Never mind an afterlife! What if, before life, we were spirits with no idea what happens after birth?...
In the evacuation of Dunkirk, my brother went missing. I dreamt he had a bullet hole in his forehead.
After a letter informed us he'd been shot in the head, I dreamt of him again--alive and happy...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P., ANTI-MATERIALIST CONCLUSION
I live in a colony of long-lived observers of humanity. But am I one? Or a short-lived human pet?
The joyful animal-angel I feel myself to be in my happiest dreams.
At a party in Animal Heaven, I fall for a rabbit-girl doomed to be human dinner.
But how can I rescue her? I'm Fate's part-time intern!
CAUTION: BREASTS, BEASTS, INCOMPETENT ANGEL OF DEATH
I was anorexic for years; I only mastered it when I saw it was a hunger for the spirit world...
I learn to fly from Arenna the moon-girl and Crest the dragon, in the House of Deep Memory...
My dead friend Charlie and his sister and I are driving around
Lake Erie. We know it’s a dream and he’s dead, and yet we’re joyous...
There's a rare dream-type that can change reality itself. I study its EEG trace. Can I learn to do it?...
I'm arguing with musicians--what's better, music that serves your goals, or purely great music...
I'm bored in class. Draw sexy furries. The babydykes by me do too! Art'll summon the girls we want...
CAUTION: PHILOSOPHY! OH NO!
Enlightenment came to me via that shimmering, animated Hamm's Beer billboard...
CAUTION: SAY YES TO DRUGS?
I dream I see the soul of my lover step out of his body, a second self of light...
CAUTION: AIDS DEATH
A sex-ghost appears in my bed, but when overstimulated,
she tends to fade out. Bad reception!...
CAUTION: SEX
My friend F. saw a child whose every move was controlled by a weird figure behind her...
The crystalline figure on the cover of the book in my dream seemed to hold as many answers as its title...
A bride flies as a ghost, invisible, inaudible, sealed in a crystal shell; a guide
shows her what'll happen if she can't shatter her armor and show her love...
Fighting an absolutist theocracy, my dragon-soul burns the
church's dragon-nursery. The cost is terrible: a black vortex...
CAUTION: ROMANTIC THREESOME GETS BURNED
A jester in love offers a queen his heart and soul. She rejects them. In
despair, he offers her the emblems of his clowning, his cap and bells...
An identity earthquake that just wouldn't stop. I transform half a dozen times, and so does everyone else...
Indiana: Father's favorite clock, a cuckoo clock, stopped at exactly the time he died...
Florida: an old clock silent for years started up at 10:20, the time of my husband's death the day before...
I'm trapped in a cute cartoon universe! Worse, to judge this beauty contest,
I have to see past our style to our souls...
I cross a hostile continent to a magic commune, fall in love with a flying girl who slaps a
soul-spark into my head, and follow an alien goddess leading the Dance of the Sun...
I'm on trial. As I argue in my own defense, I float over the court! The jurors murmur
"Why does he even bother protesting? He's beyond this world"...
After a nature show on bears and a horror-parody film, I dream of a man and a demon toddler
in a sick relationship. At least it sickens all of us...
CAUTION: DEVIL AND PEDOPHILE: WHO'S CORRUPTING WHO?
I couldn't find Mrs. B and feared she was suicidal. But I heard my late mother say "She's in that hotel..."
A woman dreamed her dog, who had died, visited--looking upset.
So she checked the dog's grave. It had been bulldozed that day...
My children ask me to tell our family history, up to the death of their mother. I wake to find
myself single, my late wife alive but married to another, and my beloved children, phantoms...
CAUTION: 19TH-CENTURY LOGORRHEA
A robed figure crowds a wild horse to a cliff-edge. One's my body, one's my soul. But which?...
A staring Eye tries to break me; his cats & robots flay me. Yet his birds rebel in sympathy, & I refuse to die...
Escaping the tiny red plush room inside a star, I dive back to earth. Oops. A beast eats my broken body. My soul waits...
I'm in Heaven, but... it's full of Christians! I fight 29,998
angels, but I want to go right to the top and punch God...
CAUTION: PAGANISM, PUGILISM, PUNS
I'm jogging in Yosemite. A man tells me I'm possessed. There IS something in my shoe...
Books are clothes, and always were. A potato makes me lie, and everyone gets it but me.
Sex in a crowd disarms the Mom Squad! And a Mystic Autistic's soul explores my room...
CAUTION: PUBLIC SEX? PROBABLY.
Climbing out of Childhood Abyss, I literally get a leg up from a girl seeking the Ledge of Teens.
A shy girl has to hide she's a were-creature. Gay men make out in the witch-registry to rattle its
homophobic guardians. My sister stripteases while scolding me for a mess I didn't make...
