I'm a schoolkid in the future who finds an ancient book the censors somehow missed...
I dream I'm reading an amazing comic about a bright red geometric dog named Question,
floating through surreal landscapes. I'm envious--until I wake in relief that it's just a dream!
DREAM: I write a book involving spies and Lord Snow, but give him a cover name: Artie Shaw.
TWO WEEKS LATER: My wife & I go on the Tonight Show; unexpectedly, Artie Shaw shows up!
I tell him the dream. He turns pale, saying "No one knows this--I wrote a book under the name..."
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
1: On a mid-Atlantic islet, a farm family plays music to summon the Greek god Pan. It works!
2: A mystical picturebook shows Pan & his mermaid lover. Again I'm told music summons Pan!
CAUTION: GOAT-GOD NUDITY
I show a friend my book of dream-art, but it's half-baked and embarrassing.
I'm no good at smuggling guns, porn or cash through customs, either...
CAUTION: LOW-RES SMUT IN THAT BOOK
The crystalline figure on the cover of the book in my dream seemed to hold as many answers as its title...
A woman urged her friend to give her daughter a musical education. Without hearing this, the child went hunting for...
My writer-friend Cecy will do anything to get published. Anything? Oh, believe me, ANYTHING...
CAUTION: BONDAGE, not to mention POSTAGE
People SAY they like realistic characters they can identify with, but they don't ACT like it...
The book's first two pages showed an ant's awareness, then a human's wider grasp--both mere freckles on reality...
I had to face the Dark Lord. But my inexperienced therapist was unprepared for the battle--he hadn't even put his
shoes on! I told him the dream; he got defensive. I switched to a veteran therapist and got much better feedback...
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...
The Emperor of the Galaxy can't publish his anti-slavery book as himself, so he quits to become a slave...
I wander a weird palace full of books, seeking my father-in-law, but find
only a blindly-flailing whip anchored in the floor, creating a dome of pain...
The tunnel has pictures of a winged unicorn filly on a quest. But the editor
of the deluxe book version is intellectual, patriarchal and heavy-handed...
CAUTION: UNDERAGE ALICORN FLIRTING
Books are clothes, and always were. A potato makes me lie, and everyone gets it but me.
Sex in a crowd disarms the Mom Squad! And a Mystic Autistic's soul explores my room...
CAUTION: PUBLIC SEX? PROBABLY.
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
In a repressive, thought-controlled future I find some old banned books;
I tell my student "Reading these makes life more interesting--and angry..."
A booklist (plus a few articles, films & comics) of interest to prodigies and geniuses. Just 100 so far; email suggestions!
A friend claims literary "personalities"--humorist, craftsman, kook, lowbrow--are really just marketing
niches. So write as you like! If readers like you, industry will make a niche for you, almost arbitrarily...
CAUTION: FOR WRITERS ONLY. OR IS IT?
Poem from a book on how love can save lives & souls, read in two dreams of a Renaissance astrologer's library...
Two sisters want to lick me all over, but they lick everything; weird gut-fauna make them immune to toxins...
Fairy eggs infest my home--become worms, then tiny horses, then mothwinged hobbits, then adult fairies....
CAUTION: NUDE EQUINES & FAE; PARASITES (OR SYMBIOTES?)
The foremost wizard of Shakespeare's age dreams he's dead. They're burning his books, but that doesn't bother him...
A Buddhist scroll shows me Hell Cafe, where diners become entrees. But I read the scroll
backwards! You can escape Hell just by walking out, against the traffic flow...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL SOULS
I learn my book A Void, supposedly written without the letter E, has lots of them--
crawling with errors. But at least I can spy on the neighbors...
a writer's dream comically summing up her own fantasy series.
My characters are all dancing together. Roach is flanked by friends--but they turn into elves.
As dragons, elves, tengu & robot mice join in, Roach slowly freaks...
I dreamed I was pulling a scroll out of my vagina and reading it like a tickertape. I was
reluctant to perform the dream--I knew I'd get into trouble!--but I felt compelled...
CAUTION: NUDITY
A library shows me surrealist Jean Arp's sketchbook. One Eschery sketch with repeated focal points is hypnotic.
But they also show me his lunch, and I try to eat it! I fail. Head & gut disagree. Stuck Arp-way...
CAUTION: NEVER EAT 12-YEAR-OLD SUSHI
Richard Russo writes that Westerners cannot dream like tribal people.
So I dream Russo's the Cubist Dictator of Dreams! I prefer the part-equine
Lady Demicorn, and the Fat Meditating Dog, and the Birdiesattva...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
Dream: up on Floor 4.4 of a strange library, I'm shown Os Lusiadas, apparently the Portuguese national epic.
