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
R.D. Laing gives two examples of dream-spillage suggesting it’s not passive but playful...
In a general store on a High Plains rez, I find two surreal collaged postcards. If only
this were a dream they'd qualify for the World Dream Bank, but sadly, it isn't. Right?
CAUTION: STUPID, STUPID CONSCIOUS!
I ask my dreams about sex, and get... sex on a beach with a sea-serpent girl--a lamia. But she gets queasy--
landsick! Too hot for her up here. Help her back in the sea. What a contrast with Ruskin's lamia nightmare...
CAUTION: SCALY SEX
We ride on a flying saucer made of stone. Atop the great cliffs, we meet a giant and
warn him not to slip. He doesn't appreciate advice from little alien tourist twerps...
I dream I'm a woman possessed by spirits with yellow eyes that tint the whole world lemon...
I wake, the sun rises, and for a single minute, the world turns that exact, strange yellow...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
A dream-fable of lemons who are really orange-people infected by a spore turns out to be about me...
The dreamer becomes a horse, the horse becomes a unicorn.
Dreams have their own quests apart from the conscious...
Three unicorns gallop out of the waves...
A man I meet leads half a dozen consistent dreamlives--an experience
so splintered that it's hard to figure out which life is his waking one...
Windsor McCay's dream-comic Little Nemo is gorgeous but plotless & passive. Or is it? Dreamwork is gradual...
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...
Loewi thought nerve impulses were transmitted chemically, not electrically. But he couldn’t prove it, until one night...
De Bray dreamed a speeding car nearly hit him; a month later, he abruptly recognized the street from his dream and paused...
DREAM 1: A man wearing long white underwear shoots me down with a machine gun.
DAY: Long John Nebel interviews me; his Freudian friend calls me a penis-envying woman.
DREAM 2: Long John and his buddy umpire a rough baseball game. Definitely not cricket...
CAUTION: SEXISM, FREUDIANS, PUNS
I smell smoke. I know I'm dreaming; did my sleeping body scent smoke in my home and
insert it in my dream to warn me? But the dream sees my worry, and erases the
scent to clarify it's symbolic smoke! Now I can have my nightmare in peace...
A nightmare. I go lucid as the bullets tear through me. Yet I go on with the dream! Why?...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARISH VIOLENCE
I reread a book I'd from years before, but fall asleep in the middle.
I wake having finished it in my dreams! Every word in place. How?
Honesty induces a joyful state with lucidlike powers. So I bike
across the Lake of Time, open the book of my future, and see...
CAUTION: SEXY FUTURE CRITTERS
I know I'm dreaming but it doesn't help--I'm paralyzed, spasms wrack my body, and I fall out of bed.
When I wake, I tingle and shake for minutes. Yet I'm still in bed; the sheets aren't even twisted...
DREAM 1: On green grass, a red & blue boat with a net draped atop. Predictive.
DREAM 2: Climbing a ladder with square rungs in a space w/o walls. Predictive.
DREAM 3: A small boy with a toy boat. A sail's laid out flat for washing. Predictive...
Our dream-group's dreams had a lot of imagery in common: circles, groups, meditation. I fused them into this piece...
DAY: I read an exposé on "Senoi dreamwork"--the Malaysian Senoi people disavow it. Some white guy just made it up!
DREAM: I'm a dream researcher in Malaysia. A manta-squid attacks! Now the "Senoi" focus on my needs makes sense...
CAUTION: TENTACLE-RAPE ATTEMPT
Four apparently psychic dreamlets of a gun in a desk, a guy needing to hide,
a canyon with woodpiles & a locked gate, and a blonde girl named Cathy...
CAUTION: SMALL DREAMS, LARGE IMPLICATIONS FOR E.S.P.
Wayan makes love to Martha's double, then sees her soul watching from the shadows...
Barbara can't reach Wayan to say farewell...
Martha falls off a mountain and decides to let herself die, just to see what happens...
CAUTION: SEX, ABUSE ISSUES
Martian robots pester me. I flee through the Asteroids, leaving chaos, cratering Earth.
Years later on my farm, a bot shows up disguised as Freud. I start mudslinging...
I got a big thrift-store toy tiger to shade my head as I slept (which worked;
better dreams in the tiger's shadow!) then sewed on a crest, mane, fishtail, fins...
CAUTION: PLUSHIE/SEXTOY
Deep in a secret diamond mine, I see stars. A door opening to the night sky!
But this shortcut's heavily guarded...
