An admittedly whimsical selection of dream guides, published dreamjournals, stories based on dreams, or tales about dreamwork and shamanism.

Almond, David: Where Your Wings Were (short story in COUNTING STARS)

An autobiographical childhood tale of a magical recurring dream that feels to me like the seed of his best-known novel, SKELLIG.

Altman, Robert: THREE WOMEN

Altman based this feature film directly on a dream of his.

Anderson, Poul : THE VISITOR

A short story, inspired by a dream, that also hinges on a dream, a psychic one. A heartbreaker.

Bergman, Ingmar: WILD STRAWBERRIES and NAKED NIGHT (also titled SAWDUST AND TINSEL):

He's claimed all his films are dreams, though I take that metaphorically. But these two have scenes straight from Bergman's dreams, staged as accurately as he could.

Brand, Michelle: "There I Was" in WIMMEN'S COMIX #1, (Last Gasp Comics, 1972)

The occasional comics about dreams in this long-running anthology (see also issue #4, #13 etc) were the first women's dreams I've seen cartooned. They looked much more like my dreamlife than the men's dreams I'd seen. Michelle Brand's story inspired me to start drawing my own! Disturbingly, though four books with dreams drawn by men are on this list (see Davison, Reklaw, Shaw, and Veitch) I've found not one book of women's dream art, neither anthologies nor individual dream-journals. Girls dream, girls draw--is it bias by editors and publishers? Comics historian Trina Robbins says comics publishing is as bad today as a generation ago. And is the fine art world still sexist? Ask the Gorilla Girls. If you're interested in building an anthology of women's dream art and comics, email me.

Bryant, Dorothy: THE KIN OF ATA ARE WAITING FOR YOU

A bittersweet utopian novel of a society centering on dreams.

Joseph Campbell: FLIGHT OF THE WILD GANDER:

His thesis: shamanism, since its roots are nomadic (you never knew what was over the next hill), handles social change better than hierarchical, past-based dogmas like Christianity and Islam. And dreamwork is shamanism.

Carroll, Lewis: ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS:

These aren't just dreamlike, but dream-based. Carroll pieced them together from bits of what we would today call hypnogogic imagery.

Cayce, Edgar: see Stearn, Jess

Charnas, Suzy McKee: LISTENING TO BRAHMS, award-winning science fiction story anthologized in VANISHING ACTS.

A lizard in a dream told her this whole tragicomic novella about music, survivors' guilt and redemption.

Cocteau, Jean: ORPHEE and KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE:

The play "Knights" was directly inspired by a dream. Cocteau's film of the Orpheus myth also borrows heavily from dreams. Ann Faraday points out that the mirror-world in "Orphee" shows the non-REM state, which is rare in art--most artists mine REM, for its vivid imagery and passion. Cocteau did something subtler in Orphee.

Crespi, Giuseppi Maria: PAVONATTO, painting, early 1700s

What about paintings based on dreams, instead of stories? Crespi dreamed of a blue cat with green feathered wings, and painted it for his daughter nearly three centuries ago--the oldest visual record of a dream I've found. "Pavonatto" is in a museum in Pisa, Italy.

Davison, Al: THE SPIRAL CAGE (graphic novel) and SPIRAL DREAMS (comics collection)

SPIRAL CAGE is a comics classic--the autobiography of a kid with spina bifida, whose parents were told he'd never walk. Well, he walks. And writes! Strong subject, strong writing, strong art--and jammed full of dreams and visions. SPIRAL DREAMS is a collection of shorter work including strong examples of psychic dreams; further vols, viewable at his site (see links, have a surreal/visionary bent, with Buddhist overtones. His MINOTAUR'S TALE is a foray into stark realism that's somehow more dreamlike than his dreams.

Dick, Philip K.

Many of his books explore anti-lucidity: the inability to tell what's real, what's a dream. Try THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH, or UBIK, or the early novel EYE IN THE SKY, and nearly all his late works. Even his most famous, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, realer than most, has strong hints that the alternate world he paints so convincingly is just a self-bursting bubble--a dream.

