THE WORLD DREAM BANK: TOPIC: the Waking World

The World Dream Bank:
Tales of the Waking World

Undreams--what a weird topic! I mean, waking is such a peculiar state, unsuited for serious stories--waking people are nearly amnesic about other states, and bound into one body and time and place. A one-note song! And waking life is so concerned with basic survival issues--work, food, shelter, raising kids. Repetitious and trivial! How often do the big issues come up?

Even waking physics is so stodgy: thick, heavy, rule-bound. Why, to change things, you have to push them. Matter is nearly as bad as, as politics.

Still, now and then, things happen in the waking world, things worth mentioning...

RELATED TOPICS: waking essays and rants - studio art and figure studies - portraits and self-portraits - Tarot images - Accounts of psychic dreams usually have significant waking-world content, since such dreams concern waking-world events - trance states - out-of-body experiences - hypnogogic dreams - dreamwork and dream research - memory and amnesia - natural laws - probability-sheaves and observer effects - doors into other universes - See also the full INDEX OF SUBJECTS.

The World Dream Bank has 1500 dreams and dream images plus 500 other pages on dreamwork and shamanism, creativity, genius, art, surrealism and fantasy. Unless otherwise noted, all material copyright Chris Wayan, 2001-2006.

What this site is - How to read these entries - Ratings: profanity, sex, etc - Add your dreams! - Copyright - Downloading -

