The latest MeToo meme is to leave a door open at night with a heater on, so a hot-air plume marks
a refuge for women in danger--or, of course, burglars! So I stalk our neighborhood locking doors... CAUTION: DECRIES HOT-AIR NAÏVETÉ
I walk home in cold rain; my hooded robe soaked. It has holes for my long pointed ears.
Hit a thriftshop to buy a dry one, and run into two girls I crushed on but ran away from:
Danielle is comforting Cary who's crying. Their ears are pointed too. Wait--who are we?...
CAUTION: GUILT FOR SINS OF OMISSION?
Night, downtown. A unicorn in tears, chained to her... barker? owner? pimp?
"Just $300" he yells. But for what? Magic? Sex? Healing?
CAUTION: PROSTITUTION? SLAVERY? GIG ECONOMY?
(a poem answering Wallace Stevens's 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)
As the beast in question (and recalling the fable Six Blind Men and the Elephant)
I don't mind letting six half-blind humans have their say--as long as I get my own...
CAUTION: UNICORNS
1: Crystal-skulled wizards, dino & lionfolk parade by. 2: I curl up with three skittish beasts. Patience!
3: My friend Mark tries to rape me. I tie him up, seek a restraining order. Will the cops believe me?
CAUTION: RAPE ATTEMPT
Huge gold construction cranes loom over medieval castles. Not rebuilding, but
hoisting knights to the heights. I get a ride up, and see a wide timescape...
DREAM: my late mom invades my workplace. "Check in weekly or we'll stop your allowance!"
What allowance? I'm independent! MONTHS LATER: I got sick from overwork. Nearly died.
NOW: I think my dead mom meant: face your limits, check in with mortality, or you'll... check out.
There was a tall man wearing a mask standing at the door.
At least I think it was a mask...
Out my window, a dog is fighting a snake. A dog with bat wings. A dog big as a horse.
A griffin! Big as a bus now. A dragon! What spell made me mistake THAT for a dog?...
Just a dream vacation! I take a train trip up the East Coast,
meeting, sketching and flirting with the locals, though they're...
Day: an exhibitionist teen uses sex to sell charity cupcakes, while her mom glares...
Dream: I date the exhibitionist, but her dad imposes weird trials, as I sing for courage...
This symposium, airing a dispute between geologists & astronomers who just don't read each others' papers, had multiple revelations--big hazards, bigger holes in our knowledge, and bigger opportunities...
CAUTION: CHART! WITH NUMBERS!!
Wayan dreams of petting an adorable cat-dog. The same night...
Cory dreams of meeting an adorable dog-cat. Later that day...
At the beach, Cory meets a woman with a dog named... Oh. You guessed.
On the show Finding Your Roots, it turns out my dad's a genetic experiment born in...
1880?! The experiment worked; my sisters and I are slow-maturing, long-lived mutants...
The 'toon actors from My Little Pony gleefully volunteer to die horribly in a TV documentary on the
impact in Yucatan that killed off the... dinosaurs? No! Unicorns, griffins, pegasi and dragons! As I
draw the dream, I get an email from the maker of a TV documentary on climate catastrophe...
I'm in a cavern. A large green & brown dragon goes over to a machine
and gives me a green egg. A gift. It comes to me this is "dragon bane"...
I meet a big cat who seems invisible to most humans. She talks in Armenian speech balloons.
Too bad she already has a boyfriend! But her mere existence proves there's hope for me...
A man enslaves a unicorn and makes her split time, for his profit! But the timeforks
don't heal as he expected. So the unicorn takes unilateral action (sorry).
Those time-forks look like our current political war. Prepare for sharp kicks...
I'm a woman trapped in a Sahara refugee camp. The only way out is to marry a rich jerk.
Try to escape but fail. Now an enemy out to kill me takes over. I have to turn and fight...
CAUTION: HARSH ON BOTH TRUMP & BIDEN
After a day of medical mess-ups, I dream whites routinely cheat super-fast Native American pony couriers,
till the riders demand showy down payments called Contract Cloaks. Now cheats'll get publicly exposed...