Du Maurier, George: PETER IBBETSON (1892)

This eccentric novel opens like a sweet, simple memoir of the author's childhood in 1840s Paris, but it morphs into a tale of lucid dreams shared by two lovers kept apart by day. First they build their own dreamworld, and then explore the lives of their ancestors back to cave times (anticipating Jung's notion of the collective unconscious by decades). You may find it too New Age (80 years before the term existed!) but I liked it. Find an illustrated edition--Du Maurier was a cartoonist for PUNCH and he obviously had a ball with these drawings. Compare with the roughly contemporary story "Brushwood Boy" by Kipling.

Dunne, J.W.: AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME (1920s)

Dunne looked for precognition in everyday dreams, not spectacular cases. He simply compared his dreams to waking events a few days later as well as earlier. He found dream images echoing the future just as frequently as the past. His examples are quiet and small--a gate and field, a particular house. But anyone approaching his data fairly has to concede he found a symmetrical pattern--rich connections to events one day off (past or future), sparser references two days off, and so on, forming a bell-shaped curve: ordinary Gaussian distribution centered on the present, but spreading into past and future equally! It's as if the dreaming mind were in a balloon, looking down on the timescape: things directly below (both past and future) are quite clear, but quickly foreshorten as one looks further into the distance. Whether there's a horizon beyond which we can't see, Dunne couldn't say--he had at least one precognition years before the event (a vivid peak experience: flying in an early plane). Like a peak on the horizon? Or looming over it?
Dunne had trouble recognizing even obvious predictive echoes. Only if he pretended they were in the past, reading his own journal backwards, would backward echoes suddenly come clear. He describes it as a trance he had to shake himself out of, over and over. Precisely the opposite of the credulous eagerness so many skeptics attribute to psychics and parapsychologists! It takes effort to strip off cultural brainwashing, even when your experience proves it false.
Dunne also points out how Einsteinian spacetime fails to explain why we experience time as a flow. To be fair, I find Dunne's own theory of "serial time" inadequate, too. But his experiment still poses a real problem for physics and psychology--and when I bothered to really try his method, (unlike most of his critics), I got his results.

Epel, Naomi: WRITERS DREAMING

A collection of interviews with writers on the role of dreams in their creativity. Admittedly, in a lot of cases the answer is "not much", but the very question forces even writers who think they ignore their dreams to look deep into the nuts and bolts of their creative process.

Faraday, Ann: DREAM POWER and especially THE DREAM GAME, for advanced dreamworkers:

Still my favorite how-to books on dreamwork. Faraday started as a sleep researcher whose subjects wanted to know what their dreams meant. Open-minded, entertaining, full of examples, with original and quite sound theories on literal dreams and dream warnings, visual and verbal puns, and the notoriously spotty nature of psychic dreams (Briefly: most of us picture ESP as like vision, but it's more like radar or sonar--without active scanning, no echoes come back. And we scan for what concerns us now, not what in hindsight looks important.)

Farmer, Nancy: THE EAR, THE EYE AND THE ARM

This book began from a dream, though it quickly went its own mad way... to win the Newberry Prize.

A FLOCK OF DREAMERS, an anthology of dream-inspired comics

The only anthology of dream art I've found yet. About twenty pieces with vivid images but weak or no plots--except for strong dreams by Kjartan Arnorsson, Bob Kathman, Luke Walsh, Danijel Zezeli & Jessica Lurie, and as usual Jim Woodring. Like other published dream art, nearly all the contributors are male.

Freud, Sigmund: The INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

I plowed dutifully along, not enjoying his pomposity, but gritting my teeth, until he concluded an otherwise plausible dream analysis by explaining away an apparently psychic element by saying the dreamer censored the REAL dream--her reported dream is wrong! That twists "real" into a pretzel even Moebius couldn't follow. And it's not just one dream. Freud rejects whatever won't fit his schemes--dreams, data, disciples... Read him for yourself, but I find him next to useless.

Gaiman, Neil: SANDMAN. (10 graphic novels forming one epic, though volumes can stand alone.)

Sophisticated comics studded with dozens of dreams, showcasing every flavor of dreaming. Gaiman's personification of Dream slips from a brooding emcee of other's dreams to a flawed hero trapped in his own lonely dream-tale, doomed if he can't unbend and change. Gaiman cheerfully loots Classical mythology and the Bard, but form his own genuinely Shakespearean tragedy of redemption. Start with vol. 2, A DOLL'S HOUSE.

