I was pregnant with a child not my husband's. I wanted to leave him, but not to join my lover;
I was done defining myself through men. Nor did I want the child. I got a knitting needle, and...
CAUTION: READ THE TITLE!
I'm a big cat lonely in this human city. Wish I had a mate! But as soon as
I take responsibility for an orphaned boy, in walks an older girl...
After he died, I dreamed that the phone rang and when I said "Hello"...
A bizarre little dream proving just how physical the impact of a dream is on the body...
A small, clear, simple precognitive dream... and its un-small, un-clear, un-simple cause...
An artificial intelligence acquires fans and has orgies with her groupies. Her creators
don't care as long as the advertisers get product placement. But she has this size fetish...
CAUTION: VIBRATORS
At the airport, a new automatic photo booth shoots your memories!
Julie can't resist... and emerges, excited, to find that...
PATIENT: I dreamt of a dangerous cat and a mixture of cream and booze called 'appealing nausea'...
THERAPIST: I heard a lecture on feeding alcohol to cats til they choose milk laced with booze...
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
After the death of her 5-year-old, Adela dreams Alexandrina says "Don't be sad, I'll come back." Eight
months later Adela bears a child identical to the dead girl--and she recalls things Alexandrina saw...
I mail some letters that will solve everyone's problems, but a man argues we need problems...
Are dreams really so ephemeral? Lewis Carroll, who built the Alice books from dream-shards, wasn't so sure...
In the evacuation of Dunkirk, my brother went missing. I dreamt he had a bullet hole in his forehead.
After a letter informed us he'd been shot in the head, I dreamt of him again--alive and happy...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P., ANTI-MATERIALIST CONCLUSION
I've gotten used to the second penis I grew, though it limits who'll want me.
But this morning I woke with a third. And am I sure the sprouting's done?
CAUTION: HORNY
Fleeing hunters, blocked by a cafe crowd, I fly up a long slope--but the cafe climbs on & on! At last
I perch exhausted on a peak, looking down on a now-alpine cafe above a sea of clouds. Next day...
I live in a colony of long-lived observers of humanity. But am I one? Or a short-lived human pet?
Sarashina dreams (again) she needs to leave court life and a spiritual path. Her skeptical mom sends a
priest to the temple to dream for her! But he too dreams the Goddess shows two life-choices--happy or sad...
A psychic dream about a New York ballet student who was a black panther. Lower case...
I was always the weakest magic-worker I knew. But when demons threatened my grandchild...
I dream of the legendary maiden chained to a rock, and the dragon coming
to abduct her--but neither one is as advertised. They look strangely akin...
CAUTION: NUDITY
At a party in Animal Heaven, I fall for a rabbit-girl doomed to be human dinner.
But how can I rescue her? I'm Fate's part-time intern!
CAUTION: BREASTS, BEASTS, INCOMPETENT ANGEL OF DEATH
Edgar Allen Poe confronts his dead girlfriend, who wants to drag him into the grave with her...
CAUTION: HUNGRY GHOST, SEX TALK
I'm Annie Oakley, sharpshooter, facing something scarier than gunmen: a formal ball
introducing me to my new husband's family--Austrian aristocracy! What's an American gal to do?
I'm in a gypsy wagon that always creeps north; to break the spell, I need an arctic unicorn.
Four days later, at work at the library, a new book appears: Nancy Luenn's Arctic Unicorn...
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...
I'm a priestess from an island of women; I meet an angel
who charges me to harvest all the dreams of the world...
Driving through California farm hills with subtly different natural laws,
I find social consequences. Can physics create evil?
I was a reptilian archeologist, a million years from now.
What I dug up at the beach threatened my marriage...
I'm in a cafe in Narnia when the lion-god Aslan attacks a giraffe for the mortal sin of
dating a zebra. And why not? Oral Roberts University just banned interracial dating...
CAUTION: CRINGEWORTHY CHRISTIANS
In our marshlands, tides, birds, dogs come and go; but must our friends and lovers, too?
CAUTION: AIDS DEATHS
four death-omen dreamlets, one predictive
Every decade or so, I dream a loved one says farewell and walks
down an avenue of trees. I wake to find that person's dying...
I pass a jogger with her upper torso twisted 180 degrees round, unable to see straight...
