As a child in Orléans, M. Deschamps got his first taste of plum-cake from a M. Fortgibu.
As a man in Paris, Deschamps saw plum cake again--but not to eat. M. Fortgibu had beaten him to it.
Many years later, Deschamps was given plum-cake. He said "All that's missing is M. Fortgibu!"...
CAUTION: TRULY POINTLESS AND THAT'S THE POINT
Ebon Ebon Thalud, a woman blended with darkness, tries to gouge out my right eye. I wake screaming. My right eyelid...
I meet the original Adam. He complains Eve neglects him, but he hopes to meet one of his cleverer descendants...
Saints and devils in a sunken statuary garden turn too real for comfort; so, creating my own wings, I fly...
My German friend resolved to commit suicide, so I agreed to poison myself to keep him company...
While walking in the country, a vista suddenly terrifies Shelley: he recognizes it from a dream years before...
Thrice I saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer shot in the House of Commons. I nearly went to London...
After fasting for six days, I dreamed of three spirit helpers who aided my village,
guiding hunters toward game and healing others. But I lost so many loved ones...
CAUTION: SPOUSE MURDERED; CAREER BURNOUT
In prison, the midnight bell chimed. I dreamt I saw a cavalry column of men and horses skinned, gory, still marching.
Wagons of the dead passed for hours. As the guard changed, the gate crashed, waking me--just minutes after midnight!
CAUTION: PROVES NOT ALL DREAMS ARE REALTIME
An epic dream on the lifelong effects of unrequited love, compressed into seven stanzas...
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing
he had put together; I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out...
A black anchor floats in the sky to the east. Impossible cities rise on mountaintops, only to erupt in flame.
The sea rises to drown them. On a plank, I ride the flood. In the ruins, I find angelic statues--who wake...
I go back 3000 years to the Judgment of Paris, then at Babylon's height see King Nebuchadnezzar,
then the doomed lovers Antony & Cleopatra, then Triton and the Nereids celebrating a divine birth...
CAUTION: DENSE CLASSICAL REFERENCES
I dreamt I was in the outermost circle of Dante's Hell, among condemned lovers, floating forever, in love, in bliss...
Keats met two winged lovers nesting in the woods: Eros and Psyche, the last Olympians, worshipless...
A knight falls in love with a fey woman, until her previous victims warn him in a nightmare that she is...
CAUTION: GOTH TO THE MAX
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
I meet a half-angel half-mortal child, fruit of an illicit affair. Constantly growing pinfeathers,
but never mastering flight; ageless, but unable to grow up; at home neither in Heaven nor Earth...
CAUTION: 19TH-CENTURY VERBOSITY
I was in the grave. Worse, a living skeleton was trying to crush my ribs. Though terrified, I fought back, and...
When my first play failed, I tried to console myself by reading Paradise Lost.
But drama and devils don't mix...
I found a honeymoon cottage by the sea, and the old landlady gave me a very reasonable rate. Everything was fine...
I experienced a delicious tembling throughout my being, sweeping up
from my toes to my head. It shook me to the marrow of my bones...
Ann Marten kept dreaming that her stepdaughter had not eloped but was buried under a nearby red barn...
CAUTION: MURDER
I possessed ubiquity: twenty of me, and each possessed by my same soul, so I could not say who I inhabited...
She dreamt Death attacked her but her youngest kids bravely fought back--and died. 3 months later...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
M. Teste, 1830-1848, and Maurice Macario, early 1850s? four dreams predicting illness
Dog bites doctor's leg. Snake bites scholar's chest. Apoplexy kills a
government minister. Tonsillitis flattens a sleep and dream researcher...
That day Frederic, craving irises, fell in the water three times. At night he swam through an iris paradise...
Why do I treat dream-figures as real people, even in otherwise lucid dreams?
And if dreams universally suspended disbelief, how did I know, in one
recent dream, that the woman I argued with was another part of me?
A TAILOR'S APPRENTICE: I become her to fight back against his abuse...