I'm in the cellar, petting a tiger-cat. She speaks inside my head: "I'm tired of living on bread. I need meat."
I make excuses--it's pricy--then see big hanging quarters of meat. I hide them! She says "Call me Mistress
Touttmouss"--well, something like that--I know it's English, but can't make it out til I wake, when I see...
Should I subscribe to Sundance Community Dream Journal? I dream I find a letter--yellowish paper, cryptic blue
lettering, a red margin. I eat it! Best thing I ever tasted. I wake and order that journal. It arrives--and the cover is...
I miss all sorts of cues I'm dreaming, but I ignore my conviction I'm awake and try to fly anyway...
The Mayan cave was a door between worlds. But also a model of the character you need to walk through that door...
The flood sickens my fuchsia bush. My mom says my fuchsia is hopeless,
but I make up a treatment. When it works, well... read the title.
CAUTION: PUNS, EXPLODING MOM
The foul old fossil woman had carved and burnt her own flesh in the name of art;
we washed her till she was reborn young. It was my turn next to enter the water...
Two moons rise. From one unpeels a sort of rind; on it I see the future
tracks of these moons' shadows and tidal sway on Earth, predicting ...
I dream I'm ranting about the structure of the mind, postulating four layers--odd, since
I think dreams are meaningless--just neurons getting some exercise! So whence this theory?
CAUTION: JARGON
I fly, send dreamails, discuss dreams with dream folk, punch a wall to test dream-pain, reach into mirrors...
A horror film and Rick Veitch's dream-comix provoke a nightmare
warning me that guilt about my dad is wrecking my life...
At college, my sheet music arrives from home, but vanishes when I try to play--or the piano does...
MY DREAM: I was walking a hilly road, my uncle ahead, my stepdad behind; trying to keep them in sight. My mom appeared and I woke.
MY MOTHER'S: the same. She told me hers before I told her mine. She thought it meant my uncle would die first, then me, then...
CAUTION: APPARENT TELEPATHY, BUT MISINTERPRETED MEANING
Why does my passport have color photos of me ice skating? I haven't in years. Your
passport must show your true face. Should I change it, or do they know me better than...
CAUTION: SHAMANIC SYNCHRONICITY
Strangers ask me about my nine selves, and I find I know exactly what they mean!
The last three are new and odd--calm quiet states that heighten paranormal senses...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL
Okay, you got your heaven, and your earth, and between, you got...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
I wished I could kiss my son farewell. That week, Ethel called. "I dreamed Ned kissed you, not me!
I was hurt. He laughed like anything and kissed me too..."
I met Nic as he steppd out of the elevator. We were both spooked. Nic asked if I believed in
mermaids and unicorns. I said “yes.” I asked Nic if he believed in dreamers, and after a pause...
A dream of body parts--maybe, impossibly, alive--hung up like drying laundry. Von Trotta inserted it in a film
script to foreshadow a suicide, but seems deaf to any personal warning--as if it's not her dream at all...
I meet a Nightmare in heat who wants me. A human girl by me says I'll catch an equine sex-disease...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
1: I sketch two deer-girls making videos. 2: I pull a man's nose off, and milk the scene for drama before...
3: My old boss is convicted of murder! 4: I wake and two friends interpret #3 as "Overwork is killing you..."
I wake again. My dream-notebook's blank. No friends here; their interpretation was a dream too....
CAUTION: NUDE DEER
I’m in San Francisco trying to throw Sauron’s Ring into the Cracks of San Andreas.
But a sexy sorcerer steals my sense of I! How can you act without a self?
No Man is Island. So Men say. I am not a Man...
I flee pursuers up a skyscraper, go lucid, and fly away. Then I'm at a lecture; Idries Shah
says "It's good Stephen learned to fly, but a shame he didn't realize he had no need to flee...
Inspired by Shaun Tan, I fill a black-paged photo album with 36 improv paintings.
They become a tour of my dreamworld, led by my anima Silky, a literal nightmare...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, WEIRD DREAM IDEAS
I wander New York City, a homeless ageless child, unnoticed--unless I climb stairs. Then people panic--see a huge cat!
But today I meet a crew lugging big paintings, who seem blind to cat or child. I think they're art thieves, mid-heist...
CAUTION: SHAMANIC INTERPRETATION
Touring an underground maze, I meet a woman I like. But her brother bristles.
Then, from a height, I see the ventilation pits of the labyrinth laid out like a map.