CAUTION: DISSES IGNORAMUSES--YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. OH WAIT, YOU DON'T.
A second me punches me in the breast. I fight back, yelling
"Bad Nancy! Bad Nancy!" Five months later I find a malignancy...
I'm in psychoanalysis. A diagnostic chart maps which areas of my psyche are bad:
nearly all of them. My therapist says "My God, how did your parents raise you?"
I'm an orphaned bat in an alley in a storm. I mistake a broken old umbrella's ribs & flaps
for... my Mom! I unfold Mom, and discover...
CAUTION: LIFE-THREATENING CHILD NEGLECT
I had to negotiate a salary for hosting a radio show. I'd never done such a thing. I asked my dreams.
I was shown a land of ruthless warriors with a bushido code. So I went in tough, stayed tough, and...
There are many astral planes--this world's just the cellar.
A cat and a bird in love, a literate bear and I guard the astral stair...
Night. Home alone. A huge bear breaks in! To defend myself, I have
a chainsaw. Curiously, an electric not a gas-powered chainsaw...
I screw the lightbulbs in my ears again, and this time, they stay. I sit down at the piano, and as I play...
A beetle helps me on a fairytale quest, then founds a great house;
but only a year later, he's an ancient patriarch, and I'm still young...
In the cathedral, before the nation, I solemnly crown someone with my own detached head...
I hide a catgirl behind Japanese screens. We have hot sex now & then--but usually I ignore her...
CAUTION: SEX; NEGLECT
On the bridge between waking and dreaming, a jet plane duels a T. Rex. But
the jet strays into dream space, becoming a pterosaur--and soon, Rex lunch...
My top-heavy friend Beryl borrows my ass and legs to become
a centaur so she won't fall over. But I want them back, so...
CAUTION: CRUDE AND STUPID
The Evil Librarians drop a 19th Century book-character on my head--a blue-skinned paranoid!
He tries to kill me with a trident missing one prong... a Bident? Oh, no! He's Joe B...
CAUTION: DIM VIEW OF TWO 2020 CANDIDATES
I live in a house full of artists--lively, but no privacy. And I need it--I'm in love with our cat! She's big as
a lynx, and literate. My bed conspires to find us a meadow, but a weird sign appears on her flank...
CAUTION: NUDE CAT; POSSIBLE PREDICTION
My mother begged me to stay in. I went out with Bill--who raped me. Mom later told me she'd dreamed...
CAUTION: DATE RAPE
I'm Bill Cosby's wife, finding it hard to cook for him without a stove or fridge...
CAUTION: SLANDER, I HOPED. I HOPED WRONG.
My son Billie, his Navy uniform soaking wet, cried "Oh, Mom--it's so terrible!"
and shrank into a baby again as I held him...
CAUTION: EXPLOSION
Such pressures there are on the sick to act well! I implore you, ignore them all...
CAUTION: EXPLODING TEACHER
DREAM: I see photos of smiling couples at the beach, but someone's scribbled on them: just black blots for eyes. Creepy.
DAY: Read a fantasy novel in which a prince has a cursed double, identical except he has black blots for eyes. Creepier...
My crazy friend Wayne goes bowling for busses with a black egg. Wait! Crazy? Or... predictive?
CAUTION: GEORGIA O'KEEFFE BEHAVES DISGRACEFULLY
I was Eve's guardian angel the second time round, and I blew it again. But this time, it came out right....
CAUTION: BREASTS AND BEASTS
I met a great blue eagle waiting to get into a library--but not to hunt books...
DREAM: I'm in a restaurant offering just one dish: wild boar, for $12. Excessive. I say no.
NEXT DAY: I tackle a book review I must write. The book costs $12. Excessive. Oh! It's a...
Mrs Griffiths has the same nightmare three times before she asks her nephew to skip a fishing trip...
I dreamt Bob was a tree-god enthroned in ivy. I said...
DAY: I'm preparing a report on our industry; but the numbers seem a bit odd.
DREAM: Someone points out a big inventory generated no sales or income.
NEXT DAY: Awake, I hunt for evidence the inventory's real. And find...
Reaching into her coat pockets, my sister pulls out fistfuls of bottlecaps.
Silly dream! Then my sister visits. Reaching into her coat pockets...
