A vampire wrestler on the Throne of Heaven pins me. Visualization and prayer don't free me--in fact, they get me killed...
I was at a dream conference and brought up a recurrent theme
that others hadn't mentioned: multiple antlerlike branchings...
In the cave, I chanted "Come Kama, Come Love..." and a procession of strange creatures came down the stone steps;
squirrels, peacocks, a blue birdlike being with golden headdress, and then the Goddess of Love. Her form shocked me...
a dream of flying, shapeshifting and spiritual advice.
When a flood traps me in my cabin, I dream I meet
an old man who warns me "Let your butterflies go"...
A spot on my elbow triggers a dream of being in a suicide clinic, getting the injection, starting to die. Yet
for two years, I put off having that spot checked! Only after a second warning dream do I go in to find...
Gennadius re-dreams a previous dream, helping him see he's dreaming. His guide points out spiritual implications...
A mom in the Black Forest photographed her young son and took the film to a lab in Strassburg. War broke out; she never got back.
Two years later in Frankfurt, she photographed her young daughter. The film came back with both her kids--superimposed.
The film with her son's latent, invisible image had wandered across wartorn Germany to be sold mistakenly as fresh--to her.
CAUTION: TWISTS "COINCIDENCE" INTO A PRETZEL
I dream a stranger's observing a lawn party at a house I've never seen.
My beau recognizes the party from three years ago, but not the man. Two years later...
In occupied Germany, Pat flags down two friends just before a truck crash. Except...
Pat was in England at the time. She sensed they were in danger, but...
M. Teste, 1830-1848, and Maurice Macario, early 1850s? four dreams predicting illness
Dog bites doctor's leg. Snake bites scholar's chest. Apoplexy kills a
government minister. Tonsillitis flattens a sleep and dream researcher...
I'm a priestess from an island of women; I meet an angel
who charges me to harvest all the dreams of the world...
From the dream-sketchbooks of Jane Gifford: odd creatures, flying,
coping with Covid, and cleaning the underworld (as one does)...
The Lord Chancelor can't sleep, and when at last he does, he drifts through nightmares full of baby lawyers
and potted tradesmen sprouting fruit, and cutthroat corporate scheming. But that's Victorian dreaming!
The hero Gilgamesh troubles his city till he dreams the gods will send him a best friend & lover, Enkidu...
CAUTION: SEX
"If you put an ear to the door of books and the doors of the night,
if you pay attention, you can hear the conversation of poets..."
Girondé dreams she's floating through the oceanic abyss...
One pays for soaring high with solitude of the soul...
The dreamer overflows from her egg, spills out to become a waterfall, a stampede of horses...
Is that a madwoman riding a horse, or a cougar pouncing on a deer,
or are these dream-creatures wildly making love?
The dreamer becomes a horse, the horse becomes a unicorn.
Dreams have their own quests apart from the conscious...
"Freedom is a gift you give yourself." But it doesn't always involve seahorses or babycarriages covered in quills...
Three unicorns gallop out of the waves...
The dancers, in a frenzy, stripped themselves. Not just their clothes; themselves...
A jungle cat needs to take time out from a hard day's predation to have a quiet smoke...
"Our resurrection is not entirely in the future; it's also in us, it begins, it's already begun..."
Gisli had two spirit-wives who told him in dreams how to evade the bounty-hunters after him... for 13 years!
Adele: alone & scared in a dark wood--but her friend John came & shook a tree; it burst into flame!
John, the same night: found Adele scared in a dark wood. Shook a bush & it burst into flame...
Viga-Glum dreamt a giantess came to visit. "She is the spirit-guide of my grandfather in Norway. He is dead...
A high place at night. The lights of a great city below. I step off into the air, and dance...
Dream-elephants slowly bring me to terms with the early loss of my dad, and lead me out of a cult I've grown beyond...
We were as if brother and sister of old in the desert land;
they sold us in slavery together before this life had begun...
I recognized the saboteur. If I had neglected that dream warning we all would likely have drowned...
I often dream I'm lost in a strange city, wandering the unfamiliar streets
in search of something unknown, and possibly unknowable...
Dream: wild animals race across Paris, but in my hotel lobby, a small creature on my shoulder murmurs "Je t'aime."
Awake, I know those racers from the themepark where I work. But the creature takes me way back--to Paris, 1918...
CAUTION: ONE-NIGHT STAND
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...
Decades ago, I was too shy to talk to Frances. Now I'm going upstairs with a girl who looks like her but...
I was nineteen again, riding my horse down a bad road in Virginia. After three hours, my horse spoke up...
Wednesday night I dreamed I had to jump overboard... that night there was a wreck
off the Yorkshire coast in a storm and the captain ordered his men to jump into the sea...
The ship I was on going down in the Irish Sea. It was not till yesterday,
looking at an old paper, I saw about the sinking of the Rowan in the Irish sea...
One image has remained with me for more than sixty years:
a man in oilskins bent double under the blow of a great wave...
Greenwood dreamt her murdered neighbor's ghost gave her tips helping her catch his three killers...
A con artist fools me and a waiter. But if my dreamfolk are all me, who's fooling whom?
Greenwood dreams he finds a severed hand on a mantelpiece. The next day
it happens! But he sees no moral, so he dismisses it...
Mrs Griffiths has the same nightmare three times before she asks her nephew to skip a fishing trip...
Guan Xiu, a painter in the late Tang Dynasty, dreamt that sixteen arhats
or luohans (Buddhist sort-of-saints)asked him to paint their portraits--
not their earthly forms but their (rather peculiar) astral forms. He did...
Four childhood dreams predicting Gudrun's life; plus a predictive dream by her husband Thorkell Eyjolfson
Gudrun dreams of four treasures: a hood, a bracelet, a ring, a jeweled helm. Her cousin sees them as four marriages...
Their bodies shift, and alter. Antlers sprout... much has been taken, and something terrible is grafted...
CAUTION: RAMPANT PHILOSOPHIZING, HUMAN SUPREMACISM
I was walking on an endless plain, upright and tense, walking beside you,
hurrying. What were we doing on the burning plain? What war...
