I'm addicted to faraway trains. I quit cold turkey, but I shake the house down! Junkie poltergeists...
CAUTION: DRUG ADDICTION. SORT OF.
An indestructible camera relentlessly shows me what passengers feel on every crashing plane...
CAUTION: PAINFUL READING
A nightmare of a killer who I let torment me because it's better than being alone...
My sister Althea decides my house has demons, and hires an exorcist who botches things, so that...
She was headed for a rock wall. The brakes faded; she smelled burning.
Then she woke. Her friends laughed, but she asked a neighbor what to do if...
I witnessed strikes in Brighton and Devon through the eyes
of others; but I felt the Cheltenham impact in my own body...
A lovely pecan pie, but the guests are cutting pieces, dropping them, hands trembling
in growing hunger desperate the dark voracious guests fighting now to freeload...
CAUTION: NOT ABOUT PIE
My family and I are prisoners in a camp that will be H-bombed so our remains
can be studied. I write a Buddhist poem preparing for death...
CAUTION: GOVERNMENT ATROCITY
The therapist my parents made me see as a kid got convicted of molesting his
child clients. But not all. I played an evasive waiting game for three awful years
under his leering scrutiny. So, can evading a molester still traumatize? Oh yes...
CAUTION: CHILD NEGLECT & ABUSE
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 burst into tears for no reason and for 15 minutes begged my brother-in-law not to go, then said...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
A knight falls in love with a fey woman, until her previous victims warn him in a nightmare that she is...
CAUTION: GOTH TO THE MAX
I'm a girl being stalked. I get drastic--scrunch up the universe & shake it out! And is THAT enough?
CAUTION: ANXIETY, GUILT, POSSIBLE APOCALYPSE
Two DC-6s catch burn over New York. Me? I'm a naked child in a Babylonian temple in Jersey...
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
My crazy friend Wayne goes bowling for busses with a black egg. Wait! Crazy? Or... predictive?
CAUTION: GEORGIA O'KEEFFE BEHAVES DISGRACEFULLY
I dreamed a large meteor had struck the Earth. I found my Dad just as the shockwave hit...
CAUTION: APOCALYPSE
Spies kidnap a girl and move her soul into a madwoman's body.
Can she survive? Recover? Thrive? The TV dance show helps...
A long terrible shiver, and my whole body broke like glass. I may live months, but in that dream I died...
I was at the beach with my friends. It was fun. But gradually they were
laughing at me, not with me. Then they picked up burning sticks...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
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
He saw a vehicle coming toward him at great speed. The light was so bright it blinded him. He screamed...
A vampire wrestler on the Throne of Heaven pins me. Visualization and prayer don't free me--in fact, they get me killed...
I find myself driving a speeding car down a freeway--in reverse. No, not reverse gear...
Closer I edge to admire their scales, the glint of their teeth, and shape of their tails. They cast a strong spell...
Gunsel kills my friend Crystal in a flaming aircar crash. But that's not enough--he comes back, and...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
We're Cubist cartoon characters, trapped in a strip gone mad. But my dad stays calm! Too calm...
CAUTION: SEAS OF BLOOD... OR IS IT RED INK?
My dad drives recklessly, hits a copcar hard, smashing our front end. I wake
knowing it says "Kay's a batterer. Leave her or I'LL be smashed." That day...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE, BATTERING ISSUES
I was a small boy living on Oahu. Out my front door I saw a 20-mile-tall wall of flames stretching across the horizon...
As a kid, when I had a fever I always had the same nightmare: a high brick or stone wall
shaking apart, faster and faster. This scared me very much. Finally, in my teens, I...
My sister & her new guru tests me psychologically--only it looks like a test to destruction...
CAUTION: EMOTIONAL CRUELTY
I get a job in China teaching bus-driving dogs how to fly. I don't know how. Luckily, the dogs...
A mob chases me chanting "Lyin' Wayan!" I get dizzy, fall off a bridge, and wake. Then comes REAL trouble!
CAUTION: FATAL FALL
We were on a train headed for a crash. No one was in the engine. Rather than jump, my friend insisted we try...
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...
An experimental helmet knocks me out. I'm groggy, miserable, till I learn what it did to others...
I asked my dreams to show me my Shadow--what I deny. It showed me at least FIVE! And in every
time-branch, a runaway truck crushed me--the Truck of Ideology. Not that I seemed able to avoid it...
CAUTION: RECURRING DEATHS
What are the psychological effects of growing up psychic, as others' thoughts
and feelings invade you? When other's bodies invade you, it's molestation...
