One boring lonely day, I meet a cute teenage bunny who wants to play with me! But half an hour later…
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, INTERSPECIES FLIRTING, AND LOSS
In a Japanese house I met a charming red-headed girl and had this
weird urge to scratch her pointed ears. Oh! She's a kitsune!...
In the corridors of a dream hotel, next to a monstrous
sunflower, little girls strip and play with whips...
AL repeatedly drew a bizarre, recurring dream-guide named Kolchec; years later he met
SARA, who'd painted her dream-guide, a distinctive spook named--oh, take a guess...
CAUTION: WILL DISTURB ESP SKEPTICS
As a child, Paul Nash dreamt he flew over rural southern England.
As an adult surrealist painter...
A huge explosion knocked the earth off its orbit; it struck other planets and wrecked the whole
solar system. Where will the souls ready to reincarnate all go? Or do they even need a planet?...
I know we will cross the water surrounding the heart of Jerusalem, but not yet...
As we climb down the steep mountainside, clutching bushes to keep from falling,
I ask Laura "Do you want another child?"
This couple keeps appearing in my dreams--as equals, as mount and rider, as friends, as enemies, as lovers...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Illness is such a handy excuse when you need solitude, care, rest, or just time to think... but...
The dreamer becomes a horse, the horse becomes a unicorn.
Dreams have their own quests apart from the conscious...
"Freedom is a gift you give yourself." But it doesn't always involve seahorses or babycarriages covered in quills...
Three unicorns gallop out of the waves...
In the dark, a dragonlike god of fire stretched out
one claw to courteously light my own small torch...
She didn't want to be there. She closed her eyes and went elsewhere. So I painted where she went...
CAUTION: NUDITY
We must hunt a man-eating lion to protect our village--our village full of slaves. But we
can't deal with our looming social crisis now--gotta focus on the lion in front of us..
CAUTION: SLAVERY, ILLNESS, DEATH
I visit a friend's ramshackle cottage--trees grow through the walls. But glorious meadows! Spring at last...
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...
Embodying that upsetting feeling
when you're crawling on the ceiling...
I realized I was dreaming, and flew. My friends were skeptical and held me down a while, but
soon I had them flying too. At a party in Valhalla, I made love with a mer-angel named Ealswa...
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
The Lynx, my dream-god,
comes for me at last...
The dancers, in a frenzy, stripped themselves. Not just their clothes; themselves...
A colorful magic web I saw in a dream and painted; but I've been unable to trace the dream so far in my journals...
I stood in the desert preparing for a contest with a man and
his snake. But he cheated! Then my cat Lulu intervened...
Jung, in crisis, drew a complex mandala, and then wrote about its
symbols & archetypes, always claiming a patient had drawn it...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; Jan-Feb 2003, painting of a dream-series
My dreams were troubled by war. So I painted them in concentric
rings--lotus, fire, children, animals, and nightmares...
Our dream-group's dreams had a lot of imagery in common: circles, groups, meditation. I fused them into this piece...
I met a woman whose art (and her love for the Earth) inspired me to start a series of paintings with creatures hidden in landscapes...
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...
While painting a tribute to my hero/mentor Caravaggio, I dream we meet. He talks of his art
as we walk a dark space full of living chiaroscuro scenes we can circle, see from all angles...
I'm a puma with a night job as a cellist. But my day job with The Architectives is the bizarre one...
I was a mermaid summoning a great storm to carry my love to me--and my love was a red sea-mare...
I rescue some drowning kids by turning into a mermaid, but towing one girl has an unexpected effect...
At a dream workshop for kids in San Francisco,
Mika painted this dream-character...
From the punk clubs of Frisco to the Safeways of Si Valley to the vermilion sands of Mars,
Silky the were-nightmare fights for the Misfits against every cliche in science fiction...
A dragon-woman showed me a cache of art. When I painted her face I recalled seeing it in a dream decades ago in a mirror...
CAUTION: DRAGON BREASTS
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 14 dreams (mostly Jan-Mar 2011) painted on one canvas
A dream urged me to paint a big landscape with cutout movable (magnetic) dream figures
and liftable flaps revealing hidden dream scenes...
