My hometown floods. I swim after some strange fish and find
a scientific community where a scaled baby tells me who I am...
An indestructible camera relentlessly shows me what passengers feel on every crashing plane...
CAUTION: PAINFUL READING
I dreamed I circumnavigated the entire Buddhist wheel of existence in a single night...
Three years before her husband died and she was left alone, Sarashina dreamt
Amida Buddha stood in her garden and told her "Later I shall return to fetch you"...
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...
My family and I are prisoners in a camp that will be H-bombed so our remains
can be studied. I write a Buddhist poem preparing for death...
CAUTION: GOVERNMENT ATROCITY
Anxious about a big party, I dream of being crowded. But
a cat-centaur in the crowd attains sudden enlightenment...
Silky, my sentient starship, gives me a scolding about playing it safe...
While writing about Tibetan dreamwork, I dream I'm on drugs and see myself in a mirror, first old &
scarred, then young & sexcrazed. I think "This'd scare me if I hadn't been reading up on Yoga stuff!"...
I was trapped inside a boulder, but as I chanted it melted around me until it resembled a discarded skin...
I'm analog myself, but in Tibet, I meet a digital shaman whose body's a sort of ...
The Hunt of the Unicorn (yeah, guess who I am), as I fly through the worlds fighting Reaganism...
CAUTION: MOCKS THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR
Gosh, I'm speechless. How Zen! Market me at once!
CAUTION: MOCKS RELIGION. OR ADVERTISING. ONE OF THOSE.
I'm gigantic, stretching from Ceylon to Tibet. Grass grows from my navel to heaven.
Worms crawl on me. Birds flock to me and change color. I climb a mountain of dung...
CAUTION: PIOUS MISINTERPRETATIONS
I dream I'm a lemur-girl in an emotional maze.
I wake to find I'm really a satyr cartoonist.
Funny, we have a lot in common! I wake to find...
CAUTION: PHALLIC SATYRE
I visit a Tibetan monastery with great cellphone reception from the gods.
But all their calls are messages to pass on to others--none for us...
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 dream up a shining mall. At a booth selling herbs I meet my mentors, Crone and Sage.
They tease me for building a venue so banal. But I tease right back: "This place shapes you..."
CAUTION: CRITIQUES BUDDHIST PURITY
Buddhism is a 12-step program; it has its pitfalls for those of us who already detach all too easily...
One of Aline Kominsky's comix has her in a bar and a guy asks "Que pasa, muñeca?" and...
CAUTION: CONVERSATIONAL FETUSES
In a museum I talk to a stained-glass artist who's a dreamworker like me.
But a meme seems to be spreading that says dreams mean absolutely nothing...
CAUTION: ADVANCED DREAMWORK
Distilling a dream to one key image can clarify it. But don't be ruled totally by traditional haiku form...
Daily dream-poems in haiku style, nonstop for a month. A flood of animals, revenant ghosts, sex changes...
The sparrow died in the ashes, but the dove in my hands became a blue cloud.
I drank it, thinking "This will benefit us all"...
After 20 years without a child, Maya dreams devas carry her to a holy lake, wash her...
and then an elephant carrying a lotus flower enters her right side. She knows it means...
CAUTION: DREAM OMITS TINY DETAIL--IMMINENT DEATH
My fever-dreams manifest physically and mess up my whole neighborhood. Seismic inspectors arrive...
I've climbed a cliff and cower on the brink; but for for the first time I need not
fall or retrace my dangerous path down. I know I'm dreaming, and wake...
Tibet, 1910. I find a cult whose ancestors manned a radar station that shot down
flying saucers. But were the aliens really hostile? I'm not so sure...
Three furry people show off their collected art & pets. But then they dissolve into their art & pets!
The room itself dissolves into a river-raft. A unicorn girl in a gauze ritual robe studies a map...
CAUTION: MILD FURRY NUDITY
Starlets Zaza and Eva Gabor grow old shopping, smiling, covering their fears, until...
Gopa dreams the earth shakes, stars and meteors fall. She's naked, her marriage bed is broken, her husband
Siddhartha's treasures lie scattered. He says "How auspicious!"--and prepares to abandon her and their son...
CAUTION: SEXISM
In a Hopi underworld, I find even lucid dreaming can't cure guilt and grief over losses yet to come...
Two days before 9/11, I dream I'm a child at ground zero, mourning the devastation--and witnessing rebirth.
A Buddhist scroll shows me Hell Cafe, where diners become entrees. But I read the scroll
backwards! You can escape Hell just by walking out, against the traffic flow...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL SOULS
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...
James Hillman and my own experience suggest we enter life with an agenda. But what if our goals are sick?
I'm a hobbit seeking Henry Fonda's haunted gold mine. And find it. Or is that chocolate?
But then I'm caught in a shamanic showdown in a bar where they serve real spirits...
In Japan, sick in bed, reading a book on radiation sickness, I dream of a restorative ritual for trees...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
I’m a brown sparrow scratching in the dirt, looking for bugs. Focused, tireless, I hunt and peck...
I also dreamed the world was a mathematical abstract, like, by subtracting 740 from 1000
you got 260 which meant 'Egg' more or less, so if you wanted an egg you had the egg...
The villagers warned me not to walk in the alien graveyard; for at night, the Id flowers wake...
To reach the Peak of Happiness on the Isle of Dreams, I must pass four Perils--but they're all backwards...
CAUTION: RELIGIOUS NUTS, KNIVES, NUDE ALIENS, BACKWARD PLOT...
Saigon, 1973. Lost in a fabric maze. I find, wearing Buddhist robes, the skeleton of a dog.
Years later I write of Buddhist monks burning themselves, and build an ominous maze...
