1: WHAT THIS SITE IS
2: HOW TO READ THESE ENTRIES
3: RATINGS: PROFANITY, SEX, ETC.
4: COPYRIGHT AND REPOSTING RULES
5: HOW TO DOWNLOAD
6: ADD YOUR DREAM!
7: ASPCA NOTE

Hi. Chris Wayan here. The World Dream Bank is a large library of dream texts and art that began as my own dream-journal and just... grew. It's biased toward coherent, well-written dreams full of humor, magic, color, sex, talking animals, sex with talking animals, flying, mystical revelations... Not much graphic violence or drug use. Quite a lot of radical politics--Green, feminist, and queer-friendly. Lots of shamans, witches and pagans. The only thing I actively censor, as an editor, is dullness.

Most online dream-journals are chronological--essentially, diaries. For the Dream Bank, however, I wanted an expandable library, built to welcome other people's dreams! So, while there is a chronological list of dreams, the site focuses on exploring dreams by SUBJECT and TYPE. Subject is obvious--you should be able to find a list of dreams about almost anything:

Physical things like

caves, cows, or crystals

Moods and broad themes, like

Sexy dreams, funny dreams, weird creatures, taboos, being someone else

Scenes and settings like

school dreams, undersea dreams, courts and trials, other planets, other times

Dreams of particularly common themes, like

Flying, nudity in public, having to take tests, falling, losing teeth

Symbolic dream figures and events, like

Jungian shadows, animas and guides, mentors, twins and doubles, initiation rituals, metamorphosis

Dreams wrestling with emotions like

Joy, anger, envy, humor, or fear

Dreams of issues and ideas and abstract themes like

Competition, beauty and ugliness, freedom, fanaticism, taking initiative

Different sleep states

Hypnogogic dreams (dreams when falling asleep or waking)--short, vivid, kinetic, visual, disjointed images

REM dreams (dreams in the Rapid Eye Movement sleep phase)--often long, intense, emotional, bizarre. Nearly all the dreams on this site are REM

Non-REM dreams (dreams in deep sleep without REM)--slow, less vivid rumination. No list because none submitted; tend to be dull, forgettable

Dreams with external elements

Out-of-body dreams and experiences

Dreams leaving apparent physical traces

Subliminal dreams picking up waking sensations and unnoticed subtleties

Telepathic and shared dreams

Clairvoyant and predictive dreams

Altered states within the dream, such as

Lucidity (knowing you're dreaming)

False waking, or dreams within dreams (you wake into another dream--sometimes several layers deep!)

Intentionally communicative dreams, like

Incubated dreams (dreams on a topic you requested, or answering a question)

Advice dreams (dream figures offering explicit, unsolicited advice)

Diagnostic and prescriptive dreams (warning of illness, suggesting cures)

Dreams offering gifts, or prompting you with opportunities

Creative dreams: dreams with inventions, stories, art, music, or dreams about the creative process

Nightmares and warning dreams

Self-referential dreams:

Dreams about dreaming, dreamwork, or dream research

Dreams that interpret or discuss themselves

Recurring dreams

Dreams for the community:

Shamanic dreams (dreams to help others)

Dreams of broad political and social issues (especially ones with policy suggestions)

Dreams that alter your sense of identity (sometimes permanently)

Your career has changed

Your tribe has changed--your race, friends, language, nationality

Your body or body image has changed

Your sex and/or orientation has changed (freaks out many dreamers)

Your species has changed

Your platform has changed (you're silicon-based life, or a robot, or an AI in infospace, or an energy-being, or pure awareness)

Your values, memories, or ability to reason, visualize, or focus has changed...

Transcendental dreams, like:

Dreams presenting life-paths and spiritual missions

Shamanic dreams (forcing you into new states of awareness)

Mystical ecstasy (still under construction--but aren't we all?)

As I write (February 2008) the site has about 1500 dreams, 2400 pictures, 450 subject lists, and 500 other pages on dreams, shamanism and dreamwork, creativity, genius, art, surrealism, fantasy and imagination. About 85% are the dreams I posted to start off the Dreambank; others have now contributed 15% and rising. Help raise it past 50%; contribute a dream!

This website and all its contents are copyright Chris Wayan, 2008, unless otherwise stated; in particular, all artists and writers herein retain copyright to their work. Please don't reproduce our work without asking permission!

Here is a BLURB.

ABOVE THE WHITE TOWER: by Wayan; 1990/1/14, a flying sex-change dream of love Flying in a wild wind, I mate mid-air with an alien, get pregnant, change sex, fight the inlaws... CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

Each BLURB leads to a PAGE with a dream--some are text (illustrated or plain), some are comics, some are paintings with notes, some are dream-songs or poems. There are some non-dream pages grandfathered in; their proportion is decreasing over time.