I climb a huge mushroom-shaped rock rising from a hotspring and prepare to dive in...
At first no one seems interested in my mural-design for the inside of the City Hall dome, but...
My glass heart survived the rocket's blast, but I'm stranded on this barren world.
Wrapped in glamor, we climb a steep forbidding stair into a rosy, fake tomorrow...
I free a friend unjustly imprisoned. On the run, we encounter our Life Paintings. Mine is a beautiful pegasus flying. But on its back is a monkey in a red suit...
We stood meekly in line to be beheaded. I tried to accept my fate and commended myself to God... CAUTION: READ THE TITLE!
Clovis imagined his death, funeral... and tomb. That night in the graveyard,
monks with whips and smoking nuns have an orgy. Then the bats join in...
CAUTION: MOCKS NUNS. A LOT.
I swim with my daughter Naomi in a desert pool amid lemon trees. She may be able to help me...
Two friends send energy through me, transforming me. Now that
my legs are detachable, I can sit comfortably on my eggs...
At our commune's new house, pandemonium breaks out when
our matriarch meets a spook. Can we live together in peace?
After reading Fourier's Nouvelle monde amoreux, proposing communes accepting all sexual orientations,
Toyen painted male & female as dogs on a grid and Toyen as a ghost-cat hiding in the cracks between...
CAUTION: GENDER POLITICS
I am given a gift of "Nibbling Fruits" which only I may eat--because I've been feeding everyone but me...
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...
My friend Catherine dreamed she was a flying mare with golden hooves. But in real life, she lost them...
Festival night in a strange town, where, one night a year, dancing in the street transforms you into...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
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
An alien beach scene--as seen through eyes that see bodies' energy fields more than surface forms...
A child of radicals goes wild in Rio. When we bail her out,
we find she's achieved not enlightenment but enloudenment...
CAUTION: UNSAFE SEX
A grotesque deep-sea diver prepares to enter the abyss. But is this
a surreal portrait of a dream character or of dreamwork itself?...
I salvaged a door. When I painted it, a fox-woman wanted to open it and get out...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
At the beach, wading with my fellow dreamworker Stephanie.
The waves are getting bigger--are they a hazard, or can we ride them?
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
Girls wrestle, tangled in sheets, competing to climb the orgasmic
pyramid. The ringmaster-referee's the boy Marquis de Sade...
CAUTION: IMPLIED UNDERAGE SEX
While visiting a friend in New Orleans in my dream, I saw a pangolin. I was very excited...
PEACHES: after painting a peach all day, I find I AM one, reclining on a mound of cottage cheese...
CHERRIES: after a day in Reno, I find I'm a wheel in a slot machine, whirling, coming up cherries...
Haiku by Roswila of a dream of meeting a winged horse, illustrated by her late friend Janet...
At a party I meet a friend I thought was dead. She's become a small talking rabbit made of cake, and I...
CAUTION: UGH
When Perissa, an exhibitionistic centaur, bares her body in a crowded Coliseum,
she also bares a human-supremacist plot...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM
Dalí's most famous piece shows him dreaming on a beach, but the paintings's not
from a dream, but a sudden inspiration. Hard to argue with the power of the result...
A strange being, part woman, part antelope and part angel, with four
bat wings, runs madly through a forest trying to attain flight speed...
A pigeon with a head like Queen Victoria's keeps fastening onto
my clothing with its beak, and this nagging feels familiar...
A dream that'd explain why I quit taking Western medicines--
(and why haven't you?) Only I didn't dream it. Just lived it.
I'm shown corn plants growing from skulls, and it seems like I must plant some skull-corn myself...
I'm detective Hercule Poirot, but I'm losing my case and my brain--
because my story isn't by Agatha Christie, it's a knockoff...
CAUTION: PINK DILDO HATS
Among the family portraits in the hall of my ancestors
was this one of a formidable old... woman, I guess.
I wish I could be as body-free as my neighbor
Jenna, hiking nude under the full moon...
a dream of flying, shapeshifting and spiritual advice.
When a flood traps me in my cabin, I dream I meet
an old man who warns me "Let your butterflies go"...
"Our resurrection is not entirely in the future; it's also in us, it begins, it's already begun..."