The Japanese invade! Hide in the jungle. Women in rags butcher centipedes & mice...
CAUTION: UNHAPPY MEALS; OVER-JUNGIANISM
The older sorceress I'm in bed with plans to marry me off to a younger woman, but I distract her with my tongue...
CAUTION: BEDROOM HUMOR
A grotesque deep-sea diver prepares to enter the abyss. But is this
a surreal portrait of a dream character or of dreamwork itself?...
The cover of a collection of 11.5 dream-tales in glorious detailed Web-unfriendly black and white....
At the beach, wading with my fellow dreamworker Stephanie.
The waves are getting bigger--are they a hazard, or can we ride them?
A suspicious exobiologist warns me that otter from Titan may not be the amiable, nerdy celebrity it seems. But...
I DREAM I'm in the mansion of my favorite film producer, Otto Preminger. Then I learn it's my home!
I WAKE realizing I'm the producer of my dreams--not some impersonal, instinctive Unconscious...
I rise out of my body, find I'm invulnerable, visit the moon, with its volcanic rocks, re-enter
my body, "wake" and write the dream--only to wake again and find all my notes gone!...
Dreams of translucent fairies, centaurs, robots & gnomes prompt me to cartoon
on transparent overlays to show how dreamworlds overlay ours...
CORY: I'm in a government complex. Tired, but guards harass me. At last they let me nap on a floor pad.
WAYAN: I'm in the Student Union. Need to study, but guards harass me. Yet they let my friend sleep on a...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
A vagabond king showed me the way into Faerie, and it made my fortune. But now it’s time to pass the gift on...
DREAM: Surgeons cut off both my breasts--without my consent! The staff's upset, but I'm oddly resigned...
DAY: I'm interviewing for a job offering $2,000 less than I make now. Told myself it's OK, but...
CAUTION: MALPRACTICE, MUTILATION
I was on an island about to explode like Krakatoa. I warned the French colonial authorities "4,000
people will die if we don't get them out!" but no one listened. I woke. The paper came. "Mont
Pelée erupts, kills 40,000". I had missed a zero! But 40,000 turned out to be wrong too, implying...
Hypnotized in therapy, I saw AT LEAST five competing goals tugging at me like gravity fields.
Naturally I drew them. Come tour the Inner Solar System of our desires...
CAUTION: NUDITY (BODY, HEART, BRAIN, SOUL)
I trained myself to associate one scent with the mountains, one with an art studio. On a random
night my servant applied both secretly, and I dreamt artist & model burst into a mountain scene...
"I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down..."
I don't understand this poem's symbolism or even its style. It came to me whole, in a dream...
I went into her room one morning before she awoke and saw her eyes moving. Suddenly she said,
"Pick me! Pick me!" I woke her and she immediately said, "Oh, Daddy, I was a flower." ...
I suspect the pinball champion of Jupiter is cheating. I try to scare her psychic confederate out of hiding...
I'm shown corn plants growing from skulls, and it seems like I must plant some skull-corn myself...
I'm building a planetary model a kilometer across, inset in Bernal Hill like an eye in a socket.
My intern Silky kicks the globe, scuffing a caravan trail in a desert. Needs to be crookeder...
CAUTION: FATSHAMING? OR CALLING OUT SKINNYSHAMING?
I'm in a play. Fear, then joyful sex, then ranching, then silly hats, as a man drones on about
class struggle. Weird chairs, pingpong, coffee, impossible double utterances. At last
I tell friends my dream--backwards. Then I write the dream down on slices of cheese...
CAUTION: SEX ONSTAGE
Swedenborg's in bed with a woman, but she has teeth down there. Oh, now and she's not a woman, but
his political buddy Johan! Well, maybe it means not to get involved with women, or men, or... politics?
CAUTION: JUST WEIRD
What if comics panels and layouts weren't so square? I try triangles,
pentagons, hexagons, circles, spirals--and some serious stuff pops out...
CAUTION: IDEAS, OCCASIONAL NUDITY, MENTIONS ABUSE
EMRICH: I'm in a conference center in "Pondecherry", even though it feels nothing like India...
THOMAS: A woman picks fruit off a tree by a pond and calls them "pondicherries--with an 'i'"...
CAUTION: WILL ANNOY E.S.P. DENIERS
Belva missed her granddaughter, who'd recently moved back in with her mom.
She dreamt they were porpoises chattering joyfully, and realized she'd been selfish...
At a museum, a weird art project shows me how art that observes and
documents life can improve that life--just from being taken seriously...