At my mechanic's garage, a child prodigy rebuilds a car engine. Gawking, I nearly plow into the crowd...
I'm trapped in a TV documentary on nuclear war! Better dive through a TV screen and find a safe sitcom...
Lucifer throws firebolts from a Montreal tower; monsters stalk us; next comes the flood...
A dream-friend blames me for nothing. I wake, and TWO friends blame me for...
My fever-dreams manifest physically and mess up my whole neighborhood. Seismic inspectors arrive...
My car's idling too fast. After hours of diagnosis, I notice a foot's on the gas! But not my foot...
Every full moon, kidnappers jump me. Sometimes I escape, but when they succeed, they torture me till
the moon wanes. They're careful to leave no physical scars...
I'm at a garden-party when They attack. I flee through a garden of swords, but a guard with a bayonet...
I was a giant carefully & guiltlessly flattening San Francisco--just following orders
to recycle it! Killing how many? While my mind inside the giant's mind was appalled...
I'm at a vaudeville for gods. Cthulhu the squid-god nearly tramples me--and then gets horny...
CAUTION: GROSS GOD, GROSS GOO
I was warned about soul-devouring art in the haunted house, but I didn't expect to find an entire art salon...
CAUTION: ABSORBING ARTWORK
I'm a homeless elf. We're a persecuted minority group. I know I'm dreaming and try to change it but...
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...
From age six on, Simon nightly climbs mountains and faces roaring floods in a sort of naptime bootcamp...
After the eco-crash, I try to join a tribe in the jungle that was Oakland. But they reject me, for good reason...
I'm chased by spaghetti, snared, sprinkled with parmesan.
My hungry classmates loom, and my best friend says...
The villagers warned me not to walk in the alien graveyard; for at night, the Id flowers wake...
Out my window, a dog is fighting a snake. A dog with bat wings. A dog big as a horse.
A griffin! Big as a bus now. A dragon! What spell made me mistake THAT for a dog?...
I'm trapped in a mad scientist's car that squeezes through wall-cracks. But when
she aims at a wall with NO cracks, I have to pull out the smuggled alien device
in my pocket. Just before impact I switch on the Inertial Damper...
When warring Greek isles kill a peacemaker, her three best friends start a vendetta! But she wanted peace...
CAUTION: HATE NURSED TOO LONG
I'm in World War II, asking a reporter to keep quiet about our secret weapon.
But it's already gone off, melting and distorting the whole cartoon world. It's...
Jack was a parachutist on D-Day. His mom dreamt of the strafings, the ditch he hid in, the deaths of his comrades...
The Mummy chases me, then unwraps his bandages to show the mutilated face of my boyfriend.
"I'm getting out of jail!" he says. Then the phone wakes me. My boyfriend. He says "I'm getting out of..."
CAUTION: CODEPENDENCE, MUTILATION, GUILT AND GRIEF
Lucid, I summon a sexy literary character. But he tries to take over my personality and make it his lucid dream...
CAUTION: VAMPIRE-SLAYING
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
I found myself defending humanity before an astral jury, begging them to delay the great die-back...
I was on a plane... It was almost graceful, the plane actually entered the building before everything dissolved into flame...
CAUTION: DEATH. DEATH TWICE.
The moment I find the Key, I'm possessed! I wake to find it's just a nightmare. Only who's broken into my house?...
CAUTION: DEMONIC POSSESSION & EVERYDAY PSYCHOPATHS
Kitty, exhausted, stops fighting what's inside her, and lets herself die.
Crystalline alien worms burst out, growing till they loom over the spaceport...
CAUTION: ADDICTION ROOTED IN AVOIDANCE
A courtroom hostage-drama where I'm forced to commit... tracheotomy! And then the Gulf War begins...
CAUTION: CARTOON VIOLENCE
I'm a slender, clever krelkin. I draw me, but then red rage erupts and I trash myself... can I be saved?
Researchers show me weird little objects like shoelaces that drive people mad with fear...
I'm on Mars. The terraforming is going well. Then saboteurs set off a laserbomb in the street near me...
CAUTION: TERRORISM
From the neck up I was me; from the neck down, Woodrow Wilson in his old age, paralyzed.
My presidential aides divided up my duties, and ignored me...
As a boy I dreamt I was trapped in a wooden chair, paralyzed, as a stampede
rushed toward me, just as my grandmother was paralyzed and chair-bound...
I'm pushing a safe off a roof in Berkeley so it won't be pushed off the roof
(yep, you read that right) but it pulls me with it! Either die, or go lucid and fly...
Alli/Tip is lured/tricked into a pen full of women, and tries to get out by repeating this ambiguous plea...