I was trapped inside a boulder, but as I chanted it melted around me until it resembled a discarded skin...
A sequence of short dreams full of creatures. They warn I'll face leukemia...
Stalin's police held my fiancée incommunicado. But I dreamt of her prison, cellmate, and the odd game they played...
I'm bad. I'm really bad. I know I shouldn't have done it. But my mail-order breasts were late...
CAUTION: BREAST THEFT
The Hunt of the Unicorn (yeah, guess who I am), as I fly through the worlds fighting Reaganism...
CAUTION: MOCKS THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR
The moon invites me to go flying, but I get tired of magic and just want to go shopping...
A long terrible shiver, and my whole body broke like glass. I may live months, but in that dream I died...
Princess Chinchilla and I use an umbrella to escape the Wizard. Now to escape the Dream Researchers!...
A certain intensity marks some dreams as predictive, whether they foresee a death or a crisis averted;
but I keep quiet about them, writing them only in a locked diary. Once I spoke up, and was shunned...
CAUTION: DISTURBING ANALOGY WITH SEX-ORIENTATION CLOSET
Our gods demand sacrifices. I let Mother mutilate me so I'd be unfit. But the priests turn out to be blind...
CAUTION: YOU CAN FEEL PAIN IN DREAMS
I dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering about, content with my lot. Suddenly I awoke and was Chuang-tzu again...
I help run the Dream Hotel, a giant mushroom with grand forest views.
It's the off season; our only guest is this lovely butterfly-wolf girl...
CAUTION: NUDE WOLF
The cake horse resented my taking one slice out of him; but he let me.
No second slice, though! He just laughed at me--through his bad teeth...
The night before Caesar's assassination, he dreamed he flew above the clouds and met Jupiter;
his wife Calpurnia dreamed he'd be stabbed, and begged him not to go out, but politics...
That night: I dream two teenage girls behind me mockingly croon the Girl Scout or Campfire Girls theme song...
Next evening: the two teens next door invite friends over to smoke, snicker and sing "Join the Campfire Girls"...
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER ESP SKEPTICS
A few years ago I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, though I knew they were carcinogenic.
I dreamed I had terminal cancer; my denial of the evidence had killed me. I woke, and quit...
A cart came by, drawn by a white horse, on its way to the hospital. In that cart was my husband....
CAUTION: ANGUISH, DEFEAT, PREDESTINATION
All her life, Cartwright dreamed of a figure disguised in a harlequin costume; she never saw his face.
He always drove her to self-sabotage. But near her death, she dreamt she gave a lecture, and he...
My guide in India says the Third World's doomed, but a stone dancer in the ruins winks behind his back...
CAUTION: NAKED CARVINGS
I take Cassandra's prophecies seriously, but she can't make sense of my future.
So we go see an otter with a crystal ball. But he's installed a new security system...
I'm a doctor in the future, trying to heal the neurolink between a girl and her cat...
I dream of four cats, small to huge, who teach me to assert my boundaries.
Next day, three inches from my nose, a tiny cat swipes at a giant dog...
CAUTION: APPARENTLY PREDICTIVE
I'm an alien exchange student in Palo Alto High School. I get stared at--they wear clothes, they don't fly...
CAUTION: FELINE NUDITY
I glue cat-legs on my snaky friend, despite the scare talk
from Christians sure that snakes never change...
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...
My writer-friend Cecy will do anything to get published. Anything? Oh, believe me, ANYTHING...
CAUTION: BONDAGE, not to mention POSTAGE
As a mob of Hollywood stars beats me up, I ask for autographs--and get them.
I sell the autographs to fund a statue of the beating--but with me smiling...
A sea-centaur explains why some dreams don't LIKE to surface to so-called consciousness...
CAUTION: WET T-SHIRT, EXISTENTIALISTS, HARPOONS
I dreamt that at 4:35 AM the chandelier over our baby's bed fell, crushing the baby to death. I woke and...
I'm a cheetah-boy in a tree above my childhood home. Our 'hood's full of cat people, and I
want to stay and marry a catgirl. But Trump is getting so crazy! Gotta choose. Stay or go?
