My hometown floods. I swim after some strange fish and find
a scientific community where a scaled baby tells me who I am...
Agassiz, faced with a fossil he had to crack open, was unsure where to strike.
But for three nights he dreamed...
When you really observe animals in language programs it's obvious WE'RE the dimwits...
I’m showing the Royal Society how to levitate. Confidence is the main thing. I teach a hesitant Fellow to lift off...
The Engineers make Eden... logical. But the blimps go blind, and a demon
goes viral. How can I escape the their ultra-efficient hell?
Fresh off the Beagle, Darwin meets three wolf-girls, but has distinctly Biblical inhibitions...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM, PUNS
My take on IQ, racism, Murray and Herrnstein's notorious book, and the theory of multiple intelligence.
As an (ex)child prodigy it's not theoretical for me: broken hearts, broken trust, broken ribs...
CAUTION: LONG WORDS, RAMPANT ELITISM, GENIUS SHOPTALK
Chapter 8 of UNICORN TAG, though it can stand alone.
A packet of magic soupmix sends me upstairs to a secret wizards' lab.
They've summoned a demon they can't handle: the furious Black Unicorn...
I dream I'm at a center for bull fighting, teaching the structure of the brain, but
they believe the brain is a structureless gelatin and the soul is all...
Clowns have a point system like chess masters, & abuse their apprentices to get ahead,
just like capitalism--but I think this dream's about the suppression of magic...
CAUTION: CHILD-CLOWN ABUSE
Swedenborg's in bed with a woman, but finds she has teeth in her vagina. He interprets it not as revealing some
fear of women but as advice about pacing his scientific work. And the surrounding dreams hint he may be right...
CAUTION: ALMOST-SEX
I don't have an erection. I have two. But how can my brain register feelings from an extra organ it's not built for?
CAUTION: PHALLIC SYMBOLISM? OR SOMETHING ELSE?
After I die, I join with others to catch the Devil, who's a bag full of bitter, angry souls. But
he infects some kids. To free the world of evil, we'd have to kill them. Making us evil...
CAUTION: FRUSTRATING AFTERLIFE
Peering in a spacetime gate, I wonder if all the dinos went extinct. Would we spot an ancient Singularity?
Why do I treat dream-figures as real people, even in otherwise lucid dreams?
And if dreams universally suspended disbelief, how did I know, in one
recent dream, that the woman I argued with was another part of me?
Sprague De Camp says religions seduce us with emotional comfort. But is dreamwork religion or science?
I'm at a symposium on how our beliefs alter not just the future, but the PAST...
CAUTION: CONTAINS IDEAS
One patch of the night sky had a huge number of stars compared to the rest; there was no atmosphere in that portion of the sky...
I'm in the High Plains, at a huge powwow on climate change. This could become, not a new
dustbowl, but a firebowl. As I wake, I find I'm running a fever! And the dream hints what caused it...
I never flew in my dreams. I felt cheated. So one day I set out to CREATE dream-flight...
THAT DAY: I test my hearing range; it turns out to be more dog than human...
DREAM: To banish a teacher & her giant fly, I summon a musical goddess...
My recent attitude changes are so big, I can fly now. Yet I hide them, lie to my family... why?
I meet the new improved giraffe people with hydraulic chrome skeletons--
such light, powerful jaws and stretchable necks. Wow, Lamarckianism is back!
CAUTION: ANTICREATIONISM--THAT IS, ACTUAL SCIENCE
I find myself sketching the slope of progress up to the coming singularity, and notice a hidden stability...
I meet an interdimensional traveler. Her navigational technique is unbelievably rough!
Yet it works. Am I so sure that math and science always need to be precise?
I read Stephen Hawking, and dream I'm in the Quantum Desert, full of bridges, holes & loops--
like the microstructure of spacetime. But it's not counter-intuitive at all--it's HOME!
It was Hitler. He had a pig face, and he was taking notes. He said
'I want to understand the uses and implications of this amazing technology'...
I fight to save a nest of 50,000 eggs that'll hatch... psychics!
But my friends want to exterminate them! Who's wrong here?
Surely the dinosaurs were as vocal as their little cousins, the birds.
But bass to the birds' soprano! So when dinos sang to the moon...
Swedenborg tenderly says goodbye to a lover. A few nights later he realizes his dream lovers
repeatedly represent scholarly fields! An avid scientist, he find research as sexy as, well, sex...
I'm fascinated by Io's feverish colors and tumultuous landscape, so I sculpted
a detailed portrait and came to some tentative conclusions about what we see...
CAUTION: AMATEUR SCIENCE, OH NO!
On TV, the first Jungian anima to leave the unconscious is granting an interview. But the questions are...
Kekule dreamed solutions to the thorniest structural chemistry problems of his era not once but twice...
I dream I'm visiting a friend who's moved to a high equatorial peak. I'm shocked to find no trees. Next day,
I stumble on a book about Mt Kilimanjaro. Its treeline is below ours in California! A high-altitude desert...
