When I was a kid I was already a mystic and knew what Captain Ahab was REALLY after, but...
I'm a schoolkid in the future who finds an ancient book the censors somehow missed...
Edgar Allen Poe confronts his dead girlfriend, who wants to drag him into the grave with her...
CAUTION: HUNGRY GHOST, SEX TALK
I dreamt my friend Anne Sexton's death was on the news. I woke, the phone rang, and I learned she'd...
CAUTION: SUICIDE
I dream of Beren and Luthien happy and mortal in their forest, and wake to find...
Beagle's fantasies, from The Last Unicorn to The Innkeeper's Song, closely resemble my dreams. The ways we differ say more about our spiritual orientation than about our art...
I love a girl who wants to settle in a radioactive jungle, a scar from an ancient war. Stay or go?
Should Anna quit hiding her psychic dreams? She dreams a cat eats her bird, and burglars loot an unprotected house. Maybe not...
The crystalline figure on the cover of the book in my dream seemed to hold as many answers as its title...
Bradbury's Mars was based on his life in Venice, California. What worlds grow out of my San Francisco?
A long terrible shiver, and my whole body broke like glass. I may live months, but in that dream I died...
Fighting a theocracy, my dragon-soul burns the church's dragon-nursery. The cost is terrible: a black vortex...
CAUTION: ROMANTIC THREESOME GETS BURNED
As I wrote a poem on Caliban, I dream I’m him: taken to Shakespeare’s England, shown as a freak, I must escape to save Miranda and Prospero from assassins...
My writer-friend Cecy will do anything to get published. Anything? Oh, believe me, ANYTHING...
CAUTION: BONDAGE, not to mention POSTAGE
People SAY they like realistic characters they can identify with, but they don't ACT like it...
G.K. Chesterton was a leopard, and he ambushed George Bernard Shaw... Oh, the blood! Why didn't I intervene?
The book's first two pages showed an ant's awareness, then a human's wider grasp--both mere freckles on reality...
I'm Coyote, keeping the Business Prophet from taking over Dante's Peak. But it turns too personal...
CAUTION: IDIOTIC VIOLENCE
I always wrote some letters strangely--my 'd' was nearly illegible. So I set out to retrain my deep motor skills...
Alli/Tip could only imagine loving the strange, intense, and unavailable--and Bronte was all three..
I struggle to write down a bizarre dream clearly and simply, but both pens and paper have mutated. Then a child prodigy explains "dreams don't always want to be linear"...
A Marin girl finds a dirty secret in the school library, and identifies with the discarded books--and people...
I dream I have just six months to live. I go through a dozen phases and moods, preparing for death...
Distilling a dream to one key image can clarify it. But don't be ruled totally by traditional haiku form...
I'm worried an alien charity is brainwashing an ex-prostitute. When I wake, she's still there--at 2/5 scale!...
My new editor starts rejecting my poems. My new new editor rewrites them for me. I feel lucky not to be arrested...
We escape the trolls, but then our author, Tolkien, breaks in to explain a word, and the rest of the night...
The Emperor of the Galaxy can't publish his anti-slavery book as himself, so he quits to become a slave...
I’m falling into endless darkness. I feel like screaming, but then I remind myself I’m dreaming. “What is for me here?” I demand. “SHOW ME!” I begin rising toward the stars. Huge metal discs with alien writing rise with me...
A time-traveling historian's caught in a moral dilemma: warn an ancient prince he died of a fall in her history books? What do you owe history?
In ancient Britain, as Christianity moves in, I'm a slave--sailing through centuries, but never free...
I dream my son the writer's living above our old family store, the one that failed in the Depression...
In a rough part of San Francisco, I climb to the roof of a tower and jump off, but not to kill myself...
The goddess of the Cult of Clutter catches a little thief, and tastes her to see if she’s worthy...
My horse and I dove into a lagoon and sought buried treasure on the sea-floor. What are we really after?
I dreamt of a couple who toss out a shabby hen that lays golden eggs. She becomes an eagle and carries me off to...
Poem from a book on how our love can save lives and souls, memorized during two dreams of a Renaissance astrologer's library...
I was held hostage in India by courteous revolutionaries who avoided spelling out that we were soon to die...
People have asked me if I ever dream that I am 'in' Harry's world. The answer was 'no' until a few nights ago, when...
The foremost wizard of Shakespeare's age dreams he's dead and they're burning his books, but that doesn't bother him...
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
After a bad writing class, I meet a shy catgirl guarding a Mongolian Hot Pot, and discover who I am...
I'm a brown sparrow scratching in the dirt, looking for bugs. Focused, tireless, I hunt and peck...
I was teaching a class on democracy in Africa when Idi Amin walked in. The crowd turned violent, but then...
To reach the Peak of Happiness on the Isle of Dreams, I must pass four Perils--but they're all backwards...
CAUTION: RELIGIOUS NUTS, KNIVES, NUDE ALIENS, BACKWARD PLOT...
My friend put an ad on her gown, so I try one on our house. I have big ideas for more, but a pickpocket steals them and...
