A large dog was chasing me, but somehow we got turned around and began racing.
As I caught up with the dog, any bit I passed went invisible--but the rest of the dog ran on
unfazed. When I won the dog vanished entirely. Awake, I animated the dog running, then...
The Big Bang happens, you're inspired, you make something of it... then what? The Big Whimper?
Agassiz, faced with a fossil he had to crack open, was unsure where to strike.
But for three nights he dreamed...
Are dreams really so ephemeral? Lewis Carroll, who built the Alice books from dream-shards, wasn't so sure...
I'm one of a trio of swimmers in a pool, making out--under the surface only. Must we hide?
I'm near Shiprock with a flying-saucer girl who sees the nearby crags and far snowy peaks
as all the same size and distance... how to teach perspective?
CAUTION: SKINNYDIPPING, GROPING
The "Amazement Park", as I dubbed it, was a building long as a football field and three floors high; you fly,
suspended, round an oval track, through a galaxy of images teaching that "sharing" is what matters...
Last night, as I slept, I dreamt--illusion blessed!--that I had a beehive, here inside my heart...
This giant life-coach says my friends and I aren't self-sabotaging as we suspected;
we just lack certain tools and opportunities. And we're aiming high...
Ariana's a brilliant young writer, but how she plans to escape her family is alarming...
CAUTION: TEEN PREGNANCY, SKIN MAGS, HORRIBLE CAREER PLANNING
I find myself at a party in London observing two minutes of silence for the dead of World Wars One and Two. But then, in the park,
blowing across the grass like leaves, were people. The windows imploded. Surely, I thought, there should be a flash before the wind?
I realize the artichoke plate in my lap is a pun: ART! I CHOKE! I need to peel
off my thorny outer leaves of professionalism to find the heart inside...
I'm a parade route. A group of child artists walks all over me. But their soles are bare, so I don't mind...
A host of Fred Astaires dance mid-air in an endless spiderweb,
then pound on typewriters randomly forever...
I show a friend my book of dream-art, but it's half-baked and embarrassing.
I'm no good at smuggling guns, porn or cash through customs, either...
CAUTION: LOW-RES SMUT IN THAT BOOK
I don't know beans about right action, so Kokoro, master chef
of the Bean Bar, teaches me the stages of true mastery...
Bear lady, bare lady,
in (or out of) a bear suit...
Parasites, Rambo, huge fetus-beets, an exhibitionist and a living statue advise me on my love life...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I'm at an all-geek banquet! We're all shy; we just can't do
smalltalk. Then the hostess explains why she chose us...
A young Tibetan boy approached me with his arms full of the shapes I had been working on for
the past week. To my delight I found the material, textures and colors I had been searching for...
At first I was afraid of the blackbird, who asked me to come away with him--I wasn't ready to die--
but now I see him as a friend and guide. One day when I'm ready, we'll fly--and I won't be back.
My sister & I try to sing an original, but every note summons old jazz greats, leaving us
no musical elbow room! So I quack like a duck. Nope! Giant ducks appear, and say...
CAUTION: RACIAL ANXIETY? GIANT DUCKS!
A startling deep-blue rabbit with scarlet eyes and red veined ears, floating in colorless air...
I'd been reading Watership Down, the chapter on the Black Rabbit of Inlé...
CAUTION: ART THEORY CRUSHES BUNNY
The crystalline figure on the cover of the book in my dream seemed to hold as many answers as its title...
In drawing class I was supposed to be studying perspective, but I went beyond the box...
Bradbury's Mars was based on his life in Venice, California. What worlds grow out of my San Francisco?
A long terrible shiver, and my whole body broke like glass. I may live months, but in that dream I died...
Biking, I stray into the steamy Brundibar Sea. My bike dissolves!
But hot-tubbers explain the Sea manifests what you visualize. Yay! Uh-oh...
CAUTION: MYSTICISM AND HOLOCAUST HISTORY
Malevolent artwork terrorizes my baby and me! What's to be done?...
As I wrote a poem on Caliban, I dreamt I was him: taken to Shakespeare's England,
shown as a freak, I must escape to save Miranda and Prospero from assassins...
A wild troupe of sexy, surreal, centaurlike dancers mostly built from Barbie dolls...
CAUTION: EXPLICIT NUDITY, FUR, BARBIE
Non-dream centaur ballerinas invade my dreams, because they long to be in the World Dream Bank...