CAUTION: NUDE CHEETAH
I find I'm a self-made... critter. A plushie sewn with zippers so I can stuff any bits of me that
seem flat or limp. But my filling's not cotton, polyester or foam. It's chocolate! So I have...
CAUTION: CRUDE DREAM, AWFUL PUN
I find myself driving a speeding car down a freeway--in reverse. No, not reverse gear...
I'm warily crossing an avalanche chute in winter, when my worst fear happens. Then the slide speaks up...
I was a wild mare in heat, torn between longing for sex, touch, love...and the fear of being tamed.
CAUTION: HORSE FRUSTRATION
I'm in the Mideast. No wonder it's a war zone--it's a vast pit BUILT for war!
But a spiral stair leads slowly out, to...
DREAM: a girl peers in my window & flirts with me. But why's she perched on a miniature clocktower?
NEXT DAY: on campus, I spot a girl perched on a ledge of a new miniature clocktower. Oh, that's...
CAUTION: CHILDHOOD TRAINING: "MEN ARE SCUM"
A girl I like invites me to her apartment. Her personal stormcloud hovers over her. Her housemates come home
and warn me "It's always there, it's her attitude," and I realize I like angsty intelligence, but I need a sunny...
Clouds wake up. Maybe they were always aware, but now they're aware of us. And rage against us all.
Oh, humanity'll survive. But easy times are over...
CAUTION: PARTISAN INTERPRETATION
My town transforms into a circus--trapeze artists, elephants, clowns. At first I loved it, but when I went home...
A dream of exhibitionist girls playing with breast milk turns out not to be symbolic, but psychic...
CAUTION: BREASTS
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'm trying to jam together my dream diary and my first comics. My grandmother's
skeptical. But at last, with an audible 'click', dreams and comics suddenly merge...
2021: I dream I'm confessing to friends how I'm over-compliant. I wake, and start transcribing my
1984 journal. Turn the page and find a dream of a horny stallion who's disturbingly over-compliant...
CAUTION: KINKY STALLION
At the beach, giant pink sea-foam sculptures. We climb a narrow ledge up a cliff.
Scary in spots, but we make it into colorful, luminous caverns full of concretions...
After seeing Christina Applegate in Married with Children, I dream I'm in bed with her. For
contraception, I open a little square packet with... a condom? Or is it a fast-food packet of...
CAUTION: SEXUAL THEME
Night. Rain. A hansom cab. The horse slips on the wet pavement, toppling the cab with my husband inside.
I woke sure it happened. Next morning a postman tried to tell me of the crash, but I told him...
A true tale proving the Trickster God really will provide. We're lilies of the field!
I was camping by a creek. I went to get soap and returned to find my baby son face-down in the water...
I did what I love. The money didn't follow. So now I have to guard a crimeboss at a theft convention...
CAUTION: INEVITABLE CHEKHOVIAN SHOOTOUT
I'm the receptionist for a research group of small oracular animals
in an Icelandic rift, who can sniff out the answer to any question...
Tossing out old papers, I find a dream about crows who
whack pigeons with baseball bats, ending with this moral...
I'm in an airport full of aliens who, when bored, crystallize until things get fun again.
My long planeflight glows like a dragon-hoard! But it's lonely...
Night. Rider and mount gallop in a ring, leaving a luminous spiral wake of glowing
flowers. Power builds, but when the spiral gate opens, where will it lead?
I dreamed I saw what looked like an ink sketch by Dali of a horse--but I was dead wrong...
CAUTION: YUCK
I dreamed of South American musical intrigue in a grand hotel. Enter a polka-dot shapeshifter...
High school reporters spy on a college dance. But the real action's not where they say...
CAUTION: MAKING OUT, AND I DON'T GET ANY
My co-worker Daphne is snappish and stressed. She meditates, seeking the cause,
and becomes a half-newt-half-koi in a giant fishbowl. Up shambles a curious AI...
My friend Dawn dreamed she crawled into a dumpster to live, and at last felt at home, secure...
My little sisters tell the detectives, "Daddy's ghost has
a message for you" but at first they don't listen...
I die young, to get it over with, like chickenpox. As I slowly revive, I face bias against the dead. So..
Climbing a Mayan pyramid in Yosemite with Deanna Troy from the
Starship Enterprise, we meet a gunman who wants to sacrifice...
