In the border-mountains, there is a Trumpeter. His clear, triadic melodies break out through the frosty air,
or through the swirling mists. No one knows whether the Trumpeter is theirs or ours...
We're children seeking gold in a fairy wood. We meet some elf-kids,
chase them off, and dig where they played. Then their parents show up...
CAUTION: INTERSPECIES BULLYING
I'm on vacation, but cultists lick my feet--then turn on me, casting stones. But they miss.
So I wander the steppe for centuries, until I come to the City of Texas...
I'm in a play. Fear, then joyful sex, then ranching, then silly hats, as a man drones on about
class struggle. Weird chairs, pingpong, coffee, impossible double utterances. At last
I tell friends my dream--backwards. Then I write the dream down on slices of cheese...
CAUTION: SEX ONSTAGE
A master criminal is tracked down by a hound in a monk's robe
who's introduced to me as... the President of the United States?
When I was 17, an older girl pushed booze at me and came on to me... in front of my parents and teachers!
For months, I had ambivalent sex dreams trying to process what Donna taught me--not all of it negative...
CAUTION: WEIRD SEX; ADULTS BEHAVE BADLY
I'm in a huge colonnade. An army of blood-painted men sacrifice the dove of peace. Their masked leader drinks its blood.
But then I'm carried upstairs to meet... the prophet Daniel! I'm amid the angels, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel...
CAUTION: BLOOD-DRINKING THUGS
A castle with horse statues in the moat. Only... one of them is alive! He's my lover...
CAUTION: EVERY SEX TABOO YOU CAN THINK OF
I go home. Our cat is there. And a small, striped new cat. Then I step on a third, much bigger cat.
This is just one cat too many! "This cat's not real!" I say...
The nonexistent cat leaps up and scratches my face.
Parking structures with spiral ramps are, secretly, screws harvesting motion from parking cars, slowly drilling
into near-impenetrable rock. Thus are skyscraper-foundations made...
I meet my true love during a coup. We go through Hell together, like Orpheus and Eurydice--only we...
I'm a psychic circus animal who's just managed to teleport my humanoid girlfriend. It's for our act, but...
CAUTION: PETTING
DAY: our ex-cat comes back, needing surgery. Dad doesn't want to pay. Big quarrel.
DREAM: Cats, birds, elf-girls; in their asteroid library, a tale of oath-breaking...
Now I'm the one who stole a tooth of jade from the volcano hall. Greed... erupts!
CAUTION: NUDE BIRD-ELF, DEATH BY LAVA
I go lucid and drive my bed to the Nevada desert where I see my next million years. And so far, it's been true...
My friend Tanya tries hard to save her marriage, but in her dreams Isidora Duncan,
Carl Jung, even the gods themselves warn her to face their deep incompatibility...
My earliest memory's a recurring dream: I'm a wild horse near Shiprock, recurrently dreaming
that I'm a human child! The two lives alternated for years, each a dream to the other...
I'm a snake being hunted by the FBI. I know English, but I can only hiss.
So I need to find an indirect way to show I'm peaceable...
1941. My dad and I are denounced to the SS. We're put in with monsters; I'm a snake or fish myself.
But the Nazis become a photo album, I go to a memorial, I cry, it's 1947, peace...
CAUTION: HOLOCAUST MEMORIES
A museum sketch of Navaho horses who got me hot--teaching
teenage me that my sexual orientation wasn't (only) human...
That day, I did bad art. That night, my friend & I get turned into levitating horses--
though some of our fellow fliers, like the mummified Inuit, are kinda creepy...
Why does my passport have color photos of me ice skating? I haven't in years. Your
passport must show your true face. Should I change it, or do they know me better than...
CAUTION: SHAMANIC SYNCHRONICITY
A ship-captain insisted some castoff clothes were mine. They fit. As I put on an elegant coat,
I recalled it was made in a past life to disguise me so I could enter a temple excluding women...
My cat dissolves in the shower. I follow her to a telepathic world. I want to stay, but can I?...
Alchemy demands I kill ten swallows. I refuse! Instead, twelve birds and I fuse and fly over a magic wood...
I cross a hostile continent to a magic commune, fall in love with a flying girl who slaps a
soul-spark into my head, and follow an alien goddess leading the Dance of the Sun...
I meet the terrible Power Behind the Gods. I don't like it. So I get my squirtgun & shoot its butt.
The enraged Power chases me as blindly as I hoped! I jump into a secular universe, and...
CAUTION: SACRILEGE
Fat Max eats with Heinrich the guard on Tuesdays. He talks too much. You and I are hungry. Tonight...
The poem appeared in the dream as it appears on the page--words, even punctuation...
CAUTION: DEATH CAMP, DEATH PLOT
Hedgehog and White Rabbit stick together, through the snipers on Broadway,
through the dogs of winter, through cannibal soup...
DATE UNCERTAIN
I ask my dreams if my dad's influencing my divorce. I dream my dad warns me "You can't ride a
motorcycle." I mount the bike and zoom down the road. I love it. When I park at last, my dad says...
As it was revealed that the pianist in Truro Cathedral was T.S. Eliot's illegitimate daughter, her
wretched playing suddenly became beautiful. I knew the dream meant "cleave to the illegitimate"...
DREAM 1: A man wearing long white underwear shoots me down with a machine gun.
DAY: Long John Nebel interviews me; his Freudian friend calls me a penis-envying woman.
DREAM 2: Long John and his buddy umpire a rough baseball game. Definitely not cricket...
CAUTION: SEXISM, FREUDIANS, PUNS
In nightmares I was stalked by a big ugly bruiser. At last, I faced him, asking "What do you want?"
He asked for my hand. His animal energy attracted me, and despite my doubts I said yes...
I DREAM I'm in the mansion of my favorite film producer, Otto Preminger. Then I learn it's my home!
I WAKE realizing I'm the producer of my dreams--not some impersonal, instinctive Unconscious...
One of my earliest drawings, of a quiet crowd of melancholy ghosts...
Kaleidoscopic constellations? No thanks! A nudist town in Italy? Ugh.
Ah, but singing vaudeville in a monk's robe & roller skates...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
My mum's under my bed, unconscious, her head cracked. I wake knowing she'll lose her mind...
DREAM: I'm in the Arctic facing a hostile mob. I insist "I'm dreaming; you can't hurt me." They try!
I look down at my body, stuck full of hatchets, and say "See?" They slink off, looking sheepish...
TWO DAYS LATER: I'm in northern England. A reporter snaps "Dreams won't help the miners..."
When I try to play the piano in public I get sabotaged. At last I see a child who says she can't play while she's in pain...