CAUTION: BARBIE CENTAUR NUDITY, CASTING-COUCH OVERTONES
A mass breakout of baby chicks. They say "Now we know how, so we'll
go where we choose." And maybe it's about more than chickens...
In vain I struggle with my father, with his strong arms and wary eyes... I give up... agonizing quests down darkened
streets... long shadows on columns and porticos... a crowd gathers; my father may be in danger... I want to flee...
Our writing class meets in this Victorian home. I turn off my filters and describe what I really see around me...
I realize a bone is protruding between my left armpit and breast. I put Maria's hand on my breast and
ask her to feel the bone. But no one grasps what it really is--something sticking out from my heart...
A surreal statue of a naked body spilling out of the wall as if someone's caught between dimensions...
CAUTION: NUDITY
1991: dream of a weird tower like a cantileved skeletal sculpture of a coyote, in San Francisco. Sketch it then forget it.
1993: experimenting with a paint program, I make a peculiar image. No idea it's from a dream...
2020: transcribing old journals, I find the dream-sketches. My nondream experiment... wasn't.
I'm in Hell. No fire, no guilt. Just endless forests under the moon. My mother paints
endlessly but never gets it right. A sunny day, but I can't go out to play. Cut off...
CAUTION: DEPRESSION
The House of Comics has a shabby annex jammed with self-publishers.
We make a human ladder and climb out a high window, but I don't fit;
as the tenement collapses, I must smash the windowframe to free...
My dream critiques a non-dream artpiece. Does it only count as dream-art
when your dream urges changes, or is creativity partly knowing when to stop?
Cartoonist Robert Crumb just turns off all taboos while drawing. A learnable technique...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, CARTOON SEX
If you can't tell what it is from the thumbnail, cheer up. It's indescribable full-size, too.
The clay came alive, shaped itself, started dancing...and mutating.
I dreamed my sculptor friend Dawn insisted I sculpt a girl really,
um, relaxing. Took me a mere 13 years to act on the dream!
CAUTION: SKETCHED & SCULPTED MASTURBATION
The Cultural Revolution denies me the Himalayas--the spiritual heights.
So I flutter around the base of the Stairway to Heaven...
As a kid, when I had a fever I always had the same nightmare: a high brick or stone wall
shaking apart, faster and faster. This scared me very much. Finally, in my teens, I...
I sold my soul to the Devil. On an impulse, I handed him my fiddle. To my
wonder, he played a sonata of exquisite beauty. When I woke I retained only echoes...
I struggle to write down a bizarre dream clearly and simply, but both pens and paper have mutated. Then a child prodigy explains “dreams don’t always want to be linear”...
"If you put an ear to the door of books and the doors of the night,
if you pay attention, you can hear the conversation of poets..."
Painting an abstract watercolor, I drifted into trance, and found myself climbing a
thorny slope. Deer in the brush. Great peaks around. Had I gone wrong?
I ride my tricycle all round Sydney trying to get bureaucratic approval
to feed bananas to my friend the grizzly bear, gooey though he gets...
Dinner with Dracula goes well, considering, except for the mayonnaise. But suddenly I'm drowning!
No one sees or hears me. Am I a ghost, am I dead or alive? And how would anyone notice?
FERRY: the crossing is rough, but I'm warned I must find my own sea-legs...
BUZZ OFF: I step into a family photo, but I'm not welcome in the past...
After a hard day getting a "free" bed, I dream my milker comes to drain my dreams.
Wait...did I agree to this? Or does milking drain objections, too?
CAUTION: CREEPY
Terse dreamlets quietly catch World War I's effect. Faith died in the trenches...
Artists have their own strange culture, and we can unintentionally mislead therapists unfamiliar with us...
CAUTION: THERAPESE
Sitting in an eviction-lawyer's waiting room, of all places, I discover my next artistic direction...
CAUTION: SEX/GENDER ISSUES
I'm a small planet in an eccentric orbit: a one-day summer, a two-day winter. Rest and hibernate, or...
CAUTION: SLACKER ETHIC
I go to work at the factory, clock in, strip naked, and build my... self! Myself as art.
A long slow job, but when my workmates ask, I'm admit I'm happy with me at last...
I learn weird sex positions from an abused elf, have calligraphic orgasms, and then I, uh, turn on my stereo...