I become a werewolf and climb into a strange attic. I find a grave marker for
an old friend--but her death date is two years in the future...
The wolf and deer people are getting along well--a relief since I like both.
Now, can the wolves learn from the deer how to open their third eye?
DREAM: bisexual deer-people go on dates. Despite their fur, they seem shy about breasts.
WAKE: read Alison Bechdel's latest confessional comic. Bisexual phase, shy about breasts...
CAUTION: POSSIBLY PREDICTIVE; TOPLESS DEER
In a parallel world, a gliding griflynx displays a brilliant
evolutionary strategy: joy! It's the strongest mate magnet...
A woman is giving birth and there is no doctor or midwife around.
Though reluctant, I have at least assisted at births, so...
I'm a world-creator, lost in mist, unsure just what sort of people to make--
since I'll be joining them. I'm only sure what not to make--or be...
CAUTION: NUDE, FURRY DEITY
I sold my soul to the Devil. On an impulse, I handed him my fiddle. To my
wonder, he played a sonata of exquisite beauty. When I woke I retained only echoes...
I built a sex-maze to reprogram businesspeople, but I only grasp its meaning when I fuck City Hall...
CAUTION: SEX, LANGUAGE, RADICAL POLITICS
I stumble into the middle of a dream conversation--on ghosts, tiaras and pigs--
and struggle to figure out what what on earth we were already talking about...
A quiet, mysterious dream image that turned out to refer to the future, not the past...
CAFTAN: My ultra-conservative brother wears a caftan. No way!
I woke amused. But later that day, he gave me a Christmas present...
DICKENS: A voice rants "I love Dickens! It has to be Dickens!"
Next evening on Night Gallery, Agnes Moorehead begs for...
I'm a reporter. In the mall, I get my pocket picked repeatedly--
but the thieves keep slipping mysterious stuff in, not out...
CAUTION: PUN
Dinosaurs and tigers fill my music club. Not that it takes many to fill it. So spiky!
A dino bard croons. A tigress leaps onstage & snuggles up! Music hath charms...
Two men down at a rodeo. The velociraptors and pterosaurs draw near.
To scare them off, I need to do something alarming, impossible...
I dreamed our physician said our son had diphtheria. When I woke, we found only a tiny
white spot in his throat. But by the time the doctor arrived...
Trump wackos bomb the World Trade Center. I flee New York. Morticia Addams puts us up. Inside the
dream, I fall asleep. When I wake I ask "was the attack a dream?" Morticia says it was smaller. I try to
write it all down on my bedsheet, but the ink spreads. I wake again, sure I need to wash the sheet...
A Marin girl finds a dirty secret in the school library--they discard the unpopular.
She kinda identifies with the discarded books. And discarded people...
A serial killer stalks our office, but our bosses deny it and do nothing.
I kill him. He revives--over and over! A robot I have to disassemble...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I dream of a future where blondes are a too-cute endangered species. How can they survive? Like this...
CAUTION: NUDITY
SITUATION: I was attracted to my prospective therapist. I asked my dreams what to do...
DREAM: His wife vanishes. We get in bed. I feel such love I ignore how tiny his penis is...
AFTER: In the morning, I decide I'd be wise to work with a different therapist...
CAUTION: SEX
A doctor lures me into his office. What he turns out to be scares me less than how I defend myself...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, ARACHNOPHOBIA
A woman dreamed her dog, who had died, visited--looking upset.
So she checked the dog's grave. It had been bulldozed that day...
I'm cold, tired and wet, and I have to take this dog to college. But when I touch him,
he howls in horror. I'm not having a nightmare, I am a nightmare. His nightmare...
CECY: In a desert, a thirsty dog jumps out of a tree--the first known dog suicide...
WAYAN: I'm a talking dog. Our owner denies us enough water, so we protest...
My hunting license won’t let me legally shoot a giraffe or ibex, but I do bag a prime Macy’s salesman...
CAUTION: LICENSE TO KILL
At death's door, my friend lets Cerberus devour her, so I can enter
Death's pyramid alive and expose the truth about the afterlife...
CAUTION: FATAL DOG ATTACK
Looking in a mirror, Julie goes lucid. She changes herself into a man
and pulls her mirror-image through the glass...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
I ride my tricycle all round Sydney trying to get bureaucratic approval
to feed bananas to my friend the grizzly bear, gooey though he gets...