CAUTION: SUICIDES BY FIRE
I'm in a mall that enlightened customers alter with a thought. But too many Buddhas spoil the architecture...
I'm slipping dimes into a boulder of jade: a vending machine that fills every order wrong. Why feed it? Well...
Swayed by sinister surgeons, I go all Buddhist and give up my attachments, including various organs...
CAUTION: DIVESTABLE GENITALIA
Richard Russo writes that Westerners cannot dream like tribal people.
So I dream Russo's the Cubist Dictator of Dreams! I prefer the part-equine
Lady Demicorn, and the Fat Meditating Dog, and the Birdiesattva...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
I find myself in astral China. The Empress is banished, the Jester rules. Wisdom is lost.
We need an Imperial Dragon...
I'm a traveling Zen warrior talking to a circus girl in a barn. Four guys enter--and my life changes forever.
Phyllis Schlafly, killer of the Equal Rights Amendment, provokes a dream where I'm Captain Kirk trapped in a magic school, with no way out but the graduate exam. Can I learn the lesson of the tree?
CAUTION: POLITICS
Humanity in the future desperately needs the magic words from the past to free them. But... "pickle?"
The Christian God vs Mahakala, Buddhist god of right anger! War in Middle Earth, as Pink Floyd sings...
Meditation's hard for me; I expect to turn on instantly, like a lamp plugged into Enlightenment...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 14 dreams (mostly Jan-Mar 2011) painted on one canvas
A dream urged me to paint a big landscape with cutout movable (magnetic) dream figures
and liftable flaps revealing hidden dream scenes...
We stood meekly in line to be beheaded. I tried to accept my fate and commended myself to God... CAUTION: READ THE TITLE!
An animal-girl I know lives like a sine-wave, first forward in time, then backwards, dying at every zero...
I fall in love with my sculpture of a mythical Southeast Asian creature. Then a mad yogi breaks in...
CAUTION: SEX, TANTRA, AND GENERAL WEIRDNESS
A child of radicals goes wild in Rio. When we bail her out, we find she's had a strange enlightenment...
CAUTION: UNSAFE SEX
I meet two Peacock Kings bigger than human beings, who chant blessings until I wake with tears drenching my pillow...
The Pope spears our Inuit captain and the Mystic, who turns solitary--a prisoner of Zen. Can I free him?
Suddhodana dreams of great upheavals; no courtier can interpret the dream.
An ascetic claims the upheaval will be for the good, then... turns into an owl?!
CAUTION: PERHAPS NOT ENTIRELY ACCURATE
First I try to break the sound barrier like my girlfriend. Nope!
Then I fly slowly to her apartment. Nothing flashy, but I make it.
Last, I zoom back to ancient China, where I find a candle-lit shrine dedicated to... me?
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...
Jeffers, that harsh, visionary, ecological poet, seems drunk on Darwinism, blind to how kindness matters...
CAUTION: SHAMANIC SHOPTALK, BRAIN REQUIRED
A Buddhist student, troubled by a corporation marketing a product called
"Satori", summons the ghost of her beloved mentor for advice...
The past. Burma. I'm shown a stupa covered in gold leaf, and given a key
to a tunnel where they say a tooth of Buddha is encased in glass...
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
A strange transforming thing appeared in the sky--a light, a sheep, a man. It told me to stop burning my head...
I dreamed I'd made a set of woodblock prints showing a scene from varied times & angles:
my anima Silky, part girl part mare, contemplates another set of prints--famous Zen ones...
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
I'm being hunted in Reincarnation Swamp, as I worry--the human population boom
means experienced souls are scarce. Are most folks you meet really dogs, cats... rats?
CAUTION: MYSTIC ELITISM
As I reread decades of dreams, I see Jung was right: even in crisis-times, soul-work goes calmly on...
A rant on over-disciplined Americans (NOT under; we just think we are) taking up spiritual disciplines...
The old man sang in the empty church, then looked at me and snapped his fingers. I was filled with voices...
Half our religion-founders were just one guy, repeating till he got it right. Practice makes perfect!
To avoid being stabbed, I flee the Psychodrama Circus. Wisely--the place explodes!
But it's the filling of the sushi roll that really upsets me...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL MAKI
A dragon killed a friend, and threatened worse. I had to fight.
We dueled mid-air, over Lake Tahoe...
My sister and I are playing cards in the air high over Lake Tahoe.
The stakes? The world. But we both cheat...
A 'toon liberation dream. I cartooned a new self and slowly she grew realer, until she ran Disney...
CAUTION: FRANK SINATRA SWEARS
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
A woman in Tibet disassembles herself! A local god hires her spirit,
but she uses the office equipment to backup her memories and...
CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
I walk in a vast graveyard full of history's most famous
people and treasures. But it's all fake, built to test your...
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.
The world needs Zen cards, to balance out the Tarot.
So here's my Zen pack--all one of them. One too many.
A cowgirl is driving us in circles round the dusty parking lot, fleeing the air-sharks... or is she?
An invisible monster is eating my lettuce patch.
It casts a huge blurry shadow, leaves footprints, but...
A dream telling how to acquire mystic power: raw food, no sex, meat, or booze; just meditate in rural solitude...
CAUTION: EXTREMISM
The same night I learn of the Kerouac Tree, a wise old man shows me the world's fair. Not the event...
Our dilemma is, now that we have the power to get what we want... what exactly was it we wanted?
A hermit spends his life wrestling with shadows. His only disciple becomes famous. Who was happier?
A doll sent from China breaks into tears over her exile here in Japan. I reassure her and she becomes real...
My Zen master keeps asking me koans. But every riddle is about insurance
forms. I always reply "I am thirsty." He asks another. It goes on forever...