Playing in a Dream

By Yu-Ling Kung

Playing in a Dream (2024) is a bilingual Chinese–English comic book written and drawn by SEN (森森) and published independently. The project received publication support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, which allowed the artist greater freedom to invest in its material production. From its physical appearance, the book already feels very different from most comics commonly found in bookstores in Taiwan. The production cost is clearly higher, and both the printing and binding use uncommon methods. The cover is deliberately understated and made of thick, rough paper that feels almost like stone. When the book is opened, a striking feature appears at the center. A custom-cut cavity holds a transparent cassette tape. The tape contains music created by SEN’s musician friends, based on the content of the comic, and it can be played. The comic is divided into nine parts. Instead of calling them chapters, SEN labels each part as a “track.” This choice directly relates to the cassette tape and frames the reading experience as something close to listening to an album. Inside the book, the artist clearly invites readers to read the comic while listening to the music.

Through this form of music collaboration, Playing in a Dream received recognition from Taiwan’s comics community. It was also acknowledged in book design competitions, where it was praised for bringing together the cassette tape, multimedia elements, and complex three-color RISO printing into a single, carefully integrated book.

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For me, what matters most is not the impressive cross-disciplinary collaboration or the special printing techniques, but how this work reflects the creator’s own experience of illness. It carries the emotional weight of a young woman in her twenties going through chemotherapy and tumor removal surgery. Before SEN received the awards mentioned above, I contacted her to ask whether she would be open to my writing about the book. She kindly shared some background on the project. The following discussion includes spoilers and reflects my own reading.

Pages 3 – 5 of Playing in a Dream.

The story presents a journey shaped by unease. It begins with a girl, who is also a stand-in for SEN herself, waking up in a place with no clear information about time or location. The only thing beside her is a portable cassette player with a tape inside. Soon another figure appears. It is a small human-like form shown only as an outline. Guided by this tiny figure, the girl sets out on a journey while carrying the player.

The opening recalls Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with its sleeping Alice, strange world, and guiding presence. As the journey continues, however, the world feels quiet and empty, with no other characters in sight. In different tracks, the girl moves through a playground, a sandpit, and a garden maze. At the center of the maze stands a large stone. This stone brings back certain memories that overwhelm her, and she escapes the maze. Her way out follows the same path in reverse. She passes the sandpit again and only then realizes that the small guide has died for her. She returns to the playground where the journey began, but it has become old and abandoned, surrounded by piles of discarded objects.

Diary zine, pages 66–67.

The moment when the girl discovers a diary among the discarded objects marks a major turning point in the story. In the physical book, this diary appears as a small zine attached directly to the comic pages. Its text consists of SEN’s own reflections written during her illness. Spanning roughly one year, the mini diary selects several key moments, including hospitalization, the day of surgery, and periods of recovery. Through short entries, SEN records everyday details, relationships with others, and her emotional responses to living with illness during that time.

The appearance of the mini diary may prompt readers to recognize a key connection. The strange, abstract, dreamlike world presented earlier has been quietly echoing the creator’s real experience of illness all along. At first glance, this illness diary seems unrelated to the girl’s journey or dreamlike exploration. It feels like an opening that suddenly appears inside an otherworldly space, leading the reader toward something closer to lived reality. It can also be understood as the insertion of a documentary-like text into an otherwise fictional comic.

For me, this small diary functions as a guide within the reading process. It leads me from a fictional and unfamiliar landscape toward another level of understanding the work. In this sense, the mini diary parallels the miniature guide figure introduced at the beginning of the comic. Both operate as forms of guidance. Through this structure, readers come to share the same position as the girl in the story, moving along a path shaped by uncertainty, unsure of what will appear or be revealed next. The reader’s sense of empathy for the girl, and for the artist, emerges precisely through this shared condition of not knowing.

Near the end of the book, a map-like image brings together the girl’s journey and its key locations. Her path takes the form of a long, winding spiral that is also the cassette tape itself. The image allows the journey and the music to intersect visually.

Pages 78 – 79 of Playing in a Dream.

