I go to a lucid-dreaming party, meet the Child who Dreams the World, and find the Body under the Bed...
A bizarre little dream proving just how physical the impact of a dream is on the body...
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...
Our gifted class is on a field trip. Our teacher happily explains we're going to wreck a freeway,
tying up traffic for months, to protest crappy gifted programs...
CAUTION: SLOWEST DREAM INTERPRETATION EVER
Sarashina dreams (again) she needs to leave court life and a spiritual path. Her skeptical mom sends a
priest to the temple to dream for her! But he too dreams the Goddess shows two life-choices--happy or sad...
The real Ambassador of Dreams was moonlighting, so I had to step in
and explain dreams to the waking world...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; two dreams (2016/11/19, 2017/1/18) on dreamwork, memory & amnesia
1: Ruins in India. Fascinating but age-blurred; wish I could see the carvings better...
2: Giving presents at a party, I hand a girl a vertebra from the abyss, encrusted with jewel-like barnacles...
I dream of a three-floor tower--but the Answer is up on Level Four!
No elevator, no stair. I can't even see it. Yet it's there...
After reading Jung's dreams, I have an anti-Jungian dream of sexy nightmare-statues
waiting to come alive, like the tree I draw & bring to life with my literally magic marker...
CAUTION: NUDE STATUES
I'm in a gypsy wagon that always creeps north; to break the spell, I need an arctic unicorn.
Four days later, at work at the library, a new book appears: Nancy Luenn's Arctic Unicorn...
There's a rare dream-type that can change reality itself. I study its EEG trace. Can I learn to do it?...
I'm arguing with musicians--what's better, music that serves your goals, or purely great music...
I'm bored in class. Draw sexy furries. The babydykes by me do too! Art'll summon the girls we want...
CAUTION: PHILOSOPHY! OH NO!
I have amnesia. Plus, I'm dead. But I have this great NASA job! Only there's a saboteur...
CAUTION: SNOTTY ABOUT CHRISTIANS AGAIN
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!"...
An experiment to see if pie can substitute for REM seems to work at first, but after the third slice
the subject grows less enthused. By slice six, he dreams he's forcing that pie down the experimenter...
In a corrupt world, a talisman called the Rai Dragon offers hope of real change--
IF it can be found, AND used by someone decent-hearted...
DREAM: a great bird carries me to Mecca, Yemen, India, the south sea islands, China, the snowy north...
AWAKE: My host says it means I'll travel the world--but he adds "in India, my brother will save your life"...
In the cathedral, before the nation, I solemnly crown someone with my own detached head...
On the bridge between waking and dreaming, a jet plane duels a T. Rex. But
the jet strays into dream space, becoming a pterosaur--and soon, Rex lunch...
As I tour an English estate, wrinkled green elephantine creatures 20' tall peer at me through huge spectacles.
I'm told "they're only kept now for their singing." I want to hear, but my guide's bored; I let her drag me off...
CAUTION: CONFORMITY STIFLES SHAMANISM
As I hike across the tundra to win a bet with God, I realize I've been subtly betraying my dreams...
Should Anna quit hiding her psychic dreams? She dreams a cat eats her bird & burglars loot an open house.
Maybe keep hiding?
I dream of a black & white TV show of a woman in a dance leotard. I whack the antenna and she pops into color.
Awake, I turn on the TV. Black & white image of TWO women in leotards. Whack the antenna. ONE pops into...
Inspired by Lynda Barry, I fill a black-paged book with 20 improv paintings.
They grow into a tour of my dreamwork led my anima Silky, a nightmare...
I DREAM I'm helping my mom make a bed, but the light keeps going out. Each time, her hair changes color!
NEXT DAY I tell my dream to a co-worker. He says it means a romantic dilemma I fear to look at. He's right...
I found a honeymoon cottage by the sea, and the old landlady gave me a very reasonable rate. Everything was fine...
The crystalline figure on the cover of the book in my dream seemed to hold as many answers as its title...
Hurry to the station to catch the train--or is it a sky tram? a ship? a hill? an island?
Climb its flank, but fissures open--it breaks up. I'm adrift. Next day, on TV...
A sexy encounter with two robotic girls hopping a night train outside Portland...
CAUTION: THREESOME
I found myself in childhood again, in a village where my dad was building a bridge. A man in a guard's
uniform introduced himself as C--. Awake I could recall no such person, but research revealed...
Swedenborg fights a worldly acquaintance, then his dog, who turns into a serpent...
CAUTION: FIGHTING, SCORNS MATERIALISM
I was led into the future, where all the buffalo disappeared, to meet a frail old man by a ranch house...
I dream I'm at a center for bull fighting, teaching the structure of the brain, but
they believe the brain is a structureless gelatin and the soul is all...
A few years ago I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, though I knew they were carcinogenic.
I dreamed I had terminal cancer; my denial of the evidence had killed me. I woke, and quit...
1521: I ask a talking ape how long I'll live. "Four years" he says. "No longer?" "No."
26 years later, I'm still hoping to get truth from dream-figures--two dead guys tell me...
CAUTION: JUNGIANS BEHAVING BADLY
All her life, Cartwright dreamed of a figure disguised in a harlequin costume; she never saw his face.
He always drove her to self-sabotage. But near her death, she dreamt she gave a lecture, and he...
A lab. The cat doesn't mind a swim in this liquid harmlessly rendering it clear as glass. It catches
a transparent mouse I didn't even see! So now I faintly see a glass mouse inside the glass cat...
Our Star Trek team explores alien ruins covered in cat scratches. Or are they writing? I uncover
Roman letters, Arabic numerals, I Ching trigrams, Chinese characters, Chumash pictographs.
Reading them turns us into cats! One cat lays eggs, but two more try to smash them...
CAUTION: CAT-EGG VANDALISM
A guy threatens me with a knife. I sit on him and wait patiently.
Slowly he turns into a huge black cat! I set him free in a garden...