My classmates stole my pen. My teacher condones it. I am, after all, a hated minority.
They won't even SELL me one. So I write my final in blood--three huge, crude letters...
In a busy, shorthanded market, the store owner's running a checkstand.
He mistakes me for an employee and starts ordering me around...
CAUTION: AGE & GENDER... BIAS? OR INFORMED JUDGMENT?
There was this giant creature in the water along with a bunch of sharks.
The creature turned out to be nice though, much nicer than the sharks...
My new bedroom has huge windows, but no blinds. I pin up bedsheets for now--flimsy.
A girl walking by peers in. Wait--we're 50' up! She's in my room--and transclucent.
I yell "WHO ARE YOU?" She looks shocked I can see her, says "No one really" and fades...
In an Oakland literary salon (no, not an oxymoron) I'm supposed to
write an ode. But it's so hot, and I have surreal dreams to sketch...
At the beach, a biology teacher shows me how bottles smashed on the rocks by jerks lead to
slow death for the tidepool creatures. I'm afraid the warning is both personal AND planetary...
CAUTION: CAUSTIC TOWARD RECKLESS G.O.P. CUTS
I'm a middle-aged British writer in a triad with a sculptor and a dairy farmer
who seem happy sharing me. But it's a small town, so we must be discreet...
CAUTION: TRIAD THAT WORKS
1: My dad can't see my world. Literally can't see my world...
2: The House of Busyness is unlivable--busy, crowded, noisy...
3: Achievement takes twelve factors; any one can block you...
I'm a kid imprisoned in an empty stone castle. Squeeze through a stone slit, and prepare to drop ten feet
down the face of a great stone gate. But I go lucid, and my dream and waking body-senses conflict...
My job's to feed the wolves downtown with the heads of tuna-human hybrids; I mystify the pack
with a blend of skating, ballet and rope tricks. Wait, could this work on scary humans, too?
In a world of wizards, many have gone silent. They seem to forget speech exists. A toxin, a disease? But what explains
people's calm as more go mute? No, it's an insidious spell--with a penumbra making us take its spread for granted...
CAUTION: IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR WORLD
Ethics professor Chidi from The Good Place, painted purple, tells me he's in love with the Mistress
of the Herd, a mix of Circe, Dr. Moreau & My Little Pony, who radiates spells of love & beauty...
CAUTION: WEIRD IMAGERY, CRYPTIC, NUDE PONIES
The Evil Librarians drop a 19th Century book-character on my head--a blue-skinned paranoid!
He tries to kill me with a trident missing one prong... a Bident? Oh, no! He's Joe B...
CAUTION: DIM VIEW OF TWO 2020 CANDIDATES
I wander a weird palace full of books, seeking my father-in-law, but find
only a blindly-flailing whip anchored in the floor, creating a dome of pain...
I dream I'm a woman possessed by spirits with yellow eyes that tint the whole world lemon...
I wake, the sun rises, and for a single minute, the world turns that exact, strange yellow...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
I knew I was on my bed, yet I felt myself falling into a tesseract--huge, crystalline, colorful.
Inside I met an energy being who explained I'm not meant to die yet; this was just training...
CAUTION: UNCONVENTIONAL GOD
AWAKE: I watch Okko's Inn. Little Okko sees spirits--until she grows up and quits settling for ghosts.
DREAM: I explore a temple, meet a fox-spirit... and see I never was human. Time to quit settling for...
CAUTION: GAUZE-ROBED PRIESTESS
DREAM: I'm a girl in love with an underage abused girl (using me to heal?) But gossips (& the Swedish navy) won't let us be...
FILM: A Swede gets his teenage assistant pregnant--and small-town gossips blame her. So she writes Pippi Longstocking...
CAUTION: TEEN SEX; ESP?
Lost in the rainforest of Olympic National Park, I stumble into the wrong cabin:
the hut of Time herself. Or is she? She asks me to clean up, but spare her web...
"What about their dreams? What if they've all been partly dreaming us, and
lacking them, our world becomes as trivial and narrow as our dreams?"...