Fleeing hunters, blocked by a cafe crowd, I fly up a long slope--but the cafe climbs on & on! At last
I perch exhausted on a peak, looking down on a now-alpine cafe above a sea of clouds. Next day...
Chapter 8 of UNICORN TAG, though it can stand alone.
A packet of magic soupmix sends me upstairs to a secret wizards' lab.
They've summoned a demon they can't handle: the furious Black Unicorn...
It had been a weirdly mild winter day, but in my dream black storms loomed as I tried to build shelter...
I dreamed of a bear playing a cello concert.
The next day at a concert I was surprised to see that the cellist...
My therapist changes into a good ol' boy? I can handle that. But that State Board of Kibitzers behind him...
The Hunt of the Unicorn (yeah, guess who I am), as I fly through the worlds fighting Reaganism...
CAUTION: MOCKS THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR
An identity earthquake that just wouldn't stop. I transform half a dozen times, and so does everyone else...
I was hunting edible fungi in Foothill Park near Palo Alto when I saw this...
Abducted as a kid by alien angels and raised in a luminous
cloud, I find it hard to keep a mortal, human perspective...
A girl I like invites me to her apartment. Her personal stormcloud hovers over her. Her housemates come home
and warn me "It's always there, it's her attitude," and I realize I like angsty intelligence, but I need a sunny...
Clouds wake up. Maybe they were always aware, but now they're aware of us. And rage against us all.
Oh, humanity'll survive. But easy times are over...
CAUTION: PARTISAN INTERPRETATION
I'm a protester in Dallas, fighting Reagan's cops. A werewolf kills two of them.
I may be its real prey; is police harassment distracting the wolf from me?
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND DISTURBING PREDICTION
I'm in a hotel by the Great Salt Lake. Deer roam the halls and lap at the drinking fountain...
We desert-hobbits break through to a world of jungle giants who
see differently from us. Will they believe us about the UFOs?
I'm a world-creator, lost in mist, unsure just what sort of people to make--
since I'll be joining them. I'm only sure what not to make--or be...
CAUTION: NUDE, FURRY DEITY
In a parallel world, a visionary's building the first plane only now. I'm his assistant. But I don't WANT...
DREAM: On a farm, I meet two sexy shapeshifting sisters. But mushroom clouds rise on the horizon...
NEXT DAY: at SF-MOMA, Susan Marie Dopp's paintings: shapeshifting sisters, mushroom clouds...
CAUTION: NUDITY; ESP
I go back 3000 years to the Judgment of Paris, then at Babylon's height see King Nebuchadnezzar,
then the doomed lovers Antony & Cleopatra, then Triton and the Nereids celebrating a divine birth...
CAUTION: DENSE CLASSICAL REFERENCES
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"...
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...
I'm trapped in a TV documentary on nuclear war! Better dive through a TV screen and find a safe sitcom...
Elegant, ancient, the tower rose into the clouds. Inside? Smoke & darkness. Workers roast meat...
Dunne dreamt of a fire with smoke so toxic it killed people on
a balcony in open air! Then came the evening newspaper...
In ancient Britain, as Christianity moves in, I'm a slave--sailing through centuries, but never free...
I'm a film actress, but the producer isn't happy with my legs, so make-up takes them away to be redone...
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...
High in the Sierra during a thunderstorm, I dream aliens steal the gold, and the sun's
going nova. But Life wants us to conquer space, so we all grow wings...
Landing in Hawaii, I dream of a magical twilit cove I must swim across. The eve of leaving, there it is...
I get a scholarship to Shaman U. Some of my classmates are Terran, but I still don't fit in, because...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
Hell Chess isn't just black and white. Living women, from weak pawns to transcendent rainbow queens...
Coming Causes Amnesia: reincarnation, 69, and plate tectonics all fuse in lava-hot orgasm...
CAUTION: ORAL SEX IN DREAM TWO
First I met an assassin girl who could raise dust storms; then a monster-hunted named Rho;
then I was the hunter, with a futuristic hovercycle and low-tech bow and arrows...