Garfield, Patricia: CREATIVE DREAMING and others.

Solid how-to books in the vein of Ann Faraday.

Gendlin, Eugene: LET YOUR BODY INTERPRET YOUR DREAMS

The book pioneering the concept of "felt shifts": the "click" you feel when a dream or part of it suddenly makes sense. He validates this subjective sense--an excellent antidote to all those great dream-theorists who'll push their interpretations on you...

Glaser, Nina: OUTSIDE OF TIME, RECOMPOSED, and MALE BONDING.

A San Francisco photographer whose surreal Butoh-influenced images affected my dreams strongly--see Eel Girls. I still don't know if her work rises from dreams or just looks dreamlike.

Gurganus, Allan: It Had Wings (short story in WHITE PEOPLE)

A tale about finding an angel in the back yard, based on a childhood dream. For an oddly parallel short story and novel, see David Almond, above.

Hillman, James: THE DREAM AND THE UNDERWORLD

A slightly pessimistic book on the rock-bottom depths of the human psyche, which he thinks doesn't change. My dreams disagreed, but what do they know?

Jenks, Kathleen: JOURNAL Of A DREAM ANIMAL

Fascinating--at once a dream-journal, a literary work (her raw entries are better than most polished writing) and a spiritual autobiography. Jungian but with a raw passion most such journals lack. Compare with Nelson's NIGHT FISHING and Moon's DREAMS OF A WOMAN.

Jones, Diana Wynne: Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream (short story in Jones's MIXED MAGICS; also in DRAGONS & DREAMS, Jane Yolen, ed.)

A precocious dream artist just repeats her commercial successes, until her dream-characters rebel... Funny.

Jung, Karl: MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS, and MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS:

The first is an autobiography so full of dreams and visions it shows Jung to be a working shaman in all but name. The second is a good popular summary of his thought, with lots of dream examples, though far less personal. Of the dream experts who matured before the discovery of REM, Jung is the most modern. I do think he has rather traditional notions of gender, but then I live in San Francisco.

Kathman, Bob: BOB'S DREAMZINE (dream comics)

I haven't seen this yet. He has a small online sample called THE NIGHTLY RECORD.

Kerouac, Jack: THE BOOK OF DREAMS

I'm embarrassed to say I still haven't read this famous dream-journal.

King, Stephen: IT

The scene in the junkyard with the flying parasites is straight from a dream. In an interview, King said he was stuck and asked his dreams for a way out, and he dreamed he was the girl in the junkyard, looking into an old refrigerator, and...

Kipling, Rudyard: BRUSHWOOD BOY:

A sweet short story on shared dreaming, in which lifelong shared dreams bring together two soul-mates. Compare with the roughly contemporary novel "Peter Ibbetson" by George Du Maurier.

LaBerge, Stephen: LUCID DREAMING and others

Several books by the foremost researcher of lucid dreams. His thought's evolved from the early books, which viewed dreams as a new space for scientists to explore and experiment in, to a more respectful approach conceding that dreams may have their own agendas.

THE LANGAGE OF THE BIRDS: collection.

A book of interviews with shamans and articles on their practices. Fun! Much of it is first-person shop talk, with less secondhand anthropological blather than is usual in shamanism books.

Le Guin, Ursula Kroeber: THE LATHE OF HEAVEN

George Orr's dreams change things--so his therapist sets out to save the world, via the power of George. The tale of a man who can change anything but his shrink's ego! Simultaneously a black comedy about rationalization, a bittersweet love story, an updating of the worldwide fable "The fisherman and his wife", a fine parallel-world story, and a Taoist parable. Way better than the movie (either version).
Her short novel THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST sets a grim parable about Vietnam in a dream-oriented culture. I'd rather have read a (unique) utopia than a (standard) political tract, but glimpses of utopia are better than nothing.
Her recent short story, "Social Dreaming of the Frin" (in CHANGING PLANES) asks: what if we always dreamed together, publicly?

