Slow Wave is a reference to the third stage of sleep, also known as delta or non-rapid eye movement sleep.
In 1995 artist Jesse Reklaw began making comics of other people's dreams after graduating from college in order to entertain himself at his job doing web development for a biotech company. Eventually Reklaw began putting the comics online. At first the comics were all black and white, later strips are in color.
The initial concept of Slow Wave entailed asking readers to submit their dreams to Reklaw, who would then adapt them into comics. He would add in little dialogue bubbles and condense complex, confusing narratives into an easily digestible entertainment.
Each dream would have a unique title and then a note at the bottom crediting the dreamer.
There have been two collections of Slow Wave comics published in book form so far. In 2000, Shambhala Press released 109 of them under the title Dreamtoons. In 2008, Dark Horse released 247 dreams in the collection The Night of Your Life. When the second book was released, Slow Wave was featured in ten different alternative weekly newspapers.
Over the course of the next year, the US economy began to tank and Slow Wave was dropped by half of its carriers. Many of the papers which kept the strip were only able to do so at a reduced rate. These sorts of cuts were occuring in alternative newspapers across the US. Max Cannon of Red Meat described the cuts as the Alternative Comics Apocalypse.
Around the same time as the cuts, Reklaw began to notice that he was receiving a lot of the same sort of dreams from his readers. He estimates that in thirteen years he's "probably read about 13,000 dreams" and was startled to find the sameness.
In order to keep his strip fresh, he began fictionalizing continuities based upon the submitted dreams that grabbed his attention.
Reklaw's website is currently on hiatus. It is likely that he will return when he has found a way to make his comics profitable on the web.
Dreamtoons is currently out of print although if you look you can probably find a copy somewhere. The Night Of Your Life is still in print. You may preview it at the publisher's site or, for sixteen USD, purchase a signed/sketched upon copy from the Reklaw direct.