If I was going up a staircase in the dark, I would dance with anticipatory excitement, like I did when we went to Disneyland.

I loved the strangeness, the mystery they presented, and I searched for more of the same everywhere. When these things didn’t happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of those visions or whatever they were-neurological misfires. I came to regard them as not only a part of life but the most interesting part. It would scare the shit out of me and I would leave my bed running to the living room…Įventually, the hallucinations became a regular part of his life: Like a staring eyeball that I would see with my eyes open or shut sometimes. There were also things that I saw when I closed my eyes that I couldn’t make go away. I could make these things go away very easily. Big, horrible, grimacing, deeply-lined faces with their mouths open, yelling at me silently, moving their mouths rapidly. I’d be lying in bed and I’d see large, silent, rotating faces hovering over the foot of my bed, faces that were very cartoony, actually. That’s why I was unsurprised to find out that many of the drawings actually come straight from Woodring’s dreams and, sometimes, hallucinations, which started when he was young:

I read the stories before bed and they gave me CRAZY dreams:

Frank comic jim woodring