A small PICTURE on the left of the blurb means the page has at least one image. Since many stories have multiple illustrations, these THUMBNAILS are not a complete Art Gallery.

After the TITLE (the only active link) comes the author's name, then FILE SIZE--text and graphics, added up. Text should load first, so you can start reading a story while its graphics are still loading. If a page loads slowly or not at all, email me! wdreamb@yahoo.com

GRAPHICS TERMS:

• ILLUSTRATED means something specific: HTML text studded with pictures like flowers on a bush. They load much faster than comics, but the exact layout you see depends on your browser, screen, and window size. If a page looks funny, enlarging the window may help--these pages were meant to be at least 600 by 800 pixels. On the other hand it may just look strange because, well, dreams are strange.
• COMICS load more slowly than illustrated stories, and the words (if any) are part of the pictures, not sharp Web text. Much of my own work is comics, but I seem to draw curvy, flowing, high-resolution, vertical book pages--hard to display in low-res, horizontal Web format. So most of my dream-comics are only offered in print (sigh)--see Catalog.
• DIGITAL ART = art done from scratch with a mouse or digital pen. Much of the art on this site is pure digital. Art touched up or finished digitally isn't on this list.
• ERASABLE CRAYONS, made by Sanford, look like crayons but a pencil will erase them. They're harder than wax, slow to lay down color, but a great art tool, and permanent, unlike Crayolas, which sun will fade. Try 'em. See crayon and pastel for examples.
• PAINT: Like many artists I distinguish between WATERCOLOR, using transparent colors on white, and thicker, opaque PAINT--oil, acrylic, gouache. Most paintings on this site are acrylic, even if they look like oils--acrylic's faster, if rougher, and dream artists tend to want to get it down now! Even some of the watercolors are really dilute acrylic--on good paper they act like watercolor, and they don't fade like some traditional watercolor pigments.

Some entries have a CAUTION note; see "Ratings" below.

All entries with material that may trouble some readers have warnings:
CAUTION: SEX
CAUTION: PROFANITY
CAUTION: GANG VIOLENCE
CAUTION: DON'T EAT SKUNKS AT HOME
CAUTION: GRATUITOUS LAWYERS, GORILLA MARRIAGE, BREAST THEFT, etc.

It's a site of dreams, and the majority are still my dreams, so it contains:

1. RELIGIOUS themes to offend almost everyone--I've tried to flag pages that EXPLICITLY flame various churches and/or gods, but so many of my dreams are pagan I've probably overlooked stuff offensive to some Christians, Muslims and Jews (who my dreams seem to think are all conservative, patriarchal, and essentially interchangeable--unfair, I know).
2. A fair amount of SEX ranging from sublime to ridiculous. This isn't a porn site, but it is uncensored, so many of the dreams contain sex, often strange sex--animals, aliens, kids, demons, weird sex organs, orgies. Very few dreams contain rape, sexual violence, sadism, or bondage (consensual or not). I didn't censor such themes, I just don't dream of them much and so far they haven't been pouring in.
3. Quite a lot of NUDITY, not always sexual--it often seems to mean honesty or directness, in my dreams at least.
4. Some VIOLENCE, but not much graphic GORE. I've found it helps me to write violent or scary dreams, but violent images make me feel worse. I don't know why--it isn't true of weird sex dreams, which often cheer me up to draw. But I've left my own violent dreams mostly in text form and stuck warnings on for the squeamish.
5. An amazing amount POLITICS for a bunch of dreams! But that's what I got--I wasn't hunting for 'em. WARNING! Americans may resent the anti-capitalist, anti-business tone of many dreams. Traditionalists around the world, particularly men, may find the feminist and anti-hierarchical dreams offensive. But then, we find y'all offensive too.
6. Occasional PROFANITY, mostly in dialogue.
7. Almost no RACISM or HATE SPEECH. But dreams often stereotype all sorts of people. Don't take that too literally--dreams use such stereotypes as symbols for various qualities or even abstract ideas; and your unconscious knows very well it's just symbolism. It's our CONSCIOUS minds that take symbols so literally that we start fights over race, gender and religion...

Copyright law varies around the world, but it's the policy of the World Dream Bank that all artists and writers on this site own the copyright to their work, whether or not a copyright statement matches your local notions or standards. The site as a whole and pages without a stated copyright or byline are copyright Chris Wayan. ASK if you want to reuse or alter something, unless it says otherwise on the work itself. Personally, I'll nearly always say yes, but I reserve the right to say no. If you exploit my work commercially, I will sue, and I suspect the same is true for most of us on the site.