1: Dad picks up Bigfoot; he bites off my ear. 2: Dad abandons me in a canyon full of wolves. 3: The man who
killed my family hands me his ax. 4: Bees move into my pillow. 5: A marionette with razor-nails lures me close...
CAUTION: OUCH
Enlightenment came to me via that shimmering, animated Hamm's Beer billboard...
CAUTION: SAY YES TO DRUGS?
His literary afterlife was just six inches of shelf space. But then friends brought more, trucks more, til I slid down hills of paper...
CAUTION: DEATH'S AFTERMATH
She turned me to a pig. I rooted hungrily, not for food but for moly, the sacred herb that could undo her spell...
CAUTION: TRAPPED IN PORCINITY
I dreamt I gave birth to a white-hot stone shedding sparks. Most folk would find my son strange...
On a hunt, Guntram took a nap. His courtier saw a snake emerge from his mouth; it tried to cross a creek. The
courtier lay his sword out like a bridge, and the snake crossed, climbed a hill, and went in a hole. It returned
and crawled in Guntram's mouth. He woke and said "I was crossing a river on a great iron bridge..."
A man in a castle plots against his enemies, while his rebel-daughter meets her lover outside...
J.H. dreamt both his mother and Queen Mary appeared in mourning. Within days, both were dying...
My dead friend Charlie and his sister and I are driving around Lake Erie.
We know it's a dream and he's dead, and yet we're joyous...
Soon after my friend and mentor James Merrill died, I had recurring, elusive dreams about him...
a dream-poem provoking a 2008/9/16 dream by Chris Wayan
I was in my mother's closet, trying on her outfits, and trapped in Hamlet, too...
An eagle lands near me and turns into a woman. She says "That pet eagle you had as a child?
It's me!" I'm a bit surprised. She wants a turquoise bead with a hole in it, and I look for one...
Before I'd ever heard of planes, I dreamed one landed near me. A white man invited me to ride,
and we flew over Oraibi. I told people but they didn't believe such a thing could come true...
twin dreams predicting their children and nation will prosper.
Ragnhild sees a lovely tree rooted in her pain and blood;
Halfdan sleeps with pigs and dreams he has a great head of hair...
CAUTION: KIDNAPPING, ARSON, GENERAL BARBARISM (check the date!)
I found myself in a cafe in Amsterdam--or was it Sevilla?--with Kevin, who I knew was dead...
CAUTION: GRIEF
Astronomer Edmund Halley had dreamed of sailing to St Helena in the South Atlantic, but didn't realize until he arrived how accurate his dreams had been...
At first I was afraid of the blackbird, who asked me to come away with him--I wasn't ready to die--
but now I see him as a friend and guide. One day when I'm ready, we'll fly--and I won't be back.
A murderer was stalking Mt Tam. I dreamed I met the murderous spirit; only
by allying with small dancers from inside the mountain could we defeat it...
CAUTION: NEW AGE
I paint my thumb with bitter aloes to break my habit of sucking it at night. I dream of
wormwood, ox gall, mineral salts. I consult Dr. Save Me and even the Pope, but...
I'm on a mesa, looking down in terror. I try to pull back but a compulsion
overrides my will--I crawl helplessly forward until I go over. As I fall...
CAUTION: PRE-FREUDIAN DISMISSAL OF WARNING
On a long steamboat voyag, a living skeleton swaps a warning for my watch; when the whistle
sounds, the boiler will blow. As it does, I dive in the river and wake to discover a real whistle...
CAUTION: UNCANNY SYNCHRONIZATION?
This strange girl reminds me "I rode your bike recently but you forgot." She's right! Rode it in an earlier dream...
Elizabeth tried to tell her dream, but her husband didn't listen. When his dad didn't show up for dinner, it was too late...
I find myself at a party in London observing two minutes of silence for the dead of World Wars One and Two. But then, in the park,
blowing across the grass like leaves, were people. The windows imploded. Surely, I thought, there should be a flash before the wind?
A coach-driving vampire seemed kind of cute until he raped me. If that's even his real face...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE
Crissi is a strange creature that has prowled my subconscious for a few years...
CAUTION: SPIDER SEX, BONDAGE
She asked "What, plus a teaspoon of knowledge and
a teaspoon of wisdom, makes three teaspoons of nothing?"
A winged serpentine beast from my dreamscape...
CAUTION: SNAKE BREASTS
Daniel thrice dreamt of money hidden under a great stone in a nearby field. He dug and found a surprise...
CAUTION: IRISH HUMOR
Hecuba dreams she gives birth, not to a child but a flaming torch! But she lets Paris live...
CAUTION: MORAL NO-WIN SITUATION
I dreamt I was begging Jim not to kill himself, but when I woke, I couldn't bring myself to call. I hardly knew him...
CAUTION: GUILT OVER (PREVENTABLE?) DEATH
Stalin's police held my fiancée incommunicado. But I dreamt of her prison, cellmate, and the odd game they played...
A surgeon persuaded me to swap my face with another man's. But I found I felt compelled
to carry on his life, not mine--to pass for him. And when I demanded my face back...
In the dream-corridor of the many doors, I meet
my husband, my lover, and my daughter...
My friend Mr D. studied psychic research but was skeptical of telekinesis. But 24 hours after his own death...
A ghost complains Herdis's grandma bothers her. Herdis wakes, tells Grandma, and they dig up the floor to find...
I dreamt Anacreon the poet reeled with drink and lust--and I am wild and wanton like to him...
This big red rabbit in a straitjacket was chasing me through a big gothic mental asylum. Scared me silly...
I walk home with a puppy to meet my mum, who addresses the dog by my name
and invites him in, while I head for my doghouse in the garden...
After breaking with the Catholic Church, Greg had recurrent nightmares about its history of atrocities
and cover-ups. Out of this came a series of paintings unlike his famous book covers. This was the first...
CAUTION: MURDEROUS MOB
A dog implausibly large, with fur the color of rose-quartz, wanted me to follow her...
I dreamed I was a cattaur...
Mysterious doings on an archeological dig bring a creature back to life, but this is no Mummy...
I'm a sexy monster, but my sister sells me to the Devil as his bride...
CAUTION: SEXY CREATURE, ROTTEN SISTER
Talk about mixed messages! Or... is it really?