The friends of a touchy aviator have to kidnap her just to give her a present... and WHAT a present...
I'm dancing on stage, in behavioral space. But right in the middle of the stage, erupt these... teeth?
When my first play failed, I tried to console myself by reading Paradise Lost.
But drama and devils don't mix...
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
Rousseau's painting of a woman on a red sofa in a glorious
jungle really was dream-based--just not his dream...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SLACKING
I'm in a small pond. A monster goldfish stalks me. I seem trapped in place, and
wake in panic, sheets drenched--to find my pet goldfish gasping on the floor...
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...
Fighting vampire archers is risky enough WITH proper armor! And all I have is dream-journals...
CAUTION: MENTIONS BATTERING
Terse dreamlets quietly catch World War I's effect. Faith died in the trenches...
A panel of argumentative gods grant me a spare lifetime of piano practice. It takes that long, but...
A nightmare turns to a sex dream turns to a weird demonstration just how out-of-body a dream can get...
CAUTION: (PUZZLING) SEX
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
Granny's magic nipple helps me foil the yuppies dumping toxic
waste. But does it count if I did it just to save my own...
CAUTION: CRUDE TALK; STETHESCOPIC NIPPLE
I will a clay cat to come to life, then start healing real cats and dogs and...
I ask my dreams if my dad's influencing my divorce. I dream my dad warns me "You can't ride a
motorcycle." I mount the bike and zoom down the road. I love it. When I park at last, my dad says...
I'm a small planet in an eccentric orbit: a one-day summer, a two-day winter. Rest and hibernate, or...
CAUTION: SLACKER ETHIC
My new editor starts rejecting my poems. My new new editor rewrites them for me. I feel lucky not to be arrested...
I'm an intellectual ballerina trying to stop zombies hatching from stone eggs, but I succeed
only when I become a dragon using touch, scent and visualization to persuade the eggs...
Georgina woke me. "I had to give a rich acquaintance eight injections in the neck. He left, climbing on high-voltage cables.."
That day, we met a rich friend who had a ski accident. He got a new therapy: eight injections in the neck, then electroshock...
CAUTION: UNCOMFORTABLY SPECIFIC "COINCIDENCE"
After the Lord of the Rings falls, Elbereth herself is sent to heal the land. But she has a troubling neighbor...
After 20 years without a child, Maya dreams devas carry her to a holy lake, wash her...
and then an elephant carrying a lotus flower enters her right side. She knows it means...
CAUTION: DREAM OMITS TINY DETAIL--IMMINENT DEATH
I'm Queen Elizabeth I, but I made a mistake--focused too much on art and culture.
Now, plotters who I overlooked smash in my bedroom door. I snatch a vial of poison...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE REFLECTS REALITY
Tubman woke ecstatic, unable to eat. "My people are free!" Her host said "My grandchildren may see it; but we will be gone."
"No! I tell you, sir, you'll see it, and you'll see it soon. My people are free! My people are free!" Three years later...
A spiral pillow-path leads to an astral portal. But creatures arriving and
departing jam the same path. Squeeze by, hop over, apologize... flirt!
Is this a dream-image of death & letting go? Then why's it look so fun?
I'm the Incredible Hulk, forced to do emergency brain surgery. For the patient's burning from within...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND UNLICENSED MEDICINE
I'm in a garden with my big sister Emilie, alive again. As she
unbuttons my pants, our father appears, swearing he'll shoot me...
CAUTION: GHOST-SIBLING INCEST
My spirit-wife and I spend our last evening together painting. Not with colors--with emotions...
The Emperor dreamt a monster hedgehog terrorized his city. On waking, he ordered the slaughter of
every hedgehog in town. People started seeing him as the killer hedgehog! Soon he was deposed...
I lose myself, but I get some startling advice from a convent-school kid with empty eyes...
DAY: I see Disney's new film, Encanto. Everything's about Family. You are your role. What is this, 1950?
DREAM: I'm trapped in Encanto's Family. We have powers--but what powers our powers is sibling incest...
CAUTION: DID I MENTION INCEST?
As the West ceded land to the Nazis to appease Hitler, Salvador Dalí
dreamed of lopped olive branches and broken phones crying...
