A small, clear, simple precognitive dream... and its un-small, un-clear, un-simple cause...
DAY: Friends described JW Dunne's experiments with time. I decide to look for dream elements from the future.
DREAM: I meet Oscar Wilde & other writers I dislike. A nonsense word like TELPOE or PELTOE appears...
DAY: A letter arrives full of anagrams (based on my poetry) about Oscar Wilde & other writers I dislike...
Our Star Trek team explores alien ruins covered in cat scratches. Or are they writing? I uncover
Roman letters, Arabic numerals, I Ching trigrams, Chinese characters, Chumash pictographs.
Reading them turns us into cats! One cat lays eggs, but two more try to smash them...
CAUTION: CAT-EGG VANDALISM
I meet a big cat who seems invisible to most humans. She talks in Armenian speech balloons.
Too bad she already has a boyfriend! But her mere existence proves there's hope for me...
DREAM: to see a film, Colquoon or Colhoun, I take a surreal ride through a multiplex...
NEXT DAY: a friend shows me an article about a 'forgotten' surrealist, Ithel Colquhoun...
I always wrote some letters strangely--my 'd' was nearly illegible. So I set out to retrain my deep motor skills...
Jung's patient dreamed of a strange name, Ericipaeus. She didn't know Jung had been studying a minor god
named, he thought, "Ericapaeus". He'd misread the manuscript; the name was actually spelled a third way...
I'm falling into darkness. I feel like screaming, but I remind myself I'm dreaming. "What is for me here?"
I demand. "SHOW ME!" I begin rising toward the stars. Huge metal discs with alien writing rise with me...
Nabokov's uncle left him a fortune but the Revolution took it. He dreamed his uncle said "I shall return to you as
Harry & Kuvyrkin." 40 years later filmmakers Harris & Kubrick paid Nabokov a fortune for the rights to Lolita...
I learn my book A Void, supposedly written without the letter E, has lots of them--
crawling with errors. But at least I can spy on the neighbors...
I must rescue Ann Soforth from righteous rapists, then Paul McCartney from a musical curse...
CAUTION: ABUSED CHILD, JAMES JOYCEAN PUNS
An archeological dig inscribed in the Roman alphabet, Chinese characters, Ethiopian
syllabics and unknown scripts. A carved egg bears news from the future, not the past...
CAUTION: CALLS PROPHECY A LEARNABLE SKILL
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
My friend Lily misuses the word 'Mareotic'; I know, because I once saw it in a Yeats poem, thought
the footnote explaining it was fishy, checked it myself, and found the editors hadn't even bothered to...
Joyce, in Paris, dreamed he was attacked by three madmen, Minos, Eaque and Rhadamanthe. Three weeks later,
a madman mailed explosive packages around Paris--signed Minos, Eaque and Rhadamanthe, the Judges of Hell...
I'm in the cellar, petting a tiger-cat. She speaks inside my head: "I'm tired of living on bread. I need meat."
I make excuses--it's pricy--then see big hanging quarters of meat. I hide them! She says "Call me Mistress
Touttmouss"--well, something like that--I know it's English, but can't make it out til I wake, when I see...
I'm in San Francisco trying to throw Sauron's Ring into the Cracks of San Andreas.
But a sexy sorcerer steals my sense of I! How can you act without a self?
EMRICH: I'm in a conference center in "Pondecherry", even though it feels nothing like India...
THOMAS: A woman picks fruit off a tree by a pond and calls them "pondicherries--with an 'i'"...
CAUTION: WILL ANNOY E.S.P. DENIERS
Biking, I find myself chanting a dinosaur name--Rhamphorhynchus. I don't even know what kind it is.
At home I open a novel, and a Rhamphorhynchus appears, politely defined for me by our obliging universe...
CAUTION: E.S.P.?
I wake up dreamnesic but singing a nonsense line about "samphires"--whatever
they are. Half an hour later, I encounter the word for the first time in 45 years...
I find the sketch-journal of a beautiful winged sphinx who left her mythic isle
to explore a great city of crazy bipeds, called San Francisco...
CAUTION: SPHINX SEX, SPHINX ATTITUDE
In a world where we speak in Mayan glyphs, comedian Tina Fey (dressed for prom night)
climbs a Tibetan peak to learn levitation. But the flying monks are scared of women...
CAUTION: COOTIES; ROWDY JESUS; MAY FLUNK THE BECHDEL TEST
You get 26 dice with letters on every face. Roll them all. Your haiku must use every letter. Go!
A murder case. But the chief suspect had taken a troubling dream to an interpreter.
The investigator saw its strange images might be puns that named the real killer. They did...