I kept dreaming demon cats tortured me. At last a vicious dog joined them. He wanted to kill me, but
the chief cat wanted to keep playing with her prey. I realized they were my mum and dad, and said...
As a mob of Hollywood stars beats me up, I ask for autographs--and get them.
I sell the autographs to fund a statue of the beating--but with me smiling...
At a polyspecies circus, I sketch three acrobat-dancers--one deerish, one human, one... a mannequin?
Fiendish to draw! I wake frustrated & sketchless. But my sketchwork in the dream helps me redraw it awake...
CAUTION: DEER NUDITY
I meet Cleo from Monster High. I like her. Why, that's pedophilia! (Huh? She's AGES old.)
Once I hide my Cleophilia, ALL sexual feelings vanish! "I'm sickly & sexless." Oh. The Mummy's Curse!
CAUTION: SEX-DENIAL; NUDE CENTAUR
Clowns have a point system like chess masters, & abuse their apprentices to get ahead,
just like capitalism--but I think this dream's about the suppression of magic...
CAUTION: CHILD-CLOWN ABUSE
I meet King Louis-Philippe, but as I recall his symbol, the cockerel, he transforms to suit.
Now he cannot read the letter presented to him, so it becomes a basket of bird-seed...
I'm trying to jam together my dream diary and my first comics. My grandmother's
skeptical. But at last, with an audible 'click', dreams and comics suddenly merge...
I sought a dream of Helpers. But rather than give me gifts, they gave me a daunting challenge...
A graduation parade has a papier-maché cowboy (hollow ego?), a giant
rampaging stallion (unconscious), and a mama cat who calms him (anima)...
He dreamed of a street with a cathedral, and round the corner, two cream horses pulling a fancy carriage.
In Spain on vacation, he saw the street and the church. To test the dream, he turned the corner to see if... CAUTION: CALLS E.S.P. & SYNCHRONICITY TWO PROBLEMS NOT ONE?
I visit a witch-smeller, who judges apprentice shamans.
But when a boy dreams he's a crocodile, she freaks out...
My grandma came in from gathering eggs and showed me one was triple-sized and very long...
A charming street, a peculiar shop... imaginary, or not? Saint-Denys found it
at last, years later, in Frankfurt where he hadn't been since childhood...
To prove I really am lucid-dreaming, I let a streetcar run me over. Mm, crunchy! Then I find out...
CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT OM...
I saw one man stalk another. Unprovoked, he cut his throat. I felt I knew him but couldn't see his face...
That night, my brother-in-law was brutally murdered in just this fashion, outside a wedding party...
CAUTION: GRIM. 19TH-CENTURY GRIM.
Night. Rider and mount gallop in a ring, leaving a luminous spiral wake of glowing
flowers. Power builds, but when the spiral gate opens, where will it lead?
Hundreds of dusty drawers, clearly not not touched in years. I open one
to find cymbals. Some part of me knows it's a dream and sees the pun...
I meet my personal demon, and discover it has a personal demon: me! Am I worse than my Shadow?
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, NUDE MONSTERS
Deer-mares join our theatre class. Adorable! Then pig people. Not adorable. I wake & sketch them.
Hear voices--sexy singing deer on TV! Wow, my dream was predictive! And then I wake AGAIN...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
A strange book has woodblock prints telling how a princess turns to a deer-centaur
and meets animal-headed forest guardians. But the message is rather practical...
CAUTION: (FURRY) NUDITY
Swedenborg's in bed with a woman, but finds she has teeth in her vagina. He interprets it not as revealing some
fear of women but as advice about pacing his scientific work. And the surrounding dreams hint he may be right...
CAUTION: ALMOST-SEX
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 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”...
I ride a recumbent bike up an exhausting slope past browsing bears.
Oh. Not bears. Dinosaurs. No wonder I'm so tired! Timetravel's hard...
Trump wackos bomb the World Trade Center. I flee New York. Morticia Addams puts us up. Inside the
dream, I fall asleep. When I wake I ask "was the attack a dream?" Morticia says it was smaller. I try to
write it all down on my bedsheet, but the ink spreads. I wake again, sure I need to wash the sheet...
SITUATION: I was attracted to my prospective therapist. I asked my dreams what to do...
DREAM: His wife vanishes. We get in bed. I feel such love I ignore how tiny his penis is...
AFTER: In the morning, I decide I'd be wise to work with a different therapist...
CAUTION: SEX
My doctor says (no exam, no tests) "hidden desires inflame you." I'm skeptical--suspect an infection.
Awake, I test both hints--repression and infection. Antibiotics work! I'm still weird--but not sick.
Struggling to recall a magical dream, I suddenly get a single, simple image. ...
"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..."
Tony works as a courier in Sarajevo till he inadvertently delivers a bomb. Held by
a warlord for months, he dreams within the dream, and draws those dreams...
CAUTION: GRIM
A girl writes a whole movie to get a shy boy to hold her; I stupidly summon a monster dragonfly-bus;
a devil-suited jerk hogs a musical's stage TWICE; leeches crawl from the treasure-box I opened...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, SEXUAL FEAR/GUILT
I find my lover sharing our secret joke with another. But I already knew
I'd lost her! Why'd my dream salt the wound?
Rousseau's painting of a woman on a red sofa in a glorious
jungle really was dream-based--just not his dream...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SLACKING
While we're making crop-circles in the field of psychotherapy, my hypnotist and I start to argue...
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
Why do I treat dream-figures as real people, even in otherwise lucid dreams?
And if dreams universally suspended disbelief, how did I know, in one
recent dream, that the woman I argued with was another part of me?
I dreamt I was given verbena sprigs--from my mother, I'm told. But am I me, Persephone, or all the daughters given love by all the mothers?
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
The police confiscate my therapist's copies of my dreams, and try me for obscenity! So why do I help?...
Are dreamworlds grim, on average? Do our dreams just express fears, or try to SOLVE our problems?
I write, draw, admire & carefully interpret my dreams, but do I ACT on their advice? Not so much...