Snakebite! I'm hooked to a health-monitor. If a red light comes on, I'm doomed. But voices start whispering...
Little Nemo's bed gets restless and takes him for a wild ride through town and up onto roofs...
I visit the underworld court of the Lizard King, but I can't leave: he makes me Queen...
CAUTION: MARITAL RAPE (NON-GRAPHIC)
A mob of kids chases me chanting "Lyin' Wayan!" I get dizzy and fall off a bridge... THEN comes trouble!
CAUTION: FATAL FALL
An avian friend of mine researches a whirlpool. But it doesn't want to be studied, and it has friends too...
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
I'm a fight promoter. But my biggest deal ever is growing out of my control.
Mammoth versus Rex, sure. But now it's a four-way bout--schoolbus, whale...
CAUTION: CRASS ACT
Many kids anxiously dream their parents aren't their real parents. I dreamed my parents ATE my real parents...
CAUTION: HUNGRY MONSTERS
A girl and two cybersnakes are clever but murderous. But
when apart, they're not mean at all! Not sin--synergy...
I'm a Romantic poet who defeats the curse of the fountain, to marry; but when our daughter's grown,
a new curse strikes me mute, paralyzed. And I mistake this for old age!
Then, in real life, my dad wakes up from a nap paralyzed...
Natalius dreamed that angels whipped him for joining a heretic cult, and woke to find welts on his back...
Nazis call my simple architectural drawing a social protest, take it at gunpoint,
and toss it in the ovens. The commander mocks me with its ashes...
Nebuchadnezzar dreams a voice from heaven commands a great tree be cut;
Daniel interprets this as a prediction the king will go mad for 7 years...
I climb a crumbling slope to a cliff with a Himalayan view; I slip, and no one lifts a hand to help as I...
I'm in a basement, forced to enact a ritual where I must mate with, then FEED on, a flayed creature...
I wake shaken, open a random book--and it describes the ancient Celtic rites of Epona...
CAUTION: BESTIALITY, MATE-DEVOURING
My sister & I swim round a weirdly shrunken Pacific. Near Fiji, we blunder too close to the drain...
In a grassy depression, a small animal is thrashing. Death-throes? No. Calisthenics!
But not under the animal's control. Someone's testing...
A child of radicals goes wild in Rio. When we bail her out, we find she's had a strange enlightenment...
CAUTION: UNSAFE SEX
I'm on a beach in Mexico with a baby--my only souvenir of an affair I can't recall.
I'm a mom? My whole life will change! Wait. Is this real, or...
A wild flying dream lands me among feral children fighting to live in a glass conservatory of lost flowers...
I show an Ohio friend the latest California sport. But
we haven't quite worked out how to land just yet...
Under the surface of my comics panels, a tiny horde is having an orgy. I can't
publish this, it's too embarrassing! Wait a minute. That one is me...
CAUTION: MICRO-ORGY
I'm trapped in the scary show The Outer Limits. A man scolds me: "You think not, but you MATTER!"
I try suicide rather than face my worth! But my dream fences off the river, forcing me to confront...
CAUTION: SUICIDE ATTEMPT
Mom's vanished, and our writer/bohemian dad's caring for us
alone now. But he's barely coping. And he's me...
Three men torture my friend (or is he ME?) and try to keep me from intervening...
CAUTION: FAST-TALKING BULLIES
Two child artists mail themselves to me in their paint kit, and
start a painting orgy that gets messy in more ways than one...
CAUTION: PEDOPHILIA, OR MAYBE PEDOPHOBIA
No work, no friends, no lover. People power-drill their own skulls. My uncle's going insane. And when I call 911...
CAUTION: BLEAK
Plato never did say what shed the light that cast those shadows on his cave wall. I find out.
CAUTION: CUT-RATE APOCALYPSE
I had fun playing fortuneteller, until David. My hands turned icy. I asked "Where are you going?"
When Perissa, an exhibitionistic centaur, bares her body in a crowded Coliseum,
she also bares a human-supremacist plot...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM
Pete told me to skip the shortcut. Only after I'd turned the truck around did I realize Pete had died weeks ago...
A hog is tied so it bounces in a fountain, and at the bottom
of each bounce, a fork jabs it! How to free this yoyo pig?
CAUTION: PAIN
Janet's obsessed with a creepy guy till her pixy friend Kay decides to "knock some sense into her cunt"--literally...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, NASTY LOVE SPELL, PIXIE NUDITY
Looks like this underground nuclear test will leak. Minutes from detonation,
we flee up the spiral stair and out across the sand. Can we run far enough in time?
