I can't stop dreaming about DC digests

I learned to read through comic books, so it's no surprise that I've had dreams about for them for as long as I remember. My lifelong obsession with comics has seeped into my skull and I've been finding impossible comics books in impossible comic shops for decades, and feeling absolutely fucking gutted when I wake up and it isn't real.

For years and years I dreamed of comic shops - ones I glimpsed on TV, and ones I last stepped foot in years ago. I dreamt of being surrounded by strange displays and special Invisibles mini-comics, and served at the counter by dragons and scary old ladies.

It actually died off a little when I started going to comic shops on the regular. Ever since I lived in a town with a couple of shops that I get to every every few weeks, there were less dreams about phantom stores, although it did start up again in the past year, almost certainly because of the whole Covid thing, and we couldn't always get out.

The other thing about these nocturnal comic missions is that the kind of things I'm looking for change as my tastes change, or as I complete a certain set of comics that I've long been after.

So it used to be that I would stumble across vast old hordes of 2000ads, but that has dropped off since getting all the regular progs. I'm still a few sci-fi specials that I sometimes find while dozing on the couch, but that's about it.

Now, I find I'm always dreaming of digests - DC Blue Ribbon digests, to be precise.

I always did dig the digest format, but I still can't deny that they're a terrible way of reprint comics, and as I teeter on the edge of my late forties, I can barely read the tiny print. You can get almost everything they ever reprinted in those things in much nicer and more expensive collections these days, and any that do show up on the second hand market are often exorbitantly priced.

And yet, that's what I keep getting excited about in dreams. It started a little while ago, with a flurry of sleeping visits to stores that sold digests that never existed, but it's accelerated since then and now I'm regularly having dreams about finding a copy of that Dark Mansions of Forbidden Love, or one of the Jonah Hex digests.

I just don't know why. There are plenty of comics I still obsess over, and am always hunting for, but I don't dream about them, just these little things. I'm sure Freud would have a fucking field day with these books' size and importance in my life, but maybe I just need to get outta the house more. I'll just have another squint through this Legion of Super Heroes digest before I go.