A huge spiral nautilus needs healing; its coils are coming undone, and if it dies, all on earth may die with it...
I meet a Mormon art-educator I know. We're so different! Then I get a call
from India. My friend tells of an erotic Hindu bas-relief of women and snakes...
Two shapeshifters meet, fight and love over the centuries--
and I live out scenes from both their long lives...
I dreamed our family's black cat Persephone had to make a life-decision...
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...
I was just sitting, minding my own business, when these
golden wedge-birds and a tiny flying white mare divebombed me...
20,000 years from now, a deer-harpist named Razi finds the Holy Wino's not quite the ruin he seems...
CAUTION: BAD PENGUINS, NUDE DEER, RUDE DRUNK
I was at a nice party when a wild horse burst in and insisted on taking me into a wilderness...
CAUTION: CUT-OFF ADVENTURE?
Mt Everest is snowfree and red; in the next dream I redden a sandstone cave with ochre. I feel uneasy...
The mysterious glyphs above the model's head are dream-language, warning me to...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Fini did sets and costumes for major ballets; asked to write her own, she staged Leonor's
Dream. She hunts a flying wig, is courted by shaggy men, visits Hades, and becomes an owl...
When whites invade, two shapeshifting Native American cubs resist architecturally...
Predawn. The beach. A gypsy goddess rises from the waves. She says
"Begin to ride the gods of the Hand, in London." I say "What?"...
CAUTION: CRYPTIC BUT FIRM
A singer in a nightgown knocks on my door. Opening a briefcase, she says "Here are my sisters."
Inside, a wooden maze--where a rat and a mouse nest. Her sisters! And what's her animal form?
CAUTION: NUDITY
A proud angry picture-poem during a hard time, when great gifts flowed through my hands...
A dark room. A grotesque little figure fiercely flings open the drapes; light blasts in on
a naked girl who squirms away from the light like a worm uncovered under a stone...
CAUTION: NUDITY
In the woods I catch a beautiful rooster. It doesn't struggle; it turns into a dog.
We make friends. We sleep together in the wood; I dream we grow old together.
The dog's owner wakes me; farewell, dog! But at least the funeral has caviar...
In a Scythian church, a painting on the floor says:
"Little St Bridget was bound so hard that when they released her she flew"...
Night. Two moons. I go lucid! Find a knob adjusting the dream's color saturation.
Dial it up--and meet ghosts of pure color, invisible til I luridified...
The desert. Living scarecrows approach me. One is me! And
scarecrow-me wears a sign declaring the time of my death...
Colquhoun, a surrealist, was in the tub. Saw the soap as a boat and her thighs as rocks. She painted it so shipwreck looks like sex.
Wayan, decades later, dreamt of a similar scene and draws it, only then noticing it echoes this painting he'd seen in childhood...
CAUTION: IMPLIED SEX
The past. Burma. I'm shown a stupa covered in gold leaf, and given a key
to a tunnel where they say a tooth of Buddha is encased in glass...
A pink dress smeared with black gunk wanders (without
a wearer) across a dead land to a subtly phallic tower...
An version of the Egyptian Ship of the Sun with a mutant Osiris at the helm,
in a monster-infested sea: image of the spark of consciousness in a sea of...
In a dull art class, I find a shy sphinx hiding in the
corner of a painting. But maybe she's right to hide...
After I fled my batterer, I was afraid to love--afraid I'd give up my freedom again for mere kindness...
My anima the singing horse was encouraging a shy werewolf boy to give it a try...
CAUTION: UNCLAD HORSE CHANTEUSE
My anima, a black mare, is upside down, hanging on the ceiling! Rears downward.
And she's changed sex! Not a mare today, a stallion! A gay, humanophilic stallion...
CAUTION: VERY QUEER FLIRTATION
I am given a dehydrated package of dried snake to insert
in my vagina. Inside it will unfold and come to life...
CAUTION: KIDS, DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
In a desert, I find a tree with red purselike pods. But they all seem empty,
and I know they should each contain a vivid yellow snake...
A woman up a tree has white flaky stuff camouflaging her.
It cracks and peels like snakeskin. What tree is this, exactly?
In my drawing class it was antlers and bones and skulls, death death death till I was tired of MY bones...