CAUTION: NUDITY, SLIGHT FIRE HAZARD
My boyfriend and I are beings with pinkish joints...
CAUTION: SEXY CREATURES
She was a girl playing in the woods when she found the dying silver fox.
His body transformed into a fox-mask. His spirit said "When you come of age..."
I loyally served a demon who punished me until at last he sent me to hell. And STILL I didn't rebel...
CAUTION: BLOODY ABUSE
This black wolf thing named Venom often shows up in my dreams.....
CAUTION: SCARY WOLF. OR OILSLICK. ONE OF THOSE.
I only meet my wolf-soulmate in recurrent dreams...
CAUTION: SEXY CREATURES
I find my lover sharing our secret joke with another. But I already knew
I'd lost her! Why'd my dream salt the wound?
A couple slips in and out of sleep, dreams, one another's bodies and dreamworlds, trying to connect...
CAUTION: FREUDIAN SYMBOLISM, LITERATE WRITING
In the border-mountains, there is a Trumpeter. His clear, triadic melodies break out through the frosty air,
or through the swirling mists. No one knows whether the Trumpeter is theirs or ours...
Suddenly, out of the clouds, a man came shooting down, head first, at a terrific pace. He landed on his head with a sickening...
CAUTION: GRISLY
My grandmother told me dreams tell the truth. I was skeptical. I dreamed my brother came home from Indian school. He looked terrible--
skeletal, with sooty skin. Soon after, my brother got sick. He looked as he did in the dream. We brought him home. Four days later, he...
DREAM: the storm was strange and fierce. A voice warned me the clouds were somehow dangerous.
DAY: I got caught out in a fierce storm. I dismounted and sheltered under a tree. Lightning struck, and...
When my grandmother was young her husband had a prosperous ranch. She dreamed some Indians attacked.
She convinced them to hide; the Utes killed or stole nearly all their sheep. But at least they were alive...
My dead father said a trusted servant was stealing our goods through an unlocked skylight. This proved true...
I found a honeymoon cottage by the sea, and the old landlady gave me a very reasonable rate. Everything was fine...
When my first play failed, I tried to console myself by reading Paradise Lost.
But drama and devils don't mix...
I meet a ghost girl and ask her about death. I figure she knows first-hand. And she tells me...
We were inseparable: the tiger, the fox, and the wolf.
Together our magic lit up the darkness around us, until...
His sewing-machine design failed--until dream-cannibals caught him & jabbed him with weird needles...
CAUTION: OUCH!
War between a big conformist land and a small land devoted to quality. Big Land's rulers all die, but at last, sheer
numbers defeat the smaller land. Now their leader, beaten and starved, awaits the sword at the end of the hall...
CAUTION: POLITICAL? ACCORDING TO CARL JUNG!
I saw a dark object like a cloud at a vast height, but coming swiftly down toward the earth.
It resolved itself into iron bars--tens of thousands, millions? I said: this is the end of everything...
I'm on stage. I have to sing. They just stare. I try dancing. Stony silence. At last,
a second me leads me offstage, saying "You can only fail so many times"...
A black anchor floats in the sky to the east. Impossible cities rise on mountaintops, only to erupt in flame.
The sea rises to drown them. On a plank, I ride the flood. In the ruins, I find angelic statues--who wake...
DREAM: Hunt's mother points at a tall figure in the shadows and shrieks "Death! Death!"
ONE YEAR LATER: in Jerusalem, his hostess finds her young son dead, and shrieks...
CAUTION: BEWARE THE IDES OF JANUARY?
I'm walking down a crowded hall at school when I see the Speaker of the House with my chemistry teacher...
CAUTION: POLITICAL INVECTIVE
I was just a street rat, but I danced with the princess at a ball, and fell in love. Three rich suitors pulled their blades...
A maneless lion-boy wins his people's respect. While training, he sees weird trespassers
who seem to be from someone else's dream... and ten years later, he finds that dreamer.
DEBBIE: I dream of my friend G's new girlfriend C (who I've never met) and tell her "you'll never fill my shoes."
C: I dreamed I met Debbie. She wore green shoes, and said "See these shoes, you could never fit into them"...
CAUTION: WILL ANNOY E.S.P. DENIERS
I see a shop in Kyoto in the early 1900s. The old woman running it is calm,
with precise movements and sure hands. A voice says "That lady is Igort"...
My heart's desire was a new piano, as hopeless as owning a yacht. The dream: a huge space in the air, full of wonderful...
Indiana: Father's favorite clock, a cuckoo clock, stopped at exactly the time he died...
Florida: an old clock silent for years started up at 10:20, the time of my husband's death the day before...
My mother's face took on a sudden expression of astonishment--possibly agony. She said "Your father
is remarrying." I laughed. 'Impossible. He'd have told me. I had a letter from him only a few days ago..."
My grandmother dreamt a white-faced black mare trampled me in our orchard.
We had no such mare. But 29 years later, I boarded a man's two mares...
I was barren. I asked Asklepios, God of Healing, to make me pregnant. Soon I was--for 3 years, until...
My home was burning; I despaired. All my negatives would be lost. But
some figures arose from their photos and walked out of the fire...
I dreamed a sentence over and over: "In my country I shall plant birds."
And I saw a man with many birds flying around him...
A crow offers me a ride. I hang on tight and he flies me up into a beech tree where lots of other crows
perch and talk. Then he flies me to another tree and leaves me. I think "How am I gonna get down?"...
Three men chase me. I can't get away so I turn and fight, and put out one guy's eye. That makes them pause!
At last they back away. As they paddle away in a boat, I realize who they are: Muskrat, Otter and Mink...
CAUTION: ANTHROPOLOGISTS!
I dreamt my wife and I lived on a farm. I was summer and all was ripe. But I found I wasn't
digging vegetable beds, but graves. I woke. By next summer, my wife and child were both...
I walked along a hilly road with ropes and boxes. My wife vanished in a hollow. But
my path went on until the hills were blue in the distance. An old man interpreted...
MY DREAM: I was walking along a hilly road, my uncle ahead, my stepdad behind; trying to keep them in sight. My mom appeared and I woke.