Engineers! How they do love to impose clean lines on our messy world...
Recycling used paint to lighten pavements could lower continental temperatures a fraction of a degree...
Deep in the caves, a Voice announces I've gone as far as the human mind can stand. But ahead, I see...
Loewi thought nerve impulses were transmitted chemically, not electrically. But he couldn’t prove it, until one night...
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
Nearly everyone in my family dreams of a mass murder as it happens nearby. But my dad's sure it's his own
evil id, and my mom clams up, and my sister forgets. And me? I doubt the whole thing for ten years, until...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE VIOLENCE
The 'toon actors from My Little Pony gleefully volunteer to die horribly in a TV documentary on the
impact in Yucatan that killed off the... dinosaurs? No! Unicorns, griffins, pegasi and dragons! As I
draw the dream, I get an email from the maker of a TV documentary on climate catastrophe...
I challenge my teacher's claim human historical patterns are universal.
She challenges me by dragging us both back to the Ice Age and...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I dream my theatre friends are particles dancing inside an atomic nucleus--
particles that reveal their character, motivations and power. And I'm one too...
After seeing an Einstein biography I find myself in the bathrooms of Thought-Experiment High, and...
CAUTION: DARK SIDE OF AN ICON
"I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down..."
My life is a mess, so I take a class on the four flavors of chaos, and find my Strange Attractors are shifting...
19 nondream imaginary worlds rendered in text, art, & sculpture. Most teem with intelligent life--alien Edens!
CAUTION: ANARCHISM, NUDITY, MATH, SOCIALISM, EVOLUTION
The roots and reasons and back-stories for the nineteen virtual worlds making up Planetocopia...
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'm a detective sent to a research station two billion years ago. The ancient atmosphere isn't just anoxic, but deadly...
In one night Descartes had three dreams convincing him he had to change the course of his life...
Biking, I find myself chanting a dinosaur name--Rhamphorhynchus. I don't even know what kind it is.
At home I open a novel, and a Rhamphorhynchus appears, politely defined for me by our obliging universe...
CAUTION: E.S.P.?
DAY: on the radio Carl Sagan calls those who've experienced ESP or UFOs "proto-fascists"...
DREAM: a flying pewter teapot orbits a round blue vase--like a starship round the Earth...
NEXT WEEK: My mom calls. She's selling that pewter pot after a century in the family...
CAUTION: DISSES SAGAN
Astronomer Edmund Halley had dreamed of sailing to St Helena in the South Atlantic, but didn't realize until he arrived how accurate his dreams had been...
by SAO (Shawn Allen O'Neal); March 2001, a painting of a dream-scene.
In the golden light of a primal Eden, my friends and I flock naked
through emerald glades like wild deer, until the tower approaches...
A book about the psychology of creatures with different sensory arrays
persuades me that all of us creatures build models of one shared world,
for understanding your neighbors vastly ups your odds of survival...
a dream exposing what my brain's up to when I forget my dreams!
I wander the galaxy in my dreams, finding and testing crowds to see if anyone reacts
to the sound of shouted English or Chinese. One in a thousand does! This implies...
CAUTION: SCIENCE AND SHAMANISM DON'T MIX (or do they?)
Sledding at night, I approached the speed of light, and the stars turned colors I'd never seen...
I'm at a physics conference. A new force has been discovered that may just
allow travel faster than light. Strange, how'd the Vikings know?...
I dream I'm suicidal; but I'm saved when I'm shown the flow of human development--the same pattern,
from souls to civilizations! Eddies and knots recur, but the challenges slowly get more spiritual.
NEXT DAY: I learn what my shaman-friend Dee just dreamed. And now I'm unsure whose dream this is...
CAUTION: IDEAS
Our physics project is top secret, but a stranger strolls into a meeting and opens a can of green light...
I'm a married couple--the cook and laundress for an English observatory in 1948.
Why are we testifying to a Labor Party committee that we WANT to be servants? Well...
DAY: I have to read three academics who mock ancient, shamanic and modern amateur 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
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
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...
Okay, say evolution is driven by things (I don't care what) besides natural selection. How could you tell?
Captain Kirk is testing vampire myths on a world where they don't bleed you dry.
At the moment, three vamps are sitting in a tent in a sunny meadow, queasy but alive...
CAUTION: FINANCIAL VAMPIRES?
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...
This symposium, airing a dispute between geologists & astronomers who just don't read each others' papers, had multiple revelations--big hazards, bigger holes in our knowledge, and bigger opportunities...
CAUTION: CHART! WITH NUMBERS!!
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
I dream I find a few 'extinct' watercats--in a slum! They talk. They say I'm one of them,
brainwashed to think I'm human. I wake, go to a dinner, and hear a tale of... watercats!
The life experiences, writers, artists and scientists that inspired the building of Planetocopia...