This layout led me to think of an “inner landscape” image of the human body, known as the Neijing Tu (a romanized form of the Chinese name 內經圖, above). Depicting a seated side-view of the human body, this nineteenth-century chart, based on much earlier textual traditions related to Daoism, represents the inner body as a landscape shaped by the movement of a kind of energy, known as qi (a romanized form of the Chinese term氣). Rather than presenting the body from a medical or scientific point of view, the chart approaches it through metaphor and visualization. Composed of mountains, caves, and flowing rivers, the chart functions as an “inner map” activated through visualization, breathing, and bodily practice. Practitioners mentally traverse these internal sites from bottom to top, imagining how qi travels through the body, much like journeying through a landscape painting. From this perspective, the Neijing Tu, though presented as a single image, depends on sequential movement through its internal elements, much like comics—even without the modern panel-based structure we associate with the medium today.[1]

I should clarify that while the Neijing Tu holds appeal for me and belongs to a shared cultural tradition in the Chinese-speaking world, I am not suggesting that SEN consciously borrowed from this imagery. In our earlier exchange, she explained that the comic’s world was inspired by the A and B sides of a cassette tape. What first appears to be a return from A to B and back to A is, by the end, revealed as a continuous path. Even when the girl seems to return to the same place, it is no longer the same “A,” because every step has left an irreversible trace.

I therefore understand the comic’s inner bodily landscape as a space that unfolds through music. Music, which cannot be seen but can be felt, becomes the driving force that moves the landscape along a path materialized as the cassette tape itself. In this sense, it resonates with the way Daoist practitioners imagine the movement of qi within the body. The difference is that Neijing Tu functions as a manual for cultivation and emphasizes harmony between the body and the cosmos, without addressing personal emotion. In contrast, the bodily landscape in the comic is charged with affect and used to express negative mental states. The large stone at the center of the maze suggests a core of pressure or trauma. The fallen miniature figure in the sandpit evokes a sense of damage or loss. The abandoned playground resembles a structure within the body that once functioned well but has gradually fallen into disrepair.

Fortunately, the final diary entry in the zine takes on a lighter tone. It expresses a sense of gratitude after surviving a difficult period—gratitude for being alive and for being able to see the beauty of life again. A similar feeling appears in a short note at the very end of the book. SEN writes that when she first learned about her illness, her instinct was to push people away or to hide the situation. Yet the painful experiences she once wanted to erase are later reframed in a more affirmative light. She tells readers that it is precisely because these things happened that she became who she is now, and that they also opened the way for other possibilities to emerge.

Details related to illness are deliberately placed in the most inconspicuous parts of the book. This restrained, almost hidden approach adds a deeply personal shadow beneath the work’s bright, polished, and even toy-like exterior. At first glance, readers may not immediately sense the emotional weight of the story, and some may even feel uncertain about what the plot is trying to convey.

When I asked SEN why she chose this approach, she explained that these private feelings were intentionally kept in the background. She wanted readers to be able to engage with the story lightly and to place themselves in the position of the protagonist. For this reason, she avoided giving the character a fixed name or backstory, allowing meaning to emerge gradually through reading. She hoped that readers might find points of identification in the story or in the diary entries, whether related to friendship, love, or questions of life and death.

Perhaps her own experience—of a young woman undergoing chemotherapy and tumor surgery—is not universally shared. Rather than confining the reader to a narrative framed solely around illness, she leaves space for readers to enter the story through their own experiences. In this sense, before asking for empathy, she first extends it. The relationship that forms feels like the two sides of a cassette tape, turning back and forth. Rather than pressing her own experience onto the reader, the artist first leaves space for the reader to enter. As a result, empathy is not demanded but emerges naturally through this movement of exchange. It is in this quiet back-and-forth that understanding takes shape.

Yu-Ling Kung is a doctoral student at the National Taiwan University of Arts. Her research has received support from Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture through a grant for a project on agricultural comics. Kung contributed the entry “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (2016) to Humans and Animals: A Geography of Coexistence, edited by Julie Urbanik and Connie Johnston (ABC-CLIO; ISBN 978-1-4408-3834-7).

[1] For discussion of the Neijing Tu, see Fabrizio Pregadio, “The Alchemical Body in Daoism,” Journal of Daoist Studies 14 (2021), with relevant discussion on 119–120.