MY MOTHER'S DREAM: the same. She told hers to me before I told her mine. She thought it meant my uncle would die first, then me, then...
CAUTION: APPARENT TELEPATHY, BUT MISINTERPRETED MEANING
When I was little, two boys with strange laughs invited me to play. Their house was crowded and underground.
After I came back out, I realized their home was a grave and they were ghosts. They gave me a power...
I must outrun the rising moon so I don't turn into a wolf and
kill my friends, but only a werewolf is swift enough to...
Jack was a parachutist on D-Day. His mom dreamt of the strafings, the ditch he hid in, the deaths of his comrades...
Jacob dreams of angels climbing to heaven. He meets God, who promises
the Holy Land to him and his tribe. Jacob uncritically accepts...
I was ordered to join Hitler's army. I dreamt a booming voice proclaimed, "This train is going to Hell!" So I...
A night-fiend strove to open the door I held shut between us--
until I realized I too was terrible, and opened it to find a great...
CAUTION: THE DREADED PROSE OF HENRY JAMES
Africa. The elephant seemed attracted to a strange wave of white heat. It faded to nothingness. Suddenly we too were enveloped.
I became flame. I was consumed. I was a thought center, alone in a white void. To create a new life I had only to speak the word...
CAUTION: DEATH
When I try to play the piano in public I get sabotaged. At last I see a child who says she can't play while she's in pain...
At a dream workshop for kids, James's trickster dream-figures provoked Jessica to dream one chased her;
fleeing, she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, became a mermaid, and married the trickster...
A stone bridge, at the crossing of a road and a river. A signal sign indicates the name of the place: (YOU)...
No matter who I dream I am, twin secret agents dog me, eating my soup, playing my games...
CAUTION: PHILOSOPHY!
I protect my friends from a demon, but the dream-guardians I summon terrify me...
I was two-thirds of a love triangle, but I always lost out. Flying was some consolation...
CAUTION: RAT DEATH, EVIL WHALES AND ADULTERY
A black dog leads me into the fairy wood. I'm curious what happens
to those who walk under the tree where the Lightning Tiger lurks....
I'm a drug-addicted amateur dramatist. A businessman and I bring humanity back from extinction, but...
CAUTION: TORTURE (brief), ADVOCACY OF WAR, HUMAN EXTINCTION (offstage)
A job as the only priest on an island colony sounded perfect, only I'm the wrong religion...
CAUTION: DOGMATISTS AND DEAD BIRDS TALKING
Erica dreams that during a protest she's caught in a radioactive flood...
Michael dreams a nuclear forcefield makes his fingertips explode and congeal into weird knobs...
Joanne dreams she meets nuclear mutants with curling black nails great for peeling potatoes...
Scott dreams the world goes silent and white, bleaching out. His hands dissolve...
Patagia dreams she fakes a Hindu rite, causing Electra to dream she fakes leadership in a refugee band. But are they faking?
I asked my dreams if I should leave my alcoholic wife. I dreamt we were conjoined flames, green and blue.
I awoke hopeful, and knew I'd stay. For eight months my wife struggled. Now she's been sober five years...
I dreamt I was out of my body. My friend John was too, so I slipped into his to see how it felt. Big lungs,
big muscles! When I woke, John told me he'd had a great out-of-body dream and was reluctant to wake...
I dreamt of a surreal poker hand where one card changed to create a full house. Next weekend, I was losing when...
From the neck up I was me; from the neck down, Woodrow Wilson in his old age, paralyzed.
My presidential aides divided up my duties, and ignored me...
I started to get up from my chair, but I couldn't move. I looked down at my legs
and saw they were manacled to the chair with a heavy chain...
I found myself in a cage, with only a bench and piles of old books. A mirror showed
I was old and twisted with speckled skin. In horror I said "I must get away"...
I was trapped in a river, trying to swim to shore. But I was in a powerful eddy. No matter which way I swam...
As a boy I dreamt I was trapped in a wooden chair, paralyzed, as a stampede
rushed toward me, just as my grandmother was paralyzed and chair-bound...
Cops hunt my girlfriend & me all over town. Strangely, whenever I ask them to back off,
they do! Alma's resigned--lets them arrest her and put her on a raft. But she turns into a...
I was having dinner with friends when I saw on the wall a huge skullbone
spider. But I lost the word for spider, and my friends seemed not to see it...
What I write in my books and think I have made up has a creepy way of coming true. I noticed it first...
CAUTION: DISTURBING INVOLUNTARY MANIFESTATIONS
Some 200 Brits have dreams and premonitions of black landslides smothering children.
After heavy rain, half a million tons of coal slag sweeps over two Welsh schools, killing...
Eileen rose out of her body. A man dared her "How far away can you go?", then stole her body!
Jony and their daughter Kim had nightmares of invasion too; all three woke up shaken...
At the beach, facing down a wave taller than you,
the only thing to do is levitate discreetly...
Resistance fighter Josephus, cornered, took a hard look at his prophetic dreams and decided to make peace...
Adele: alone & scared in a dark wood--but her friend John came & shook a tree; it burst into flame!
John, the same night: found Adele scared in a dark wood. Shook a bush & it burst into flame...
Edgar Allen Poe confronts his dead girlfriend, who wants to drag him into the grave with her...
CAUTION: HUNGRY GHOST, SEX TALK
Such pressures there are on the sick to act well! I implore you, ignore them all...
CAUTION: EXPLODING TEACHER
I know I'm a murderer; what isn't so clear is what I killed and why...
CAUTION: DISMEMBERMENT, GUILT, DREAD
I search for family skeletons, but then a talking plant on TV inspires me to seek the sun and fly free.
But certain velociraptors and barbarian swordswomen object...
CAUTION: DUELS, FISH ABUSE, THE F-WORD
Malevolent artwork terrorizes my baby and me! What's to be done?...
My foxy lover teases and tempts, but I can't let him into the patio for fear he'll hurt the rabbits…
CAUTION: UNFUNNY BUNNY PUNS
The clay came alive, shaped itself, started dancing...and mutating.
Three friends in one bed dream three dreams in one night about a talking rabbit with a persistent request...
My teacher insists, "You'll be scared too, when you see it." But when he shows us humanity's greatest fear...
