Dreaming Backward

 

“Who would have thought forty-nine short pieces about Butlin’s holiday camps could be so touching? A kaleidoscopic look at the past, Dreaming Backward is an enchantment – together all the vivid, intense parts create strange patterns, catching the light of memory. Reading it, reality shifts and we are taken by surprise, travelling in time, nearer the tumble and drift where we forget we live.”
Linda France

“In this exhilarating poetic documentary, Alex Reed transports us to the ‘brightly hued reality’ of Butlin’s holiday camps with the All-Star Redcoats’ Show and the Lovely Legs competition. Dreaming Backward is a compelling social history of a pre-digital era. But it is also a musing on perceptions of time, how we choose to fill our leisure hours, and how that might be judged by others. In its playful hybrid form, reminiscent of the Japanese zuihitsu tradition, incorporating myriad sources and using fragments, collage techniques, and occasional tracts of white space that provide interpretative space for the reader, Reed’s movement on the page echoes the shifting, fragmented nature of memory. This startling mosaic of 49 passages numbered backwards will leave you interrogating your personal history– choices not taken, lives that might have been, and decisions yet to be played out.” Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana

Dreaming Backward is very evocative and very resonant.

ISBN: 978-1-7394122-7-2
36 pages
R.R.P. £7.50

A sample from Dreaming Backward can be enjoyed below.

PRE-ORDER Dreaming Backward NOW using the paypal options below. [Dreaming Backward is published June 2025. Pre-orders will be sent out in the week of publication.]
Dreaming Backward (with p&p options)
N.B. We can no longer sell to the EU. Any other international customs/duty charges are the buyer's responsibility.

11.

When we got home, I came down with a bug which kept me off school for the rest of the week. Lying in bed sweating and woozy, transistor radio on the pillow beside me, yearning to catch the song they’d played at the disco, ‘Behind a Painted Smile’, with its stately flute intro before the drums crash into action commanding your body to pay attention, then the rush and release of that soaring chorus, half-euphoria, half-desperation, the loveliest sound I’d ever heard piercing my restless, hormonal heart.

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