THE WORLD DREAM BANK: Topic: Alternate History

The World Dream Bank:
Alternate History

Dreams set in parallel worlds, alternate histories, if-time, and chronoloops. All those moments that aren't so easy to label past, present OR future.

When I was a kid, I read an old pulp science fiction tale by Heinlein ("Elsewhen") that had a tossed-off yet quite ambitious model of all possible spacetimes and experiences--simpler and clearer than any of the many-world or one-world physics models I've seen. Sort of a Feynman diagram for cosmoses! Picture a hilly landscape dissected by rivers--rivers of time. Height is unlikeliness: outcomes of events slope downward (much like Richard Dawkins's "Climbing Mount Improbable", written decades later). Time-streams are where many possible outcomes are indistinguishable, and reality runs dense. In this model, past and future are local--just going with the flow down the local slope; upstream was your past. But if you're in good shape, you can (the story's premise went) hike upstream or down, despite the current. Or over to another stream. Or even (if you have the nerve) scale the Dubious Hills.

Most time travel in dreams is along the time-stream we know, past or future; but now and then the dreaming mind will stray further afield--as you'll see below.

The World Dream Bank has 1500 dreams and dream images plus 500 other pages on dreamwork and shamanism, creativity, genius, art, surrealism and fantasy. Unless otherwise noted, all material copyright Chris Wayan, 2001-2006.

What this site is - How to read these entries - Ratings: profanity, sex, etc - Add your dreams! - Copyright - Downloading -