CAUTION: DUH, SEX TABOOS! KIDS, FURS, GAYS, SIBLINGS
I was a closet unicorn. SO closet, I didn't even know what a unicorn was,
till I went to college and met Lindsay, who was half and could pass...
CYLINDER OF LIME (1926): I find I'm in bed facing a man-size cylinder of lime, who happens to be me...
THE GRANARY (1940): I peer through a porthole into a shadowy chamber like a granary--and it too is me...
Gennadius re-dreams a previous dream, prompting him to notice he’s dreaming. His guide points out the spiritual implications...
A child from another universe materializes--part way. Too bad we called in that expert from Stanford...
After 25 years I land on my native island of Wyre, to touch an ancient clay figurine, who grows young and wakes...
Poem from a book on how love can save lives & souls, read in two dreams of a Renaissance astrologer's library...
I dreamed my late stepdad warned me to stand by my mom--she'd be in trouble soon--gossip & blame...
I go invisible in my dance class and hear what the girls I like have to say about me. Uh-oh...
CAUTION: PAINFUL RELATIONSHIP TRUTHS
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!
A Buddhist scroll shows me Hell Cafe, where diners become entrees. But I read the scroll
backwards! You can escape Hell just by walking out, against the traffic flow...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL SOULS
Who built the tornado in the Heartland, that sucks anyone who opens their spirit-wings down to Hell?
CAUTION: BAD THEOLOGY, WORSE PHYSICS
Kat Hepburn burns inside, as fierce aliens take over our souls.
But these parasites forgot they're now bound to our bodies...
Forced into a duel, I let my spirit fight for me using Boomerang Blades. But my
enemy becomes giant floating sticky lips! My spirit finds incarnation confusing...
My dead father said "We're looking for Howard any time now. We'll be glad to see him..."
When your brain-cops are edgy, you're getting warm!
I tour the heart of a red supergiant, where dreaming souls explore
their fears and heart's desires, unconstrained by solid matter...
CAUTION: SWEDENBORGIAN VISION, UNICORN NUDITY
I'm at a party in an air-lake. We fish for a girl who's gone invisible. But... what if we catch her?
Soon after my friend and mentor James Merrill died, I had recurring, elusive dreams about him...
My father's friend C.G. Lamb was open-minded; to him I confessed "My grandmother Jennie teaches me music."
He had known her, before her death. I played him a stormy piece. His hands shook as he told me its history...
CAUTION: CRYPTOMNESIA, ESP, OR SOUL-SURVIVAL?
Ko said "Now we have come to where we die." I thought it looked just like the land we'd been traveling,
and couldn't see why we should have to die. Ko grabbed me and pulled me over the cliff...
CAUTION: DYING IN DREAM
Last night I seemed in your embrace; you were about to die.
Today I wake into my place: you immortal, I...
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'm dead and skewered on a steel beam. Joy! Friends are here; I hold
the hand of my mentor Max Jacob. We rise toward a globe of light...
CAUTION: HAPPY HUMAN SHISH KEBAB
Creatures in the primal sea touch my third eye, dragons cry their eyes out, I fight the Sphinx, and arrive at last in...
A friend in Heaven promises Helen a lost ring would return to her. Three days later it did; but its path had been strange...
My friend Mark is ready. He evaporates into the spirit realm--as we all do here when we die! Flesh to glass to air...
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
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
I saw my mother standing on the tip of one wing of our plane. She was
dressed in white flowing robes and calling my name, warning me of danger...
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 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...
Aliens take me to meet my soul. It's on a pedestal in a quasi-Roman villa. I'm ashamed to
see my soul's just a tribble. But it sings soulfully, and when happy, it purrs...
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'm attacked by a narcissist firebird, a rabid rattler-manticore, a masochist bear, and a sexless succubus...
CAUTION: INEPT DEMONS
We're spirits over a volcanic fountain of energy. And some of us prepare to ride the current up to...
CAUTION: ASSUMES MYSTICAL LITERACY
Painted as I heard that country song by Leonard Cohen, where Adam, Jesus, Washington, and
FDR all get interviewed in their darkest moments, and they all sing "We're only passin' thru..."
Turns out my life's a TV show. My scriptwriter is half pegasus, half dragon,
and my own humanity has been her science-fictional imagination all along...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
I'm photographing lifesize furry statues. How explicit, how sexy? If I get shots that
hovering souls like, they'll be lured to enter these bodies and bring them alive...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
I'm in heaven. But... what can you do up here? And it's so small. Where is everyone?...
CAUTION: WE FIND OUT
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"...
In a museum full of spacetime-bubbles holding lost souls, the museum-goers are as weird as the exhibits...
Even after the Resurrection, a mother and daughter still have issues to clean up...
These days I'm doubtful about both an afterlife AND utter extinction.
Was Shakespeare wrong about what gets buried, what lives on?
Wilkins visits his parents in a dream. Only they think he's a ghost, and panic--in the real world...