CAUTION: SEX, ESP, ANORGASMIA, PAST LIVES, ABUSE ISSUES
In between drawing devil-bunnies, I advocate letting doomed fringe candidates donate their votes
to more viable colleagues, letting voters express their real choices, not vote for the lesser evil...
CAUTION: POLITICS!
I meet Envy, that pushy, ambitious rock singer from the Scott Pilgrim books.
She's kind of sabotaging herself--but then don't I go too far the other way?
As it was revealed that the pianist in Truro Cathedral was T.S. Eliot's illegitimate daughter, her
wretched playing suddenly became beautiful. I knew the dream meant "cleave to the illegitimate"...
In ancient Britain, as Christianity moves in, I'm a slave--sailing through centuries, but never free...
The whole village welcomed in the Mothers of Rain. An aged deer had visions.
A young mother gave birth. All the creatures and spirits danced...
In life drawing class, the model built a sort of green island/nest in the sea of grubby students...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
A book's example of a mathematical savant made me stop and try to do what he did. I can! Can anyone?
In the field, a huge dog whose markings form the image of
a running horse. So who am I dreaming of? Horse or hound?
Flying unicorns hang out with me and my friends, sending us
dreams full of useful advice--and more concrete gifts...
My dreams urge me to build furry dream creatures with joints,
muscles & bones, then to heal myself by mating with them...
CAUTION: FETISHISM, FURRY NUDITY & SEX
Dreamwork takes discipline, but writing and painting dreams for others takes even more: courage!
For the New Year, I draw a group portrait of the old year's main dream-figures. Four needs came up constantly...
I'm one of four mediocrities: all our efforts come to nought. Mum says "You're netted, but you can fray the ropes...
The first thing any beginner does with a paint program is behead someone. Why?
CAUTION: PAINFUL SPLINTERS
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing
he had put together; I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out...
I'm with an Englishman in a taxi who seems rather calm about the fresh blood welling from his crotch...
I find a famous European Veterinarian, but his waiting room's too crowded, so I just leave a bouquet of dolls...
...and wake to find blood on my own thighs. Why does menstruation always come to me as a surprise?
My horse and I dove into a lagoon and sought buried treasure on the sea-floor. What are we really after?
I'm trying to hump the entire State of California. In public,
too. What brought THIS on? Well, actually, I know...
CAUTION: OBSCENE SITUATION--AND TITLE. OOPS, TOO LATE.
A friend claims literary "personalities"--humorist, craftsman, kook, lowbrow--are really just marketing
niches. So write as you like! If readers like you, industry will make a niche for you, almost arbitrarily...
CAUTION: FOR WRITERS ONLY. OR IS IT?
I dream my sister has an epiphany--we should relax, blur our boundaries, and just be
sloppy old Geysers of Good. Surprisingly, my financier mentor agrees...
CAUTION: DECLARES CAPITALISM OBSOLETE
Peter draws painstaking realism til his tense hand turns into a horn!
An anima urges him to walk into a blue light.
He & Sybelle struggle against a crowd walking the wrong way...
My husband's sweet, supportive, but not that attractive. It's my brother (meaning creativity) who
gives me oral sex to die for, as my parents quarrel and a chorus chants "Ecstasy, ecstasy"...
CAUTION: INCEST
I was held hostage in India by courteous revolutionaries who avoided spelling out that we were soon to die...
A biracial girl doubts her own heritage; a human friend has to confirm the obvious. So what am I blind to?
Night. Broken metal sculptures, a welder too horny to weld safely, and a steel panther longing to be whole and loved...
CAUTION: KINKY SCULPTUROPHILIA
An insight about a fictional character who unblocks her creativity changes my own life strategy...
People have asked me if I ever dream that I am 'in' Harry's world. The answer was 'no' until a few nights ago...
I, sleeping me, watch dream-me find a third me who saw too much
in the kitchen. Unconscious or dead? I just don't know...
After seeing The Tempest with a tattooed Miranda, I dream she has a Cutie Mark on her flank--
a logo showing her life-purpose, her life-path. Except she's outgrowing it...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
Saint-Denys pushes a strange theory of dream-incompetence, using as an example
a woman's dream of grief over her brother, killed in a war. But her case suggests
a second explanation a 19th-century scholar isn't equipped to see ...
A musical prodigy has a gorgeous, unplayable keyboard.
But serious creativity takes a dull, regular, ergonomic instrument...
A beautiful herbivore suddenly eats one of its friends! Bloody. Who or what is this warning me about?...