Distilling a dream to one key image can clarify it. But don't be ruled totally by traditional haiku form...
Fighting vampire archers is risky enough WITH proper armor! And all I have is dream-journals...
CAUTION: MENTIONS BATTERING
I'm the composer Schumann, till a nightmare jumps me and I wake. And wake. And wake...
CAUTION: MALE NUDITY
In the cave, I chanted "Come Kama, Come Love..." and a procession of strange creatures came down the stone steps;
squirrels, peacocks, a blue birdlike being with golden headdress, and then the Goddess of Love. Her form shocked me...
An experimental helmet knocks me out. I'm groggy, miserable, till I learn what it did to others...
"I've always dreamed other lives. Other bodies. Other times. Other worlds. I draw my lives..."
I'm worried an alien charity is brainwashing an ex-prostitute. When I wake, she's still there--at 2/5 scale!...
I was on one of those package dream-tours--an hour here, a scene there. But then in Patagonia...
CAUTION: CREEPING PAGANISM
Dumuzid dreams raptors prey on his flock, his hearth fire's doused, his churns knocked over; he lies dead.
His sister Jestinana interprets it: "Manhunters will kill you; you must flee." He does, across the known world...
Sitting in an eviction-lawyer's waiting room, of all places, I discover my next artistic direction...
CAUTION: SEX/GENDER ISSUES
My only chance of life and freedom is to leap. He raises the gun and fires.
I'm flooded with a soundless explosion of light...
I will a clay cat to come to life, then start healing real cats and dogs and...
In a museum, I absent-mindedly eat crumbly bricks I think are pastry; they really are rare soil-samples...
Three days later, I see a TV show I thought was on children. Wrong; it's on soil samples--that turn into eatables...
I'm in an elevator with a giant guy with a hotel cart bearing a silver platter.
On it, an erect penis. The guy tries to enlist me in his program to... what?
CAUTION: CARTOON PENIS
Pa warns me to protect my paws. Then gilt wounds my sole. Then
a lioness eats a tasty drumstick. Then a bus crashes on our corner--for real!
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?
The hero Gilgamesh troubles his city till he dreams the gods will send him a best friend & lover, Enkidu...
CAUTION: SEX
Jung's patient dreamed of a strange name, Ericipaeus. She didn't know Jung had been studying a minor god
named, he thought, "Ericapaeus". He'd misread the manuscript; the name was actually spelled a third way...
I turned off my conscious judgment and just drew. Two paths appeared--one led to
psychodrama, then parental prison; the other, into the underworld of dreamwork...
CAUTION: NUDE DREAM-SELVES
I meet a girl who's 16 and 61, who tells me dreams are lives, not messages.
But then I must fly over a sinister parade...
Dunne dreamt of a fire with smoke so toxic it killed people on
a balcony in open air! Then came the evening newspaper...
Patagia dreams she fakes a Hindu rite, causing Electra to dream she fakes leadership in a refugee band. But are they faking?
I dream my son the writer's living above our old family store, the one that failed in the Depression...
He turns on the radio, and a moment later a loud horn section rings out.
I wake shocked--for that horn fanfare isn't just in my dream ears...
I dreamed I was one of several soldiers about to be executed. I told my girlfriend the dream.
She asked "What were you wearing?" and I burst out laughing as I saw the pun: "Fatigues!"
A great director alternates hits and bombs, because in half his films he sets out to trouble his viewers. Here's one...
I dreamed at least weekly I had to view a slide showing something wrong with my fetus.
I assumed the dreams expressed doubts about motherhood--until my miscarriage...
The tunnel has pictures of a winged unicorn filly on a quest. But the editor
of the deluxe book version is intellectual, patriarchal and heavy-handed...
CAUTION: UNDERAGE ALICORN FLIRTING
I never flew in my dreams. I felt cheated. So one day I set out to CREATE dream-flight...
1: I visit Elrond and Bilbo in Elvenhome, but overthinking traps me in a timeloop;
2: Elrond says he renounces seriousness for joy, and plans a great, inclusive party;
3: I feel unworthy, but set out on a desert quest with Elrond's young apprentice;
4: I meet joyful, drunken, singing elves but hide in a tree, too shy to join in;
5: I meet a nervous elven singer and a dolphin trapped in a tiny pool in my bedroom...
In prison, the midnight bell chimed. I dreamt I saw a cavalry column of men and horses skinned, gory, still marching.
Wagons of the dead passed for hours. As the guard changed, the gate crashed, waking me--just minutes after midnight!
CAUTION: PROVES NOT ALL DREAMS ARE REALTIME
A jaguar tracked me. I ran, but never escaped; it pounced on me and I woke crying. I tried climbing trees, but
it climbed after me. The only escape was to jump from the highest branch, flapping desperately. And I flew...
After trying "the Interpretation of Dreams," I meet Floyd Freud, who's attracted to the neo-Nazis...
CAUTION: INSULTS THE MEMORY OF A GREAT GUY
A farmer dreamt his new cow grew wings and flew away. Next day, he sold that cow at a heavy loss. Walking
home with the cash, he found a tame falcon, and tied its leg to his moneybag. One guess what the bird did...
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
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...
Dreamwork takes discipline, but writing and painting dreams for others takes even more: courage!
Climbing out of Childhood Abyss, I literally get a leg up from a girl seeking the Ledge of Teens.
A shy girl has to hide she's a were-creature. Gay men make out in the witch-registry to rattle its
homophobic guardians. My sister stripteases while scolding me for a mess I didn't make...
CAUTION: DUH, SEX TABOOS! KIDS, FURS, GAYS, SIBLINGS
Freud and I argue dream-theory while we're stuck in an elevator that projects dream-examples on the walls...
After a year of intense dreamwork, Berryman rejects Freud and accepts open-ended dreaming, and writes Dream Songs...
CAUTION: SIXTIES STONER REBELLING AGAINST SPELLING... and grammar... and punctuation...
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.
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
For two years, I sat at the desk in our co-op gallery, and
secretly sketched our bewildered, art-assaulted customers...