CAUTION: UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS
One boring lonely day, I meet a cute teenage bunny who wants to play with me! But half an hour later…
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, INTERSPECIES FLIRTING, AND LOSS
My mom hires a therapist who really goes for my throat! Why is she so desperate to make me lose my...
CAUTION: OVER-THE-TOP CONFRONTATION
At our commune's new house, pandemonium breaks out when
our matriarch meets a spook. Can we live together in peace?
Through wild jungles and over the Mattress Mountains, I lead a giant purple newt to love...
My own fear creates a field of time/speed distortion; can I use it against my attackers?
In a museum full of spacetime-bubbles holding lost souls, the museum-goers are as weird as the exhibits...
When whites invade, two shapeshifting Native American cubs resist architecturally...
At boot camp for sex slaves, a rapist makes me a surprisingly tempting offer. But it's really not about sex, is it?
CAUTION: ORAL SEX, OUTRAGEOUS COMPARISON
I want to drink the elixir, but negative 20 spoons block me! Can I remove them? With warped teacup logic & reciprocals…
ESP? Weird luck? Subliminal perception? Whatever it is, it kicked me right out of a bad day...
We lose control of our new time machine, which seems to have its own agenda...
CAUTION: CONTEMPLATION OF SUICIDE, CHRONOLOGICALLY IMPAIRED DREAMER
When my friends and I learn to fly, all of Middle Earth turns against us!
Fleeing from Saruman's army, I discover the backstage truth about our world...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, DOOM, PHYSICS! YODA IN THE TUB!
Xalgriin is a sweet stegosaurus boy locked up in a research lab, planning to free not just himself but others...
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...
My mom and I road-duel an alien beetle, then investigate a deepspace Marie Celeste;
then I spy for the Angevin Empire to protect the Crown Jewels...
Jung's ally in killing the murderous German archetype Siegfried was Atmavictu.
Here he's worn out, turning to stone, ready to manifest as a different guide...
He dreamed of a street with a cathedral, and round the corner, two cream horses pulling a fancy carriage.
In Spain on vacation, he saw the street and the church. To test the dream, he turned the corner to see if... CAUTION: CALLS E.S.P. & SYNCHRONICITY TWO PROBLEMS NOT ONE?
In a castle, a white bird lands on the table and becomes a little girl who plays with Jung's kids, hugs him,
then turns back into a bird, explaining "I can become human only for a few hours of the night, when...
A green monster guards the divine egg; with the right prayer, it
explodes in a fountain of mad color, half grenade, half freed jinni...
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...
My home seemed antiquated but pleasant. I found a stair down to a darker, medieval floor.
A dark stair led down to a Roman cellar. A trapdoor led down to a cave with ancient skulls...
Jung's visions of dragons evolve from fiery destroyers
to thieves who can be forced to give up treasure
to peacful, luminous guardians of the sacred...
Jung was told in dreams and visions that Europe would soon drown in blood. But he just couldn't believe it...
In dark, grimy, rainy Liverpool, a friend shows me a park with an islet
in a pond, where a great magnolia tree shines--an oasis of light...
Jung, in crisis, drew a complex mandala, and then wrote about its
symbols & archetypes, always claiming a patient had drawn it...
Jung (at age three and a half) sees a terrifying god deep underground, and is told "That is the man-eater!"...
As a child in Orléans, M. Deschamps got his first taste of plum-cake from a M. Fortgibu.
As a man in Paris, Deschamps saw plum cake again--but not to eat. M. Fortgibu had beaten him to it.
Many years later, Deschamps was given plum-cake. He said "All that's missing is M. Fortgibu!"...
CAUTION: TRULY POINTLESS AND THAT'S THE POINT
As she told me her dream of receiving jewelry--a golden scarab--
I heard a tapping on the window behind me. I opened it. In flew...
An version of the Egyptian Ship of the Sun with a mutant Osiris at the helm,
in a monster-infested sea: image of the spark of consciousness in a sea of...
Jung and a little brown man shoot down Siegfried the German Hero, riding his chariot of bones. Wait... his what?
CAUTION: GRIM
Jung walked against stiff wind and fog, sheltering a tiny light, generating a huge eerie shadow--his other self!
He concluded this was his life-task--to nurture his spark of awareness & rationality in the dark. But...
In hindsight his dream models four key Jungian ideas: Self, Ego, Shadow and Unconscious--at age 18!
CAUTION: REJECTS JUNG'S OWN DREAM INTERPRETATION!
A mom in the Black Forest photographed her young son and took the film to a lab in Strassburg. War broke out; she never got back.
Two years later in Frankfurt, she photographed her young daughter. The film came back with both her kids--superimposed.
The film with her son's latent, invisible image had wandered across wartorn Germany to be sold mistakenly as fresh--to her.
CAUTION: TWISTS "COINCIDENCE" INTO A PRETZEL
The cosmic egg nests in the branches of the tree of life, glowing with
Muspel-fire. But the tree must periodically burn to regenerate life...
UFOs hover near enough so I can see they're truly lenses--lenses projecting images.
I judged UFOs to be projections from our minds, but now I see I am their projection!
A huge wolfhound tore past me. My blood froze. The Wild Hunt was carrying off a soul...
Hiking, I come to a chapel where a yogi is meditating--on me. Creating me! And when he stops...
"But what is wrong with my friends' faces? Why have they changed that way to wood?"
I slept late and felt a bit stiff, but until my friends pulled it out of my neck I had no idea...
At a dream workshop for kids, Kamar drew this dragon, explaining that
the dragon had a door, and inside lived a witch with two cats...
"Oh no" she moaned. "I don't want Frankie to go to that camp. He must not go there." She began to cry...
Swedenborg stuns the Queen of Sweden by whispering a secret only she and a dead man knew;
A widow begs him to ask her late husband to find a lost receipt. Swedenborg reveals a secret drawer;
Swedenborg, at a dinner party, grows alarmed by a fire that nearly burns his home--500 km away!
Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush were having a secret love affair, and I was sharing their bed...
My anima sends me on peculiar journeys--smoke rings, islands, conversations with a stone--
but at last it's just us. She has something more she wants to teach me. On that bed...