Drops fall outside. But it's not rain! It's dripping from a
gray-purple block of ice floating fifty feet above me...
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?...
The fog parts. A huge ship's on San Francisco Bay. Impossible--half a mile long! I must be dreaming.
But half a century later...
This place isn't out of my dreams, it just looks like it. It's real real real...
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
I saw a dark object like a cloud at a vast height, but coming swiftly down toward the earth.
It resolved itself into iron bars--tens of thousands, millions? I said: this is the end of everything...
Deep in Jupiter's atmosphere it's dark as a moonlit night, but warm; we sail a
world-sea. And mutiny against our commanders! Clouds clear to a red dawn...
CAUTION: RED POLITICS, GREEN NUDITY
I dream I'm visiting a friend who's moved to a high equatorial peak. I'm shocked to find no trees. Next day,
I stumble on a book about Mt Kilimanjaro. Its treeline is below ours in California! A high-altitude desert...
I find myself in astral China. The Empress is banished, the Jester rules. Wisdom is lost.
We need an Imperial Dragon...
Creatures in the primal sea touch my third eye, dragons cry their eyes out, I fight the Sphinx, and arrive at last in...
After fighting off an electrified Orson Welles, I meet the twelve
vulture-pine-politicians climbing Mt Sinai, looking for librium...
A volcano erupts in San Francisco! No human could survive the blast, but one researcher does--what IS he?
Suddenly, out of the clouds, a man came shooting down, head first, at a terrific pace. He landed on his head with a sickening...
CAUTION: GRISLY
An ancient Mesopotamian city learned to make catapult-bombs of powdered
manure. But excessive stockpiles & bad housekeeping led to Armageddung...
CAUTION: BABEL-MYTH DEBASED
DREAM: Gay boys, underage girls & my own sister all mock me, sure I want their forbidden sexual fruit
at a beach where grotesque trees make their own precipitation and salt-dunes spill into saturated, toxic brine...
NEXT DAY: I read Margaret Atwood's The Salt Garden--sex, guilt, and grotesque trees in saturated, toxic brine.
CAUTION: SEXUAL GUILT, EXHIBITIONIST TWEENS, APPARENT E.S.P.
The smog of Portland is so bad it hides the dream-towers! Only one thing will heal it: making music...
I'm a Romantic poet who defeats the curse of the fountain, to marry; but when our daughter's grown,
a new curse strikes me mute, paralyzed. And I mistake this for old age!
Then, in real life, my dad wakes up from a nap paralyzed...
It takes time to build yourself out of found objects and trash...
DREAM: a 1950s newsreel shows J. Edgar Hoover, founder of the FBI, staged a coup.
So his enemies dropped a tactical nuke on his HQ, killing hundreds in the street...
NEXT DAY: TV news shows clips from The Day After. My nightmare newsreel...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND POSSIBLE ESP
I'm pulling a cart in the woods. At a bridge over a canyon, owls urge me to climb down into the misty abyss, but...
My detective lover warned me, "Stay away!" Now I'm trapped. Dare I follow the lion over the edge?
A misty day in San Francisco's Presidio, where migrant pegasii graze on pine-tips and shadow witches nest...
On a cloud in space I met an ape molding a model of Earth, glancing at the original far below. We were much alike...
Looks like this underground nuclear test will leak. Minutes from detonation,
we flee up the spiral stair and out across the sand. Can we run far enough in time?
My body turns protean: big Popeye muscles pop out as needed, relaxing into stick-figureness...
A large airship crashed onto a hilltop and burst into flame, silhouetting people who tried to escape, but...
Night. A mirror-maze of contradictory preachings. But in the secret mermaid pool, I find love.
Then... sphinx-angels war in the air! A war of riddles. Can I, a batwinged devil, make peace?
CAUTION: SEX, NUDITY, MEAN ANGELS, AND ONE HAPPY DEVIL
Earth has rainbow rings. They're braided like Saturn's, so their shadows create tinted microclimates...
At a party, a sad girl attracts me. But to reach her, I must have an affair with a sexy, frustrated writer...