Dreams and other revelations shouldn't be dissected--they need to be reveiled, not revealed...
CAUTION: INTENSE MYSTICISM
A movie version of heaven. Souls line up for rejuvenation from a great
fountain. But fat old rich guys crash the line, demanding to be first...
CAUTION: UGLY NUDITY, UGLY BEHAVIOR, POLITICALLY PREDICTIVE
I'm told a girl in an armored nutrient-bath wheechair has my shoes. I need them back. But
to get them I have to answer the riddle written on her breasts. We both get a bit distracted...
CAUTION: CARTOON BREASTS
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 was a robot who had a soul--till the Reagans stole it! I track them down, and
demand it back. Simply confronting them works--the hole inside me is filled...
CAUTION: CAUSTIC POLITICS
Two souls coalesce from bars of light into human beings by the power of words. Words like stupid, ugly...
In a pizzeria, customers walk blindly through a ghost; briefly possessed, they
echo his moods. But for such an insubstantial figure, he seems strangely stable...
A Finnish shaman/witch gives me a lesson in night flying; in the waking world
I meet Ram Dass and sense him speak astrally before his body can get the words out...
CAUTION: HIGH MYSTICAL QUOTIENT; IF ALLERGIC, AVOID
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 friend Mr D. studied psychic research but was skeptical of telekinesis. But 24 hours after his own death...
An astral travel advisory. You'll fly better, if (before you leave your body) you...
The glow seemed to come from within her, but I knew it flowed from my own breast. Her eyes fluttered...
I get assigned a life as a skink. Eat flies, mate, do my lizard pushups, but
behind my daily mind, my soul gets so bored it finally flies out...
I'm a peace terrorist trapped in Squaw Valley, herded like a mare by a huge stallion made of snow...
And then the dream shifts. I blurt out the truth behind our idiotic waking world! And wake believing it...
CAUTION: MERMAID AND HORSE NUDITY
The pier jutting into the sea of dreams has an 8th chakra at the end, where a lonely woman fishes for, um, sole...
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.
Africa. My horse trusted me as we faced lions and fire, but to face the Soul-Board, he must trust himself...
I'm a wolf in an ashram studying astral travel with my spirit-wife. Our souls blend a bit, enraging
our guru, a minor Hindu god, who sends demons to make us stop this spiritual "contamination"...
I'm being hunted in Reincarnation Swamp, as I worry--the human population boom
means experienced souls are scarce. Are most folks you meet really dogs, cats... rats?
CAUTION: MYSTIC ELITISM
As I reread decades of dreams, I see Jung was right: even in crisis-times, soul-work goes calmly on...
A voice told me, "Human beings have a spark of the divine"...
For years I dreamed of neglected pet birds, caged, starved, lonely, dead. But tonight
I lovingly groom my bird-emissary, who'll soon set out to answer a strange summons...
DAY: Age 7, touring New York, I ask to ride the subway. Father and I see blood, severed feet--a suicide.
DREAM: I coax the dead man to reattach his feet, grow young again, and meet his beloved daughter...
CAUTION: GRISLY SUICIDE
So you die, and to your secular surprise, your soul metamorphoses into...
On the road with a poet and a philosopher, I insist we rescue an owl.
But we get lost, and the poet turns into...
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
I'm a spirit flying over the dead, blessing them. They're in mass graves, sorted & grouped
only by their life-stages--kids, adults, elders. Wait... is this how to structure my book?
The stranger seemed to know me. He said "Tell her about the little dogs, it will comfort her." Two weeks later...
I'm half Anglo, half Kwakiutl. My uncle the shaman died,
but he still wants to teach me his medicine...
I possessed ubiquity: twenty of me, and each possessed by my same soul, so I could not say who I inhabited...
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
DREAM: Angels ask a circle of us newlydeads, "What's your dream?", wanting quick answers. I fear they'll grant it!
NEXT DAY: On TV, Kelly Corrigan asks a circle of spiritual therapists & ministers "What's your dream," wanting...
An empire of creatures asexual most of the year has affected its human neighbors--or bred a new type.
I meet a ghost girl and ask her about death. I figure she knows first-hand. And she tells me...
A huge wolfhound tore past me. My blood froze. The Wild Hunt was carrying off a soul...
Hot air rises, right? So there's a monsoon from Hell,
lifting souls. Lucky for us that gravity balances it...
A world-mind I never really liked dies generously, helping others; so I make my peace with it...
A writer's found in his office mating with an ash-covered creature! But could she be his muse?
CAUTION: NUDITY OR NOT? SEX OR NOT? NO ONE QUITE KNOWS...
I'm in line to meet a shockingly accurate psychic. But she's
running late, so as I frame my question, she just snaps...
CAUTION: I'M NOT GAY BUT I SURE AM QUEER
It's true: after death, angels advise you where to go next.
But what if you get an over-eager travel agent?