After studying assertion in dreams, I find I'm a shaman in an
African village, troubled by an irresponsible young rival...
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...
Suddhodana dreams of great upheavals; no courtier can interpret the dream.
An ascetic claims the upheaval will be for the good, then... turns into an owl?!
CAUTION: PERHAPS NOT ENTIRELY ACCURATE
In one night Descartes had three dreams convincing him he had to change the course of his life...
My tiny alter ego cried in hunger. I caught him a fine fish, but a rabbit and a beaver stole & ate it!
CAUTION: COMIC SURFACE, SERIOUS WARNING
A precognitive dream about levitating snake girls, raccoons, and lunar eclipses.
CAUTION: MY SNAKE BREASTS
Radar O'Reilly's teddy bear is stolen. He builds spy-planes to find it. One morning the camp wakes to find...
by Jenny Badger Sultan, 1999/5/15, 6/12 & 7/14, a painting based on 3 dreams
I'm in the Hypogeum, an ancient Maltese dream-temple. I join some women
staging a ritual; a little girl draped in a web plays the role of an insect...
twin dreams predicting their children and nation will prosper.
Ragnhild dreams of a beautiful tree rooted in her pain and blood;
Halfdan sleeps with pigs and dreams he has a great head of hair...
CAUTION: KIDNAPPING, ARSON, VIKING-AGE BARBARITY
I saw a red screen, as if formed by flowing blood. On it, a hand wrote elliptical integrals.
I knew they were from Lakshmi. As soon as I woke, I committed them to writing...
1: My dad can't see my world. Literally can't see my world...
2: The House of Busyness is unlivable--busy, crowded, noisy...
3: Achievement takes twelve factors; any one can block you...
The wildcat Rare Bit Fiends slinks out of the hills to stalk and maul
dreamers--until one day she rears up to teach a dream workshop...
A raven summons a levitating mirror that shows her face as a human, and
tries out moods & expressions based on Tarot cards plucked from a tree...
How do we make dream narratives readable, when so many
readers are brainwashed to think they're nonsense?
I was trapped in a Handmaid's Tale dystopia; I was a mannequin, naked &
helpless. I couldn't even walk. But I hid one rebellious act: I kept a diary...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, CARTOON DYSTOPIA
MARCH: a bull followed my wife, who was wearing a red dress. I know we must sell all our stock...
APRIL: I'm accused of murder. I'll die by hypodermic. I false-wake & interpret this financially too...
CAUTION: IN OCTOBER, THE CRASH
As a boy I dreamt my uncle (a calm man) glared at me in red rage; I was terrified. A decade later, in a bar...
I dreamt I saw, over a balcony rail, bright-colored, spectacular scenery. Years after in Arizona, I took a detour...
Lounging in the sun, I do a magical make-over--molding my bones to give myself more room for
intuition, judgment, nerve--all the while feeling shallow & indulgent for self-improving!...
A horde of demented dwarves invades Market Street, jumping up & down, shaking the skyscrapers...
DAY: Sidarta Ribeiro theorizes dreams are brilliant at extrapolation, which we mistake for a sixth sense.
DREAM: I tell Ribeiro "Your theory explains the occasional prediction. But after your first thousand..."
The Rem Road I climb every night, from flesh to spirit, earth to sky. Though tonight, all these
wounded skateboarders worry me! And my own bruises say I overdid it in contact improv today...
Our teams search through fountains and pavilions, finding & trading the glowing stones.
None of the magic makes me go lucid, but as we sail toward the finish line...
I meet Rob's exes; all have wounds called witch's marks. Rob is really Pluto/Anubis, dog-headed god of death.
I flee a rapist--Rob? I meet fake Robs; have I ever met real Rob? At long last, I (literally) outgrow him...
CAUTION: CREEPY CONFESSION FROM ABUSER
I'm a robot in high school. I have my first dream, but I'm deaf to its message cuz it's not spectacular...
At 16, Rochan dreamt she rose from her body and explored outside, seeing a white car and brown bag. She
woke--and checked! White car, brown bag. Now, adult, she trusts her dream intuitions about larger things...
I'm sitting in a car teetering in the front row of a theater balcony. By me, R. is licking a cherry-
flavored sucker. As the film crew yells "Roll it!" my foot slips on the brake and I do...
DREAM: a distinctive house with a tempting green field by it. But the field's forbidden...
DAY: Ronald's analyst had rented that house--but the adjacent field was forbidden...