In older studies at least, women dream of both sexes but men dream largely of men. Just like TV, huh?
CAUTION: YOU'LL NEVER WATCH TV AGAIN
Parking structures with spiral ramps are, secretly, screws harvesting motion from parking cars, slowly drilling
into near-impenetrable rock. Thus are skyscraper-foundations made...
A hulking, intimidating young man is at my door, with two scary dogs. Wait, is that Carl Jung?...
Comics character Doctor Blasphemy, on stilts, bares his secret identity:
poet Allen Ginsberg! But who chopped off his missing fingers?
CAUTION: BLOODY FINGERS
In a California with no Gold Rush, wild deer carry a girl over the San Fernando hills to a secret dream-pool...
Then in a Japantown hotel lobby, that girl floats meditating in a huge aquarium, as local gossips lie about her...
A snotty shopkeeper won't let a kid have a balloon, so she teleports one through the display
window! Blind to the magic, he just scolds her and takes it away. So her mind reaches
through the window to liberate every balloon in his store! And then, 26 years later...
I knew I was dreaming but the world looked quite realistic. I struck a wineglass with all my strength--a risky act,
if I were awake. It didn't shatter. But when I looked again, it lay broken! Like an actor who'd missed its cue...
Dream-skeptic Cicero dreamed a youth descended from heaven on a golden chain.
The next day he first met Octavius, and exclaimed "but there is the actual boy I dreamed of!"
The boy became Augustus Caesar, presiding over Rome's golden age...
I get a crush on two mare-girls--sunny palomino Goldie is cute,
but it's dark-silver, lunar Grimoire that really stuns me...
CAUTION: EQUINE NUDITY, ESP REFERENCES
After an article suggests we roam the multiverse in sleep, I dream of three strange names. Awake, I google them...
I wake in a suburb with Dire Wolves next door. I'm told an herb will appease them.
But the local herbal expert's a regal talking lily--and can I speak plant-language?
A winged god whose body's a wave urged me to do... what? I couldn't understand him! I woke...
A scribe with a shining stylus listed stars; an architect gave me plans and a brick-mold. I woke
again! My dream had clarified itself. So I built the temple shown me, aligned with those stars...
They led me to the guillotine. As the blade struck my neck,
I woke to find my headboard had broken loose and fallen on my...
I was painting to a sad scary song by Laurie Anderson that goes "This is the hand... the hand that takes..."
Nabokov's uncle left him a fortune but the Revolution took it. He dreamed his uncle said "I shall return to you as
Harry & Kuvyrkin." 40 years later filmmakers Harris & Kubrick paid Nabokov a fortune for the rights to Lolita...
A con artist fools me and a waiter. But if my dreamfolk are all me, who's fooling whom?
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...
Swedenborg meets an executioner who cooks the heads he chops off,
and eats them. Yet in context, the nightmare may be constructive...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
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 ...
How's it feel to be an anima off the job? Is it lonely, when no one even believes you're a real person?
Greenwood dreams he finds a severed hand on a mantelpiece. The next day
it happens! But he sees no moral, so he dismisses it...
A single dad loves his daughter, but is so pathologically cheap he's teaching her an unintended lesson...
CAUTION: CHILD NEGLECT
I'm stuck on a jet full of cartoons. We get hijacked by a kid who just wants
pilot practice, and then a talking cactus counter-hijacks us...
CAUTION: THE F-WORD
Hilda, founder of two monasteries, dies in one. Begu, in the other, 13 miles away,
dreams Hilda's been taken to heaven. She tells her sisters. Messengers arrive...
She dreamed she'd written a wise and beautiful poem. Half asleep she scribbled it down. Awake, she found...
CAUTION: HOGGEREL
I fight to save a nest of 50,000 eggs that'll hatch... psychics!
But my friends want to exterminate them! Who's wrong here?
I'm in the Rocky Mountains. Gold-hungry Mexican bandits capture me and put my feet to the fire,
demanding "How do you transmute copper into gold?" I scream "I don't know!", waking to find...
CAUTION: TORTURE PLAYED FOR LAUGHS
I dream I'm taking a hot shower, then realize our water heater died; this is a dream. "It means I want hot water!" I
blurt (in the dream) & wake. Next day, a plumber's error gets me drenched in hot water with no new heater...
I meet a circle of students with up to five eyes. The lone three-eyed girl
is embarrassed, indeed ashamed she's merely attained enlightenment...
I marry, just to get into a clannish world where I'm seeking symbiotic unicorns. I end up fleeing...
Next evening, a TV movie--Goldie Hawn marries into a clannish world and ends up...
My party's a slow disaster. Talk, booze, pot, sex--nothing works out.
What will Mom think? At last, trapped in an office, I get the Message...
At an amusement park, big 3D letters appeared in the air, saying
"I WANT YOUR DREAMS". Terrified, I dived underground...
I meet the mermaid goddess of love in her pool, but when she advises me, I dispute one small point...
Captain Ahab's part-whale students are better ice wranglers than I'll ever be--
wrestling icebergs of possibility round to their best outcomes, in this pea-soup sea...
I'm in a construction zone behind the world's largest bookshop, telling a friend that late 2020
& January 2021 will be a mess. I hide that I know it because a unicorn in a dream said so...
Swedenborg tenderly says goodbye to a lover. A few nights later he realizes his dream lovers
repeatedly represent scholarly fields! An avid scientist, he find research as sexy as, well, sex...
An archeological dig inscribed in the Roman alphabet, Chinese characters, Ethiopian
syllabics and unknown scripts. A carved egg bears news from the future, not the past...
CAUTION: CALLS PROPHECY A LEARNABLE SKILL
Dream researcher Stephanie Van Zandt Nelson questions me on the roots of the art of dreaming...
Xerxes twice dreams a god orders him to attack Greece. So he asks his uncle to dream of the god to confirm...
On TV, the first Jungian anima to leave the unconscious is granting an interview. But the questions are...