DAMSEL ON THE PYRE: I become a girl being burned alive, but get
so distracted by my beautiful body I forget to escape until it's too...
I was floating in the Ether, not far from this world, which seemed small as an apple.
An angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, 'This must thou eat'...
A charming street, a peculiar shop... imaginary, or not? Saint-Denys found it
at last, years later, in Frankfurt where he hadn't been since childhood...
Agassiz, faced with a fossil he had to crack open, was unsure where to strike.
But for three nights he dreamed...
Night street. Two masked assassins attack a woman. I intervene. But I need a weapon!
I picture the Turkish sword on my mantel. The yataghan appears in my hand and I...
I dreamt the world itself hired me, at a generous salary, to report its great affairs exactly as they happen...
A gentleman clad but in a sheet notified me that an old friend had died of a terrible disease. What disease? Well...
I dream I meet a lady in red named Miss Napier. I know no such person. Senseless! Next evening,
after I read onstage, friends enter my dresssing room to introduce me to the lady in red--Miss...
Mary Queen of Scots' will (1556) was lost for centuries. In 1845, Major Buckley hypnotized
a fellow officer and had him 'read' a family heirloom. He said it was Mary's! Her lost will
was found in 1854 and published in 1863. Turned out the claim in the trance was right...
CAUTION: MARY'S LIFE WAS BRUTAL
His sewing-machine design failed--until dream-cannibals caught him & jabbed him with weird needles...
CAUTION: OUCH!
I meet King Louis-Philippe, but as I recall his symbol, the cockerel, he transforms to suit.
Now he cannot read the letter presented to him, so it becomes a basket of bird-seed...
An Arab shows me a stone he calls a book, and a prophetic shell that warns of a flood rushing toward us...
I dreamed of flying like a bird over beautiful meadows to a border or river I couldn't cross. But ladies in white
helped pull me over. After I did escape, I met some of those ladies and knew by their faces who I could trust...
Layanasha foresaw the British would bring a great snake spanning Maasai territory, then a plague killing
half the tribe, a second plague killing nearly all the cattle, and finally huge birds flying over the veldt...
I slept on an island in a scalding hot spring, praying for a dream. I got one--and woke up on the shore...
One night as I slept over a cheese shop, I dreamt I was trapped in a huge cheese, as a rat-horde gnawed...
CAUTION: YOU ARE LUNCH
I dreamt a couple toss out a shabby old hen. But it lays golden eggs! She becomes an eagle and carries me off to...
Saint-Denys pushes a strange theory of dream-incompetence, using as an example
a woman's dream of grief over her brother, killed in a war. But her case suggests
a second explanation a 19th-century scholar isn't equipped to see ...
M. Teste, 1830-1848, and Maurice Macario, early 1850s? four dreams predicting illness
Dog bites doctor's leg. Snake bites scholar's chest. Apoplexy kills a
government minister. Tonsillitis flattens a sleep and dream researcher...
Stevenson's dreams changed over decades: from childhood nightmares into
creative collaborators dreaming whole stories...
On New Year's Eve, I 'woke' to find my room full of light. A coffin lay on chairs; inside was my father.
My watch read 12:40. I woke again. A day later the letter arrived. My father had died at 12:40...
DREAM: Hunt's mother points at a tall figure in the shadows and shrieks "Death! Death!"
ONE YEAR LATER: in Jerusalem, his hostess finds her young son dead, and shrieks...
CAUTION: BEWARE THE IDES OF JANUARY?
I saw a man riding across the face of a lake. Bullets and arrows flew at him, but all missed.
He reached the shore. Men who looked like him rose from the ground, and pulled him down...
CAUTION: GENOCIDE DIRECT, GENOCIDE BY PROXY
On the Euphrates, a monstrous crocodile eats all his kin. But when a winged ship appears, he feigns remorse...
A friend scoffed at Biblical talk of the apocalypse, but as we spoke, the evening star came down and burned all our
cities. I knew it was no ordinary dream. Next day came the news: the Russians had burned the city of Sevastopol...