Lewis, C.S.: VOYAGE OF THE DAWNTREADER

This kids' book contains a startling chapter in which the voyagers land on an island where dreams come true. Not day dreams--real dreams. They flee in terror before anything's even bitten them. In PERELANDRA, Lewis equates dreams, pagan spirit worlds (fair enough), and... Hell! Lewis is a highly imaginitive artist who fears his own dreams. Here Be Monsters...

Lindquist, Rowena Cory: PRELUDE TO A NOCTURNE

A short story in DREAMING DOWN UNDER, a collection of Australian speculative fiction, involving two sisters, one of whom matures while the other, due to a controversial treatment, stays young. Lindquist's afterword says "Amazingly, the title and attitudes of the main characters came to me fully formed in a dream."

McCay, Winsor: LITLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND, and DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND

McCay inspired me to draw dream-comics. LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND has intricate dream palaces, amazing graphics, and a simple but quite Jungian story, as Nemo slowly grows from a scared little boy to a prince of the dream realm. Clunky word balloons, but otherwise many decades ahead of its time. RAREBIT FIEND has a different dreamer each week, letting McCay play with bizarre dream imagery with no plot restraints--just newspaper censors.

MacDonald, George: LILITH

A pre-Surrealist novel asserting the world is a nested dream--a dream within dreams--and one difficult, but essential, to wake from. One of very few Christian writers who expressed dreams' depth and complexity--most were hobbled by a rusty chain of associations: dreamwork is witchcraft is devil-worship.

McNeil, Carla Speed: FINDER

A brilliant independent comic from Lightspeed Press. Not all about dreams, but the recent series DREAM SEQUENCE certainly is--and wrestles with the misuse of dreaming, with implications for any world-creator, whether shamanic or literary or artistic.

Miesel, Sandra: DREAMRIDER (also revised and reissued as SHAMAN):

Under either title, this novel, nominally science fiction, does a better job of showing a modern shamanic initiation than most nonfiction. The how-to bits are solidly researched, but it's also just plain fun to watch Ria bust loose from her narrow life (with a little help from her dream-friends).

Moon, Sheila: DREAMS OF A WOMAN.

Long, coherent, literate, mythic dreams. But the title's true. Moon writes like she's some generic "woman," not an individual. She'll tell some outrageous weird-ass image, then only say "it was an archetype" or "it was an aspect of me." OK, but who are YOU? And WHICH you? A subtle cowardice--instead of exposing her private life, she gets cosmic on us! She may go deeper in private, but the book leaves a false impression. It's a bad guide for beginning dreamers, worth reading just as a warning--she's not the only dreamer to hide the heart of her dreams behind safe, solemn, impersonal Jungianism! Compare with Jenks or Nelson.

Mukherjee, Bharati: JASMINE and WIFE

The endings of these two novels, as well as a number of her short stories, come from dreams. In each case, just as she was about to write the final scenes, she dreamed a different and better ending.

Moore, Alan: PROMETHEA

An ongoing series of comics based on Gnostic mysticism, about a girl who gradually becomes an avatar of a goddess/principle who wants to free our souls. She undergoes a gradual shamanic initiation, moving further and further into dreamspace. I think Moore's done solid research but not personally experienced all the astral dream-levels he portrays... still, the premise and images are compelling.

Nelson, Katherine Metcalf: NIGHT FISHING

Selections from her dream-journal. Each dream's a one-page prose-poem facing an illustration in clear light pastels. Little contrast--lack punch. She favors squares & circles, solid but a bit static. Her writing's vivid, literate, a bit elusive. Her dreams? Enlightened, humane, Native American in spots, with lots of animals, especially fish. Fragmented plots, but often her shifting scenes are contrasting two choices, and dream figures often give explicit advice. Compare to Jenks or Moon, above.
A note on gender: I thought female characters dominated Nelson's dreams about 60/40. Then I counted. Near-exact gender equality! I'm a feminist and I STILL mistook true equality as slanted toward women! So brainwashed...

Norton, Andre: STORM ON WARLOCK and ORDEAL IN OTHERWHERE:

Early science fiction novels about a matriarchal, dream-based society. The second, in particular, had a big influence on me. Sketchy action novels, but hardly fluff--they tackle a host of issues pop culture of the period ignored--fundamentalism, lucid dreaming, sexism, capitalism's looting of native cultures...