CAUTION: ASTRAL COME-ON
I was at a nice party when a wild horse burst in and insisted on taking me into a wilderness...
CAUTION: CUT-OFF ADVENTURE?
A knight falls in love with a fey woman, until her previous victims warn him in a nightmare that she is...
CAUTION: GOTH TO THE MAX
I dreamt I was in the outermost circle of Dante's Hell, among condemned lovers, floating forever, in love, in bliss...
Keats met two winged lovers nesting in the woods: Eros and Psyche, the last Olympians, worshipless...
Kekule dreamed solutions to the thorniest structural chemistry problems of his era not once but twice...
Often while lucid dreaming I find myself exploring a pathway with amazing detail.
Sometimes a doorway seems to be asking me to continue on to a higher level...
This dreamer is starting to notice certain subtle signs that all
is not normal and this may be a dream. Well, not that subtle...
I was focusing on emitting healing energy from my hands which resulted in
an "electric" flow of energy through my entire body. Later in the dream...
I kept dreaming demon cats tortured me. At last a vicious dog joined them. He wanted to kill me, but
the chief cat wanted to keep playing with her prey. I realized they were my mum and dad, and said...
Aliens take me to meet my soul. It's on a pedestal in a quasi-Roman villa. I'm ashamed to
see my soul's just a tribble. But it sings soulfully, and when happy, it purrs...
I was moved that Betty came to see my two babies despite her illness, but shocked when her father told me...
An indestructible camera relentlessly shows me what passengers feel on every crashing plane...
CAUTION: PAINFUL READING
A lovely pecan pie, but the guests are cutting pieces, dropping them, hands trembling
in growing hunger desperate the dark voracious guests fighting now to freeload...
CAUTION: NOT ABOUT PIE
My family and I are prisoners in a camp that will be H-bombed so our remains
can be studied. I write a Buddhist poem preparing for death...
CAUTION: GOVERNMENT ATROCITY
Two DC-6s catch burn over New York. Me? I'm a naked child in a Babylonian temple in Jersey...
I'm on trial. As I argue in my own defense, I float over the court! The jurors murmur
"Why does he even bother protesting? He's beyond this world"...
Finally I've turned into an old whore... a silly Jack Kerouac whore with that same old tired old gasafaycagoo...
I'm in Mexico. The mountain of the gods looms over Coyacan. Around it, silhouetted
on the rising moon, wheel terrifying griffinlike winged horses wearing capes...
I've climbed a cliff and cower on the brink; but for for the first time I need not
fall or retrace my dangerous path down. I know I'm dreaming, and wake...
Starlets Zaza and Eva Gabor grow old shopping, smiling, covering their fears, until...
Perched on a huge sandpile by the train track, I wrote. Then met a narcissistic
hipster chasing happiness and sex. But this globe's austere and full of hurt...
I also dreamed the world was a mathematical abstract, like, by subtracting 740 from 1000
you got 260 which meant 'Egg' more or less, so if you wanted an egg you had the egg...
My party's a slow disaster. Talk, booze, pot, sex--nothing works out.
What will Mom think? At last, trapped in an office, I get the Message...
Wounded, bandaged, chased by cops, I end up heading a huge children's parade,
marching to Mongolia. No secret what it's about--On The Road was just published...
I look down by the dock and see the Navy vessels anchored in the bay and the crowds of sailors walking on the water towards the land...
I wanted to steal this pink woolen sweater. I didn't need it;
what I really wanted to steal was middle-class security...
June admired this forgotten philosopher Plipias or Snipias, who wrote 'Never go on strike against man'...
Green snakes fly over Elkhorn Marsh. My mom says "They're just cockroaches." She's not fooled by my... friends?
IRENE tries to mold Francesca like clay to bring her back to life, and does--for a moment...
JACK finds his brother Gerard dead, and all Jack's words can't revive him...
As the train pulled into the cathedral William Burroughs and I saw amid the pews
the Hound of the Baskervilles transform into a great black bird and fly...
In America the woman has the Police State Telephone in one hand and My Child swathed in
incredible bills in the other... Ah, Kafka, you never had it so good...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, MISOGYNY
I walk the corridors smiling, realizing for the first time that I don't have to go to high school---because I'm a great writer...
I commute to my dreamjob on a four-story bus; then my baby brother
(who I wouldn't let eat any chocolate pudding) utters a new poem by William Blake...
A sex-fantasy dream that shifts backstage and gets real
In Charlotte they want to lynch her just for dancing. I protest. As she leaves town, she tells me...
I dream of strange wide brown houses on the tracks... A knock wakes me--our train's moving out.
As we pass through San Mateo, I see them on the rails, ready to roll--the first prefabricated homes...
They're hanging the political traitor in my closet. I stand horrified.
The old man's resigned--no complaint. It's my father, I now realize...
My mom had to climb a ladder down the side of the Empire State Building; I'm told she fell and died...
I try to protect the kitten from being strangled and girl geniuses from the depth charges; ...
Us guys take turns getting pounded by this fist of cloud that must never hit
the world. It hammers my skull and retreats; we laugh and switch positions...
The vulture people are fucking in the city dump. I end up their guest, given putrid food
in their cold stinking house of rancid grease. I'll become a vulture too...
CAUTION: UGH!
I feel horrified--how publishers will batten on the sufferings of junkey musicians... unbearable...
My friend put an ad on her gown, so I try one on our house. I have big ideas for more, but a pickpocket...
Giant worms put me on trial for wearing a nameless hat, but I like their punishment so I taunt the judge...
I dreamt a friend poisoned me. I "woke" and slew him in fury. But guilt gnawed me. I confessed and was due to hang...
CAUTION: NOT A CALM GUY
Eileen rose out of her body. A man dared her "How far away can you go?", then stole her body!
Jony and their daughter Kim had nightmares of invasion too; all three woke up shaken...
I dreamed my mouth was full of typewriter keys and a typewriter ribbon issued from the back of my head. Joan
was hanging out the window by the ribbon. I reached for her, but my hands kept hitting the space bar, and down...
I'm watching MTV. Laurie Anderson gets inside my remote control. I try to change channels
and she turns my head into an apple. I grope for a potato peeler, and carve a new mouth...
