SLEEPTALK — a zine about dreams

Issue 09 · The Falling One A zine about dreams, kept half-asleep Print + PDF
SLEEP TALK

Sixty pages of dreams transcribed at 3 a.m., drawn by people who were still half inside them. Reads wrong in the best way. Printed on paper that feels slightly too soft.

Get issue 09
Riso printed · 400 copies Submissions open while you sleep Ships worldwide

Issue 09 · The Falling One · 60 pages

The contents, in the order it happens to you

Riso in two colours — indigo and fluoro pink, no grey anywhere in the book. Sewn at the spine so it lies flat at 3 a.m. Open any line to read its first sentence.

Transcript desk · line 2 · 03:14

there is someone in the hallway who is also me

i Before you fall pages 3 – 18

I found it again behind the airing cupboard. Less furniture this time, and weather in it — proper weather, with a front coming through.

He played a C and I lost a molar, and he apologised in my mother’s voice, and I told him it was fine, and it was.

Six pages of the same staircase. The banister is warm and nobody in the building will admit to having touched it.

Every phone in the house is off the hook and the tone is in the key the fridge hums in. I am not allowed to hang any of them up.

ii The falling one pages 19 – 42

The cover piece. Three plates printed one over another, slightly out of register — which is the accident we decided to keep, and then to name the issue after.

A notebook page, scanned exactly as it arrived. The handwriting grows toward the bottom of the sheet and then stops in the middle of a word.

The room is otherwise correct. The light arrives from the wrong side and everyone at the table has quietly agreed not to mention it.

It only goes down, and it says sorry at every floor, and by the eleventh sorry you begin to believe it means it.

iii After pages 43 – 60

For eleven minutes every label in my flat was set in a serif I do not own. The kettle worked normally. That was the frightening part.

She pays no rent, she moves no furniture, and she is always sitting in the one place you cannot turn your head to check.

Recorded with permission, printed with permission, read back to her with permission. She remembers none of it and disputes all of it.

Two hundred and six rooms, alphabetised, cross-referenced by whoever fell asleep in them. The kitchens outnumber everything else by a distance.

Issue 09 sold out on paper twice. The third printing is the one where the pink sits two millimetres low, which we now prefer and will not be correcting. The PDF is always in print and always arrives at an unreasonable hour.

Submissions · issue 10 · The Long Hallway

Send us your night

We are not looking for good writing about dreams. We are looking for the dream, written down fast, before it tidies itself. Everything below is meant literally.

What we want

  • Dreams written down inside twenty minutes of waking. Keep the typos — they are evidence.
  • Recurring dreams, but only if you can tell us what changed since the last one.
  • Drawings made with your other hand, or with the lights off, or on the back of something.
  • Any corridor you have never walked in waking life. We are collecting corridors.
  • Sleep-talk transcribed by whoever else was in the room. Credit them too; they were working.
  • Comics up to six pages, two colours, no grey — we riso in indigo and fluoro pink and that is the whole palette.

What we don’t

  • Dreams that resolve into a metaphor about your job.
  • Anything ending and then I woke up. We had assumed.
  • Interpretation of any kind: symbol keys, dream dictionaries, what the teeth mean.
  • Nightmares written for shock. We print unsettling. We do not print gore.
  • Dream logs generated by software. Machines do not sleep, they only stop.
  • Anything that needs a content warning you are not willing to write yourself.

How to send it

  • Plain text or PDF to nightdesk@sleeptalk.example, subject line: SLEEPTALK 10 / your title / your name.
  • Or post it — Postbox 12, rear of the old laundrette, Cawley Road. Handwriting welcome; we scan it as it arrives.
  • Prose 200–1,400 words. One poem per envelope. Art at 300 dpi greyscale — we do the separations.
  • We read on Tuesdays, late. Reply in four to six weeks; if we go quiet, nudge us once, kindly.
  • If we print you: two copies, one strip of misprints, and £45 a piece, paid the week it ships.
  • Simultaneous submissions are fine. Tell us the moment it lands somewhere else.
Issue 10 — The Long Hallway Reading now Closes 21 October, at whatever hour you happen to fall asleep
Issue 11 — Water Damage Opens 1 December Water, ceilings, things heard through a wall. Early notes already welcome by post
Issue 12 — untitled Closed We have not dreamt it yet. Check back after the clocks change

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