Nylund, Eric: PAWN'S DREAM:

Fantasy novel of a recurring dreamworld that's real. The dream dynamics are convincing, but are just the frame for a rather conventional fantasy plot within the dreamworld--the dreamer must take charge of a family power struggle.

O'Neill, Dan: HEAR THE SOUND OF MY FEET WALKING, DROWN THE SOUND OF MY VOICE TALKING (graphic novel) and THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIENCE OF ODD BODKINS (collection of his comic strip ODD BODKINS)

Sixties-era masterpieces full of metaphysical and political humor, in loose dreamlike drawings inspired by the Tarot and Krazy Kat... Dan warped me for life. Or made me a mystic. Or both. He also did the radical DAN O'NEILL'S COMICS AND STORIES (3 issues?) and the raunchy, satirical MICKEY MOUSE MEETS THE AIR PIRATES FUNNIES (series, only two completed, for reasons that follow...) Parodies Disney's early cartooning style. Disney Corporation sued him for slandering their mouse. Dan was forbidden by court order from drawing mice. So he introduced Virgo Rat, a fat old rodent suspiciously like...

Pierce, Meredith Ann: THE DARKANGEL TRILOGY

A fantasy quest, set on the Moon, that Pierce based on a series of dreams by a mad patient of Jung's--and you can feel it. Compelling, genuinely dreamlike, yet working as tales, too. Some heartbreaking images!

Prelutsky, Jack: THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN RIDES TONIGHT and NIGHTMARES: POEMS TO TROUBLE YOUR SLEEP

These two collections of comic/scary poems for kids almost all come from dreams. In fact many poems in his other books are dream-based, like "Forty Performing Bananas."

Henry Reed: GETTING HELP FROM YOUR DREAMS

This 1970s book has fine examples of group work, still cutting-edge today, though I quarrel with the Me Decade values: Reed says demand gifts from dream figures and show them who's boss--even kill your enemies and trust they'll return as allies or servants. This so-called Senoi tradition (which the Senoi people disown) assumes that those you hurt or kill are just shadowy parts of you, other masks of God. Charlie Manson assumed that! And it didn't end with Reed--much American dreamwork underrates fairness and community. It's not proven dreams are only about the self!

Reklaw, Jesse: DREAMTOONS. Collection of 4-panel strips

Reklaw draws dreams contributed by his fans, in a simple crisp Zipatone style, like Tom Tomorrow. Surreal deadpan humor, emphasizing dream-absurdity. They're masterpieces of 4-panel compression, but I'd love to see him draw longer, more continuous dreams he'd have to treat meaningfully, where he couldn't milk disjointedness for easy laughs. He also has a new collection I haven't yet read: CONCAVE UP. See also Kindred sites for current link to his online zine SLOW WAVE.

SANDMAN see Gaiman, Neil.

Sayles, John: THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (film)

Sayles says, in "Writers Dreaming," that BROTHER was inspired by three consecutive dreams. If he'd stopped at dream one the film'd be called ASSHOLES FROM OUTER SPACE. He said "Nah," but his dreams came back with a rewrite, with more sympathetic characters: BIGFOOT IN THE CITY. He said "Better, but it's only good for a half-hour short." So his dreams tried a third time, and that version is the feature film he made.

Schreiner, Olive: DREAMS

I still don't know if these fables are actual dreams or if Schreiner crafted them consciously, or something in between. In any case, they're powerful shamanic visions, with scorching imagery. Schreiner was an early 20th century writer whose present obscurity is probably due to her fierce political radicalism--it's sure not because her stuff is dull.

Shakespeare, William: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, and THE TEMPEST

Two plays about dreams, one a playful young man's farce on fairies and illusions, the other a fable about shamanic renunciation--and, in the end, the renunciation of renunciaton.

Shaw, Jim: DREAMS. Marketed as a graphic novel; really an artist's dream-journal.

Intricate shaded pencil drawings of dreams--surreal, manic, insane dreams. Shaw's a working artist, and it shows, both in the vividness of the graphics and in his obsessions--he dreams about art and its meanings. Strange intricate knots of images and ideas--vivid, but nothing like my dreams at all!