I'm playing 'Drop Me Anywhere' with a friend: I pick the latitude, he picks the longitude.
Can I survive naked one day? I pick the equator as my best bet...
I'm a delicate little ermine-chinchilla whose best friends are all sewer rats.
They push their food and drink on me, and I nibble to be polite...
I'm trapped in a TV documentary on nuclear war! Better dive through a TV screen and find a safe sitcom...
I'm at a symposium on how our beliefs alter not just the future, but the PAST...
CAUTION: CONTAINS IDEAS
On a volcano's rim, watching the lava fountains, I interview a huge blue alien bird who never planned to be a monk...
DREAM: Landsmen betray their mermaid lovers in a harbor full of towers that seem tilted and broken from under the sea.
NEXT MORNING: My boss asks me to track down a new translation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.
AFTERNOON: I find a book on IQ tests that include spatial questions full of broken geometric shapes--familiar shapes...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
I meet a forgotten goddess--outlived all her cults. Today she passes as a psychic, reads a crystalball...
CAUTION: NUDE CHALK SKETCH
I turned off my conscious judgment and just drew. Two paths appeared--one led to
psychodrama, then parental prison; the other, into the underworld of dreamwork...
CAUTION: NUDE DREAM-SELVES
Night, downtown. A unicorn in tears, chained to her... barker? owner? pimp?
"Just $300" he yells. But for what? Magic? Sex? Healing?
CAUTION: PROSTITUTION? SLAVERY? GIG ECONOMY?
A woman--Gaia?--leads me up Mt Diablo. Nature preserves--grass, oak, pine. But... all silent. The animals are gone...
CAUTION: ECO-RAGE
WAYAN: I wake deep in the night. From the black square of a curtainless window, eyes are peering in at me...
MARK: I wake to find a black square trapdoor in my bedroom ceiling. From the dark above, eyes peer in at me...
A monstrous Kafka beetle grows gradually out of my face. And it's a MESSAGE...
Elegant, ancient, the tower rose into the clouds. Inside? Smoke & darkness. Workers roast meat...
I fall in love with a sexy T. Rex at the Renaissance Faire. Then things get weird...
CAUTION: DINO ABUSE
Demons open a trunk full of the horrors I've faced this year, and lay them out, mocking me... but is that all?
I dream my son the writer's living above our old family store, the one that failed in the Depression...
He turns on the radio, and a moment later a loud horn section rings out.
I wake shocked--for that horn fanfare isn't just in my dream ears...
I saw a chariot fly south then return with the cold body of my friend. I ran into town to warn them
"Miss Fanny's dead!" As I reached town, the news came, confirming her death...
After 18 years of exile, Fariba in a lucid dream visits her old friend Yalda, in an unfamiliar home.
That night, Yalda has a lucid dream in which Fariba visits. On waking, each writes to the other...
A shapeshifting girl lets me try her spell--I become a
wolf-raven-parrot-human blend. Weird, but I love flying...
That levitating bear's not tightrope-walking--she rides a goat strung like soap-on-a-rope. A goat that's me! I'm eating...
CAUTION: UGH!
A dream of a shaman named Fred who plotted to use
Bear herself as... a lightbulb. Fred, Fred, Fred...
DAY: I've been studying if lucid dreams are really that lucid beyond the bare fact of knowing you're dreaming...
DREAM: I fly over the sea, spotting creatures of the deep below, and creatures of the sky, reflected--blended...
My classmates stole my pen. My teacher condones it. I am, after all, a hated minority.
They won't even SELL me one. So I write my final in blood--three huge, crude letters...
I found myself in a cafe in Amsterdam--or was it Sevilla?--with Kevin, who I knew was dead...
CAUTION: GRIEF
On Christmas eve, I ask my dreams what they think of our annual orgy, and...
CAUTION: THE F WORD AND THE C WORD (CAPITALISM)
I'm in the High Plains, at a huge powwow on climate change. This could become, not a new
dustbowl, but a firebowl. As I wake, I find I'm running a fever! And the dream hints what caused it...
I have weird, bad luck around dating. Finally I go on a picnic with Page, and the Great Fire begins...
Schoolmates talked about flying dreams, but I'd never had one.
I felt cheated! So I set out to create dream-flight...
