INTRODUCTION

I began the World Dream Bank by planting twelve hundred seeds--posting my own favorite dreams, to lure other dreamers to contribute. I had definite biases: toward readable, coherent, entertaining, sexy, funny, magical, profound dreams. I wanted quality.

But quality cast a shadow. It set an unnaturally high standard for others to meet, and gave a false impression of my own dreamlife. Most nights, most dreamworkers (including me) recall just brief dream-shards, or long sprawling messes. Maybe that's inevitable in a noisy, cluttered age--my own recall is choppier now that I'm living in a noisy urban house.

Siphonian Quartet is more typical of my dreamlife today. Four short dreams in one night, each making its own point. Or do they all approach one issue from different angles? You be the judge.

THAT DAY

My sister Miriel calls. Long talk. She says "My inner art critic's still so strong I can't stand to face it. But outside art, I've been asserting herself more. And lost a lot of friends by doing it!" I counter-confess "I'm having trouble acting for my own benefit. Terribly guilty if I even slightly inconvenience anyone else. I must be selfless, Gandhi, Buddha... what a nag to have in your belly!"

Walk round Bernal Hill with my poet friend Patagia. No new poems yet, but outlines for some.

Do some tax work for our house, tracking down some bothersome (though not fatal) missing income. Then two friends, Christopher and Alder, drop by to tell me all about their tiring days. Until I'm tired.

In the evening I read Negima!, a raucous manga by Ken Akamatsu.

THAT NIGHT

1: Octopi Flood our Cliffhouse

I live in a town carved into the cliff-walls of a gorge where we farm. Wiggly water-channels are carved into the rock, both for drinking water and for irrigation below. We just carved a new cave-reservoir too, reducing evaporation. But while we're in it, inspecting, the cave starts filling abruptly! We scramble but get caught in the flood. Must tread water as it rises, and try to ride it out.

This was no engineering accident, but sabotage! Part of an invasion plan by strange cave-beings. They want a flood. It won't drown the city, since the outflow pours down to the fields, but we're trapped.

At last I get out and try to climb down a ramp-trail carved into the cliff-face, behind a rail of the same soft rock. But though I try a couple of routes down, every one has an octopoid alien blocking my way. Can I fight through them? Unsure.

What do they really want?

• Weird burrowers: in Negima, Zazie juggles for an audience of cannibal monsters no one else can even see.
• Octopus/squid saboteurs recur in my dreams. They often complain about my diet--even being vegan is greedy, I should live on air!
• Canyon, cliff town & irrigated fields: my current art project in the Planetocopia series is Siphonia, a model of Earth without 90% of its water. Deep seabasins have dense air conducive to flying... In the fracture zones near "undersea" rifts, I postulate just such cliff-villages of flying or gliding creatures who ride the updrafts.
• Pipes in the rock, reservoir, flood: my recent allergies--due to a flooded immune system!
• ACTION: ride out the allergic flood. Try to reduce irritants--but it's partly stress from inner nagging, and partly seasonal; a big pool to drain. Slow to ebb.

2: Whalerider's Family

My girlfriend lives on a houseboat in a cliff-walled sound; a subtropical "fjord". Lakes and marshes; floating, flowering islands of lilypads. A lovely place, but her people disapprove of me. My sort (traders) are fine to do business with, but you wouldn't want to marry one! So around her clan, we have to pretend we're just friends.

She's a whale tamer, I think. At least that's the term her relatives use. The whales call themselves equal partners in farming these sounds (oysters, scallops, what?), but her relatives treat them as trainable animals. So around the homeboat she pretends they're just big wet farmdogs... (are you seeing a pattern here?)

A long dream--many scenes lost. I took a whole life for granted--exotic scenery, new job, new girlfriend, annoying relatives, friendly whales... a whole world.

• Warm fjord: 1: Siphonia again! Earth's old sea basins are full of these warm fjordlike cliffwalled sounds, around fracture zones. 2: Yosemite. 3: the marinas and side canyons of Lake Powell in Utah. 4: Half-Circle Seahold on Pern, in Ann McCaffrey's Dragonsong and Dragonsinger; where the heroine Menolly grows up, in a family that beats her for composing, or thinking, or breathing. She runs off.
• Girl rides whales: echoes the Maori film Whale Rider--again, sexist relatives held the heroine back.
• Girlfriend: someone from Negima? Or my ex-girlfriend Emily? I confessed to my sister how much I missed just talking with Emily. She thought I should try to maintain a connection in hopes Em'll come round to friendship at least.
• Troublesome relatives: Christopher and Alder's bitching. And Emily's best friend Madeline comes to mind! I think she's been tearing me down to Em...
• Pretend in front of relatives: I do feel private, almost hide my sex life from family and even friends. I do sorta set myself up, ensure I'll feel private/secretive. I date weird and inappropriate people; I recently blundered into a triangle and lost two friends I cared about.
• ACTION: from now on, be ABSOLUTELY blunt and open about who I'm interested in--never furtive. Disapprove of me? Goodbye!