CAUTION: E.S.P. THEORIES
Think of your dreams as a rainforest, clearcut every morning--unless you make the effort to remember...
CAUTION: TINY NAKED ANGELS
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...
Idiotically, I'm biking west acroos the length of the Sahara. Dust & sickly
goats. Even the coast is barren. Still, every rainless zone has limits...
CAUTION: POLITICAL DESERT?
I sit on a half-flooded pier and read a dream-journal--the first ever written by a dog. But
I can't interview the dreamer; the dog followed a fad diet and just died of excess salt...
I wake up with my head swollen, full of vivid bewildering experiences, without a clue...
I always kept a guitar and tape recorder by my bed. I wake up and see the tape's run to the very end.
I ran it back to the start and there, in a sort of ghostly version, was...
Stranded on an island where a marching band drowned, I escape
by paddling across the Pacific using a rusty, er, cymbal...
The feud between our magical families is getting ugly. Hawk-Head's dad throws boiling water on me, so I...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
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...
I dreamed I quarreled with dream-group leader Shaykh Qusi.
I woke shocked to find two long scratches on my left cheek...
I take my friend Neil Gaiman to a park where we sculpt a giant horned head. Months later
we collaborate on a graphic novel. The course of the project's full of echoes from the dream...
We need to get down to the sea, but Disney Corporation blocks the way. Wait--we're
dreamworkers! We ooze through the walls, and cheer the parade marching in on the tide...
I'm in an art class drawing a dream image--a dog-taur or wolf-taur girl.
But I hesitate to draw her flashing me as she did in the dream. Should
I risk offending half my class, or make her modest and innocuous?
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
ACT 1: Age 14. I find photos my dad took of me at 10-12 in a red Chinese robe. Beautiful, but I was pushed to look adult...
ACT 2: Adult, I look in a mirror. I'm bustier & curvier than I thought. I look good now, too--except for this awful rash...
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM-DAD
I'm in Santa Cruz with my friend, a shocking-pink stuffed toy cow
with sewed-on accessories: big red lips, a floral wig, and a third eye. I wake,
draw the dreamcow--and my sister calls from Santa Cruz to sing me a song about...
A doctor tells Ellis to try "selvdrolla", but he's so focused on the odd name he forgets to take any...
DREAM: a thirtyish blonde says her death is ordered. Her head's cut off. But it won't die--bites his hand!
Dr. Prince feels the dream shouts "premonition!" and writes an account at the Society for Psychical Research.
Next night, a thirtyish blonde nearby commits suicide, leaving a note saying her severed head will live on...
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM, CREEPIER NEWS
Five short playful dreams exploring sex. Because too many therapists
get in the habit of thinking all dreams must wrestle with unhappiness...
A great teacher abruptly blanks out. Memory loss is scary, but the empty moment bared a deeper fear:
Swedenborg shakes uncontrollably all night, releasing or discharging some strange energy.
He frames it in religious terms, but it's a phenomenon even secular writers have reported...
CAUTION: WEIRD
I was in a gang, but I quit. They stoned me--and the green heron, the green color I called "Sharonne".
The setting (Israel), the green (Islam), and the name (Ariel Sharon?) all hint the dream's political...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, POLITICS
My friend Mr D. studied psychic research but was skeptical of telekinesis. But 24 hours after his own death...
I meet a 140-year-old hermit in her black chadoor,
skateboarding down a hill near her sacred dream-spring...
A man frames his big brother, til their sister makes him shoot his own reflection. Neither one expects...
I dream I'm trying to understand how I write poetry, but then I recall my daughter's sick
from a bad prescription. So I try to research her illness, but our library's renovating...
Sirin hungered to understand dreams. He dreamt he met Joseph (who interpreted Pharaoh's dreams).
Joseph made Sirin peer down his throat, deeper and deeper, until Sirin could see Joseph's heart...
(by a California model, pre-1961, and by a Texas maid, 1945; two predictive dreams compared)
Predictive dreams rarely hint how far they've peered ahead; they just place you in their foreseen future...
As a child I read Jules Verne's Clipper of the Clouds--a metal craft with many propellers on spars, not wings.
Soon I dreamt I designed & flew quite a different craft, like a small boat of canvas on a wood frame.
20 years later, I was test-flying a new aeroplane with a boatlike cockpit of white canvas on a wood...
Wayan: A sleazy brother calls the cops, blaming us for a fire he set...
Cecy: A sleazy brother calls in a fire while not even trying to put it out...
