this book, but I think its still worth a mention:
Now, I've had many dreams about words and letters, but never any dreams about numbers. But after spending hours wrestling with page numbers and entry numbers, I had a dream that was basically all about numbers. In my dream, I was at the computer, writing out another dream in which there was a character called "3" and I was known as "1". My father came into my room and saw me typing out the story, and asked me "Why do you always have to play character 1? 1 is the smallest number! Why don't you play a bigger number?" And I said, "Don't be silly, 1 is also the most important!" I also knew that "1" was merely a role, a kind of stock character that many actors might play at a certain point in the course of one's acting career, like Hamlet or King Lear. At that point I decided to go outside to buy an unagi eel for my supper (this must be because that day at dinner, Kent had been going on about how his favourite food at a certain Japanese restaurant was UNAGI fried rice). Stepping out of the house, I walked down the street and past a room full of girls who were all 7s, past a middle-aged 26 sleeping inside a clear perspex box. The person at the 7-11 was a 47. I realised everyone was actually just a number, but I just hadn't properly noticed it before because I was not looking at it in the right way. I got back to my computer and started drafting out a map of these numbers I had seen. Over the internet, I also told George this strange revelation, "people are all just numbers!" When I told him this, he asked me what number he was. But then, I realised that I did not know what number he was...
Anyway. For more dream stories like this...
PREORDER DREAM SYNTAX: THE BOOK
http://dreamsyntax.bigcartel.com
SGD 30 (SELF COLLECT) / SGD 35 (LOCAL POSTAGE WITHIN SINGAPORE)
DREAM SYNTAX
First Published September 2013
ISBN: 978-981-07-7491-2
Designed by Debbie Ding
Written by Debbie Ding