CAUTION: WAR CRIME
Leading a party out of slavery, I got off the road when God warned me to. He insisted I must ford a cold river.
Turned out the slaveowner had posted a reward at the station ahead; we were saved by divine guidance...
When my grandmother was young her husband had a prosperous ranch. She dreamed some Indians attacked.
She convinced them to hide; the Utes killed or stole nearly all their sheep. But at least they were alive...
In bed asleep, the dreamer discovers this seemingly empty room hosts a
fairy ball, full of luminous half-seen beings serenaded by a monstrous band...
Samuel Pepys dreamt of kidneystones, pee, come, & snot--or did he? Thomas Macauley dreams his niece confesses...
I sought a dream of Helpers. But rather than give me gifts, they gave me a daunting challenge...
I was led into the future, where all the buffalo disappeared, to meet a frail old man by a ranch house...
I dreamt again of that mountain east of Concord where no hill exists. I ascended that long
rocky ridge where wild beasts haunted, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity...
Exploring Indonesia's lesser isles, Wallace fell sick with fever. He dreamed that Malthusian hunger and
population pressure might explain the evolution of the species he found. He wrote to Darwin, and...
I saw a snake with a white-bearded man's head, and two younger heads alongside. Men attacked the
snake, cutting off the younger heads. The eldest looked at me, mournful, and they cut off his head too.
Soon after, I met John Brown; I knew it was him. But only on the day of Harper's Ferry did I understand...
My brother Henry lay in a metal casket. He wore a suit of mine. On his breast were white roses, with
one red at the centre. A few days later, the boilers of the riverboat Henry worked on exploded...
Kekule dreamed solutions to the thorniest structural chemistry problems of his era not once but twice...
I saw a dark object like a cloud at a vast height, but coming swiftly down toward the earth.
It resolved itself into iron bars--tens of thousands, millions? I said: this is the end of everything...
Tubman woke ecstatic, unable to eat. "My people are free!" Her host said "My grandchildren may see it; but we will be gone."
"No! I tell you, sir, you'll see it, and you'll see it soon. My people are free! My people are free!" Three years later...
A lab. The cat doesn't mind a swim in this liquid harmlessly rendering it clear as glass. It catches
a transparent mouse I didn't even see! So now I faintly see a glass mouse inside the glass cat...
When I'm stressed, I build a set of luna-moth wings and fly invisibly. Though once a blind man caught me by ear...
I rise out of my body, find I'm invulnerable, visit the moon, with its volcanic rocks, re-enter
my body, "wake" and write the dream--only to wake again and find all my notes gone!...
I trained myself to associate one scent with the mountains, one with an art studio. On a random
night my servant applied both secretly, and I dreamt artist & model burst into a mountain scene...
A comet grows hair, a girl named Rosalie becomes a bed of roses, writing in a beautiful
hand appears on a beautiful hand, and Sylvia becomes a talking forest bird...
A TAILOR'S APPRENTICE: I become her to fight back against his abuse...
DAMSEL ON THE PYRE: I become a girl being burned alive, but get
so distracted by my beautiful body I forget to escape until it's too...
I found myself in childhood again, in a village where my dad was building a bridge. A man in a guard's
uniform introduced himself as C--. Awake I could recall no such person, but research revealed...
My face was leprous white like parchment; my eyes shone with
a cold blue eerie light. I shrieked "Papa, don't you know me?"...
Delboeuf, ignorant of botany, dreams of feeding lizards a fern called Asplenium ruta muralis;
years later he finds both lizards and fern in books he read and forgot years before the dream...
I recognized the saboteur. If I had neglected that dream warning we all would likely have drowned...
I dreamed I built a palace, but for fifteen years I kept silent, ashamed. Then
I tripped over a beautiful stone. I took it home. Next day I collected more...
They led me to the guillotine. As the blade struck my neck,
I woke to find my headboard had broken loose and fallen on my...
On a long steamboat voyage, a living skeleton swaps a warning for my watch; when the whistle
sounds, the boiler will blow. As it does, I dive in the river and wake to discover a real whistle...