Lucid, I summon a sexy literary character. But he tries to take over my personality and make it his lucid dream...
Writer Joan Grant, who was a psychic and trance channeler, got a sort of reading herself, from H.G. Wells...
At least fantasy and science fiction address my life-issues; "realism" just declares me nonexistent...
The true story of the very first tree-hugger. Not Kerouac! You'll never guess. In fact, you'll say it's impossible...
I dream a Chinese fable: how the poet Li Po was abucted by the gods, till they face heavenly justice...
CAUTION: ABDUCTION, DRUNKS, EVIL PUN
One wizardry-classmate summons strange beings; another's learned how not to. Some things should be avoided at rush hour...
Alli/Tip is lured/tricked into a pen full of women, and tries to get out by repeating "Let me pass!"...
I'm Emily Dickinson reborn in 2100 as a peaceful breeder of hydroponic lilies, till my dad drafts me as an Arctic energy-prospector, where I meet a ghost, a fiery Beast, a new me, and the girl of my dreams...
CAUTION: QUEER-POSITIVE, NUDE PROSPECTORS, GNOMIC DICKINSON QUOTES
Lions trap me in an African cave with only coffee, paper and pens! Is this what it takes to get me to write?
A book that kept me up late. Ariel and Robin get abused as subtly, as deniably as me and my sisters...
CAUTION: RELIGIOUS/PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE
I meet a shapeshifting dream-mentor who warns of plague and war (note the date). Then a sentient book, "The Art of War," gets intimately involved...
CAUTION: ELECTRODES, LIBROPHILIA
I sink into a book on a murderer who rationalizes away all guilt, but pull out thinking "How morbid!"...
Advice from a successful writer of worstsellers to all you aspiring failures: unfame has its price...
I was in my mother's closet, trying on her outfits, and trapped in Hamlet, too...
I'm in San Francisco trying to throw Sauron's Ring into the Cracks of San Andreas. But a sexy sorcerer steals my sense of I! How can you act without a self?
Sexy dreams of Chinese archeology, authorized by the fairies, make me face that my family abused me...
A writer I haven't seen for 40 years gives me a drink, but all I want is to find my mom in The Other Room...
Frederick dreams a monk writes words on the door of Wittenburg’s church with a pen so big it pokes the Pope. The next day...
I get stuck with a one-year mandatory gig as President of the World just as Saudi Arabia collapses, and fools rush in...
A literary agent--not my current one--is proposing a 'novelization' offer from a writer I've barely heard of. Twelve weeks later...
In one night Descartes had three dreams convincing him he had to change the course of his life...
I'm a telepathic rabbit defending our world from space-laser attack. We do, but do we modernize too much?
CAUTION: IDEAS
How do we make dream narratives readable, when most readers are raised to think they're nonsense?
Jung Chang's exposé of Mao's brutal deeds and legacy provoke dreams I demand that leaders listen...
Blake was broke. Couldn’t pay to typeset Songs of Innocence and Experience. But his brother showed him in a dream...
An Arab shows me a stone he calls a book, and a shell that speaks prophecies of the flood rushing toward us over the desert...
I dream I'm an insomniac trapped in a flat full of snoring writers and reporters. Wait a minute...
Samuel Pepys dreams of kidneystones, pee, come, & snot--didn't he? Thomas Macauley dreams his niece confesses...
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 and I blurt out the truth behind our idiotic waking world! And wake believing it...
Cover of a book telling my dream of a sphinx who visits humanity and leaves her sketchbook with notes...
Stevenson's dreams changed over decades: from childhood nightmares to creative allies dreaming whole stories...
I slept late and felt a bit stiff, but until my friends pulled it out of my neck I had no idea...
On the road with a poet and a philosopher, I insist we rescue an owl. But we get lost, and the poet turns into...
My father's trapped in a crashed car. But I'm distracted by a young man whose palm cups a living flame...
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...
Twain saw a coffin with white and red flowers. Inside lay his brother Henry. A few days later the riverboat Henry worked on exploded...
In my dreams, a co-worker tells me HER dreams. Their focus is utterly unlike mine! Dream goals differ...
All I know about humans, I learned in psychodrama. I gawked as caterpillars grew wings. Except me...
Trapped in a blend of Joan of Arcadia and The Tempest Tales, I'm tired of being the pratfall sidekick...
We lose control of our new time machine, which seems to have its own agenda...
CAUTION: CONTEMPLATION OF SUICIDE, CHRONOLOGICALLY IMPAIRED DREAMER
A mystic postman delivers a letter on the world's best glasses and a reply in my own hand, telling how to find and clean them...
I often dream of words forming on a page as their corresponding images dance around me. Here's an example...
I dreamt the world itself hired me, at a generous salary, to report its great affairs exactly as they happen...
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...
Most writers search for their unique style. Not me--I struggle to convey unique EXPERIENCES...
I wander a sunken maze, meet a playful woman, find a hidden treasure. Meanwhile, my friend Zooop...