CAUTION: YUCK, MEAT REALLY IS MURDER
I’m a brown sparrow scratching in the dirt, looking for bugs. Focused, tireless, I hunt and peck...
I watched her dive into the lake... and fail to come up. Her golden cloak
floated on the water. I hesitated just a moment, and...
A surgeon persuaded me to swap my face with another man's. But I found I felt compelled
to carry on his life, not mine--to pass for him. And when I demanded my face back...
a writer's dream comically summing up her own fantasy series.
My characters are all dancing together. Roach is flanked by friends--but they turn into elves.
As dragons, elves, tengu & robot mice join in, Roach slowly freaks...
The trans-arctic Ice Express, blinded by birds, gets off-track and blocked by oddly rectangular ice floes...
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
When I see that grim museum shit I start giggling "Boy art!" The guards glare, so I go home and paint like this.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX TALK, LUST FAIRIES AND FLYING TEENY WEENIES
Dream researcher Stephanie Van Zandt Nelson questions me on the roots of the art of dreaming...
At a dream workshop for kids, James's trickster dream-figures provoked Jessica to dream one chased her;
fleeing, she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, became a mermaid, and married the trickster...
Kekule dreamed solutions to the thorniest structural chemistry problems of his era not once but twice...
The true story of the very first tree-hugger. Not Kerouac! You'll never guess. In fact, you'll say it's impossible...
I'm a courier with a message for the Faerie Queen. Can I avoid all these
colorful, sexy, crazy distractions, and focus on the Studio and the Gong?
A dream-fable of lemons who are really orange-people infected by a spore turns out to be about me...
In the dark, a dragonlike god of fire stretched out
one claw to courteously light my own small torch...
Lions trap me in an African cave with only coffee, paper and pens! Is this what it takes to get me to write?
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
Loewi thought nerve impulses were transmitted chemically, not electrically. But he couldn’t prove it, until one night...
My mom hires a therapist who really goes for my throat! Why is she so desperate to make me lose my...
CAUTION: OVER-THE-TOP CONFRONTATION
Honesty induces a joyful state with lucidlike powers.
So I bike across the Lake of Time, open the book of my future, and see...
CAUTION: SEXY SKETCHES FROM THE FUTURE
Parkinson dreamed his new telephone device got added to an anti-aircraft gun. He told his dream;
guns with M9 units turned out to be so accurate it gave the British hope against the Luftwaffe...
I befriend author Andre Norton--an ageless high-school kid writing enthused fan fiction, forever...
I find my Niche--the stone nook that decides if I'm a journeyman mage! Here comes my prophecy...
I worry I'm overworking, but my dream says life's so crash-prone you should let creative frenzy happen...
I don't want to kill my friend, though his clothes say I must. But
a sculptor lets us sit on her metal trees and drink tea instead...
An un-jealous wind lifts me above the San Francisco hills, so I can hunt for my love: the Muse...
The comics industry degenerates into civil war. We peddle all night to avoid the Marvel...
While painting a tribute to my hero/mentor Caravaggio, I dream we meet. He talks of his art
as we walk a dark space full of living chiaroscuro scenes we can circle, see from all angles...
A monkey who stole a handgun aims at a troopmate and fires, ignorant of the consequences.
The next evening I hear gunfire for real, and...
The foul old fossil woman had carved and burnt her own flesh in the name of art;
we washed her till she was reborn young. It was my turn next to enter the water...
At first no one seems interested in my mural-design for the inside of the City Hall dome, but...
This woman shows me a book of my art. I'm not sure I want to see them--some pieces are from my future...
Advice from a successful writer of worstsellers to all you aspiring failures: unfame has its price...
My friend Nic vows to paint two pictures a day, and, impossibly, does.
Meanwhile, I'm blocked. Can she show me how to get unstuck?
A dream of body parts--maybe, impossibly, alive--hung up like drying laundry. Von Trotta inserted it in a film
script to foreshadow a suicide, but seems deaf to any personal warning--as if it's not her dream at all...
1: I sketch two deer-girls making videos. 2: I pull a man's nose off, and milk the scene for drama before...
3: My old boss is convicted of murder! 4: I wake and two friends interpret #3 as "Overwork is killing you..."
I wake again. My dream-notebook's blank. No friends here; their interpretation was a dream too....
CAUTION: NUDE DEER
My lover's half-mechanical cunt wakes fully--a first. But what inspired my dream wasn't sexual at all...