CAUTION: UNCANNY SYNCHRONIZATION?
Lincoln dreamt his body was lying in state in the White House. A guard said he'd been assassinated. Two weeks later...
I saw a chariot fly south then return with the cold body of my friend. I ran into town to warn them
"Miss Fanny's dead!" As I reached town, the news came, confirming her death...
At a party, Nietzsche told a young woman "my hand was transparent as glass;
and a fat toad sat on my hand. I felt compelled to swallow it, and did..."
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM, CREEPY FOLLOW-UP
Will you walk in the fields, love? / Let us be gone.
The tall grass will wave to thee / Fairest one...
Mrs C. dreamed she was the ascetic preacher Savonarola, who wanted to burn all vanities.
In her audience she saw... Mrs C! So she, Savonarola, aimed her barbs at all of C's flaws...
I'm on a mesa, looking down in terror. I try to pull back but a compulsion
overrides my will--I crawl helplessly forward until I go over. As I fall...
CAUTION: PRE-FREUDIAN DISMISSAL OF WARNING
I paint my thumb with bitter aloes to break my habit of sucking it at night. I dream of
wormwood, ox gall, mineral salts. I consult Dr. Save Me and even the Pope, but...
I'm in the Rocky Mountains. Gold-hungry Mexican bandits capture me and put my feet to the fire,
demanding "How do you transmute copper into gold?" I scream "I don't know!", waking to find...
CAUTION: TORTURE PLAYED FOR LAUGHS
"I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down..."
Sketching on North Dome, thinking only of the glorious Yosemite landscape, I was suddenly
possessed by the notion that my friend Professor J. D. Butler was below me in the valley...
I ask my dreams about sex, and get... sex on a beach with a sea-serpent girl--a lamia. But she gets queasy--
landsick! Too hot for her up here. Help her back in the sea. What a contrast with Ruskin's lamia nightmare...
CAUTION: SCALY SEX
Thieves stole 100 of our horses. The tracks suggested white men, but that night
my dream Helpers declared them Sioux. We tracked them across Montana...
Are dreams really so ephemeral? Lewis Carroll, who built the Alice books from dream-shards, wasn't so sure...
I dreamt a friend poisoned me. I "woke" and slew him in fury. But guilt gnawed me. I confessed and was due to hang...
CAUTION: NOT A CALM GUY
When my grandmother was young her husband had a prosperous ranch. She dreamed some Indians attacked.
She convinced them to hide; the Utes killed or stole nearly all their sheep. But at least they were alive...
DREAM: a stranger tells me "The Teacher" won the Handicap. AWAKE: At the track I meet the man in my dream! He
says The Teacher is now called Aldrich. But Aldrich's owner discourages me. A friend trusts my dream & wins £1,000...
On a cloud in space I met an ape molding a model of Earth, glancing at the original far below. We were much alike...
Emily Dickinson ties up a worm she mistrusts. Bad move! It grows into a talking snake with a score to settle...
We were on a train headed for a crash. No one was in the engine. Rather than jump, my friend insisted we try...
A mystic postman delivers a letter on the world's best glasses and a reply from me, telling how to find them...
Goaded by a green spirit of envy, an Ice Age sorceror kidnaps Adam's Eve, arresting human evolution...
Jesus's disciples kvetch that Paul, who never knew Jesus, twisted his clean simplicity into a religion...
CAUTION: JARGON, HERESY (on one side or other)
Gazing at the moon, Anna finds herself touring the Solar System, meeting all the planetary guardians...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL ECSTASY
Should Anna quit hiding her psychic dreams? She dreams a cat eats her bird & burglars loot an open house.
Maybe keep hiding?
I lead my daughter up a thorny path; she’s getting scratched. She'd rather stay in that fishing village below...
Jung (at age three and a half) sees a terrifying god deep underground, and is told "That is the man-eater!"...
With no sense of incongruity, I planned to take the child Polly
with me to the theatre, to see the grown-up Polly act...