Dream math often seems bad, but I think the discrepancies are a signal, not noise...
Can dreams have taste and smell, I wonder? That night my dreams set out to show me...
Lucid, I summon a sexy literary character. But he tries to take over my personality and make it his lucid dream...
CAUTION: VAMPIRE-SLAYING
I saw a snake with a white-bearded man's head, and two younger heads alongside. Men attacked the
snake, cutting off the younger heads. The eldest looked at me, mournful, and they cut off his head too.
Soon after, I met John Brown; I knew it was him. But only on the day of Harper's Ferry did I understand...
Joseph as a teen dreams sheaves of his brothers' grain bow to his; then the sun, moon & stars bow to him.
Eleven years later, in prison, Joseph interprets two cellmates' dreams as premonitory, and gets both right.
Two years later, he interprets two bizarre dreams troubling the Pharaoh, thus saving Egypt from famine...
CAUTION: BRONZE AGE FUN! NEAR-FRATRICIDE, SLAVERY, EXECUTION, FORCED MARRIAGE...
My home seemed antiquated but pleasant. I found a stair down to a darker, medieval floor.
A dark stair led down to a Roman cellar. A trapdoor led down to a cave with ancient skulls...
Jung's visions of dragons evolve from fiery destroyers
to thieves who can be forced to give up treasure
to peacful, luminous guardians of the sacred...
Jung was told in dreams and visions that Europe would soon drown in blood. But he just couldn't believe it...
Kekule dreamed solutions to the thorniest structural chemistry problems of his era not once but twice...
I half-wake as a kettle abruptly starts whistling. Odd, it's quite unlike ours. Wake. Silence. A dream!
Dawn. That abrupt whistle again! But this time, real. Somehow, a housemate got our kettle to sound...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
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...
Swedenborg struggles to grasp the King's broken French. He wakes to realize he's trying to learn
a greater King's difficult language. Still relevant today, for he saw the problem's twofold: the
difficult language of images, but also issues the waking mind missed--or wants to deny!
I met two strange sisters on a train who turn out to be half-cat. They open my eyes
so I realize that my neighbor Elaine must be a shapeshifter too...
CAUTION: FLIRTATIOUS UNDERAGE CAT
Huge gold construction cranes loom over medieval castles. Not rebuilding, but
hoisting knights to the heights. I get a ride up, and see a wide timescape...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree (at least till that visitor from Porlock barged in)
CAUTION: POET ON PAIN MEDS
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
R.D. Laing gives two examples of dream-spillage suggesting it’s not passive but playful...
In a general store on a High Plains rez, I find two surreal collaged postcards. If only
this were a dream they'd qualify for the World Dream Bank, but sadly, it isn't. Right?
CAUTION: STUPID, STUPID CONSCIOUS!
I ask my dreams about sex, and get... sex on a beach with a sea-serpent girl--a lamia. But she gets queasy--
landsick! Too hot for her up here. Help her back in the sea. What a contrast with Ruskin's lamia nightmare...
CAUTION: SCALY SEX
We ride on a flying saucer made of stone. Atop the great cliffs, we meet a giant and
warn him not to slip. He doesn't appreciate advice from little alien tourist twerps...
I dream I'm a woman possessed by spirits with yellow eyes that tint the whole world lemon...
I wake, the sun rises, and for a single minute, the world turns that exact, strange yellow...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
A dream-fable of lemons who are really orange-people infected by a spore turns out to be about me...
The dreamer becomes a horse, the horse becomes a unicorn.
Dreams have their own quests apart from the conscious...
Three unicorns gallop out of the waves...
A man I meet leads half a dozen consistent dreamlives--an experience
so splintered that it's hard to figure out which life is his waking one...
Windsor McCay's dream-comic Little Nemo is gorgeous but plotless & passive. Or is it? Dreamwork is gradual...
In dark, grimy, rainy Liverpool, a friend shows me a park with an islet
in a pond, where a great magnolia tree shines--an oasis of light...
Loewi thought nerve impulses were transmitted chemically, not electrically. But he couldn’t prove it, until one night...
De Bray dreamed a speeding car nearly hit him; a month later, he abruptly recognized the street from his dream and paused...
DREAM 1: A man wearing long white underwear shoots me down with a machine gun.
DAY: Long John Nebel interviews me; his Freudian friend calls me a penis-envying woman.
DREAM 2: Long John and his buddy umpire a rough baseball game. Definitely not cricket...
CAUTION: SEXISM, FREUDIANS, PUNS
I smell smoke. I know I'm dreaming; did my sleeping body scent smoke in my home, and insert it in my dream to warn me?
But the dream sees my worry, and erases the scent to clarify it's symbolic smoke! Now I can finish my nightmare in peace...
A nightmare. I go lucid as the bullets tear through me. Yet I go on with the dream! Why?...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARISH VIOLENCE
I fell asleep reading a book I'd read years before. I finished it in my dreams. Every word in place. How?
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
DREAM 1: On green grass, a red & blue boat with a net draped atop. Predictive.
DREAM 2: Climbing a ladder with square rungs in a space w/o walls. Predictive.
DREAM 3: A small boy with a toy boat. A sail's laid out flat for washing. Predictive...
Our dream-group's dreams had a lot of imagery in common: circles, groups, meditation. I fused them into this piece...
DAY: I read an exposé on "Senoi dreamwork"--the Malaysian Senoi people disavow it. Some white guy just made it up!
DREAM: I'm a dream researcher in Malaysia. A manta-squid attacks! Now the "Senoi" focus on my needs makes sense...
CAUTION: TENTACLE-RAPE ATTEMPT
Four apparently psychic dreamlets of a gun in a desk, a guy needing to hide,
a canyon with woodpiles & a locked gate, and a blonde girl named Cathy...
CAUTION: SMALL DREAMS, LARGE IMPLICATIONS FOR E.S.P.
Wayan makes love to Martha's double, then sees her soul watching from the shadows...
Barbara can't reach Wayan to say farewell...