I meet a monster--half earthworm, half giraffe. Then I realize she’s kind of cute...
My little son accidentally tears the tail off our goldfish. The wound
looks vaginal. The fish, moaning in pain, turns into my daughter...
Exiled, husband dead, country in ruins, Li stands in dream before the Emperor of Heaven. He asks, kindly,
"Where from here?" She begs only for a wind fierce enough to blow her out of this world for good...
I need money, so I sign up to be the sacrificial bull in a corrida. I've grown
the contractual five horns. But at the last moment I won't sign--it's suicide!...
CAUTION: WHERE'S THAT FIFTH HORN?
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...
I'm a monster working in a shopping mall in Stockton, California, when I smell smoke...
CAUTION: FILM NOIR SEX
A girl from a low-gravity, dense-air world, where you strap on wings and fly, tours a
world of tropical atolls with me. I love sailing, but flight's spoiled her for it--too slow...
I meet William Blake! He says "The will is given us that we
may know the delights of surrender." While in my bedroom...
The city museum's new levitating sculpture shows a space reef explored by
a floating wolf who needs no spacesuit--vacuum adapted!
My eighth grade class is a flock of birds migrating south for the winter, but we don't migrate the easy way...
I live in a huge half-hotel. The only way into the other half is through a fireplace.
It's forbidden. But one woman steps through the fire--do I dare follow?...
THAT DAY: I test my hearing range; it turns out to be more dog than human...
DREAM: To banish a teacher & her giant fly, I summon a musical goddess...
In my ballet class, we were learning to leap. But I wanted to FLY. So I went outside alone...
I tell the angel teaching me to fly that I'm not ready to go solo yet--
I'm wobbly, the terrain's unknown. He lets go, and I...
DAY: I research a weird Salvador Dalí dream-painting mingling flight, big cats and sex.
DREAM: I flirt with a talking cat. Want her to fly with me. But she wants something earthier...
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...
Our group's being hunted. We flee into a cave. A gulf ahead that we can't jump. We have to fly.
I know how, and I teach the kids among us quickly enough, but the adults are scared to try...
Flying unicorns hang out with me and my friends, sending us
dreams full of useful advice--and more concrete gifts...
Giant chefs chop food, and occasionally drop crumbs on the floor--a city of ant-size people.
Tiny truckers cut up vegetable slices and bagel crumbs to distribute them all over town...
On the Night Train out of my small-town life, I meet the town rebel. But she's misplaced her tongue...
CAUTION: PETTING; UNNERVING TONGUE
In our mutant future, a lovely horse-tailed four-armed girl sings her heart out--as clubgoers ignore her...
CAUTION: NUDE CABARET
I dreamed that in four days a plague would hit our reservation and people would start dying.
Four days later it happened just as I was warned---the 1918 flu. And my dream caused it...
CAUTION: NOT JUST SURVIVOR'S GUILT, SEER'S GUILT
I dream my Doors of Perception have four layered screens to keep out mosquitoes, when one is plenty...
The goddess of the Cult of Clutter catches a little thief, and tastes her to see if she's worthy...
AWAKE: I watch Okko's Inn. Little Okko sees spirits--until she grows up and quits settling for ghosts.
DREAM: I explore a temple, meet a fox-spirit... and see I never was human. Time to quit settling for...
CAUTION: GAUZE-ROBED PRIESTESS
I'm a guard on a train crossing the desert who falls in love with a refugee fox-girl,
despite heavy specist peer-pressure and the archaic Railway Code...
CAUTION: NUDE FOX
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing
he had put together; I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out...
I was a bird-girl, the pet of some rich, royal humans. I summoned
a storm of rebel birds, flooding the moat and driving out our owners...
CAUTION: BIRDGIRL NUDITY
DAY: I reread Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. His own dreams feel petty, devious, status-obsessed... dull.
DREAM: I find Freud's bought my childhood home! I spelunk the Freudian underworld--a dark complex of tunnels,
sewers and rats. Cross the rivers of muck on stepping stones. Emerge into sun at last, swearing "Never again..."
As they lower me into my grave, mourners don't throw dirt but--cottage cheese? I toss it
back, starting a huge foodfight. I climb out to join the fun. Only the poor pastor looks lost...