I say Christ’s “blood” is a metaphor for “spiritual perfection.” My mom says "You're killing me; please repent"...
A night-fiend strove to open the door I held shut between us--
until I realized I too was terrible, and opened it to find a great...
CAUTION: THE DREADED PROSE OF HENRY JAMES
At ten, I fasted a long tedious time. I dreamed a bird offered me showy gifts, but I kept to my grandmother's advice: never take the
first offer. At last a big, strange bird from the north, a white loon, offered me long life and health; that I accepted! So now I'm called...
An albatross with beautiful eyes transformed into a woman. But her nose remained a beak! She asked...
Age 7 to 11, I often dreamt I inhabited a consistent geography of mountains & deserts. I was an adult of dark
complexion in non-European clothes; I spoke a tongue (and read a script) that I didn't recognize when awake...
CAUTION: ADULT DRUG EXPERIMENT; PAST LIFE MEMORY?
Kingsford meets a girl who burns herself as a protest. K flips out! Rants instead of helps...
CAUTION: RANT MIDWAY YOU'RE BETTER OFF SKIPPING
I find myself in a vault with tables where half-dissected animals writhe. Hidden in each was a human shape...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
Malaria nearly kills a talented young artist; he must retrain from scratch. Why? Well, he's not exactly himself...
A dream telling how to acquire mystic power: raw food, no sex, meat, or booze; just meditate in rural solitude...
CAUTION: EXTREMISM
The two great political leaders of the Victorian Age bare their souls to me. Gladstone's ashamed that
he betrayed his ideals; Disraeli dances about, vilifying his loathed rival, but he feels no shame at all...
CAUTION: VICTORIAN PROSE, BAD POLITICIANS
I was shown what veils the God in us: Blood (violence), Idols (dogmatism), and the Curse of Eve (sexism)...
CAUTION: FUNDAMENTALISTS (OF ANY FAITH) WILL SEE RED
Poem from a book on how love can save lives & souls, read in two dreams of a Renaissance astrologer's library...
The Lord Chancelor can't sleep, and when at last he does, he drifts through nightmares full of baby lawyers
and potted tradesmen sprouting fruit, and cutthroat corporate scheming. But that's Victorian dreaming!
Subtitled "In his Sleep he Saw Love, Glory and Wealth Appear to him". Is it a real pre-Freudian dream
on being tempted by three powerful allies of the Id... or just allegory? I have my doubts...
Anna trusts to luck, but her mentor urges her to plan--"Think it out!" And what are these cards?
I dreamt of a better translation of Nebuchadnezzar's name, since universally accepted...
I dreamt a priest of old Nippur told me two agate pieces, long separated, formed a pair...
I saw one man stalk another. Unprovoked, he cut his throat. I felt I knew him but couldn't see his face...
That night, my brother-in-law was brutally murdered in just this fashion, outside a wedding party...
CAUTION: GRIM. 19TH-CENTURY GRIM.
Age 7 to 11, I often dreamt I inhabited a consistent geography of mountains & deserts. I was an adult of dark
complexion in non-European clothes; I spoke a tongue (and read a script) that I didn't recognize when awake...
CAUTION: ADULT DRUG EXPERIMENT; PAST LIFE MEMORY?
John Lee, sentenced to hang, dreamt he walked to the scaffold but the trapdoor stubbornly stuck.
He woke, told his jailors the dream, walked to the scaffold, and...
Dreams and other revelations shouldn't be dissected--they need to be reveiled, not revealed...
CAUTION: INTENSE MYSTICISM
I dreamt an epic poem on a sinister ruined city now home
only to reptiles. I woke with at least a hundred lines, but...
Stevenson's dreams changed over decades: from childhood nightmares into
creative collaborators dreaming whole stories...
I was warned about soul-devouring art in the haunted house, but I didn't expect to find an entire art salon...
CAUTION: ABSORBING ARTWORK
I'm a French revolutionary facing a firing squad. But palmistry predicts I'll be strangely saved...