Martha falls off a mountain and decides to let herself die, just to see what happens...
CAUTION: SEX, ABUSE ISSUES
Martian robots pester me. I flee through the Asteroids, leaving chaos, cratering Earth.
Years later on my farm, a bot shows up disguised as Freud. I start mudslinging...
I got a big thrift-store toy tiger to shade my head as I slept (which worked;
better dreams in the tiger's shadow!) then sewed on a crest, mane, fishtail, fins...
CAUTION: PLUSHIE/SEXTOY
Deep in a secret diamond mine, I see stars. A door opening to the night sky!
But this shortcut's heavily guarded...
I'm in the cellar, petting a tiger-cat. She speaks inside my head: "I'm tired of living on bread. I need meat."
I make excuses--it's pricy--then see big hanging quarters of meat. I hide them! She says "Call me Mistress
Touttmouss"--well, something like that--I know it's English, but can't make it out til I wake, when I see...
Should I subscribe to Sundance Community Dream Journal? I dream I find a letter--yellowish paper, cryptic blue
lettering, a red margin. I eat it! Best thing I ever tasted. I wake and order that journal. It arrives--and the cover is...
I miss all sorts of cues I'm dreaming, but I ignore my conviction I'm awake and try to fly anyway...
The Mayan cave was a door between worlds. But also a model of the character you need to walk through that door...
The flood sickens my fuchsia bush. My mom says my fuchsia is hopeless,
but I make up a treatment. When it works, well... read the title.
CAUTION: PUNS, EXPLODING MOM
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...
Two moons rise. From one unpeels a sort of rind; on it I see the future
tracks of these moons' shadows and tidal sway on Earth, predicting ...
I dream I'm ranting about the structure of the mind, postulating four layers--odd, since
I think dreams are meaningless--just neurons getting some exercise! So whence this theory?
CAUTION: JARGON
I fly, send dreamails, discuss dreams with dream folk, punch a wall to test dream-pain, reach into mirrors...
A horror film and Rick Veitch's dream-comix provoke a nightmare
warning me that guilt about my dad is wrecking my life...
At college, my sheet music arrives from home, but vanishes when I try to play--or the piano does...
MY DREAM: I was walking a hilly road, my uncle ahead, my stepdad behind; trying to keep them in sight. My mom appeared and I woke.
MY MOTHER'S: the same. She told me hers before I told her mine. She thought it meant my uncle would die first, then me, then...
CAUTION: APPARENT TELEPATHY, BUT MISINTERPRETED MEANING
Why does my passport have color photos of me ice skating? I haven't in years. Your
passport must show your true face. Should I change it, or do they know me better than...
CAUTION: SHAMANIC SYNCHRONICITY
Strangers ask me about my nine selves, and I find I know exactly what they mean!
The last three are new and odd--calm quiet states that heighten paranormal senses...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL
Okay, you got your heaven, and your earth, and between, you got...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
I wished I could kiss my son farewell. That week, Ethel called. "I dreamed Ned kissed you, not me!
I was hurt. He laughed like anything and kissed me too..."
I met Nic as he steppd out of the elevator. We were both spooked. Nic asked if I believed in
mermaids and unicorns. I said “yes.” I asked Nic if he believed in dreamers, and after a pause...
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...
I meet a Nightmare in heat who wants me. A human girl by me says I'll catch an equine sex-disease...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
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
I’m in San Francisco trying to throw Sauron’s Ring into the Cracks of San Andreas.
But a sexy sorcerer steals my sense of I! How can you act without a self?
No Man is Island. So Men say. I am not a Man...
Inspired by Shaun Tan, I fill a black-paged photo album with 36 improv paintings.
They become a tour of my dreamworld, led by my anima Silky, a literal nightmare...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, WEIRD DREAM IDEAS
I wander New York City, a homeless ageless child, unnoticed--unless I climb stairs. Then people panic--see a huge cat!
But today I meet a crew lugging big paintings, who seem blind to cat or child. I think they're art thieves, mid-heist...
CAUTION: SHAMANIC INTERPRETATION
Touring an underground maze, I meet a woman I like. But her brother bristles.
Then, from a height, I see the ventilation pits of the labyrinth laid out like a map.
The Japanese invade! Hide in the jungle. Women in rags butcher centipedes & mice...
CAUTION: UNHAPPY MEALS; OVER-JUNGIANISM
The older sorceress I'm in bed with plans to marry me off to a younger woman, but I distract her with my tongue...
CAUTION: BEDROOM HUMOR
The cover of a collection of 11.5 dream-tales in glorious detailed Web-unfriendly black and white....
At the beach, wading with my fellow dreamworker Stephanie.
The waves are getting bigger--are they a hazard, or can we ride them?
A suspicious exobiologist warns me that otter from Titan may not be the amiable, nerdy celebrity it seems. But...
I DREAM I'm in the mansion of my favorite film producer, Otto Preminger. Then I learn it's my home!
I WAKE realizing I'm the producer of my dreams--not some impersonal, instinctive Unconscious...
I rise out of my body, find I'm invulnerable, visit the moon, with its volcanic rocks, re-enter
my body, "wake" and write the dream--only to wake again and find all my notes gone!...
Dreams of translucent fairies, centaurs, robots & gnomes prompt me to cartoon
on transparent overlays to show how dreamworlds overlay ours...
CORY: I'm in a government complex. Tired, but guards harass me. At last they let me nap on a floor pad.
WAYAN: I'm in the Student Union. Need to study, but guards harass me. Yet they let my friend sleep on a...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
A vagabond king showed me the way into Faerie, and it made my fortune. But now it’s time to pass the gift on...
DREAM: Surgeons cut off both my breasts--without my consent! I feel resigned, but the staff is upset...
DAY: I'm interviewing for a job offering $2,000 less than I make now. Told myself it's OK, but...