As I recalled what I'd dreamed the night before, a snake, I looked down and saw my foot was poised to come down on...
Suddenly, arbitrarily, Russians, furniture and space gear get me hot. And then,
suddenly, arbitrarily, a highschool class of beautiful girls leave me cold...
CAUTION: SEX-ORIENTATION CHAOS
Guards in a museum confiscate my goofy purple-warted shoes, then lose them!
I fuss till they find them. For it's vital to retrieve my, uh, soles.
I dreamt a sparrowhawk perched on my shoulder. Next day a friend was given a stuffed sparrowhawk. He...
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!
Laying my timeline in a Fibonacci spiral, it's clear great changes come in a pattern--
as soon as I've digested the last couple, a new revelation/revolution appears...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, HEAVY ISSUES
I spy on a girl learning magic in a quilted ditch. She lets me join her telekinesis lesson! Can my mind move a balloon?
Then I tour a witch-world where normality's shameful. One kid's not witch or normal--he keeps turning into Donald Duck!
CAUTION: DISNEY = DISABILITY?
He said "Oh, Mom, I had a terrible dream. A car ran me down."
I said we could not live by dreams or we live a life of horror...
A sacred starfish piloting a Cessna plane survives a crash. But can it survive a boy's clumsy rescue efforts?
Weird blue snow covers a dump of unwanted historical statues, but they seem
less political than... strange. Is that a griffin? What's really getting covered here?
A man in a blue coat on a white horse delivered papers from a nearby wrecked ship, signed Stephenson and...
I'm a bike courier. I take a packet of fifty potent dreams
up Dream Street and deliver them to the year 1980...
I'm a teenage girl diving for treasure. In an eerie coral grotto reeking of sulfur,
I spot a diver in trouble... and wake to find the grotto is real..
(1918 and 1996, twin images of our limited conception of dreaming)
What you call dreams are just the surf-zone between waking and dream!
Swim out past the foam to the dream-deeps and you'll find...
I dream my friend Suvy introduces me to a man who just took a class I'm considering.
Weeks later she introduces me to him--but just as in my dream, he feels a bit insipid...
Swedenborg cuddles a talking dog who asks after its old master, Swab, and then kisses
Swedenborg, grossing him out. But he wakes knowing just what his doggy pest represents...
A comet grows hair, a girl named Rosalie becomes a bed of roses, writing in a beautiful
hand appears on a beautiful hand, and Sylvia becomes a talking forest bird...
Solve a pictographic riddle and you can fly, shapeshift, work magic!
But someone doesn't want us solving dream-riddles...
Find your strength in dreams: facing (and befriending) what you've feared, or fought...
Seeking my lost teacher-bird, I dabble with the time machine in the basement.
Oops! I summon Bigfoot. But the monster rips out her fur...
A black separatist commune hides two little girls who are psychokinetic.
They fear I'll expose them. But I've spent my whole life passing too...
CAUTION: PARAPSYCHOLOGY, RACIAL SEPARATISTS
DAY: I have to read three academics who mock ancient, shamanic & modern dreamwork as superstition.
DREAM: I'm learning to fly in the Temple of Dreamwork, next to a cute new colleague.
NEXT DAY: I meet her...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.; DISSES ACADEMICS
A friend says lucid dreaming doesn't matter--you can even fly awake if you clearly will it. So I jump...
Doctors remove my upper skull and sew my scalp over my brain.
I can get around, if I stay upright, but I'm terribly vulnerable...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE REFLECTS REALITY
I'm biking on a crowded, steep San Francisco hill, but at the same time
an inexplicably terrifying office meeting gets superimposed. And
the AI feeding me the virtual office gets all snarky about my fear...
In therapy, I'm wrestling with sex. But workmen invade--hammer & hang pictures. MY pictures!
And my therapist keeps confusing me and her, and our sexual orientations! She means well, but...
CAUTION: NUDE PORTRAIT
DAY: An article claims dreams rarely include touch, taste or smell.
DREAM: I bike to work. Get a snootful of diesel exhaust. Think "So this can't be REM."
NEXT MORNING: I bike to work. A fire truck pulls out, and I get a...
Thorhadd's been slandering his enemy Thorstein. He spars publicly with a dream expert
who interprets all his dreams as: "Your tongue just can't quit!" True. It can't...
CAUTION: VIKING EGOS (AND BODY COUNT)
I watch Disney animate the Legend of the Thousand Birds, who pull
a wireframe sleigh of light right through a dark, material Santa...