When I was very small I dreamt a pack of wolves climbed the tree outside my window and
somehow got it open. Freud told me I must have seen my parents having sex doggy style...
CAUTION: REALLY, DR. FREUD?
As a child I read Jules Verne's Clipper of the Clouds--a metal craft with many propellers on spars, not wings.
Soon I dreamt I designed & flew quite a different craft, like a small boat of canvas on a wood frame.
20 years later, I was test-flying a new aeroplane with a boatlike cockpit of white canvas on a wood...
I wondered where a friend was, and felt as if I were walking at night near the Sphinx. Months later...
Glaciers feed a mountain lake; dust blows over a pass. Then I realize the ice is the robes
of a great choir; the dust, thousands of musicians filling the cirque, singing, playing...
Closing my eyes I saw an old man and a red-haired girl in a shop. My workmate was writing home...
We were as if brother and sister of old in the desert land;
they sold us in slavery together before this life had begun...
Sledding at night, I approached the speed of light, and the stars turned colors I'd never seen...
Adele: alone & scared in a dark wood--but her friend John came & shook a tree; it burst into flame!
John, the same night: found Adele scared in a dark wood. Shook a bush & it burst into flame...
Jung walked against stiff wind and fog, sheltering a tiny light, generating a huge eerie shadow--his other self!
He concluded this was his life-task--to nurture his spark of awareness & rationality in the dark. But...
In hindsight his dream models four key Jungian ideas: Self, Ego, Shadow and Unconscious--at age 18!
CAUTION: REJECTS JUNG'S OWN DREAM INTERPRETATION!
Mrs Claughton moved into a house known as haunted. She dreamt multiple ghosts asked her for help.
She crossed England to pass messages to heirs, containing private details Claughton couldn't have known...
CAUTION: ENOUGH CORROBORATION TO MAKE SKEPTICS UNEASY
When I was little, two boys with strange laughs invited me to play. Their house was crowded and underground.
After I came back out, I realized their home was a grave and they were ghosts. They gave me a power...
We went to visit a well-known psychic. As an afterthought I asked about an upcoming race. The answer was firm: "Marco to win..."
We made a lot off her tip. But when I thanked her later, we were shocked to learn she'd never heard me! Then who had spoken?...
CAUTION: WEIRD EVEN FOR SPIRITUALISTS
My dead father said a trusted servant was stealing our goods through an unlocked skylight. This proved true...
A con artist fools me and a waiter. But if my dreamfolk are all me, who's fooling whom?
Greenwood dreams he finds a severed hand on a mantelpiece. The next day
it happens! But he sees no moral, so he dismisses it...
I don't understand this poem's symbolism or even its style. It came to me whole, in a dream...
After Shaw's Arms and the Man eclipsed my own play The Land of Heart's Desire, I dreamt I was haunted by...
My scalp had an infection that just wouldn't heal. I tried everything. Then I dreamed I met
a big, black man who advised me to use certain ingredients from Africa...
George sees a cart-crash pinning a friend. He yells to bystanders to free the wheel, but they can't hear him...
As a child, Paul Nash dreamt he flew over rural southern England.
As an adult surrealist painter...
As a child, landscape artist Paul Nash dreamed of flying over the countryside
of southern England. But he was threatened by the legendary Black Dog...
As a child sick in bed, Max had a fever dream that the shapes in the knots and grain in a
wooden panel were children terrorized by a bird. Adult, he assembled a sort-of-painting...
Mark Twain dreams we're cells inside God, and writes of Huck Finn among the microbes.
A century later, unaware of Twain's dreams, Robert Moss...
I walked along a hilly road with ropes and boxes. My wife vanished in a hollow. But
my path went on until the hills were blue in the distance. An old man interpreted...
14 years before the Titanic sailed, Robertson wrote of a great liner, the Titan,
with 3000 people aboard, that strikes an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic...
I say it's 4:30 PM; the waiter says 4:30 AM! I wake in the night to find
my watch says 4:30, but it's stopped! I wind it, and next morning...