I'm addicted to faraway trains. I quit cold turkey, but I shake the house down! Junkie poltergeists...
CAUTION: DRUG ADDICTION. SORT OF.
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
by "Veronica Franco"; 2006/8/19, a dream of penned creatures and those who love them.
Alpine deer-hamsters, pigs, birds, children, even fundamentalists' daughters grow up and want to fly free...
I'm a Puertorriqueña who falls for an Anglo doctor, but he's not what he seems...
CAUTION: UNDERAGE SEX, CREEPY GUY, VICIOUS FIGHT
Enlightenment came to me via that shimmering, animated Hamm's Beer billboard...
CAUTION: SAY YES TO DRUGS?
I'm in bed with a movie star, and it's awful. Why? Because I can only feel
her with FIVE senses--the sixth is missing! So disorienting it's creepy...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE, BAD SEX
Drunk, I fight writer Peter Beagle. He falls. Out cold. I wake sure I'm a killer...
Next day I read Ellen Klages's Passing Strange. Its climactic scene is curiously familiar...
I meet a sex-kitten in the Underground Cartoonists' Bar, but her body language makes no sense to me...
CAUTION: UNDERAGE FLIRTATION... OR IS IT?
My family has a hidden gene for incest--and griffins.
When I bring the family skeleton from the closet...
CAUTION: RAPE, INCEST
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...
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...
I'm James Bond. Captured and questioned, I lie to the enemy: the senators of the
Committee on Intelligence Activities. Till I see myself through their eyes...
CAUTION: SPY SEX, SPY MENTALITY
I keep dreaming of awkward but successful transitions into new life, and paint them all in one landscape...
The Hunt of the Unicorn (yeah, guess who I am), as I fly through the worlds fighting Reaganism...
CAUTION: MOCKS THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR
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...
DREAM: my parents nag me to go on a picnic, then bring plastic cheese and sprayed, scab grapes. Eat this & I'll get sick...
DAY: a farewell lunch at work. No one likes her, so folks brought only plastic cheese & scab grapes. I eat a bit & get sick...
CAUTION: PSYCHIC DREAM, STUPID DREAMER
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 meet a dancer who plays a stick figure on stage. She smokes
a cigar. I ask her how many a day she smokes, and she answers...
The day after my mom outed me to my dad, I dream a great storm has passed and everything's just glowing...
I infiltrate the Cult of Cake. Novices drool over chocolate frosting
and hand over their life savings. It's a pyramid scheme! A food...
CAUTION: TRUMP REFERENCES; HIDEOUS PUN
Chapter 1 of a nine-story series: UNICORN TAG.
A sentient factory shows me a gene-tweaked future where the Deer Party agitates for
liberty, equality and fertility. In that future I learn I too may not be human...
A catalog of American addictions and the absurd distinctions we make between them....
CAUTION: EMBARRASSING DRUG LIST
Our Appalachian town revolts against fundamentalists, but brainwashing takes time to undo...
CAUTION: SEX AND INJUSTICE
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
Fighting alcoholism, I dream I drink all the booze in a bar, then wake up shaken...
so shaken I reach for the bottles by my bed and drink THEM, then wake up shaken...
and clutch my cat, wondering if I'm still dreaming--will I wake up again?
CAUTION: ALCOHOLIC NIGHTMARE(S)
An experimental helmet knocks me out. I'm groggy, miserable, till I learn what it did to others...
I fall in love with a sexy T. Rex at the Renaissance Faire. Then things get weird...
CAUTION: DINO ABUSE
A bug with a horse-skull face reappears all through this nightmare of betrayal. I only know I feared it...
While my body expels a kidney stone, weird scenes happen on the astral plane. At least I get to dip the pope.
CAUTION: PAIN, PEE, POPE
1: I visit Elrond and Bilbo in Elvenhome, but overthinking traps me in a timeloop;
2: Elrond says he renounces seriousness for joy, and plans a great, inclusive party;
3: I feel unworthy, but set out on a desert quest with Elrond's young apprentice;
4: I meet joyful, drunken, singing elves but hide in a tree, too shy to join in;
5: I meet a nervous elven singer and a dolphin trapped in a tiny pool in my bedroom...
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...
Worms rappeled down from my ceiling. My friend says "I've had great talks with those creatures."
They became flying flowers exuding a gas that, if you napped, let you have wonderful conversations...
George Jetson is married to Wilma Flintstone--though they're both big cats.
When George comes home high on mushrooms, he doubts what's on his bed...
CAUTION: CARTOON ADULTERY
I dreamed God was naked, selling cigarettes in a nightclub...
CAUTION: MONOTHEISTIC FALL
High in the Sierra during a thunderstorm, I dream aliens steal the gold, and the sun's
going nova. But Life wants us to conquer space, so we all grow wings...