I find myself clinging to a pole as tall as the Empire State Building. Can I slide down
without falling? Or burning from friction? And... what's down there?
At thirteen, I dreamed a van crashed right at the spot where my best friend always met me after school.
The next day we went to see what'd happen. I suggested we stand across the road just to be safe...
I'm swept off sea-rocks, as my scaly guardian watches calmly--letting me drown in the tears I shed...
CAUTION: DROWNING
One by one, we're pulled under the water, the earth... eaten. That's the fate of all flesh. And we're flesh.
CAUTION: HORROR
A detective talks all his suspects into suicide. But they still bury me in wood pulp and beat me to death...
CAUTION: BAD POLICE PROCEDURE
A monster's out to eat my dog--and maybe me. We get cornered in the barn...
I was on a steamer run amok, in a boiling yellow incredible sea out of which great pylons rose...
I'm working alone in the lab at night, when the lab gear wakes up and tries to kill me...
In the recording studio, some background noise. Isolated and amplified, it's a chorus of
inhuman voices praising an unknown deity. The song becomes a mandala pulling me in...
Women rain out of the sky. People shrug "Suicides." I don't believe it--and what if one falls on me?
CAUTION: SEXIST BLINDNESS TO VIOLENCE
My parents invite me out to dinner, but there's a rattlesnake under the table,
and my mom chases it up my leg. I wake to find two holes in my knee...
I dreamed I was riding a huge toy train, and a gigantic rattlesnake was at the controls...
A man slowly walled in by neighbors till he died, is now a mad, murderous ghost.
And he's me! Can I exorcise MYSELF?
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
My city's invaded and occupied. I become a gigantic Owl and fight with impossible stamina.
But in the end I'm dead, stuffed, on a museum wall. Can I let go NOW?
CAUTION: WAR
A horde of demented dwarves invades Market Street, jumping up & down, shaking the skyscrapers...
I was in the grave. Worse, a living skeleton was trying to crush my ribs. Though terrified, I fought back, and...
Gloom clung to me & I skipped the dance. I begged Frances to ride in a safe car, but coming home...
New moons appear. I try to mash them into a spare Earth, but botch the orbits.
So now, runaway moons rumble down a steep San Francisco hill...
CAUTION: ALWAYS SET PARKING BRAKE
I'm a flightless bird hopping down a line of marble columns rising from the sea, as they topple behind me...
I fled a demon into a shadowy construction zone where an even worse telepathic lion-devil
lured me in with soothing flattery. I woke shaking--and then things in my room began to move...
CAUTION: DEMONS, POLTERGEIST PHENOMENA
Aliens, hypnotherapy, dancing molars, riots, witches, flying pianos, lettuce... yet there is a point.
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...
Yuppies with a lighter set me on fire--not even out of malice, just idly.
I'm a shaman, I can survive it, but I'm not immune to pain...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE, UGLY POLITICAL COMPARISONS
My sisters get bored with the game of power, so I watch TV--
until it melts, and a terrifying giant rises to chases me...
My childhood home explodes into a vast pyroclastic cloud that comes boiling toward me, miles away...
CAUTION: DOOM
Stolen by the Fairy Queen, I'm forced to nurse her great project: creating life! But her synthetic baby is...
At boot camp for sex slaves, a rapist makes me a surprisingly tempting offer. But it's really not about sex, is it?
CAUTION: ORAL SEX, OUTRAGEOUS COMPARISON
My sexual orientation shifts arbitrarily, turned on one second, off the next. Who's at the controls?
CAUTION: SEXUAL CONFUSION
An art critic asks me what I think of a sexually explicit nude, and I
find myself blurting nearly the opposite of my conscious opinion...
CAUTION: NUDE SKETCH
Africa. My horse trusted me as we faced lions and fire, but to face the Soul-Board, he must trust himself...
The world is a whirlpool, a black and white spiral pulling me
down toward a black hole, and it's laughing...
I drum on an ocarina-gong in the dark. My weird music summons a choir of
fierce angels, who send a wave of tingling energy surging through me...
On the freeway, my car and I split into quantum possibilities. I steer both entangled cars
till I split again--now I have to steer three cars with just one pair of hands and eyes...
I'm a hot archeology student till I open the wrong tomb. A plague
turns us into green moldy monsters--at first...
CAUTION: DISEASE, DEATH, GRIEF, SHAME
I'm a French revolutionary facing a firing squad. But palmistry predicts I'll be strangely saved...
I defeat the knife-wielder, in spite the blade in my belly I can't pull out. I may have to let it be...
