Right away, a narrator showed up. Not day-me, but Silky, my anima, who manifests in my dreams in animal form as often as human. Silky looked back over half a century of dreamwork--a long arc of 40,000 dreams--my full range.
Pages 6-7 compare dreams to a cloud chamber in physics. The tracks of strange particles (individual dreams) can build up to imply a deeper, invisible order.
Pages 8-11 show a few odd dreamworlds... though one of them, most people would call waking reality. But to Silky, and me, your reality's just one more recurrent dreamscape in a much bigger multiverse.
Pages 12-15, Silky explores the ideas of a spacetimescape (with height as improbability) and time-streams as merely local flows downhill--inclinations one can overcome! This model's the only one I've found useful to explain predictive dreams and our ability to change the future foreseen. I learned it from Heinlein's tale "Elsewhen", 1940; he based it on JW Dunne's An Experiment with Time, 1927; timeforks and the multiverse originated with psychologist William James c.1900--as early as Freud! And for 15,000 years before James, shamans have called it the Tree of Time.
Pages 16-17 became a two-page spread, exploring the lure of seductive dream characters who can draw you out into new behaviors. The carrot's more effective than the nightmare stick! By the way--all these creatures are real dream figures I met, or, in the dreams of the Shiprock Mare, Revolution's Owl and the Mermaid Detective, I was.
Pages 18-21 show the opposite--the austere type I call 'topological' dreams--no characters, just landscape or space. Such dreams are often prophetic or diagnostic, for me. These spreads are a tribute to Shaun Tan's textured art, as in The Arrival or Tales from Outer Suburbia. I painted them with a kitchen sponge.
Pages 22-25: the issues of scale and moderation in dreamwork--aiming for just a few characters and issues at a time, and neither nightmare nor pure escapism--neither Dante nor Disney! And does good dreamwork demand quiet, time and calm in your day life too?
Pages 26-31: after your ten thousandth dream, you may see types and patterns a novices may miss. "Advisory, shamanic, lucid, cledonic, clairvoyant, telepathic, predictive..." Even now, many of these are denied by Freudians, sleep scientists, even Jungians. They still show up... if you do the work.
Pages 33-34: in this final two-page spread, Silky argues that most "normal" American dreaming is just a confused surf-zone halfway between the waking world and a stabler shamanic dreamworld beyond. But tech society suppresses deep dreams with noise, sleep deprivation and light. You huddled masses yearning to breathe free!