Silverberg, Robert: LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE and sequels

A world where dreams are regulated by a government bureau! CASTLE drifts away from dreams to more conventional politics, but the early parts are fascinating. How do you cope with insanely megalomanic dreams if there's evidence they're true?

Starhawk: DREAMING THE DARK; THE FIFTH SACRED THING; etc

Dreaming the Dark is a solid guide to visionary work and the cultural blinders we need to shake off; it prompted a spectacular dream of mine. Her other nonfiction is equally strong. The Fifth Sacred Thing is a utopian novel illustrating her ideas, with psychic dreamers playing an interesting but not central role.

Stearn, Jess: EDGAR CAYCE, THE SLEEPING PROPHET

A bio of a very effective American shaman who never heard the word. Not exactly dreamwork, but not exactly not, either. For more on trance work, try Jane Roberts.

Storm, Hyemeyohsts: SEVEN ARROWS, and SONG OF HEYOEHKAH

Plains dreamwork and shamanism taught in subtle and well-told teaching-stories. As cleverly nested as Sheherazad's tales, too--tales within tales, dreams within dreams, lives within lives.

Thomas, D.M., THE WHITE HOTEL

Sigmund Freud treats a woman with psychosomatic illness and eerie dreams, unaware they're premonitions of the Holocaust... A novel with humor so dark it can pounce on you like the monster under your bed.

1001 EROTIC DREAMS:

A thousand and one sex dreams, and not one like mine! In fact, whole themes are missing: cross-gender dreams, transformation dreams, and dreams of animal people or other dream-creatures. The latter category, as "dreams of sex with animals", is explained as a sign of cruelty or insecurity. A spicy curio of a book, shallow in its interpretations, being particularly ignorant of shamanism and spiritual sex. I include it as a warning and an example of dream dictionaries--books trying to interpret dreams via fixed, universal meanings. Five thousand years of books like this, and the premise is still wrong. At least this one isn't serious. So many of them are.

Van de Castle, Robert L.: OUR DREAMING MIND

An excellent history of the dance between dreams and culture, by a pioneer of modern dream research. Comprehensive. Van de Castle is cautious, fair-minded, and always reliable. Solid bibliography too--much of this list derives from it. The best modern reference book for dreamers.

Veitch, Rick: RABID EYE: THE COLLECTED "RARE BIT FIENDS"

"Rare Bit Fiends" is an ongoing comic showing Veitch's and other people's dreams. RABID EYE's examples are mostly brief and surreal, like Jim Shaw's DREAMS or Jesse Reklaw's DREAMTOONS (see above). Veitch's dreams are mostly of his buddies and, well, guy stuff--work, fights, comix, monsters, war. So different from mine! But it's a vivid tour of this man's dreamworld. Courageous. The format (usually one page per dream) is limiting--Veitch only shows the climax, the shock-value panel. Yet his appendix says these dream-scenes, in context, meant things for him that aren't evident to us readers--some dreams were even psychic (predictions of the Challenger crash, etc!). I'd like to see his full process on the comic page... Oh, well, that's MY thing!

Woodring, Jim: JIM (comic book: Vol 2 #1) from Fantagraphics

This second half of this issue is one long shadowy tale that Woodring says is a recurring dream, wrestling with the central issues of any creative artist--ego, images, discipline, soul-sculpture, even dreaming itself. Powerful. Much of Woodring's work (like FRANK and THE BOOK OF JIM) comes from dreams.

Yeats, William Butler: COLLECTED POEMS; CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN

Yeats was, besides a poet of great technical skill, a visionary of equal dedication. He worked with dreams, induced visions, Tarot, automatic writing, you name it. The play "Cathleen" is dream-based, as are dozens of his poems, which constantly wrestle with the basic shamanic task: how to embody complex visions, both in art and in life.

Zograf, Alexandr (pen name of Sasa Rakezic): LIFE UNDER SANCTIONS, PSYCHONAUT

Zograf's a cartoonist trapped in Serbia under the UN embargoes. He just wants to draw dreams, not report what it's like outside--but his worlds can't help fusing.