My friend Stanley is a social icebreaker: blundering in where I'm too shy, and
too thick-skinned to worry much. He is what he is. So why am I mad at him?
My unconscious sabotages a lunch date with my friend Stephanie. The tricks get weirder, till...
I'm sentenced for a crime I didn't commit; then the bailiff beats me for "resisting", though I'm not...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, SWEARING
The first drop struck about four miles away, with terrific force and thunder, breaking and drowning the land...
My sister and I are on a ship abandoned by its crew, heading full-steam for the rocks, when...
A gigantic herd of buffalo stampede toward me. I panic, then surrender in peace to what is surely my death...
An alien is taking over our world, and I feel so helpless that even when I wake I want to just forget the dream...
High up a scaffold, I was beating the chaff off a huge seed, unable to stop. I was beating my own heart...
A stallion reared to strike me. He was all the fear and rage I'd repressed for 35 years. I cowered til a woman said "offer him...
Nightmares can warn. But when awake, what warning can you get from nonstop ill-luck?
My dog and I are abducted by aliens who turn us into cats. We escape & go feral to survive.
How we got back, and what happened along the way, even my own shrink refuses to believe...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUID AND KLEPTOMANIAC BUGS
They're hanging the political traitor in my closet. I stand horrified.
The old man's resigned--no complaint. It's my father, I now realize...
Did sex turn creepy because I sensed the madman stalking us? Or did our sin (casual sex) summon him?
CAUTION: CREEPY SEX, CREEPIER PREMONITIONS
In 1985 I was flooded with nightmares about heads and necks. They had an unparalleled intensity...
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
Silicon Valley goes enthusiastically fascist. I hide in a berry patch. They build a shining world, and then...
Stuck in a horror movie, I get to meet the triceratops-headed monster
who scriptwrites all my nightmares. But he's open to suggestions...
I'm carried off by a crane to meet birdfish, singing sheep, fell-spirits, mad shopkeepers and devil-bulls...
I ride a magical self-guiding canoe, seeking the right beach and cove for me.
Even when the boat climbs hills so I can explore inland, I expect it to fail...
I'm climbing a tower, as my dad, Apollo, drunk, throws bottles at me from the top, breaking bones...
CAUTION: DENIAL ABOUT ALCOHOLISM
My mind and my soul both apply for a job in Stanford Cathedral. Their rivalry grows to a shamanic duel...
I volunteered to meet him underground. He held me underwater and slammed into me. I nearly drowned, yet...
CAUTION: ROUGH SEX
My art mentors turn on me! My mom the painter says I'm genetically inferior,
and then my art teacher Verity sits on my head (ow!) and chants...
Trapped in a blend of Joan of Arcadia and The Tempest Tales, I'm tired of being the pratfall sidekick...
Robot wolves with videocamera eyes prowl our block, freezing me
in their headlight glare. Why do I think one's my ex-girlfriend?
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 ask to see my past lives, and dream of a viewpoint where I can--but this Mormon ranger...
We lose control of our new time machine, which seems to have its own agenda...
CAUTION: CONTEMPLATION OF SUICIDE, CHRONOLOGICALLY IMPAIRED DREAMER
Half-mad with fear, I massacre a cult, till my gun manifests stigmata: a gory miracle.
Then I'm a cultist, resisting the Voice of God pushing all us mortals to murder in His name.
I woke up haunted, and wondered for weeks what this was about... until the Waco Massacre.
CAUTION: CREEPY VIOLENCE, CREEPY GOD, CREEPY PREDICTION
The vulture people are fucking in the city dump. I end up their guest, given putrid food
in their cold stinking house of rancid grease. I'll become a vulture too...
CAUTION: UGH!
I'm stuck on a runaway bus. So we decide to picture the axle falling off, and
it obeys! But the bus zooms on, carried by a horde of little animals...
CAUTION: ESP SKEPTICS WILL LOATHE THE AFTERWORD (true story, though)
Lost in an industrial maze, my memories hopelessly outdated, I resign myself to the Wheel...
We're exploring the English farm we inherited, when The Wild Hunt storms over the hill...
I was bodiless but trapped. All I could see were these moving wires. Whenever a knot drifted by...
CAUTION: MADNESS, TORMENT, TELEPATHY, SEXUAL REBELLION
A woman I had wronged set her pit bull on me! Hand in its jaws, I gave in, and we both began crying...
This man comes into the chapel, makes a fascist salute, catches fire, and burns right down to his shoes...
Emily Dickinson ties up a worm she mistrusts. Bad move! It grows to a talking snake with a score to settle...
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...