Never mind an afterlife! What if, before life, we were spirits with no idea what happens after birth?...
A horde of wild women camp in my yard and practice leaping
through invisible spacetime portals. They invite me along...
CAUTION: FEATHERED, PAINTED NUDITY
High-voltage traces of our lust and love flowed through our mattress nightly...
until one night when the power surged and overflowed. Then I felt you...
I was anorexic for years; I only mastered it when I saw it was a hunger for the spirit world...
Guan Xiu, a painter in the late Tang Dynasty, dreamt that sixteen arhats
or luohans (Buddhist sort-of-saints) asked him to paint their portraits--
not their earthly forms but their (rather peculiar) astral forms. He did...
I have amnesia. Plus, I'm dead. But I have this great NASA job! Only there's a saboteur...
CAUTION: SNOTTY ABOUT CHRISTIANS AGAIN
I dream I see the soul of my lover step out of his body, a second self of light...
CAUTION: AIDS DEATH
four death-omen dreamlets, one predictive
Every decade or so, I dream a loved one says farewell and walks
down an avenue of trees. I wake to find that person's dying...
There are many astral planes--this world's just the cellar.
A cat and a bird in love, a literate bear and I guard the astral stair...
A bear rips open my wall and guides me into a psychedelic space where I learn to see with new eyes...
The supreme mystery which we learn after death is that the cosmos with all its galaxies is a blue drop...
CAUTION: HIPPIE DIPPIE
A visit to a world where they fear blue soup ends in death and resurrection, so I'm pissed at my boss--God.
CAUTION: DEATH, REBIRTH, SACRILEGE... JOB BURNOUT
The Hunt of the Unicorn (yeah, guess who I am), as I fly through the worlds fighting Reaganism...
CAUTION: MOCKS THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR
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 join a circus, but soon all the best carnies sail off to the Blessed Isles. The circus animals pitch in
and carry on--clumsy and lonely. Then a divine herald arrives from the Isles: Donald Duck! He says...
I've turned into my sister; and she's turned into me. We try sex. A wolf lopes by and joins us.
The energy from our orgy lifts us into space. Moons planets stars swim by as we float and fuck...
CAUTION: CARTOON ORGY IN SPACE
At death's door, my friend lets Cerberus devour her, so I can enter
Death's pyramid alive and expose the truth about the afterlife...
CAUTION: FATAL DOG ATTACK
Africa. The elephant seemed attracted to a strange wave of white heat. It faded to nothingness. Suddenly we too were enveloped.
I became flame. I was consumed. I was a thought center, alone in a white void. To create a new life I had only to speak the word...
CAUTION: DEATH
America isn't the Melting Pot. It's the Humping Pot...
CAUTION: THE BEAST WITH 300,000,000 BACKS
Lights on the moon! Future cities shine. Gotta fix that time-slip. But in
shaman-space, the moon's a deerskull up a tree! I take it down, pocket its
jewel-city-eyes and try to stew the moon. I'm Coyote, so my cookery goes wrong...
After trespassing in a staff-only part of Faerie, I'm cast out.
Only I'm cast like a seed, meant to grow a new elf circle...
A spiral pillow-path leads to an astral portal. But creatures arriving and
departing jam the same path. Squeeze by, hop over, apologize... flirt!
Is this a dream-image of death & letting go? Then why's it look so fun?
I signed a prenatal agreement for weird, uneven luck to turn my life toward art and spirit.
I want to broaden it, but I've lost the contract! So my spirit wife Silky sets out to find it...
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
Hokusai's wild mad lines inspired me to draw myself his way, floating asleep on the astral sea...
CAUTION: NUDITY
On my quest I find magic portals, snarky flower-fairies, undersea redcoats,
reassembling bodyparts, living chess, and Nosferatu the Cheating Vampyre...
A child from another universe materializes--part way. Too bad we called in that expert from Stanford...
My grandma couldn't drive, but after she died, I dreamt she drove my brother Bill and me
around--speeding, in fact. When I told him the dream, he filled in details--he'd dreamt it too!
Who's the demon? Mom, the Dragon, the Smiler, the Rubber Ax Murderer, the Doll Princess or the Tiger?...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I dreamed my friend Beryl's soul was a giant rabbit, arguing in paradise with our mutual guardian angel...
I climb a small-town water tower. The tank holds a reedy marsh where sentient herons live! They say
the Heartland below them is a nest reserved for greedy, screechy, flightless, half-grown souls like us...
CAUTION: DISSES SMALL-TOWN VALUES
I paddle through the grim streets of Karachi on my belly, on a skateboard,
with my flipper-hands, until at last I reach the border to a Higher Realm...
Driving down a country road, I go lucid. A gorgeous hitchhiker appears. I'm tempted, but I decide to try for something higher than
a sex dream. The car takes off, climbs past religious symbols into a clear sky where I find myself singing a transcendent hymn...
In Ireland, in Yeats's stone tower, he leads me up the spiral stair toward a thyme-scented portal...
A poster playing with superimposed messsages. How strangely the mind sorts out different layers!
I'm an initiate in a Sung Dynasty monastery. But I have no idea how far the hazing can go...
CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
I was teaching a class on democracy in Africa when Idi Amin walked in. The crowd turned violent, but then...
I tour the heart of a red supergiant, where dreaming souls explore
their fears and heart's desires, unconstrained by solid matter...