Lucifer throws firebolts from a Montreal tower; monsters stalk us; next comes the flood...
I was officer of the watch in the Southampton. I knew that as we passed an islet a mile ahead, a man would fall overboard...
Should Anna quit hiding her psychic dreams? She dreams a cat eats her bird & burglars loot an open house.
Maybe keep hiding?
I argue that Christ's "blood" is a metaphor for "spiritual perfection." But my mom says I'm killing her; she begs me to repent...
I lead my daughter up a thorny path, but she's getting badly scratched. Shall I leave her in that fishing village? She wants to...
Gazing at the moon, Anna finds herself touring the Solar System, meeting all the planetary guardians...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL ECSTASY
We were on a train headed for a crash. No one was in the engine. Rather than jump, my friend insisted we try...
Goaded by a green spirit of envy, an Ice Age sorceror kidnaps Adam's Eve, arresting human evolution...
Anna trusts to luck, but her mentor urges her to plan--"Think it out!" And what are these cards?
Poem from a book on how love can save lives & souls, read in two dreams of a Renaissance astrologer's library...
I was warned about soul-devouring art in the haunted house, but I didn't expect to find an entire art salon...
CAUTION: ABSORBING ARTWORK
I find myself in a vault with tables where half-dissected animals writhe. Hidden in each was a human shape...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
Malaria nearly kills a talented young artist; he must retrain from scratch. Why? Well, he's not exactly himself...
Jesus's disciples kvetch that Paul, who never knew Jesus, twisted his clean simplicity into a religion...
CAUTION: JARGON, HERESY (on one side or other)
Dreams and other revelations shouldn't be dissected--they need to be reveiled, not revealed...
CAUTION: INTENSE MYSTICISM
I'm a French revolutionary facing a firing squad. But palmistry predicts I'll be strangely saved...
I was shown what veils the God in us: Blood (violence), Idols (dogmatism), and the Curse of Eve (sexism)...
CAUTION: FUNDAMENTALISTS (OF ANY FAITH) WILL SEE RED
Kingsford meets a girl who burns herself as a protest. K flips out! She rants "This is wrong!" when help is what's needed...
CAUTION: RANT MIDWAY YOU'RE BETTER OFF SKIPPING
A mystic postman delivers a letter on the world's best glasses and a reply from me, telling how to find them...
A dream telling how to acquire mystic power: raw food, no sex, meat, or booze; just meditate in rural solitude...
CAUTION: EXTREMISM
I wanted spiritual guidance. A guide appeared regularly in my dreams for months, but then
vanished. I incubated a dream, and was told "you have a big job you forgot! Come back when..."
On my way to a wedding, I dream I'm in a war. I liberate a camp of prisoners. But one man's so injured
he can't be moved. We have to leave him behind. My rescue of his fellows has effectively killed him...
CAUTION: GUILT AND LIFE-QUESTIONING
I dreamed a large meteor had struck the Earth. I found my Dad just as the shockwave hit...
CAUTION: APOCALYPSE
It was Christmas and we needed to buy gifts. But the shopping dragged on
and when at last we went to the register, the sales clerk laughed...
I hear voices: "The road to success is in Kafkat, in a place called Goshen." I look back, and see seven male shadows...
Someone's prowling outside my window. I'm paralyzed in bed, but I force myself into action...
In Japan, sick in bed, reading a book on radiation sickness, I dream of a restorative ritual for trees...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
As my brother was dying, I had a series of vivid premonitory dreams about him. But I was unprepared for...
I save our horses from a fire, but they run back in. Then it's
my family I must save from themselves. At last, it's my turn...
Dreams of my childhood--bootlegger dad, critical mom, gun-
happy uncles, slaughtered squirrels, slaughtered Jews...
R.D. Laing gives two examples of dream-spillage suggesting it's not passive but playful...
Our starship crashed on an alien world. Humanoid aliens attack us. A witch saves us. A second kind of alien
attacks; again she saves us. A third--ugly, monstrous--and the witch goes off with them! Turns out they're friendly...
It started like a nightmare--someone behind me, a groping hand that's not human...
It was a Hindu god! He made love to me. Felt great until he said: "You're taking too long!"...
CAUTION: SEX WITH A SELFISH DEITY
Lanyi dreamed in detail of the assassination of his friend Archduke Franz Ferdinand hours before it happened...
I knew I was on my bed, yet I felt myself falling into a tesseract--huge, crystalline, colorful.
Inside I met an energy being who explained I'm not meant to die yet; this was just training...
CAUTION: UNCONVENTIONAL GOD
Laurel and Frank each dream the gardenia in their bedroom went
neglected & unwatered, but with care is now blooming again...
In prison, the midnight bell chimed. I dreamt I saw a cavalry column of men and horses skinned, gory, still marching.
Wagons of the dead passed for hours. As the guard changed, the gate crashed, waking me--just minutes after midnight!
CAUTION: PROVES NOT ALL DREAMS ARE REALTIME
I dreamt I could clearly see the sun's corona, like a lion-mane of fire. But the
corona dwindled; then the very sun dimmed, shrank, and went out. I thought...
CAUTION: POLITICAL?
My Cambodian village was burned, my family murdered. At 12,
I was the oldest survivor; I led a band of kids to the border...
Layanasha foresaw the British would bring a great snake spanning Maasai territory, then a plague killing
half the tribe, a second plague killing nearly all the cattle, and finally huge birds flying over the veldt...
I visit a beautiful artificial mountain with loved ones--but my demons overwhelm me one by one.
CAUTION: SUICIDAL FEELINGS, BODY HATE/FATPHOBIA, IMPLIED RAPE
by Daughn Lee and Roswila; 1999 (2000?), a collaborative dream-poem
Alternating stanzas by very different poets, based on
Roswila's dream of bellydancing in the streets...
John Lee, sentenced to hang, dreamt he walked to the scaffold but the trapdoor stubbornly stuck.
He woke, told his jailors the dream, walked to the scaffold, and...
I admire a baby, and talk the tired mother into washing it. I go get some
clean baby clothes and return to find she's roasting her baby in the oven...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, DENIAL
You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river
with darkness coming over / and salt has lost its savor...