Traditional exceptions apply--you can download copies for personal enjoyment, for limited educational use (research, class handouts and reference, etc), and to quote for site reviews. Please use common sense. Legality aside, dreams are uniquely personal. Theft or misuse of such intimate material will hurt people--and provoke sharp legal responses.

Individual pictures are savable in the usual ways. If you want a group of images, go to the Art Gallery--everything but the smallest spot illustrations are listed, and can be saved easily.

Copying illustrated stories, or indexes with thumbnails, means you have to duplicate the site's structure on your home system, so the text can find the pictures and display them in the right places. Two solutions:

The SIMPLE way: buy the whole site on CD-ROM--I've structured it so you can run it from that, OR copy the whole site onto your hard disk (8500 files, 240 Mb at the moment) with the correct structure. See the catalog--I price the CDs on a sliding scale, so you CAN afford it, even if you're broke or living in Tombouktou.

The FREE but LABOR-INTENSIVE way: save the Web text and the images separately. Your browser may be smart enough to track down and save all the pictures referred to in a Web text, but don't bet on it. If not... first save the text file, say, DUMDREAM.HTM, in a folder named "D" for dumb, then try saving the illustrations one by one, and stick them next to the text file. They'll almost always be called DUMDREAM1.JPG, or DUMDREAM3.GIF, imaginative names like that. Yeah, if you copy a second story, STUPIDRM.HTM, you'll have to create a directory called S for it and its pictures. Sorry. You can put all these alphabet-folders in one big folder called WAYAN IS A FOOL. But they still need those letter-folders to sort themselves out.

In rare cases, a story whose name starts with D will have one picture starting with S. Put that picture in a folder called S, not D. Sort EVERYTHING alphabetically. I'm an ex-librarian, what can I say?

Let's pretend I just put an insufferably cute smiley-face here, and get back to something interesting, OK? Namely...

To start off the Dreambank, I seeded it with my own best dreams and dream paintings, but the idea is to grow it into a shared library. Send me your favorite dreams! Email them to wdreamb@yahoo.com!

Here's what I need to turn your dream-journal entry into a page here:

1. VITAL: a unique title. "Eat the Toaster" is a unique title. "A Dream" is not.
2. VITAL: dreamer's name or webname--preferably one NOT already on the authors list! Unless it's your real name, and you're stubborn.
3. IF YOU LIKE: your email address or your website. If you want, I'll disguise it from spambots like this: "wdreamb at yahoo.com", omitting the @ symbol.
4. VITAL: the date you dreamed it, if you know. If not, when you painted/drew/wrote it up. This lets me place your dream on the Timeline.
5. VITAL: the dream! Plain text is fine--doesn't have to be an email attachment, or formatted in any special way. Clear writing matters, though! You may have to add explanations to your raw dream record so strangers will get what these people and places mean to you.
6. IF YOU LIKE: images! Any format, any size. Off-color, tilted, too pale, too dark? No problem! I can correct those, especially if you tell me what effect you want. Blurry photos or streaky scans are harder to fix. Images will get compressed to load fast on the Web, so they may not look quite as smooth as what you send me, but I'll try not to ruin them! (Webgeeks can send HTML texts studded with images, as long as the code is VERY simple--no style sheets, frames, scripts, no callouts to other sites, nothing fancy! If you're not a techie but want a certain layout, just attach any pictures to your email and write [fox image here] or [cliff image here] if you want them at specific places in your dream-text. I'll lay them in.)
7. GOOD: any daytime events that provoked or inspired the dream.
8. GOOD: Explanations of symbols you often dream of. You may take 'em for granted, but we won't know. Tell us.
9. GOOD: Your interpretation of the dream. Duh!
10. GOOD: Anything else you deem relevant. And I do mean ANYTHING.
11. VITAL: themes you see in the dream--even a few words help. I use them two ways: 1) below your dream, I'll add links to similar dreams, and 2) your themes tell me what lists to post your dream on. Get the implication? Listing your dream's themes presents your work to the right readers and viewers! I do try to spot themes and put dreams on appropriate lists, but help me out! (Though the bare mention of a cow doesn't make a dream about cows. Don't cheat the cow-dream fans!)
12. HELPFUL, NOT ESSENTIAL: make a mock entry describing your dream. I may edit yours, but give me text to start with! Here's a sample entry (don't bother formatting it like this--I'll do it)
    