CAUTION: SWEDENBORGIAN VISION, UNICORN NUDITY
Ko said "Now we have come to where we die." I thought it looked just like the land we'd been traveling,
and couldn't see why we should have to die. Ko grabbed me and pulled me over the cliff...
CAUTION: DYING IN DREAM
I found myself defending humanity before an astral jury, begging them to delay the great die-back...
I die. But then I find a door in my grandmother's pantry leading to a beautiful library...
Windsor McCay's dream-comic Little Nemo is gorgeous but plotless & passive. Or is it? Dreamwork is gradual...
A friend in Heaven promises Helen a lost ring would return to her. Three days later it did; but its path had been strange...
My friend Mark is ready. He evaporates into the spirit realm--as we all do here when we die! Flesh to glass to air...
As a boy in Australia I briefly died on the operating table. I found myself living among the Mimi,
spirits living in rocks. I grew up, grew old, died--and woke up nine years old again...
Okay, you got your heaven, and your earth, and between, you got...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
An alien beach scene--as seen through eyes that see bodies’ energy fields more than surface forms...
The poet e.e. cummings drew a book of astral fairytales with watercolors that felt a bit like my dreams...
While conducting a census of fairies in Golden Gate Park, I fall in love
with an abused oriole-girl, and we try to heal one another...
CAUTION: AWKWARD SEX
Painted to that country song by Leonard Cohen, where Adam, Jesus, Washington, and FDR
all get interviewed in their darkest moments, and they all sing "We're only passin' thru..."
I bike deep into Time Hall, barging through security gates of amnesia, to climb the midden of the past...
I always liked the little creatures in picture-poet Kenneth Patchen's wild collage-pages...
My art teacher said "Draw a spiritual experience." I tried, but that night, I dreamed of sharp-toothed...
CAUTION: TOPLESS MEDITATORS
In a museum full of spacetime-bubbles holding lost souls, the museum-goers are as weird as the exhibits...
In one night Descartes had three dreams convincing him he had to change the course of his life...
Even after the Resurrection, a mother and daughter still have issues to clean up...
A mad scientist sneaks me into a museum that holds the Ring of Power I made at 14. I put it on, and
slip into the spirit world--as a dragon! An ice-drake sent by Sauron comes to duel me for my Ring...
I'm a raft guide on a circular river that may just be reincarnation. A girl in my
tour group jumps ship: she dreads the white water of rocky relationships ahead...
CAUTION: METAPHYSICS, SEX, WEAK SOULS...
A Finnish shaman/witch gives me a lesson in night flying; in the waking world
I meet Ram Dass and sense him speak astrally before his body can get the words out...
CAUTION: HIGH MYSTICAL QUOTIENT; IF ALLERGIC, AVOID
My anima, a pegasus mare, leaps out of a girl's book and teaches us to fly up to an astral land...
CAUTION: FLIRTY PEGASUS
Silla Kristos angered Saint Walatta Petros, so she cursed him. He got sick and died. She knew she'd overdone it,
and asked the Virgin Mary to revive him. Mary grumbled, but did. While dead, Silla Kristos got wise angelic advice...
CAUTION: BRATTY SAINT, BRATTY MONK
An astral travel advisory. You'll fly better, if (before you leave your body) you...
I get assigned a life as a skink. Eat flies, mate, do my lizard pushups, but
behind my daily mind, my soul gets so bored it finally flies out...
I dream I'm suicidal; but I'm saved when I'm shown the flow of human development--the same pattern,
from souls to civilizations! Eddies and knots recur, but the challenges slowly get more spiritual.
NEXT DAY: I learn what my shaman-friend Dee just dreamed. And now I'm unsure whose dream this is...
CAUTION: IDEAS
The Crocodile King & the Geisha Queen, the couple who guard
the bridge over the River Styx, seem to quarrel a lot...
You get to fill one tray. Guns sex jewels pot hamburgers TV God power thrills love? Choose!
Visiting Time City, I witness the "suicide" of a woman named Thieu but suspect it was really assassination...
CAUTION: SUICIDE? MURDER?
I meet some alien wolves, and see the social scene as they do--pack, status issues. But then...
I cross a pasture & slip thru a barbwire fence, as I explain cows, wires & organic life to an energy-being...
Animal teachers, mostly equine, drag me (as I scream NO!) beyond plain dreamwork into shamanism...
Chapter 1: The Deer Party: by Wayan; 6 illus.
Chapter 2: Ariane's Honeymoon: by Wayan; 8K
Chapter 3: The Everest Marathon: by Wayan; 1 illus.
Chapter 4: Who'll Be My Love?: by Wayan; 100K, 4 illus.
Chapter 5: Dreamrider: by Wayan; 7K, a nondream interlude
Chapter 6: Half Shaman, Half Statesman: by Wayan; 170K, 4 illus.
Chapter 7: Eight To A Horn: by Wayan; 2 illus.
Chapter 8: Black Magic: by Wayan, 7 illus.
Chapter 9: Misfits On Mars: by Wayan; 300K, 7 illus.
We're air pirates running a music shop, till our biplanes are hijacked by cat angels! Furious, we set out...
Junk in the attic? Treasures! The cat musicians shift from cartoons to life as I ascend,
til in the ultimate attic--the astral beach--I meet a cattaur made of pure (de)light...
CAUTION: SEX-CRAZED CATS, NEW AGE FINALE
I meet a ghost girl and ask her about death. I figure she knows first-hand. And she tells me...
You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river
with darkness coming over / and salt has lost its savor...
It's true: after death, angels advise you where to go next.
But what if you get an over-eager travel agent?