Next day at work, I'm handed a new purchase to input--Os Lusiadas. And yes, it's Portugal's national epic...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
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
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'm inside a magical novel by Patricia McKillip, amid tricksters, cosplayers, spooks, sex changes, levitation and (sigh) cops...
CAUTION: COYOTE SEX
I meet a shapeshifting mentor who warns of coming war (9/11?). Then a sentient book, "The Art of War," gets intimately involved...
CAUTION: ELECTRODES, LIBROPHILIA
I sink into a book on a murderer who rationalizes away all guilt, but pull out thinking "How morbid!"...
This woman shows me a book of my art. I'm not sure I want to see them--some pieces are from my future...
After an impatient bookseller puts me down, I dream I'm licking a girl who nothing pleases...
I'm a girl in a Catholic school. But a magazine and my too-small bed combine to change my life...
CAUTION: MASTURBATION, QUEER-POSITIVE, CHRISTIAN-NEGATIVE
Dreams of translucent fairies, centaurs, robots & gnomes prompt me to cartoon
on transparent overlays to show how dreamworlds overlay ours...
I meet two Peacock Kings bigger than human beings, who chant blessings until I wake with tears drenching my pillow...
I get stuck with a one-year mandatory gig as President of the
World, just as Saudi Arabia collapses, and fools rush in...
A library book with a brutal attack & rape scene has pages stuck together. Why?
Some trollish reader masturbated all over it! Oh. Not an orgasm, a wargasm...
CAUTION: HARSH TOWARD PUTIN (AND HIS AMERICAN BRO)
In one night Descartes had three dreams convincing him he had to change the course of his life...
The posse lost their enemy; reluctantly they asked a tracking detective--me.
They found him where I knew he'd be--from eating my Rolodex cards...
A friend nags me to be lookout as he steals a cult's papers. I know it'll end in murder, but foresight paralyzes me!
In a videogame that keeps freezing unplayably, I find a button calling up a secret screen of second chances...
I'm lost in a grim basement, but two kids show me a cobwebbed glass door you can walk through like air...
A book about the psychology of creatures with different sensory arrays
persuades me that all of us creatures build models of one shared world,
for understanding your neighbors vastly ups your odds of survival...
An Arab shows me a stone he calls a book, and a prophetic shell that warns of a flood rushing toward us...
My anima, a pegasus mare, leaps out of a girl's book and teaches us to fly up to an astral land...
CAUTION: FLIRTY PEGASUS
Samuel Pepys dreamt of kidneystones, pee, come, & snot--or did he? Thomas Macauley dreams his niece confesses...
I find the sketch-journal of a beautiful winged sphinx who left her mythic isle
to explore a great city of crazy bipeds, called San Francisco...
CAUTION: SPHINX SEX, SPHINX ATTITUDE
DREAM: I was a cheetah seeking a book of cheetah rolemodels, but this specist librarian harassed me...
PAINTING: months later, dream forgotten, I painted myself without knowing why as a cheetah stretching...
I'm holding a pornographic novel, trying to keep it dry, as huge waves
flood the room. The book and I are both going to get drenched...
As we cross a scary ledge, my tough survival-guide, always no-nonsense before,
finally willing to consider... intellectualism, dating, ethics... fun?
Nightmares can warn. But when awake, what warning can you get from nonstop ill-luck?
Psychics give me an incomprehensible reading. A book from the tree-library gives only Victorian dating advice.
At last a madman gives me a treasure-box holding a tooth that unfolds into slices carved in unreadable symbols...
1: I ask how to fly. "Breathe air from high levels; its light and purity will wash away earth's heaviness..."
2: To join a flying game, you must cut off your own head! Players acquire new heads and can work miracles...
3: I float up to reach a book in a shop. People call the police but I defiantly soar--over Paris, up to the stars...
DAY: our ex-cat comes back, needing surgery. Dad doesn't want to pay. Big quarrel.
DREAM: Cats, birds, elf-girls; in their asteroid library, a tale of oath-breaking...
Now I'm the one who stole a tooth of jade from the volcano hall. Greed... erupts!
CAUTION: NUDE BIRD-ELF, DEATH BY LAVA
This symposium, airing a dispute between geologists & astronomers who just don't read each others' papers, had multiple revelations--big hazards, bigger holes in our knowledge, and bigger opportunities...
CAUTION: CHART! WITH NUMBERS!!
In a Tibetan monastery on an ancient lakebed, I swim through a vast sunken library.
Books open like sea anemones, letters float to the surface like kelp...
I'm holding a pornographic novel, trying to keep it dry, as huge waves
flood the room. The book and I are both going to get drenched...
I wander a sunken maze, meet a playful woman, find a hidden treasure. Meanwhile, my friend Zooop...