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What we dream about, they are not our memories.
It's always in the present; it's novel; it's creative.
It's an original experience rather than a memory.
In the fall semester of 2023, Jiyun Kim, a PhD candidate from Korea, was a student in a seminar titled Memoir/Illness/Graphic/Grief that I taught at the CUNY Graduate Center. This was the first time I had met Jiyun. At the second seminar meeting, Jiyun stunned the class with a slide presentation on Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor in which she analyzed Sontag's argument through Lacanian diagrams. Her remarks in class were always sharp and often surprising, but it was only with her final project, did I realize how Jiyun's intense psychoanalytic training in Korea and her understanding of the graphic medium would combine to produce the remarkable essay we have here, “The Wounded Sleepwalker.” (The title riffs on the Arthur Frank's classic book on illness and narrative, The Wounded Storyteller.) I immediately urged Jiyun to submit her paper to this special issue of American Imago.
Tragically, Jiyun Kim became a wounded storyteller herself at the end of the spring semester 2024 when she died at thirty-three from a recurrence of breast cancer. In fact, she had been ill the entire fall semester and unbeknownst to most of us, writing through extreme pain.
Not long after her death that shocked our community, Jiyun's friends, Ju Ly Ban and Ellen Siyuan Pan, her former advisor in Korea, Seok won Yang; and I, Nancy K. Miller, had the privilege of making minor revisions to the essay, which we are happy to share with you here.
We hope you will enjoy this highly original and thought-provoking analysis of what dreaming can tell us about the shape and meaning of four powerful graphic narratives: David B.'s Epileptic, James
Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook's visualization of David Wojnarowicz's 7 Miles A Second, David Smalls's Stitches, and Nicola Streeten's Billy, Me & You.
In the realm of cognitive neuroscience, comp