    FRANCHISE!: by Wayan; 170K, 1995/10/12, a comic dream with a serious warning. I was the first woman made High Commissioner of Baseball. One day a team of mutants begs a franchise... CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, BAD TEAMWORK, HORNY BEES

    --Put the TITLE and your NAME or PEN NAME; skip the FILESIZE (I'll do it) but add the date of the dream if you know. Then concisely describe what you sent: "a lucid dream", "portrait of a dream figure", "a dream song", "a nightmare drawn as comics", "six dream haiku"...
    --Now comes the heart of it. You get one line to summarize your dream. Write with care! This is your ad. Rope us in, yet tell the truth! Not easy. Writing haiku and headlines is an art.
    --Last... if your piece contains stuff to upset any readers--nudity, sex, drugs, political or religious shockers, violence, swearing, blood, vomit... then say so: "CAUTION: SWEARING, DRUNK LIONS, BARF". Wit is good--just be honest too.
13. VITAL! Make it clear and concise. Translate abbreviations and Web slang. Readers are diverse, and jargon limits your audience, IMHO. Oops! Either type out "in my humble opinion" or leave it out--some readers won't knows what that means. ^_^. Translate emoticons like that, too; plenty of readers don't know them. Check spelling, grammar, logic, style, mood and structure. If it's awkward or unclear, I get to spend hours fixing it--or not posting it, if it's just hopeless.

HOW TO SEND IT

Email your dream to me at wdreamb@yahoo.com. I hoped to build a form to allow automated entry of dream text & images, but machines just can't intelligently catalog a dream's themes, and I end up emailing most of you anyway with questions, proposed edits, clarifications, illustrations... So for now, just email me directly. Doesn't have to be an attachment--you can just stick it in the body of the email.

Oh--when mailing me, DON'T describe your email using words like enlarge, giant, penis, Viagra, Nigeria, Ghana, bank, lottery... If it's common in spam, Yahoo may block it. I answer all email I get, so if I don't respond, I didn't get it; try re-sending from an email account at school, work, or a friend's; spam filters totally block mail from some servers (because of one spammer among thousands of users. There is no justice!) If I still don't get it, try snailmail and... just... wait....

CONTENT

When picking my own dreams, I skipped two types

1. Boring's self-explanatory.
2. Mean. I avoided dreams of sadism, kidnapping, enslaving, molestation, murder or serial killing, especially from the perpetrator's viewpoint. If the dream has a lesson that's useful to readers, or if you're asking for help/feedback in finding a lesson you suspect is there, then yeah, go for it. But if not, why spread bad vibes? I won't censor you, but dreams are more than slasher flicks. We have Hollywood and the news for that.

STYLE

Raw dream accounts are usually hard for others to read. EXPLAIN things--we don't know you! Read it aloud to friends (you have friends, right? Uh-oh) and see what they miss. Check spelling, check your grammar--is it CLEAR? Is it vivid, funny, moving--is it YOU?

Write like you talk. Academic and business writing emphasizes polysyllabic Orwellian circumlocutions to maximize deniability, wallpapering your posterior. But dreams are out to BARE your ass (soul optional). Most formal prose is dull anyway. True, the Dreambank has pseudo-Victorian narratives, blank verse, dreams like lost pages of Finnegans Wake, and tales told by grammarless dogs. All fine, if you can pull it off! But psychobabble and office-speak are just plain dull.

IRREVOCABILITY

It's hard to delete, move, or retitle fully catalogued items. Once they're integrated in the system, it's a nightmare to trace the links all over the site. I HATE dead links! So don't submit work you'll be ashamed of later. Well, if you do have a shyness fit, ask me to change your name to a pseudonym--that's much easier than erasing everything. Revising or expanding a dream-text or illustration is also easy. Adding a picture later is a bit more work, so send text and even rough images together, if you possibly can. But changing titles (since so many lists are alphabetic by title) and total removal are torture! Don't torture the nice editor!

NUMBERS

Think quality, not quantity. Cataloguing takes time--I simply can't prepare more than a few dreams a day. Spend some time on 'em so (I don't have to).

ADD ILLUSTRATIONS TO EXISTING TEXTS!

Yes, you can illustrate other people's dreams. Why not? Illustrate MY dreams! You're probably a better artist than I am. Send images! Be sure you send your name and the date you drew it so I can add a credit. You still own the copyright of course.

COLLABORATIVE ART
What if I think an illustration needs big changes to work? If so, you still get the credit and we both have free use of the hybrid, while you keep all rights to your original version. Fair enuff?

I did say email dreams to me at wdreamb@yahoo.com, didn't I?

No dreams were injured in building this website.