3: Triadic Flog

I wake from this other world to find I'm in a plaza, lying on my back, naked, legs and arms up like a dead squirrel. But not dead: a huge erection. Next to me is another guy in the same position.

Around us, fluted columns and concrete balconies of an old school--worn, but once elegant. No onlookers... for the moment. But it's very public.

We're two-thirds of a romantic triad. The other third is a dominatrix. She's in full black leather regalia--spiky boots and all. And a whip! She's flogging us. That big grin says she enjoys it, too.

So does the other guy--he loves it. I don't. The first lash to hit me just stings. This is fun? I seem to have borrowed someone else's sex dream without borrowing his tastes!

So I get up. They gawk at me as I leave their fun without a word--stagger off naked, with a sore and quickly shrinking erection.

I lack the slightest desire to hang around the... Old School.

• School, columns, kinky outfits: Not Siphonia. But the manga I read was set during a school festival--everyone's in costumes, some pretty daring.
• School, pain: I got hit a lot in school. The dream hints I'm not quite over it. Almost (I know what I don't like) but...
• Triangle, dominatrix, no fun: one of us stuck in that romantic triangle was a beautiful, brilliant girl who needed to punish guys. Her dad had molested her, so I cut her a lot of slack... but I just couldn't take chronic abuse. She went back to an ex-boyfriend who could.
• Walk off naked: good! I seem to be acting on Houseboat Girl's message.

4: Sheepshape

I'm back on Siphonia, my version of Earth with its seas mostly drained. I'm in the Anzac Deeps, near what was once New Zealand. I'm not sure how many miles down we are, but it's hot and the air seems very dense.

Two middle-aged women, one fat one thin, run sheep on these hills and ridges. They're Australians or Zealanders. This may be a BBC show--or more likely an Antipodal TV series, since it's a comedy making fun of Yank and Brit accents, slang and attitudes.

Me? I'm just a comic bit actor, applying for a shepherd's job on their ranch--without experience. And I don't understand the local conditions. It's hot in the Deeps, so the wool surely can't be worth much. Or is the ranch all about milk, or mutton?

And what'll the high air pressure and even higher partial pressure of oxygen do to the sheep? They may get bigger, smarter, rangier/gracile... hard to predict what's sheepshape in the Deep. Skin flaps, gliding sheep? Why not? They may need to, to escape the gliderwolves... I guess I'll learn.

• Shepherd job: Protecting helpless creatures. Myself? I do feel pretty vulnerable these days.
• Two herders: looked like Rosemary and Thyme (from that lame BBC series about two landscapers who constantly dig up murder victims). Do they mean digging up secrets? Stumbling stupidly on things? Bad scripts?
• What mutant Aussie sheep produce: echoes the sick Norstrilian sheep in Cordwainer Smith's classic science fiction: they produce stroon, an immortality drug, making Norstrilia rich.
• Sheepshape: is this pun on "shipshape" talking about adaptability? Protecting myself while I mutate to fit new conditions?

THE WIDE VIEW

Most of the dreamlets have clear individual messages, but as a group? If they're all approaching one issue from different angles, I don't see it yet.

• All but #4 concern self-defense or assertion. The attacks are diverse: octopus-induced flooding, a snotty family, an ex-girlfriend's abuse. I guess #4 contains a potential threat to the sheep, but it wasn't serious. The gliderwolves I envisioned were intelligent and amenable to reason; rustlers at the worst, and more likely buyers and cliffside restaurant owners...
• All but #3 seem set deep in the ocean basins of Siphonia. Even #3 might have been; it was pretty hot. Meaning what? All but #3 concern farming or ranching, too. Unless you consider a dominatrix a sort of sperm farmer. Eww. Pain farmer. Double eww.
• All but #1 had women in peculiar jobs. Unless those octopus terrorists were all girls too? Hard to tell with molluscs.
• #2 and #3 share themes: sex and public/private, and together they give a pointed lesson about who I like and don't. But #1 and #4 didn't feel sexual.
• If the sheep in #4 are raised for mutton, #1 and #4 may both share guilt that my vegism isn't strict enough...
• In short: so far I see no theme common to all four.

So what to do? I write and draw them, speculate, and try to act on their individual messages, while feeling like I missed the overall point. Wait to see if themes recur, and if related dreams eventually build into a coherent all-night blockbuster explaining the whole series.

So I apologize, dear readers. I suspect nights full of such unresolved dreams are common for most dreamworkers. But I created the false impression that I dream a shamanic epic every night! Himalayan peaks are real, but foothill-dreams outnumber them. And you don't reach the peaks without climbing through foothills. Or deep basins like these.

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