Dreams.

Jim Shaw cannot tell a lie and he seems embarrassed by nothing. In this book of drawings and writings he meticulously recounts eight years of his ultravisceral, supersleepy dreams. A project anyone could undertake who wanted to, sure, but only in Shaw's hands would you get such candor, recall, and detail. He's a master of intricate self-obsession.

Chronicling Shaw's every sleeping breath, Dreams comes off like autobiography. There's a ton of the most absurd pictures, which is a great pleasure. The text is there if you want it, to explain or contextualize or tell you what Shaw couldn't draw, or rather what he couldn't cram in; there isn't anything Shaw can't draw, I'm convinced. He's, like, skill level 2,000. All his drawings here are done in pencil (a notebook vibe), in a kind of thumbnail-sketch manner. His dreams presented him with every conceivable challenge (distorted figures in cloud patterns, underwater, or in flames, psycho interiors, weird textures, etc.), but there isn't a page that isn't executed with a precise, articulate, spontaneous line.

Spare, objective, and deadpan, Shaw's writing is also curiously lush. He dreams about girls, boobs, and sex ("I was having an affair with a spy's wife. She was making love to another woman while I hid under some aluminum barrels in shallow water"); animals, body parts, and midgets ("As I climbed out the back window, a couple of dwarfs dressed as Leprechauns came through, one friskily darting between my legs. I grabbed onto him to lower him down safely & protect my genitals"); monsters, toys, dolls, his parents, and friends ("Pettibon had gotten out of the hospital & he was looking great, but unusually neatly groomed. Now he was gay & eyeing these lacquered photos of Latino dream boys on upright wood panels on the floor"); and art ("I was telling Dave Hickey there ought to be a slot machine that wrote critical theory phrases, but then I realized it was too similar to Mark Tansey's wheel to actually execute"). Though his brain movies are funneled through the language of Hollywood special effects, visual art, and horror films - they seem to be produced by an intensely cinematic mind - he goes to great lengths not to embellish. Objectivity and distance rule; the exaggeration and freakiness are already there tenfold. And there's never a sliver of how anything made him feel. If this book were in any way emotional it would be a disaster.

An easy criticism of the project could be that it's simplistic, egocentric, exhausting, repetitive, endless. For me, though, perhaps no one alive could do a better dream book than Jim Shaw. He was born to do it. Dreams is thick and unpaginated, but the six-by-eight-inch format is great for reading, if only so-so for pictures (the images are swallowed by the binding, or by one's own fat, barbaric thumb). Many pages are memorable but they seem somewhat lost in the context, trapped in the book. The lame-ass words of a ghoulishly commercial writing teacher I once had - "Write a dream, lose a reader" - come to mind, but only make the book more urgent.

Benjamin Weissman is the author of the story collection Dear Dead Person (High Risk/Serpent's Tail). He teaches writing at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.