CAUTION: MALPRACTICE, MUTILATION
I was on an island about to explode like Krakatoa. I warned the French colonial authorities "4,000
people will die if we don't get them out!" but no one listened. I woke. The paper came. "Mont
Pelée erupts, kills 40,000". I had missed a zero! But 40,000 turned out to be wrong too, implying...
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 trained myself to associate one scent with the mountains, one with an art studio. On a random
night my servant applied both secretly, and I dreamt artist & model burst into a mountain scene...
"I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down..."
I don't understand this poem's symbolism or even its style. It came to me whole, in a dream...
I went into her room one morning before she awoke and saw her eyes moving. Suddenly she said,
"Pick me! Pick me!" I woke her and she immediately said, "Oh, Daddy, I was a flower." ...
I suspect the pinball champion of Jupiter is cheating. I try to scare her psychic confederate out of hiding...
I'm shown corn plants growing from skulls, and it seems like I must plant some skull-corn myself...
I'm building a planetary model a kilometer across, inset in Bernal Hill like an eye in a socket.
My intern Silky kicks the globe, scuffing a caravan trail in a desert. Needs to be crookeder...
CAUTION: FATSHAMING? OR CALLING OUT SKINNYSHAMING?
I'm in a play. Fear, then joyful sex, then ranching, then silly hats, as a man drones on about
class struggle. Weird chairs, pingpong, coffee, impossible double utterances. At last
I tell friends my dream--backwards. Then I write the dream down on slices of cheese...
CAUTION: SEX ONSTAGE
Swedenborg's in bed with a woman, but she has teeth down there. Oh, now and she's not a woman, but
his political buddy Johan! Well, maybe it means not to get involved with women, or men, or... politics?
CAUTION: JUST WEIRD
What if comics panels and layouts weren't so square? I try triangles,
pentagons, hexagons, circles, spirals--and some serious stuff pops out...
CAUTION: IDEAS, OCCASIONAL NUDITY, MENTIONS ABUSE
EMRICH: I'm in a conference center in "Pondecherry", even though it feels nothing like India...
THOMAS: A woman picks fruit off a tree by a pond and calls them "pondicherries--with an 'i'"...
CAUTION: WILL ANNOY E.S.P. DENIERS
At a museum, a weird art project shows me how observing and documenting life
in art can improve that life--just from being taken seriously...
After studying assertion in dreams, I find I'm a shaman in an African village, troubled by a young rival...
M. Teste, 1830-1848, and Maurice Macario, early 1850s? four dreams predicting illness
Dog bites doctor's leg. Snake bites scholar's chest. Apoplexy kills a
government minister. Tonsillitis flattens a sleep and dream researcher...
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
In one night Descartes had three dreams convincing him he had to change the course of his life...
A precognitive dream about levitating snake girls, raccoons, and lunar eclipses.
CAUTION: MY SNAKE BREASTS
Radar O'Reilly's teddy bear is stolen. He builds spy-planes to find it. One morning the camp wakes to find...
by Jenny Badger Sultan, 1999/5/15, 6/12 & 7/14, a painting based on 3 dreams
I'm in the Hypogeum, an ancient Maltese dream-temple. I join some women
staging a ritual; a little girl draped in a web plays the role of an insect...
twin dreams predicting their children and nation will prosper.
Ragnhild sees a lovely tree rooted in her pain and blood;
Halfdan sleeps with pigs and dreams he has a great head of hair...
CAUTION: KIDNAPPING, ARSON, GENERAL BARBARISM (check the date!)
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...
A raven summons a levitating mirror that shows her face as a human, and
tries out moods & expressions based on Tarot cards plucked from a tree...
How do we make dream narratives readable, when so many
readers are brainwashed to think they're nonsense?
I was trapped in a Handmaid's Tale dystopia; I was a mannequin, naked &
helpless. I couldn't even walk. But I hid one rebellious act: I kept a diary...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, CARTOON DYSTOPIA
The wildcat Rare Bit Fiends slinks out of the hills to stalk and maul
dreamers--until one day she rears up to teach a dream workshop...
As a boy I dreamt my uncle (a calm man) glared at me in red rage; I was terrified. A decade later, in a bar...
I dreamt I saw, over a balcony rail, bright-colored, spectacular scenery. Years after in Arizona, I took a detour...
Lounging in the sun, I do a magical make-over--molding my bones to give myself more room for
intuition, judgment, nerve--all the while feeling shallow & indulgent for self-improving!...
A horde of demented dwarves invades Market Street, jumping up & down, shaking the skyscrapers...
DAY: Sidarta Ribeiro theorizes dreams are brilliant at extrapolation, which we mistake for a sixth sense.
DREAM: I tell Ribeiro "Your theory explains the occasional prediction. But after your first thousand..."
The Rem Road I climb every night, from flesh to spirit, earth to sky. Though tonight, all these
wounded skateboarders worry me! And my own bruises say I overdid it in contact improv today...
Our teams search through fountains and pavilions, finding & trading the glowing stones.
None of the magic makes me go lucid, but as we sail toward the finish line...
I'm a robot in high school. I have my first dream, but I'm deaf to its message cuz it's not spectacular...
At 16, Rochan dreamt she rose from her body and explored outside, seeing a white car and brown bag. She
woke--and checked! White car, brown bag. Now, adult, she trusts her dream intuitions about larger things...
I'm sitting in a car teetering in the front row of a theater balcony. By me, R. is licking a cherry-
flavored sucker. As the film crew yells "Roll it!" my foot slips on the brake and I do...
DREAM: a distinctive house with a tempting green field by it. But the field's forbidden...
DAY: Ronald's analyst had rented that house--but the adjacent field was forbidden...
CAUTION: E.S.P. THEORIES
Think of your dreams as a rainforest, clearcut every morning--unless you make the effort to remember...
CAUTION: TINY NAKED ANGELS
I'm a small child in Finland writing out the meaning of three ancient runes
about trees, ships and elbow room. They seem to hold serious advice...
I sit on a half-flooded pier and read a dream-journal--the first ever written by a dog. But
I can't interview the dreamer; the dog followed a fad diet and just died of excess salt...