I dream I'm teaching my students that those willing to let evidence change their minds are rare.
Climbers seek fame and status, while iconoclasts seek to upset order without regard for truth...
CAUTION: SOBERING FROM A NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
Three dreams set on Abenaki holy ground, of weird shamans--one ashen, one pumpkin-headed, the
third goofy-faced--lead me to visit the site. Where I find the river's washed up that third shaman's face...
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
I'm shown pictures of three different magical ways to fly. But the third
shows no actual flight--just someone giving away the magical means...
DREAM: a car crash; my parents both die, though my sister & I are thrown free, unhurt.
DAYS LATER: Aunt & uncle invite me on a car trip; my dad says no, I have to study.
TWO WEEKS LATER: Aunt & uncle die in a head-on; their kids are thrown free...
In 1985 I was flooded with nightmares about heads and necks. They had an unparalleled intensity...
When I overwork, neglecting my body's wants, I dream of an angry tiger. Over
time, I've learned (mostly) to feed my tiger, and sometimes he's an ally now...
1: On remote islands, Feral Cabbages prevented scurvy--though no one knew why...
2: A worn-out plushie, abandoned outdoors, goes limp & droopy--its fill bleeding out...
3: A lynx-sized tigress is waking from hibernation at last--gradually, grouchily, reluctantly!
I'm a cat person, grooming. But not MY fur--it's a woolly mass of timelines!
We cats travel time, smoothing out snarls... Then I wake, go to a party, and...
I dreamed that huge nouveau-riche polar bears invaded San Francisco, evicting us locals...
CAUTION: CORRUPTION, URSACIDE, MATH!
A trail toward Freedom has extra markers, for it's three trails, superimposed! Not all the cues are for us...
A couple slips in and out of sleep, dreams, one another's bodies and dreamworlds, trying to connect...
CAUTION: FREUDIAN SYMBOLISM, LITERATE WRITING
I was walking on an endless plain, upright and tense, walking beside you,
hurrying. What were we doing on the burning plain? What war...
In an oneirophobic society, it's easy to forget that when you do dreamwork, you're doing basic science.
No funding, no team, no lab coat? Can't be science! Unless they mistaught us what science is...
I'm an exchange student at the Solar System's best university for
the magic arts; my classmates are methane-breathing foxtaurs...
The innkeeper insisted I try a strange-looking liqueur, a house specialty called "Tuccotine"...
1: I failed to save a magic tree. It fell and killed someone. I'm racked with guilt...
2: A giant pinball game on a tilted oval relief-map. But you can only win as a team of six friends...
3: A Caribbean girl with a weird aura tries to align two magic crystals to heal herself...
CAUTION: BREASTS, MY LITTLE PONY AS ROLEMODEL
DREAM: at a dreamgroup, I tell a predictive dream that my artist friend's front tooth will get infected. Then
we all chant "Loga-Shana!" THREE WEEKS LATER: my artist friend's front tooth gets a serious abcess...
CAUTION: WILL TROUBLE E.S.P. SKEPTICS
Khodasevich (1939): I dreamt a call announced my friend was dead. Really he was still alive--but not for long...
Sergey (1945): My brother died in January but the news took months to reach us. Just before it did, I dreamed...
Half awake, Nabokov interprets shadows as guillotines and believes he and his wife will be executed...
I dream my daughter's selling two unused guitars. They seemed symbolic until I told her the dream and...
I saw a vast transparent plane inscribed with pictograms and symbols. Through it, at an unknown distance,
lay a second plane of less clear shapes and colors, but with great mass, depth, and unknown currents...
A TAILOR'S APPRENTICE: I become her to fight back against his abuse...
DAMSEL ON THE PYRE: I become a girl being burned alive, but get
so distracted by my beautiful body I forget to escape until it's too...
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!
Animal teachers, mostly equine, drag me (as I scream NO!) beyond plain dreamwork into shamanism...
Chapter 1: The Deer Party: by Wayan; 6 illus.
Chapter 2: Ariane's Honeymoon: by Wayan; 8K
Chapter 3: The Everest Marathon: by Wayan; 1 illus.
Chapter 4: Who'll Be My Love?: by Wayan; 100K, 4 illus.
Chapter 5: Dreamrider: by Wayan; 7K, a nondream interlude
Chapter 6: Half Shaman, Half Statesman: by Wayan; 170K, 4 illus.
Chapter 7: Eight To A Horn: by Wayan; 2 illus.