	THE ABUSE PANELISTS: by Wayan; 1997/2/6, nondream journalism A whole convention of adults abused as kids shows me how hard it is to hide the damage... CAUTION: ABUSE ISSUES
	AIN'T EASY: by Wayan; 1990. Nondream digital Coyote dance poster. As Red Emma said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution..."
	AMBITION: by Wayan; 1994/5/25, an odd little dreamlike real-life experience. My intuition led me to a panel discussion of women artists, just to hear one single sentence...
	ANOREXIA NIRVANA: by Wayan; 106K, 1993, digital picture-poem of my astral reality. I was anorexic for years; I only mastered it when I saw it was a hunger for the spirit world...
	BANANA MOON: by Wayan; 149K total: painting of dream figures, 1998, acrylic on wood, 36 x 48" My figure-painting class here in San Francisco has a diverse student body, but not THIS diverse... CAUTION: NUDITY
	THE BEEP TREE: by Wayan; 1998, a dreamlike but true story. I heard a noise out my window. I looked out, and saw something strange...
	BOILING MY FRIENDS: by Wayan; 1984, a nondream poem of letting go. Giving up a circle of friends is like the collapse of a sun--do you dry up like a raisin... or explode?
	BOOKSTORE ILLUSION: by Wayan; 560 x 680, erasable crayon 14x17", 1986? I was in the Stanford Bookstore and saw this strange visual pun across the room... or did I? CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
	BOXES, or, THE THRILL OF DRAWING: by Wayan; 18 x 24", 1999, nondream nonlife pencil sketch. I was supposed to be studying perspective but I went beyond the box...
	BRADBURY'S PLANET, AND MINE: by Wayan; 1994/1/12, a rant. Bradbury's Mars was based on his life in Venice, California. What worlds grow out of my San Francisco?
	THE BURBS: by Wayan; 1990/7/1, a true-story poem. A perfectionist gardener builds perfect planterboxes while his seedlings starve. And so I left the burbs...
	CAPITOL REEF: by Wayan; 277K, 1996. Cartooned daydream of a mid-air (or is it mid-water?) orgy News of a new national park fused with a science show on cleaner-fish spur a fantasy of dolphins, cats and... CAUTION: FISH ORGY; MOCKS THE ANGEL MORONI, TOO
	CHICKENS: by Wayan; 1998/6/6, a journal extract on survival I realize how strongly environmental illness sculpts my view of the world... CAUTION: CHICKEN BONDAGE
	CHINA BEACH: by Wayan; 1992. Digital poster of a waking life-shift.. That moment when you tire of your old trauma and suddenly turn to the sun. Or fun. CAUTION: NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
	CIRRUS: by Wayan; 580 x 450, 1982? Crayon, 11x14"; a waking skyscape. I was hunting edible fungi in Foothill Park near Palo Alto when I saw this...
	THE CITY, NOT LONG AFTER: by Wayan; 1998/4/22-30, acrylic cityscape of our flooded future. What my home town will become, if you fools keep burning gas and spewing CO2 in the air...
	THE COIL: by Wayan; 1999-2000. Model for a mad instrument that might just work. A spiral dream-instrument I'm building, that's easier to play than a piano or guitar, and a lot snakier...
	DATING WEIRDOS: by Wayan; 1996/8/12 a short rant. Normal people want someone complementary. Weirdos want someone like them. Why? Economics!...
	DREAMRIDER: by Wayan; 1986/4/15, a short, startled rant, chapter 5 of UNICORN TAG. A novel on a modern woman called to become a shaman echoes my real life too closely...
	DREAMWORK IN A DECADENT AGE: by Wayan; 1997/11/19, a short essay Sprague De Camp says religions seduce us with emotional comfort. Is dreamwork science or faith?
	THE DREGS EFFECT: by Wayan; 1997/11/19, a waking insight on artists in therapy Artists have their own strange culture, and we can unintentionally mislead therapists unfamiliar with us... CAUTION: THERAPESE
	THE EFFECTS OF PSYCHIC INVASION: by Wayan; 1999/4/17, a dreamtale on ESP. What are the psychological effects of growing up psychic, as others' thoughts and feelings invade you? When other's BODIES invade yours, it's molestation...
	A FAMILY ALBUM: by Wayan; 197K total: ink, digital tints; 1980ish; overview of family nightmares. A series of family shadows, as I saw them then. These scenes are NOT literal, do I make myself clear? But these tensions were real... CAUTION: GRIM! SEXUAL VIOLENCE, INCEST, MUTILATION
	FIRE IN THE CRUCIBLE: by Wayan; 1996/11/5, a confessional essay on genius. A book's example of a mathematical savant made me stop and try to do what he did. I can! Can anyone?
	FIRST DATE: by Wayan; 1991/10/20, a true story. I have weird, bad luck around dating. Finally I go on a picnic with Page, and the Great Fire begins...
	FLOWERING:: by Wayan; 215K, 1996, pencil, digital tinting; nondream portraits. Sketches from a San Francisco street music festival where, after a long sleep, I woke up sexually at last... CAUTION: NYMPHETS, QUEERS, AND OTHER REAL PEOPLE
	FROG: by Wayan; 120K, 2000/4/19, a narrative digital picture-poem I was single and tired of kissing frogs. Then I realized--I AM one. Or worse: a pretentious polliwog...
	GEEK SHORTAGE: by Wayan; 135K, 1990-95. Digital panorama on body image--literally. A narrative mural on the sexiness of dancers, as I became one--at the moment I lost my old geeky self...