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?)
A CIA man trying to infiltrate a revolutionary group flunks a lie-detector test, so the Headshrinker...
CAUTION: REAL HEADSHRINKER
As my grandmother is dying, I have a dream about what really went on in her house...
CAUTION: CHILD SLAVERY
A mind-control drug urges her to strangle her loved ones, but
to beat the curse she busies her fluttering hands with bluegrass banjo...
I’m at a lecture on Art, Beauty and the Nude, but no one paid the model and he wants a drink...
My family runs a bar. I walk through, after hours. Who are all these silent figures?
CAUTION: UNHEALTHY READING FOR SINGLES
An ink sketch in a magazine shows a new Ghost Dance invading city clubs.
But the (biased?) artist uglifies the Indians, horses and giraffes dancing...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY; JAUNDICED ART/REPORTING
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
What really built Silicon Valley? Oh, pizza, sugar, coffee, speed and cocaine, mostly...
CAUTION: DRUGS ON THE JOB
I dream of German dirges I don't know. I hum them for a friend, who shocks me by asking
"Have you abandoned any children, or burned a manuscript?" Right on both counts...
I dream I go to my NY dentist, but the novocaine sends me into a dream of having dentistry in Tel Aviv!
I 'wake' and my NY dentist explains he can't do me today: sore hands from doing Henry Kissinger...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree (at least till that visitor from Porlock barged in)
CAUTION: POET ON PAIN MEDS
After fighting off an electrified Orson Welles, I meet the twelve
vulture-pine-politicians climbing Mt Sinai, looking for librium...
My "friends" pull me away from the girl of my dreams, push booze & pot at me,
and won't even try to climb the rope to success. But Marvin saves Evel Knievel
from a motorcycle crash. Sounds good--until, ten years later, I hear how Marvin died...
CAUTION: GRIM AFTERMATH
Two medieval women poison one another. One dies in my arms; the other may just survive. Why did they...?
CAUTION: MURDERERS
A jungle cat needs to take time out from a hard day's predation to have a quiet smoke...
I meet a cult worshiping a mermaid who just wallows in a puddle, teaching
her followers absolutely nothing; she just wants admiration for her looks...
CAUTION: CARTOON BREASTS
I'm in what seems to be a village of very conservative Muslims. But they're really alien castaways...
My dad's new wife is a collie. Naturally, she wants a prosthetic arm. But she has no site to bind it to...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, LEERING BUSINESSMAN, DOG WIFE
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
Dinner with the Lightbulb Heads. When we leave, the Mood Elevators welcome us...
but won't let us out! And in the struggle to escape, heads will roll--and shatter...
CAUTION: HARSH WORDS ON WESTERN MEDICINE
At the airport, I'm told I can't take my flight; I must finish my education first. Decades have passed,
and I still dream of borders and officials who won't let me go until they decide I've finished my...
I was downtown when I knew I had to hurry home. I found it full of gas.
As my husband napped, our two-year-old had turned on all the stove jets...
The first two dragons numb my pain. I demand it back, and soon regret my haste.
But the third dragon I seduce, for I'm a dragon now...
Age 7 to 11, I often dreamt I inhabited a consistent geography of mountains & deserts. I was an adult of dark
complexion in non-European clothes; I spoke a tongue (and read a script) that I didn't recognize when awake...
CAUTION: ADULT DRUG EXPERIMENT; PAST LIFE MEMORY?
When Perissa, an exhibitionistic centaur, bares her body in a crowded Coliseum,
she also bares a human-supremacist plot...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM
I put a singles ad in our paper, but I just couldn't say what I really wanted to. Now, I can...
CAUTION: SEX, DRUGS, AND DOGGEREL
Poison takes many forms, from attitudes to environmental by-products to actions done deliberately...
My friend the Polygamous Pilot is up in an ice-storm, hanging powerlines on the sky, when...
Bob is at the window asking to be let into my house. He is dressed as Santa Claus; but I think he's really...
CAUTION: MURDER ATTEMPT
20,000 years from now, a deer-harpist named Razi finds the Holy Wino's not quite the ruin he seems...
CAUTION: BAD PENGUINS, DEER NUDITY, RUDE DRUNK
How do we make dream narratives readable, when so many
readers are brainwashed to think they're nonsense?
After too much TV, I dream I'm plotting against a regime of suave, treacherous magical beings. But
a unicorn sorceress suggests I enlist the robots. She's right--they find plutocratic thaumocracy ugly...
CAUTION: ANTI-CAPITALIST
It was way too late to call, but an irrational urge made me wake my friend up and pester her until...