A disintegrating board game reminds me to take time to enjoy things beyond work and activism...
CAUTION: NUDITY, TRANSGENDER, ASTROLOGY
The black bird hovered above my cradle, and several times struck me with its tailfeathers between my opened lips...
A vivid nightmare that turned out a week later to be devastatingly true ...
I'm in a barn full of peaceful animals lit by a golden glow. And then they all blacken, crinkle, and corrugate like burnt paper...
4 AM. A train wakes us all. We watch it pass, thinking of lost friends. And then I wake again to find...
I meet William Blake! He says "The will is given us that we
may know the delights of surrender." While in my bedroom...
I had to deliver a message from the gods. Not that I understood its meaning!
I arrived at your home, and found I liked and envied your big, warm family. ..
A man I loved goes into the Jungian depths, but when his anima appears in the mirror-pool, his nerve fails...
I'm a small child in Finland writing out the meaning of three ancient runes
about trees, ships and elbow room. They seem to hold serious advice...
I loved the feel of the green snake, and reassured my friends it wasn't poisonous, but really...
I led a blind man through a vast art museum underground. But guiding him, I too was blind to the beauty...
Two archangels meet; one red and gold winged, one blue and green. In heaven, form reveals
worldview. Yet these two souls in dispute are great; rather than fight they appreciate...
I meet my own muse--the muse of all of us, perhaps--scooping water from a sacred well...
We go swimming in a sea full of wrecked tankers. We explore one derelict, but ebb tide pries it off the bank,
out to sea. Do we swim for shore, or wait, hoping high tide will wash it in again? Guess wrong and we die...
A workmate said "They feed they lion"; two dreams later, the poem emerged as you see it...
CAUTION: POLITICAL RAGE, SURREALISM
Only at age 33 did Marc Liblin at last meet someone who spoke his dream language.
He married her, and moved to Rapa Iti, the only place in the world it's spoken...
I asked my dreams why I had no more sexual desire for my rage-prone boyfriend. I dream
a nature show says "Rabid dogs can't be cured" and shows the horrible wounds they inflict...
CAUTION: THERAPIST TRIVIALIZES URGENT DREAM-WARNING
Lily & Wayan have simultaneous dreams of bizarre quarrels over seating bankers at picnic tables...
A dream of exhibitionist girls playing with breast milk turns out not to be symbolic, but psychic...
CAUTION: BREASTS
I drive around hunting for my car, but even though it's a bright red rental car
I can't spot it anywhere. From my car. From my bright red car...
I dreamt I met my friend Karen, looking like she did years ago... except she was
towing around a son about seven years old! And she'd been childless. I called her, and...
I dream I'm telling a tall tale about a cat-funeral with hung-over mice pulling the hearse. But it turns a bit too real...
Lincoln dreamt his body was lying in state in the White House. A guard said he'd been assassinated. Two weeks later...
WAYAN: My housemate Linda shows me her weird navel--and pussy, to compare...
LINDA: At Christmas, I run through snowy streets, naked except for earphones...
CAUTION: NUDITY & AWFUL DREAM-PUN
The world was ending. Volcanoes, floods. Refugees trudged by in the mud, carrying their belongings
on their backs. I think I better get dressed to go. But I can't find anything appropriate to wear...
The far future. The moon falls to Earth. But then... the moon unfalls!
Golden light nurtures a rebirth of our dying ecology & civilization...
Central America. A pale sorceress has stolen the splendor of the Mayan pyramids. Is pagan
power strong enough to defy the church's promises of savation & its fears of a rumored devil?
I'm trying to bathe, but there are Boat People in the tub!
And my inner Grandma's spying on me, behind her fan...
The sixties. I'm at a party with Eydie Gormé and Sammy Davis Jr.
I get a laugh with a pun about para-keets/para-chutes/para-shoes...
My glass heart survived the rocket's blast, but I'm stranded on this barren world.
Wrapped in glamor, we climb a steep forbidding stair into a rosy, fake tomorrow...
The past. Burma. I'm shown a stupa covered in gold leaf, and given a key
to a tunnel where they say a tooth of Buddha is encased in glass...
The past. Summer. Sunset. I want to sneak in a final
swim--in someone else's forbidden backyard pool...
During Tiananmen, I was in Beijing for a conference. I heard chaotic noise outside, and the muffled sounds of gunfire.
I dreamed a star painted the sky an eerie purple-green. Children sang, marching over snow, rifles fitted with bayonets...
Each spring my mom took us up to Yellow Crane Tower.
One night I dreamed I rode the crane over the city of Wuhan...
WAYAN: I'm a cat climbing on sea-cliffs. Fear I'll fall. Run into Silky, an archer firing
a line across to an islet. Now the Deer People can build their gossamer bridge...
LIZ: I was hiking along a trail atop sea-cliffs. But I feared I'd fall...
A newsreel showed a flier for the Schneider Trophy Air Race. I felt a violent shock and said "He's going to die..."
A man frames his big brother, til their sister makes him shoot his own reflection. Neither one expects...
Loewi thought nerve impulses were transmitted chemically, not electrically. But he couldn't prove it, until one night...
I'm in a cavern. A large green & brown dragon goes over to a machine
and gives me a green egg. A gift. It comes to me this is "dragon bane"...
Examples of inexplicable moods that appear (after the fact) to be reactions to future events...
At ten, I fasted a long tedious time. I dreamed a bird offered me showy gifts, but I kept to my grandmother's advice: never take the
first offer. At last a big, strange bird from the north, a white loon, offered me long life and health; that I accepted! So now I'm called...
I was at the beach with my friends. It was fun. But gradually they were
laughing at me, not with me. Then they picked up burning sticks...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
Terse dreamlets quietly catch World War I's effect. Faith died in the trenches...
I dreamt a couple toss out a shabby old hen. But it lays golden eggs! She becomes an eagle and carries me off to...
As a boy, my family urged me to aim low and follow our trade: stonecarving. I dreamt two strong women fought
over me, a grubby sculptor and an elegant writer. I sided with the writer, and she let me ride in her flying chariot...
I live two complete lives with the same woman in my dreams, then wake up next to her...