CAUTION: SEXUAL SYMBOLISM
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...
Softly snows the spam upon my lonely brain, quilting me in flounderdrifts. Shovel it again...
I'm a spy tracking down coinlike bombs. Fighting a double agent, I fall in love!
So I suggest her gang rob golden-parachute bankers...
CAUTION: POOLSIDE SEX
An open microphone in a San Francisco cafe. Others tell stories, sing songs, chant poems. But I
want to tell a shamanic dream! To an audience sure that dreams are dull, incoherent, meaningless...
Towers, before he was killed, argued Terman was wrong: geniuses are often isolated and maladjusted...
CAUTION: UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS
PEACHES: after painting a peach all day, I find I AM one, reclining on a mound of cottage cheese...
CHERRIES: after a day in Reno, I find I'm a wheel in a slot machine, whirling, coming up cherries...
Hypnotized in therapy, I saw AT LEAST five competing goals tugging at me like gravity fields.
Naturally I drew them. Come tour the Inner Solar System of our desires...
CAUTION: NUDITY (BODY, HEART, BRAIN, SOUL)
"I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down..."
I'm photographing lifesize furry statues. How explicit, how sexy? If I get shots they like,
souls will be lured to enter their bodies and bring them alive...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
I forgot how to play my pianobed, so I just thrash around in it. And thus thrash music is born (sorry)...
One tribe builds earth-magic pits that can teleport you or grant wishes.
But the other tribe's more powerful flow-state magic is harder to define...
CAUTION: SEX FANTASY GRANTED
A hunter catches a Rabbit-Eared Doe by her yard-long ears, pulls on them like reins, and mates with her!
She doesn't object; maybe ear-pulling's normal for her. Should I intervene? I can't tell if this is love or rape!
CAUTION: STRANGE FURRY SEX
I'm in an alt-world Berkeley where mythic creatures shop on College Avenue. Marigold
the unicorn flirts with me. Rainbow Dash the pegasus has turned male. Very very male...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY (AND CRUDITY)
I saw a red screen, as if formed by flowing blood. On it, a hand wrote elliptical integrals.
I knew they were from Lakshmi. As soon as I woke, I committed them to writing...
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...
20,000 years from now, a deer-harpist named Razi finds the Holy Wino's not quite the ruin he seems...
CAUTION: BAD PENGUINS, DEER NUDITY, RUDE DRUNK
How do we make dream narratives readable, when so many
readers are brainwashed to think they're nonsense?
My city's invaded and occupied. I become a gigantic Owl and fight with impossible stamina.
But in the end I'm dead, stuffed, on a museum wall. Can I let go NOW?
CAUTION: WAR
A middle-class girl rejects me, and a newsman declares my politics irrelevant. "Liberal media" my ass...
CAUTION: POLITICS
Blake was broke. Couldn’t typeset Songs of Innocence and Experience.
But in a dream, his brother advised him...
I wrote my dreams each morning no matter what--even if I it made me late for work.
They assumed I was sloppy, lazy, spacy. No; disciplined about priorities!
I wake up with my head swollen, full of vivid bewildering experiences, without a clue...
I always kept a guitar and tape recorder by my bed. I wake up and see the tape's run to the very end.
I ran it back to the start and there, in a sort of ghostly version, was...
I'm more a dream artist than a realist, but one day I set up a mirror and looked in it...
by Wayan; 1999/9/1; pencil mirror-drawing.
Einstein's tongue got its own poster, why shouldn't mine?
After all, even the Ein Tongue can't do this...
His sewing-machine design failed--until dream-cannibals caught him & jabbed him with weird needles...
CAUTION: OUCH!
Should I try to keep Janine out of jail? But outside, she'd gotten back on drugs. That night I dreamed
a huge beautiful snake bit my writing hand, and said "Don't go to court. Stay home and write"...
CAUTION: JUNKIE, RESCUER
My dreams are made of lovely carvable jade. Too bad my tools and skills suit our plastic age...
Closing my eyes I saw an old man and a red-haired girl in a shop. My workmate was writing home...
I find a shy sphinx hiding in the corner of a painting in a dull art class. But maybe she's right to hide...
I dream I'm trying to understand how I write poetry, but then I recall my daughter's sick
from a bad prescription. So I try to research her illness, but our library's renovating...