CHRIS: I find what may be a magic potion, if it has a scroll hidden in the liquid...
MARK: I'm underwater. Spirits dance around me, on top of sunken scrolls...
Aliens, hypnotherapy, dancing molars, riots, witches, flying pianos, lettuce... yet there is a point.
Compulsively honest spirit-women with waterjugs invade my friend's house.
I wake to find my girlfriend's obsessing on hair loss. To calm her, I babble about limb loss...
and wake again to find she was a dream too.
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...
I'm a trade rep for Terra, on a new world. But an old rival, a rep from another world, arrives, and...
I'm a girl in the 1960s, but not a native--a time-traveler. I'm smoking with friends (not necessarily
tobacco)--but I have this strange sense smoking may lead to serious danger. I wake, get invited
to the film Terms of Endearment, and watch Shirley Maclaine and Debra Winger enact my dream...
I dreamed of speckled eggs, Caribbean drug traffickers and of
almost drowning near a sinking boat...
My family moves into a damp, leaking basement. My dad just sneers at us for fussing
about the cold, the damp, the mildew, the leaks. "I'll show you REAL leaking..."
Lost in a dark maze of machine-shops, I follow Mr. Spock, who's drunk, and talks to tree-spirits...
CAUTION: ALCOHOL AS INSPIRATION?
My unconscious sabotages a lunch date with my friend Stephanie. The tricks get weirder, till...
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..
The tale of the most truly sincerely religious revelation I've ever witnessed...
CAUTION: REAL WITCHES
A boar attacks Swedenborg's late brother, alive again. He tries to help, but the pig
eats his brother's head. That's what you get for drinking, partying, and gluttony...
CAUTION: VIOLENT DEATH
Solve a pictographic riddle and you can fly, shapeshift, work magic!
But someone doesn't want us solving dream-riddles...
I get speared by Irish warriors, slipped an LSD dose, chased by giant spiders, torpedoed--hey, I'm not bored!
A beer-soaked cowboy barbecue goes wrong when a dog named Teri Garr catches fire
and they just laugh and won't waste beer to douse her. Then their big old hats catch fire...
CAUTION: SEXIST BLAMING OF VICTIM; PROBABLE DEATHS BY FIRE
As a kid, my nightmares were of Sesame Street characters. In my teens I graduated to
slasher nightmares and recurring lucid dreams. Alcohol trashed my dreams for years, but
now they're not nightmares--just surreal. Hitler wrecks my sex life! What a spoilsport...
CAUTION: (MOSTLY FRUSTRATED) SEX
That day: I read of a young healer in rural Indonesia harassed by the local mullah.
That night: I dream she leads a revolution on a starship against her elders...
My German friend resolved to commit suicide, so I agreed to poison myself to keep him company...
A free-lance torturer chooses me for his victim. He has the right. I bluster, but when I fall asleep at last...
CAUTION: NO PAIN, BUT GORE
I'm climbing a tower, as my dad, Apollo, drunk, throws bottles at me from the top, breaking bones...
CAUTION: DENIAL ABOUT ALCOHOLISM
A tribute to Hokusai's sketches. A crane and a fairy were out drinking, and now can't fly home...
In a future society, I'm deliberately, permanently paralyzed. Yet my home-grown cure slowly works...
DAY: I'm an experimental subject given a drug in hopes it'll induce ESP. I just babble stupidly. Humiliation!
DREAM: my vacuum cleaner comes alive to attack my terrier & me. I flee, but there's an explosion...
TWO DAYS LATER: at the movies, a cartoon: a vacuum cleaner comes alive to attack a terrier. Then, BOOM...
CAUTION: WILL REALLY BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
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
I'm a flying fox in England. I see a poisoning and call for help. Ugly knockoffs of
Peanuts characters attack me! The real Peanuts gang defeats them; Snoopy drives
the victim to the hospital, saving her. It really is vital to be... authentic.
CAUTION: PUNS
Blondie Wiggle builds a Video Igloo. But I'm allergic--TV kills me! A BAD omen for our video project...
CAUTION: TV KILLS (BUT YOU KNEW THAT)
I dreamt Anacreon the poet reeled with drink and lust--and I am wild and wanton like to him...
Swedenborg fights a monster but lacks strength. Yet later, on a higher plane, he learns the beast did die...
CAUTION: VIOLENT
In a dream, a dead friend told Mrs. Cl. how to cure her daughter's chronic illness: the yew tree. But yew is toxic...
I careen from a sacrificial marriage-altar to the Oracle Harper's secret pool,
into the jaws of Leviathan and the joys of lucid flight, shifting from male to female
and gay to straight--till I meet the Dragonfly People themselves...
CAUTION: STUPID, STUPID SEX CULT!