My childhood home explodes into a vast pyroclastic cloud that comes boiling toward me, miles away...
CAUTION: DOOM
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
A thousand feet above New York. I meet two naked angels who say it's their first flight, but I
got no fear of falling anymore; got no body to fall. Sit on a cloud. Just me and my shadow...
Big Blonde and her officemates don't believe in flight; but the dragonfly-girl I meet hatched in mid-air...
Jung walked against stiff wind and fog, sheltering a tiny light, generating a huge eerie shadow--his other self!
He concluded this was his life-task--to nurture his spark of awareness & rationality in the dark. But...
In hindsight his dream models four key Jungian ideas: Self, Ego, Shadow and Unconscious--at age 18!
CAUTION: REJECTS JUNG'S OWN DREAM INTERPRETATION!
I dream I'm a runner named Silky; but straying outside the crowd can get you stomped by giant aliens...
I find the cure for an alien plague, then visit its homeworld, to find it has a curious variant...
CAUTION: SEX CUSTOMS OF THE NEWT PEOPLE! MY COUSIN'S GAY WEDDING!
Multiple tornadoes touched down in the fields, but the farmer's wife sewed
in a rocking chair, oblivious. I moved to warn her but my lieutenant said...
I'm Doctor Who, being chased by an air-surfer who demands we give up a reserved, proud man named...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
Visiting Time City, I witness the "suicide" of a woman named Thieu but suspect it was really assassination...
CAUTION: SUICIDE? MURDER?
An article claimed smell is rare to absent in dreams. My dreams felt insulted and sent me a stinky one!
But why THAT stink? Well... next morning on my way to work...
14 years before the Titanic sailed, Robertson wrote of a great liner, the Titan,
with 3000 people aboard, that strikes an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic...
Our band's touring Titan. Road trip blues: diners, feuds, romances. Have I been chasing the wrong girl?
I'm in Houston, gawking at giant starfishy towers looming through the smog. Their shapes are familiar...
We escape tornadoes by fading out and rematerializing in a future dream...
But one of the tornadoes manages to follow us from the old dream to new...
I've always been scared of tornadoes, until I went lucid and became one...
CAUTION: HORNY TORNADO
Climbing a mountain on Mars, I reach a hall where I'm transformed into a cryophilic being.
Then I feast on methane soup with the heroic Martian dead...
Silicon Valley goes enthusiastically fascist. I hide in a berry patch. They build a shining world, and then...
I'm carried off by a crane to meet birdfish, singing sheep, fell-spirits, mad shopkeepers and devil-bulls...
I read Barbara Tuchman's history of the American Revolution and had to paint this portrait of George...
CAUTION: TRANSVESTITE PRESIDENTIAL ICONOGRAPHY
"I believe, O lord/ Help thou mine unbelief"--as a kid I thought this meant "God, keep me skeptical"...
I grope through fog to the Vague House. Fog inside, too. Find a stone carved with an Eye of
Horus, and know it's my anger. Find a bigger stone scarab, and know it's my REAL anger...
Us guys take turns getting pounded by this fist of cloud that must never hit
the world. It hammers my skull and retreats; we laugh and switch positions...
We're air pirates running a music shop, till our biplanes are hijacked by cat angels! Furious, we set out...
I was on a path winding over grassy hills, while humans zoomed by on a freeway below...
An invisible monster is eating my lettuce patch.
It casts a huge blurry shadow, leaves footprints, but...
DREAM: Witchmare the sorceress patiently wins over Twilight, a unicorn who thought she was straight.
NEXT NIGHT: at a queer picnic, I find I know my orientation--witches! But I'm less sure what sex I am...
CAUTION: LESBIANS, UNICORNS, FANART, COMPLEXITY
A woman I had wronged set her pit bull on me! Hand in its jaws, I gave in, and we both began crying...
Great towers rise into a fog zone--or is it another world with other rules? And how to draw both levels?
I'm an elephant working in a diner. In the bathroom, I inadvertently summon the Genie of the Urinal...
CAUTION: PISSED PACHYDERM