	GRAVE: by Wayan; 1999, a poem of everyday life, if this is your everyday life. So I looked out my window and saw this guy burying a tiny robed woman in a trench in the street...
	AN INTERVIEW WITH WAYAN: by Wayan; 1994/3/20, an interview. Dream researcher Stephanie Van Zandt Nelson questions me on the roots of the art of dreaming...
	JUNK FICTION?: by Wayan; 1990/6/15, a rant on literature's treatment of shamans & psychics At least fantasy and science fiction address my life-issues; "realism" just declares me nonexistent...
	LET'S PLEASE THE RICH: by Wayan; 1998/6/24, a disgusting proposal The rich block reform. So let's offer the rich and power what they really want: ranking and attention... CAUTION: CHIMPONOMICS
	LILIES, DREAMER, FOX: by Wayan; 1998, acrylic on 46" plywood disk, life study. She didn't want to be there. She closed her eyes and went elsewhere. So I painted where she went... CAUTION: NUDITY
	LONELY NO MORE: by Wayan; 115K, 2000, a sculpture of American singlehood. The Dating Fairy, built on lonely evenings waiting for her to call me back--whoever "her" was that week... CAUTION: NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
	MATRONIZED: by Wayan; 1996/5/25, a real-life vignette. An older woman I know nags me about food. Suddenly my mind flips our genders and weights...
	MONSTER PROM: by Wayan; 107K, 1993. How parties look when auras are seen. If you sense auras, every singles event feels like a scene from Halloween Hell... CAUTION: HORNY MONSTERS
	MULTIPLE: by Wayan; 101K, 1992; digital picture-poem on seven dream-selves. I have all the signs of multiple personality but memory gaps. But YOU all have gaps every night... CAUTION: BACKGROUND SEX
	MY LIFE CHANGED: by Wayan; 1993/6/15, the plain truth. Advice from a successful writer of worstsellers to all you aspiring failures: unfame has its price...
	MY PAST CHANGES SO: by Wayan; 1985, a poem on healing-stages. It takes time to build yourself out of found objects and trash...
	NAVAHO HORSES: by Wayan; 1970; childhood drawing, felt pen and color pencil A sketch I made as a kid in a museum, of a Navaho painting of horses who got me hot...
	NEUTRINO EYES: by Wayan; 1983, a poem on dark matters. ESP is like having neutrino detectors for eyes: what radiates from people's cores blinds you to their surfaces...
	NICHE: by Wayan; 1990, a poem on crashing your computer. A poem linking the dawn of digital art to early, tinny phonographs, cranky film cameras... CAUTION: IDEAS
	NIGHT FLIGHT: by Catherine as told to Wayan; 1985, a flying transformation dream.. My friend Catherine dreamed she was a flying mare with golden hooves. But in real life, she lost them...
	NO MAN IS ISLAND: by Wayan; 125K, 1990, poem refuting John Donne's, illustrated with dreamselves. No Man is Island. So Men say. I am not a Man...
	OPENING: by Wayan, 640 x 400, 1992 Digital picture. Why don't I push for more art shows? I asked how I feel at shows of my own work, and this came out...
	OR... IS IT YOU?: by Wayan; 1990 nondream digital painting on marginality. When I was battered, I briefly lived on the streets. What struck me was how fragile most of us were... CAUTION: GRIM
	PASSION: by Katie Hofgard; 100K, 2006, an undream portrait of a complex woman. Talk about mixed messages! Or... is it really? CAUTION: NUDITY, SLIGHT FIRE HAZARD
	PET THE FOX: by Wayan; 1993; map of my olfactosphere. Sexual beauty scares me--how I'm affected--how vulnerable I am. An irresistable pheromone... CAUTION: SEXUAL THEME
	PHILOSOPHER: by Wayan; 1992. Nondream digital picture-poem. I worked at Stanford too long. I got tired of observing the mating displays of the purple-prose patriarch.. CAUTION: NUDE ACADEMIC GROUPIE
	I DREAMED MY PILLS WERE TAKING ME: by Wayan; 2004/3/13, a dirty lie. 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.
	PRAY: by Wayan; 1992? Digital nondream image--childhood memory?. I don't know what this scene is about--but it's not a dream. A stage, I think. Something from childhood. CAUTION: UNBEARABLE BARE BEAR
	PRODIGIES' ODDITIES: by Wayan; 1994/2/2, a confession. I suspect we child prodigies and geniuses are as unlike the gifted as normal people. So here's a checklist... CAUTION: BRAIN REQUIRED
	PSYCHIC FAMILIES ARE SO MUCH FUN: by Wayan; 1980/7/21, a true story of ESP. My sister's avoiding our nosy parents, but I sense they'll run into her soon. I just didn't know HOW soon...
	RAISE YOURSELF!: by Wayan; 1998, 17" mixed media sculpture; nondream . Why wait for the Rapture when you can use a chinup machine and raise yourself off that cross?... CAUTION: NUDE PSEUDO-CRUCIFIXION, SACRILEGIOUS SELF-HELP
	RHAMPHORHYNCHUS: by Wayan; 1996/11/12, a waking premonition. Biking, I find myself chanting a dinosaur name. I don't even know what it is. At home I open a novel, and a Rhamphorhynchus appears, politely defined for me by our obliging universe...
	RHINE CHECKERS: by Wayan; 1970-71, a journal extract on ESP. My sister and I played games based on the Rhine Institute's ESP studies. Our scores were not random...
	THE ROAD OF MY LIFE: by Wayan; 1999, pencil; a life-map. The white road is my life history, told in women: friends, lovers, relatives, ancestors--and one past life...
	SAMURAI LIBRARIAN: by Wayan; 1990. Digital self-portrait as a dream-samurai I wrote my dreams each morning no matter what--even if I was late for work. They thought I was spacy...