	AIDA'S TOILET BOAT: by Wayan; 1993/4/7, a psychic dreamtale. A sexy comedian and her troubles down the drain. A dream that turned out to be true...
	ARSON MUSIC: by Wayan; 2000/10/4, a parallel-world dreamlet Driving through California farm hills with subtly different natural laws, I find social consequences. Can physics create evil?
	THE AZTEC EMPIRE'S RESERVATIONS: by Wayan; 1998/3/19, a parallel-world dream The modern Aztec Empire is as bad as Anglos toward other Indians, for it's not poverty that hurts...
	CAPRICES: by Wayan; 2.5 MB, 2006-, a trio of nondream virtual worlds: Bizarre alternate Earths--geography turned inside out, seas siphoned away by master soup-makers, or abysses turned into continents...
	CHRONOPHOBIA!: by Wayan; 1993/7/10, a physicist's nightmare. I find myself driving a speeding car down a freeway--in reverse. And I don't mean the gear...
	THE CIRCUS HUMANS' DESERTION: by Wayan; 180K, 14 images, 1988/2/19, a holy dream. I join a circus, but soon all the best carnies sail off to the Blessed Isles. The circus animals pitch in and carry on--clumsily, lonely. Then a herald returns from the West! Donald Duck...
	COLLAPSE THEM IN THE ZONE: by Wayan; 1995/4/7, a dream of ghosts and physics. I explore a zone lost in Shroedinger probabilities, and meet time-ghosts who want to collapse into reality...
	CROSSTIME HEALTH RISK: by Wayan; 1999/7/23, a warning dream of parallel worlds. A man learns to hop between time-branches, but like all transportation, this has epidemiological risks...
	CUPOLA: by Wayan; 1994/7/28, a dream of an alternate life. I live in a cupola atop a Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury, but that's not the City out my windows...
	DON'T WANT HIM TO SOAR: by Wayan; 1991/4/18, a dream of sabotage. In a parallel world, a visionary's building the first plane only now. I'm his assistant. But I don't WANT...
	DOPPELBRUDER: by Wayan; 1985/5/9, a dream of a self at war over... labels? Lured to a parallel, feudal world by a marriage-vow, I'm trapped in my double's arrogant, twisted mind...
	DRAGON WITH A SUITCASE: by Wayan; 1994/1/8, a dream on alienation. A young dragon, raised as human, is finally setting out to see the world on dragon-terms...
	THE ETHICS OF LUCIDITY: by Wayan; 1994/2/19, a thoughtful dream on time and cause. I'm at a symposium on how our beliefs alter not just the future, but the PAST... CAUTION: CONTAINS IDEAS
	HELPLESSLY LUCID: by Alder; 2007/6/23, a lucid dream in which I’m powerless! I’m a homeless elf. We’re a persecuted minority group. I know I’m dreaming and try to change it but...
	HIS DEER WIFE: by Wayan; 195K, 20 images, 1995/7/9, a parallel world love story. I'm a slave, a scribe in the house of a Captain of the New Aztec Empire, when he brings home a wife... CAUTION: SLAVE SOCIETY, SEX, SPOUSAL ABUSE/NEGLECT
	THE HOLY HARP: by Wayan; 1994/3/22, a dream of musical guilt. The Goddess's harp, that calls in the seasons, just passed on. But the new harper has a shocking admission...
	I THOUGHT HE LIKED ME: by Wayan; 1994/8/16, a dream of rejection... or worse. I join the Seattle Tribal Council, which of course means marrying them all. The guy I'm to sleep with on our collective wedding night SEEMED to like me, till he pulls that practical joke... CAUTION: GROSS!
	THE INCIDENCE OF BUDDHAS: by Wayan; 1996/4/24, a dream testing me. I'm in a mall that enlightened customers alter with a thought. But too many Buddhas spoil the architecture...
	INUIT MEDITATION: by Wayan; 1989/11/16, a surreal dream-comedy. I'm the first tuna to get a scholarship to Stanford. Naturally I sign up for a course in Inuit Meditation...
	LIFECYCLE: by Wayan; 1980s. Pencil sketch of daydream The life-loop. A woman bears a child who grows up to become herself, who bears a child who... CAUTION: SKETCHY NUDITY
	MERCURY: by Wayan; 1987/3/7, dream-poem of a lost future. Mercury didn't spin! One side fire, one side ice. We farmed in domes, between--until the sun brightened... CAUTION: BAD SCIENCE
	MORAL FIBER: by Wayan; 1997/11/10, a dream of trouble in Ecotopia. We hippies won, but now we're backward and isolated; it's time we joined the rest of our alternate Earth...
	MY SINE-FRIEND: by Wayan; 1984/3/6, an emotional dream of time and rebirth. An animal-girl I know lives like a sine-wave, first forward in time, then backwards, dying at every zero...
	ORDEAL BY INFRASTRUCTURE: by Wayan; 1987/11/22, a Clintonian dreamtale. I want to join the inner circle of America's political elite. But to do that I have to survive the Ordeal...
	PERISSA: by Wayan; 660K total (15 images); 1997/9/13, a sexy political dream. When Perissa, an exhibitionistic centaur, bares her body in a crowded Coliseum, she also bares a racist plot... CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM
	PICNIC IN THE RUINS: by Wayan, 2002/9/18, digital painting of dream figure. On an alternate Earth where centaurs lived in a beach town with old Roman ruins, a local girl invited me on a picnic... CAUTION: NUDITY
	PYRAMID POWER: by Wayan; 1981/2/2, a dream of love and time. We drive into a zone of perpetual night to see Sweet Melinda, but our time-path splits! Two lives at once?
	THE RIFT ZONE: by Wayan; 1987/11/27, a dream warning. I'm not ambivalent--I'm confused! I live here by the Rift Zone and I don't. I'm single and not. Two lives!...
	RINGSHADOWS: by Wayan; 1985/3/7, an otherworldly ecodream. Earth has rainbow rings. They're braided like Saturn's, so their shadows create tinted microclimates...
	SAFETY GETS ME HOT: by Wayan; 1997/3/27, a dream on sensitivity. I'm trapped in a post-apocalypse pulp story! Fun for my readers, but not for me! How to escape?
	SEAMY REALITY: by Wayan; 1999/10/21, a semi-psychic dream. Sharp seams between realities cross Silicon Valley; I end up in the Dark Castle of the Oracle. When I wake...
	SHEVEK'S TIME-SLIP: by Wayan; 1996/10/14, a chronohomeostatic dream. Shevek invents time-travel and discreetly alters the past. But the future alters Shevek's present, to make his changes meaningless. Who's sabotaging him? Or should we ask... WHAT?
	TEHURA TRIES COMICS: by Wayan; 1994/7/19. pencil, Xerox, erasable crayon. I dreamed a sphinx artist visited humanity and drew the crazy natives. I copied her sketchbook and notes... CAUTION: NUDITY, PAGANISM, SLACKERISM, ACTUAL IDEAS
	THIEU, I'M SORRY: by Wayan, 1997/11/1, a troubling dreamtale. Visiting Time City, I witness the "suicide" of a woman named Thieu but suspect it was really assassination... CAUTION: SUICIDE? MURDER?
	TIBETAN DISASSEMBLY: by Wayan; 2007/7/5, a dream of a desperate ploy A woman in Tibet disassembles herself! A local god hires her spirit, but she uses the office equipment... CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
	TILT!: by Wayan; 250K, 10 illus., 2002-3, a nondream world-building game. I drilled new poles in my globe and tilted the Earth. Ice Age or Carboniferous? Flood or drought? Come visit tropical Antarctica, the Thai Desert, the Hawaiian glaciers, the jungles of France!
	TRAIL OF POGS: by Wayan; 2002/9/6, my dreams' response to the first Burning Man dream-workshop A trail toward Freedom has extra markers, for it's three trails, superimposed! Not all the cues are for us...