I tried to cartoon a joyful dream but nightmares kept intruding. Finally, aching, I half-slept...
My spirit guide Silky came, and said the obvious, and stretched my sore neck and back...
CAUTION: NUDE ANIMAL DANCE TROUPE
Stolen by the Fairy Queen, I'm forced to nurse her great project: creating life! But her synthetic baby is...
I dream I'm an insomniac trapped in a flat full of snoring writers and reporters. Wait a minute...
After Shaw's Arms and the Man eclipsed my own play The Land of Heart's Desire, I dreamt I was haunted by...
I tried to be like my classmates--use tools, control what I made. But I couldn't. It came alive, and...
I was desperately arranging cut flowers for something important; the forces
that acted upon me seemed to say "Your life depends upon this assemblage"...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 2002/1/19, a dream-painting of a dream about dream-painting!
I'm teaching an art class full of strange masklike beings. We debate art
as spontaneous process, versus art as planned product...
I'm a half-sphinx--human dad, sphinx mom--stuck in human form so far.
Will I ever learn to shift? I practice--sculpt my elegant feline future self...
CAUTION: SPHINX NUDITY
I find the sketch-journal of a beautiful winged sphinx who left her mythic isle
to explore a great city of crazy bipeds, called San Francisco...
CAUTION: SPHINX SEX, SPHINX ATTITUDE
I'm slow to catch on that this skunk's slidetalk isn't a business pitch; it's about seduction...
CAUTION: ABSURD LOVE TRIANGLE, KINKY SKUNK
I meet the Red God of Running and Holly Golightly; we're in the triathlon up the world's greatest peak...
Stevenson’s dreams changed over decades: from childhood nightmares into
creative collaborators dreaming whole stories...
I dream I'm an otter, and wake into a dream about sculpture--and learn my style's due to my species...
I dreamed a short story--even its title. Not that I read it. No, I lived it, through the eyes of a 5-year-old...
During Tiananmen, I was in Beijing for a conference. I heard chaotic noise outside, and the muffled sounds of gunfire.
I dreamed a star painted the sky an eerie purple-green. Children sang, marching over snow, rifles fitted with bayonets...
I'm a married couple--the cook and laundress for an English observatory in 1948.
Why are we testifying to a Labor Party committee that we WANT to be servants? Well...
I slept late and felt a bit stiff, but until my friends pulled it out of my neck I had no idea...
No, not a guy with a tan. Yves Tanguy was a sailor who became a Surrealist.
When I was nine or ten, his work inspired me to try my first landscape drawings...
Chased by purple squid from Jupiter, I seek refuge with a guru the Goddess recommends for me...
The card of excessive self-denial, whether compulsive or artistic or spiritual...
The card of building your dream no matter what. I dreamed I met the Primal Builder...
The card of big messes, confused beginnings--and fertilization...
Using the mind's blade humbly, minding ideas and people, clarity's disciple may not see her full power...
The knight of creative fire who takes over when you've mastered technique and can let go...
The Conference on Love has two sexy speakers. One says
"my teacher's stalking me" but she clings to him. Love? Hate? Both?
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM--but what are these two exhibiting?
Nightmares can warn. But when awake, what warning can you get from nonstop ill-luck?
An artist I know dismisses her (gorgeous) art as just therapy... while the museums are full of trash. Why?
Kaleidoscopic constellations? No thanks! A nudist town in Italy? Ugh.
Ah, but singing vaudeville in a monk's robe & roller skates...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
A workmate said "They feed they lion"; two dreams later, the poem emerged as you see it...
CAUTION: POLITICAL RAGE, SURREALISM
As a kid, my nightmares were of Sesame Street characters. In my teens I graduated to
slasher nightmares and recurring lucid dreams. Alcohol trashed my dreams for years, but
now they're not nightmares--just surreal. Hitler wrecks my sex life! What a spoilsport...
CAUTION: (MOSTLY FRUSTRATED) SEX
My father's trapped in a crashed car. But I'm distracted by a young man whose palm cups a living flame...
A 'toon liberation dream. I cartooned a new self and slowly she grew realer, until she ran Disney...
CAUTION: FRANK SINATRA SWEARS
I'm shown pictures of three different magical ways to fly. But the third
shows no actual flight--just someone giving away the magical means...
1987/8/15, 1990/3/31 & 6/10, 1993/8/10, four dreams prompting Planetocopia
I dreamed I took a globe off its stand, drilled new poles, and put it back on tilted, so that
most continents are greener; Tokyo, Alaska and Tierra del Fuego are now all tropical...