The red string tying that creepy puppet to
the child sitting on the moon has broken...
A voice told me, "Human beings have a spark of the divine"...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 2002/1/19, a dream-painting of a dream about dream-painting!
I'm teaching an art class full of strange masklike beings. We debate art
as spontaneous process, versus art as planned product...
For a decade, Fini painted sphinxes, first as pets, then as a flock, finally
as her real self. This sphinx-self became the one painting and protecting...
CAUTION: SPHINX BREASTS
Across a dead land, a little girl wanders--or is she just an empty
dress and a wig? She holds a butterfly net as if to catch dreams...
I'm at the beach, collecting stones to make a gigantic face viewable only from the air...
While I study how humans went extinct, my
daughter happily splashes in the sea...
Just an abstract birdlike acrylic squiggle I liked. Sorry, no story...
Balthus paints a real street in Paris, but populated with bizarre figures
dreamily going about their business, ignoring us and each other...
CAUTION: ASSAULT
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...
In bed asleep, the dreamer discovers this seemingly empty room hosts a
fairy ball, full of luminous half-seen beings serenaded by a monstrous band...
I had to sell my horse Shadow, but I missed him so much I painted him. As I finished, a strange impulse led me...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 1997, a collage on a dream-idea
A phrase from a dream, "the remains of men and women," led to this image
of a black sun in the underworld amid strata of time and the psyche...
Sunday Afternoons giant cats and litle girls were suggestive but not threatening.
Before Sleeping, though, made it clear what went on, up on those closet shelves...
CAUTION: TWEEN SEX?
A crowned woman with an ax and a torch carries out a
mysterious sacrifice. Is this Helen of Troy, or Hecuba?
A gigantic herd of buffalo stampede toward me. I panic, then surrender in peace to what is surely my death...
The past. Summer. Sunset. I want to sneak in a final
swim--in someone else's forbidden backyard pool...
I dream Edward Abbey shows me a secret grove of telepath trees.
That night, in my dreams inside my dream, they meet me...
At first glance, an abstract. Slowly you notice the lips, tongues,
labia and clits. But what are those things on the left? Owl skulls?
CAUTION: AMBIGUOUS GENITALIA
I was a mermaid trying to find Count Coyote's stolen dreams, so I could marry my human girlfriend...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, LESBIAN MARRIAGE, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
The animal goddess of peace, stubbornly raising her sign, my sign, as you all slide into your nice holy war...
Dream-inspired landscape with herons and wild horses in a vaguely Japanese style...
I dreamed of this tree growing out of a cave-mouth. Years later, in Guatemala, I
was shocked to encounter my dream. That tree and that cave were all too surreal...
It's Thanksgiving but my brother won't come in; he's digging up red earth. In our family he always digs up...
The cosmic egg nests in the branches of the tree of life, glowing with
Muspel-fire. But the tree must periodically burn to regenerate life...
A feathered dryad plays panpipes as she eyes a passing troubador, who harmonizes.
But the strings he plays are the hair of a living mermaid-boat. Will he leave her?
Tuba Man plays from the top of a tower, even when Loveless Man opens fire; for music is life to him...
I'm climbing a tower, as my dad, Apollo, drunk, throws bottles at me from the top, breaking bones...
CAUTION: DENIAL ABOUT ALCOHOLISM
As a child sick in bed, Max had a fever dream that the shapes in the knots and grain in a
wooden panel were children terrorized by a bird. Adult, he assembled a sort-of-painting...
I'm shown a mysterious two-faced carving;
I shush loud people disturbing my therapy;
I'm told of a documentary on the archetypal mother...
I see two gorillas in the field. One waves at me and approaches. I feel excited but a little scared...
Dalí is two naked knights riding two alternate streets, one clear as a Raphael painting,
the other foggy and leaden. He realizes the drab one is his life if he'd never met his wife...
Two witches, maiden and crone, ride a flying monster made of two magically fused trolls.
But I know somehow that the two are really just aspects of a single powerful sorceress...
One of my first tries with paint--part Tibetan, part medieval, part hippie, part Navaho...
Yellow fireflies circling round the horn of a reclining red unicorn, in the evening...