Chapter 8: Black Magic: by Wayan, 7 illus.
Chapter 9: Misfits On Mars: by Wayan; 300K, 7 illus.
In my dreams, a co-worker tells me HER dreams. Their
focus is so unlike mine! Dream goals really differ...
I grope through fog to the Vague House. Fog inside, too. Find a stone carved with an Eye of
Horus, and know it's my anger. Find a bigger stone scarab, and know it's my REAL anger...
I wander a valley where unicorns love cyborgs but fear giant ants, who love unicorns but
fear cyborgs, who love ants but fear unicorns! And while the Three Tribes squabble, cave-monsters
sculpt them all. I set up peace talks between these four aspects of my tetrahedral soul...
CAUTION: SWEARING, DRUNK LIONS, CYBORG SURGERY, AND GOGGLE-BARFING
1: A nature spirit's physics experiment proves that time forks. But how much? How dense is the multiverse?
2: I sculpt a model of this multiverse. A physicist likes it; the nature spirit likes it more. So she swipes it...
3: A 'friend' offers refugees my bedroom, crowding me and my work into a corner. I wake. The phone rings...
After a class where students are forced to vivisect anesthetized dogs
I dreamed I'd made a mistake; I was sawing open my daughter...
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM, CREEPY DISMISSAL
God speaks in surreal images from the sky, and I hurry to write down
what God says. But I find I wrote mere squiggles on the page...
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
There is a war between liberals and reactionaries, but the dream makes no
sense: friends claim to be hit, to be wounded, but I see no bodies, no blood...
CAUTION: ANTICIPATES THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
A murder case. But the chief suspect had taken a troubling dream to an interpreter.
The investigator saw its strange images might be puns that named the real killer. They did...
I'm the new manager of the watermelon mine. And to free the trapped minors--
oops, miners!--I have to plan. So I cover the floor with My Little Pony post-its...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
Why am I an outsider? Can I change? Even my dreams don't know. I wake to find my
meditation was a dream, and as much of an answer as dreamwork can give...
Attacked on the ground, in the air, even in space, I fight back effectively.
Not lucid, yet in my dreams I now have real power...
I meet a man in a box. A mob wants to attack him. But five white horses defend him! Well, one's really a unicorn. I know each horse is a talent, but only recall one when I wake: clairvoyance...
A dreamer I know dreamt she was fired by a Mr Bleeden. Baffled her, but made shocking sense to me! My dad...
Here's an incantation to induce flying dreams. "Bring me wings NOW, or forever hold your peace..."
First I dream the neighbors are powerful witches offering dog-collared children
to the local men. Later, on a train, I meet two kids who managed to escape...
CAUTION: CHILD ABUSE, NUDITY
After his dad's death, a boy dreams he's an orphan facing cannibal witches--every night! Therapy helps;
his recurring dreams shift to a manhunt for a criminal who hides on the ceiling. The dreams shift again, to
a tiger hunt. That is, the tiger hunts you. The boy jumps in the sea. Swimming with sharks...
CAUTION: INTENSE NIGHTMARES, PARENTAL LOSS
Night. The Nile; the Pyramids on one bank; minarets and domes on the other.
But if the dream's comparing antiquity to modernity... which does it condemn?
I'm in a college class studying a bizarre alternate Earth where
anarchist co-ops never evolved and (of all things) money rules all...
CAUTION: SCORNS CAPITALISM
This picture of a split man was in no sense a product of my conscious will. I simply
bowed to compulsion after four years of being haunted by that face in my dreams...
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...
Sharks unicorns and moonbeams / Lost loves and karma chocolate I-beams
Raw telepathic bundles of beans / Write a little dream with me...
A man dreamed he was the River Xanthus at Troy. I interpreted it to mean he'd bleed for years, but not die of it...
A warning from my spirit wife, Silky, about the World Dream Bank.
Building a cathedral of classic dreams is all very well, but what about NEW dreams?
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
Night street. Two masked assassins attack a woman. I intervene. But I need a weapon!
I picture the Turkish sword on my mantel. The yataghan appears in my hand and I...
Hiking, I come to a chapel where a yogi is meditating--on me. Creating me! And when he stops...
You say you want to remember your dreams, but do you write down what you DO recall? And ACT on it?
A mystic lives a solitary life. His best student is more outgoing;
she becomes famous and founds a school. Who was happier?
I wander a sunken maze, meet a playful woman, find a hidden treasure. Meanwhile, my friend Zooop...