Over a decade later, dreams forgotten, I start what I think is a nondream art project, by tilting...
A couple slips in and out of sleep, dreams, one another's bodies and dreamworlds, trying to connect...
CAUTION: FREUDIAN SYMBOLISM, LITERATE WRITING
Only up close do I see that the map of these mysterious continents is made of moths. I wake
in Polynesia. By the bed, in a jar, floats one of my hands. For no reason, I begin to cry...
I'm an exchange student at the Solar System's best university for
the magic arts; my classmates are methane-breathing foxtaurs...
Changelings invade our orbital station, selling drugs, kidnapping teachers--but Constable
Odo can handle that. What's weird are the beans pouring out of that kid's tuba...
The innkeeper insisted I try a strange-looking liqueur, a house specialty called "Tuccotine"...
You get 26 dice with letters on every face. Roll them all. Your haiku must use every letter. Go!
In Castle Frankenstein, will Mary Shelley wed Elmer Fudd? His two-headed monster has marital advice...
THAT DAY: art nonstop! Put myself down for obsessing. Empty man!
THAT NIGHT: I'm in rural China. Two women tell me their village declared them
dead, killed by demons. So are they ghosts, or just written off by idiots?
MORNING: wait--have I been calling me dead? Oh...
I meet a giant squirrel. But a Committee condemns the squirrel for such long periods
of unproductive hibernation. The squirrel points out a teensy flaw...
I wander a valley where unicorns love cyborgs but fear giant ants, who love unicorns but
fear cyborgs, who love ants but fear unicorns! And while the Three Tribes squabble, cave-monsters
sculpt them all. I set up peace talks between these four aspects of my tetrahedral soul...
CAUTION: SWEARING, DRUNK LIONS, CYBORG SURGERY, AND GOGGLE-BARFING
I was on a spiral stair. The walls had scrawled messages, not sprayed,
carved or painted but living tissue--and getting fresher as I descended. Whatever was growing them was still below me, and still writing...
Make silhouettes of your beloved vegetables; then listen to the spaces between...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUASH
My art mentors turn on me! My mom the painter says I'm genetically inferior,
and then my art teacher Verity sits on my head (ow!) and chants...
Blondie Wiggle builds a Video Igloo. But I'm allergic--TV kills me! A BAD omen for our video project...
CAUTION: TV KILLS (BUT YOU KNEW THAT)
These sketches bare my work process: I multitask, but without planning, in a
flow state. I really do just follow my bliss. Works better for me than logic.
My sister just bought a biocomputer: an enslaved human brain in a box of weeping skin...
I dream ESP isn't just for oneself.
A romance between a wolf singer & a deer guitarist.
I'm furry too, and better accept it!
In cave times, while the men were all out hunting, it was
the women who learned to paint the cave walls to summon...
A teacher drafts me into her magic class to shake up her sheltered wizard-wannabes.
My magic's wild, ignoring spells and rules. I don't think I realized how wild...
CAUTION: NUDITY
An art experiment--the only rule is DRAW without preconceptions--
no models, no ideas, no plans, not even dreams. Drawing from the void!
A writer I meet is either flirting with me obscenely, or
advising me about eyecare, or... are those the same?
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM
Great towers rise into a fog zone--or is it another world with other rules? And how to draw both levels?
This picture of a split man was in no sense a product of my conscious will. I simply
bowed to compulsion after four years of being haunted by that face in my dreams...
Mark Twain dreams we're cells inside God, and writes of Huck Finn among the microbes.
A century later, unaware of Twain's dreams, Robert Moss...
We go swimming in a sea full of wrecked tankers. We explore one derelict, but ebb tide pries it off the bank,
out to sea. Do we swim for shore, or wait, hoping high tide will wash it in again? Guess wrong and we die...
A writer's found in his office mating with an ash-covered creature! But could she be his muse?
CAUTION: NUDITY OR NOT? SEX OR NOT? NO ONE QUITE KNOWS...
Most writers search for their unique style. Not me--I struggle to convey unique EXPERIENCES...
"I liked the melody a lot, but because I'd dreamed it, I couldn't believe I'd written it..."
You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river
with darkness coming over / and salt has lost its savor...
You say you want to remember your dreams, but do you write down what you DO recall? And ACT on it?