An improvised painting-series exploring my obsession for Utopia--and your deafening silence...
CAUTION: IDEAS, FURRY NUDITY, THAT GOSH-DARN MODERN ABSTRACT ART
Make silhouettes of your beloved vegetables; then listen to the spaces between...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUASH
A dream voice announced "The verdure is accomplished." Green is a healing color for me...
In the next dream we sat round a green pool, talking of healing. But the snails troubled me...
My friend Verity's given a beautiful set of wings. I'm envious until I consider what angel wings imply...
A friend explained she planned to be a human viewfinder, bending into
an arch for a male spirit to dive through. I didn't want to risk it...
I dreamt Anacreon the poet reeled with drink and lust--and I am wild and wanton like to him...
I paint myself as a child having a flaming vision of
adulthood--or is it puberty, or old age, or war?
Junk in the attic? Treasures! The cat musicians shift from cartoons to life as I ascend,
til in the ultimate attic--the astral beach--I meet a cattaur made of pure (de)light...
CAUTION: SEX-CRAZED CATS, NEW AGE FINALE
"I am the Volcano!" the red-bearded man said. His family was certainly hot-tempered enough.
Leiris landed on the growing islet of the vent. Lava flowed, the sea was hot, the ground shook...
The home we were to stay in was on fire. The next had a living room
that was shallow water, wall to wall, where turquoise fish swam...
I dream my mother takes over caring for my sick daughter; I feel pushed aside.
When I wake, I try to paint a more positive image of mothering.
For a week, dream after dream has opportunities for patience and letting go of jealousy...
A stylized waterfall--a distillation of all those childhood summers camping in Yosemite...
In a camp, women wove mats. I was tempted to try. But it was
months before I learned what they'd really been weaving..
Chased by the old movie Wolfman, I get tired of fear and turn on the monster. I take on his wolfness!
But in me, wolf-nature manifests differently--as a human body with a calm, happy wolf's head...
I dreamed I was a whale swimming against a Christian ebb tide,
trying to lead humans to a cleaner spiritual current...
CAUTION: HARD ON AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY
My friend's ignorant of our local Congressional race. I loathe Pombo
and like his rival McNerney, but can't pronounce his name right...
A male real estate agent knocked on the door. The house was full of sleeping crocodiles.
She fled through the house, trying not to rouse the attention of either sort of predator...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 2000/3/23 & 2000/4/19, twin dreams of carved women
A woman is knifed by the sea. I cradle her, but she's probably dying...
For my intitiation-ordeal, I have to cut designs in my own back! I can't reach, so...
I'm in a ring of seven white-haired women, our arms all interlocking.
When I woke I had fun working out the pattern of those interlinked arms...
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...
DAY: we're preparing for a trip to Malta to see ancient sites.
DREAM: Hiking, I discover a gigantic white snake. It feels like a good omen...
My sister's fiancé Billy died a year ago. I didn't realize how deep the grief ran till I dreamed...
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...
Seeking a mate? Mutual attraction and having much in common aren't enough--
it's equally vital to learn what you don't have in common...
Some shy folks don't even know they're dragons...
A friend who's fought lymphoma invites me to sleep in a cave, but I fear a rattlesnake will bite me...
I'm a part-owner of Eden, harvesting windfalls.
But a renter says his Landlord promised him all the apples...
After teaching a class on color, I had a series of vivid dreams
about color, and tried fusing them into one painting...
At the beach, a barrel of huge snails somehow heal my legs.
In the next dream, back on the beach, I give birth to our son...
I live in four consecutive bodies: I'm a Bose-Einstein condensate, a cloud of particles moving as one--
unless overheated. No, I'm Witch's Butter, a mob of amoeboid cells who unify into a quasi-slug--temporarily.
No, I'm a person, but soft and yellow as Witch's Butter. No, I'm firming up, but still entangled...
When I was very small I dreamt a pack of wolves climbed the tree outside my window and
somehow got it open. Freud told me I must have seen my parents having sex doggy style...
CAUTION: REALLY, DR. FREUD?
I'm to be beheaded. Guards chant "It's important to enjoy what you're doing."
I know my spilled blood will create a work of art...
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...