	SAX: by Wayan; 300K total, 8 pp, 1991/5/31, a digital comic--a true story. Alone in my blue room, I heard sax music. Two sunbathers were jamming outside my window... CAUTION: SEX AND SAX
	SLUG ETHICS: by Wayan; 1974/10/7, an undream tale. A man who wants to love and respect all life has unwanted kitchen guests: a wave of slugs...
	SO TIRED OF MY BONES: by Wayan; 1999. Ink painted on with cardboard wedges, acrylic wash. In my drawing class it was antlers and bones and skulls, death death death till I was tired of MY bones...
	SPUTTERNIK: by Wayan; 1979, a Beat poem: the comedy of the streets. A street poet preaches a gospel of smallness, until he pokes at capitalism in a slightly too personal way...
	A STAGE FRIGHT: by Wayan; 1993/11/17, a revealing daydream I froze in dance class when I followed anyone else's script. Was it fear? A dragon inside said no...
	THE STAGMAN: by Wayan; 2000/4/7, waking landscape with dream figure. A slightly surrealized San Francisco landscape--not that it needed much help... CAUTION: PINK PAGAN TOES
	STANDING UP CITY: by Wayan; 1973? childhood imaginary world As a kid, my Ecotopian fantasy city was hollowed out of living rock, with hanging gardens and terraces...
	STARVATION?: by Wayan; 1995/8/28, a journal extract on body image. On a poster of a model who's around my weight, someone's scrawled STARVATION IMAGERY... CAUTION: DEFENSE OF SKINNY PEOPLE
	STEPHANIE GODOT: by Wayan; 1994/12/14, a waking comedy of two dreamworkers. My unconscious sabotages a lunch date with my friend Stephanie. The tricks get weirder, till...
	SUCKER!: by Wayan; 1990? Crayon, 12" square. Health reminder.. I was anorexic for years before I found I was allergic to many foods--I had good reason not to eat!...
	SUTRO PARK: by Wayan; 1990-91; nondream digital painting. The tale of the most truly sincerely religious revelation I've ever witnessed... CAUTION: REAL WITCHES
	TACKY IS AN ANGLO IDEA, or, NEW BRACELET!: by Wayan; 1983. Bicultural nondream vision I like bad taste. Taste always tasted like another Anglo conspiracy to keep me from having fun...
	TALL UNICORN: by Wayan; 1990. Digital nondream picture-poem. Since I've been seeking out, talking with, and turning into unicorns a lot in the last few years... CAUTION: ANTI-FUNDAMENTALIST
	TANGUY: by Wayan; 1965? Childhood surrealist drawing. Not a guy with a tan. Yves Tanguy was a sailor who became a Surrealist. When I was nine or ten, his work inspired me to try my first landscape drawings...
	TELEPATHY VERSUS AUTISM: by Wayan; 1997/4/19, an utterly dreamlike but waking vignette A weird little identity-confusion at a dance suggests I'm simultaneously psychic, autistic, and... stupid.
	THAT'S NOT ART! THAT'S ART!: by Wayan; 1995/3/19, a true story An artist I know dismisses her (gorgeous) art as just therapy... while the museums are full of trash. Why?
	TILT!: by Wayan; 250K, 10 illus., 2002-3, a nondream world-building game. I drilled new poles in my globe and tilted the Earth. Ice Age or Carboniferous? Flood or drought? Come visit tropical Antarctica, the Thai Desert, the Hawaiian glaciers, the jungles of France!
	TRAIL OF POGS: by Wayan; 2002/9/6, my dreams' response to the first Burning Man dream-workshop A trail toward Freedom has extra markers, for it's three trails, superimposed! Not all the cues are for us...
	TREFIL, ON SCIENCE: by Wayan; 1994/1/26, a rant on science. 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...
	TWISTED!: by Wayan; 510K, 2003/6/23, 18 images; a nondream experiment I twirled pinups into surreal not-quite-abstracts, to see just how twisted sex could get... CAUTION: NAKED PRETZELS
	UFOLUTION: by Wayan; 1997/12/19, a comic science rant Okay, say evolution is driven by things (I don't care what) besides natural selection. How could you tell?
	THE UNMAKING OF A DANCER: by Wayan; 1994/5/22, a journal extract on dance and health. Ballerina Joan Brady quit, but ten years later, returned. Her body rejuvenated! So what can MINE do?
	THE VACUUM CLEANER POEMS: by Wayan; 1981, four bizarre poems. All I know about humans, I learned in psychodrama. I gawked as caterpillars grew wings. Except me...
	VIRGIN ON THE VERGE: by Wayan; 640 x 680 tall, 1992. Digital picture/poem/rant. Ever since I was battered I feel like a virgin again: longing, but wary--scared where sex may lead... CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
	WASTE: by Wayan; 100K, 1990/5/15, a desert singles poem, 11 images. A road trip through New Mexico mutates into a tour of my relationship disasters...
	WE MARCHED THROUGH THE CITY OF SAINT FRANCIS: by Wayan; 1982/5/1?, a dream-influenced poem. After a peace march in San Francisco, I saw us as deer, and Americans as dogs. Yet WE frighten THEM...
	THE WEB-BIRD LED ME: by Wayan; 115K, 1994. Digital sketch of a vision... of this dreamsite?. Maybe the web like a shining dove will lead me out of my lonely cave into the light. The glaring light. Wait! CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
	WING IT: by Wayan, 1995/12/23? 1 MB, a 9-page improv comic. An art experiment--the only rule is DRAW--no models, no ideas, no plans, not even dreams. Drawing from the void!