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...
Stranded on an island where a marching band drowned, I escape
by paddling across the Pacific using a rusty, er, cymbal...
The feud between our magical families is getting ugly. Hawk-Head's dad throws boiling water on me, so I...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
As she told me her dream of receiving jewelry--a golden scarab--
I heard a tapping on the window behind me. I opened it. In flew...
I take my friend Neil Gaiman to a park where we sculpt a giant horned head. Months later
we collaborate on a graphic novel. The course of the project's full of echoes from the dream...
We need to get down to the sea, but Disney Corporation blocks the way. Wait--we're
dreamworkers! We ooze through the walls, and cheer the parade marching in on the tide...
I'm in an art class drawing a dream image--a dog-taur or wolf-taur girl.
But I hesitate to draw her flashing me as she did in the dream. Should
I risk offending half my class, or make her modest and innocuous?
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
I'm in Santa Cruz with my friend, a shocking-pink stuffed toy cow
with sewed-on accessories: big red lips, a floral wig, and a third eye. I wake,
draw the dreamcow--and my sister calls from Santa Cruz to sing me a song about...
A doctor tells Ellis to try "selvdrolla", but he's so focused on the strange name he forgets the prescription...
DREAM: a thirtyish blonde says her death is ordered. Her head's cut off. But it won't die--bites his hand!
Dr. Prince feels the dream shouts "premonition!" and writes an account at the Society for Psychical Research.
Next night, a thirtyish blonde nearby commits suicide, leaving a note saying her severed head will live on...
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM, CREEPIER NEWS
Five short playful dreams exploring sex. Because too many therapists
get in the habit of thinking all dreams must wrestle with unhappiness...
A great teacher abruptly blanks out. Memory loss is scary, but the empty moment bared a deeper fear:
Swedenborg shakes uncontrollably all night, releasing or discharging some strange energy.
He frames it in religious terms, but it's a phenomenon even secular writers have reported...
CAUTION: WEIRD
I was in a gang, but I quit. They stoned me--and the green heron, the green color I called "Sharonne".
The setting (Israel), the green (Islam), and the name (Ariel Sharon?) all hint the dream's political...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, POLITICS
My friend Mr D. studied psychic research but was skeptical of telekinesis. But 24 hours after his own death...
I meet a 140-year-old hermit in her black chadoor,
skateboarding down a hill near her sacred dream-spring...
A man frames his big brother, til their sister makes him shoot his own reflection. Neither one expects...
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...
(by a California model, pre-1961, and by a Texas maid, 1945; two predictive dreams compared)
Predictive dreams rarely hint how far they've peered ahead; they just place you in their foreseen future...
As a child I read Jules Verne's Clipper of the Clouds--a metal craft with many propellers on spars, not wings.
Soon I dreamt I designed & flew quite a different craft, like a small boat of canvas on a wood frame.
20 years later, I was test-flying a new aeroplane with a boatlike cockpit of white canvas on a wood...
Wayan: A sleazy brother calls the cops, blaming us for a fire he set...
Cecy: A sleazy brother calls in a fire while not even trying to put it out...
As I recalled what I'd dreamed the night before, a snake, I looked down and saw my foot was poised to come down on...
My sexual orientation shifts arbitrarily, turned on one second, off the next. Who's at the controls?
CAUTION: SEXUAL CONFUSION
Guards in a museum confiscate my goofy purple-warted shoes, then lose them!
I fuss till they find them. For it's vital to retrieve my, uh, soles.
I dreamt a sparrowhawk perched on my shoulder. Next day a friend was given a stuffed sparrowhawk. He...
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!
Laying my timeline in a Fibonacci spiral, it's clear great changes come in a pattern--
as soon as I've digested the last couple, a new revelation/revolution appears...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, HEAVY ISSUES
I spy on a girl learning magic in a quilted ditch. She lets me join her telekinesis lesson! Can my mind move a balloon?
Then I tour a witch-world where normality's shameful. One kid's not witch or normal--he keeps turning into Donald Duck!
CAUTION: DISNEY = DISABILITY?
He said "Oh, Mom, I had a terrible dream. A car ran me down."
I said we could not live by dreams or we live a life of horror...
A sacred starfish piloting a Cessna plane survives a crash. But can it survive a boy's clumsy rescue efforts?
Weird blue snow covers a dump of unwanted historical statues, but they seem
less political than... strange. Is that a griffin? What's really getting covered here?
A man in a blue coat on a white horse delivered papers from a nearby wrecked ship, signed Stephenson and...
I'm a bike courier. I take a packet of fifty potent dreams
up Dream Street and deliver them to the year 1980...
I'm a teenage girl diving for treasure. In an eerie coral grotto reeking of sulfur,
I spot a diver in trouble... and wake to find the grotto is real..
(1918 and 1996, twin images of our limited conception of dreaming)
What you call dreams are just the surf-zone between waking and dream!
Swim out past the foam to the dream-deeps and you'll find...
I dream my friend Suvy introduces me to a man who just took a class I'm considering.
Weeks later she introduces me to him--but just as in my dream, he feels a bit insipid...
Swedenborg cuddles a talking dog who asks after its old master, Swab, and then kisses
Swedenborg, grossing him out. But he wakes knowing just what his doggy pest represents...
A comet grows hair, a girl named Rosalie becomes a bed of roses, writing in a beautiful
hand appears on a beautiful hand, and Sylvia becomes a talking forest bird...
Solve a pictographic riddle and you can fly, shapeshift, work magic!
But someone doesn't want us solving dream-riddles...
Find your strength in dreams: facing (and befriending) what you've feared, or fought...
Seeking my lost teacher-bird, I dabble with the time machine in the basement.
Oops! I summon Bigfoot. But the monster rips out her fur...
A black separatist commune hides two little girls who are psychokinetic.
They fear I'll expose them. But I've spent my whole life passing too...
CAUTION: PARAPSYCHOLOGY, RACIAL SEPARATISTS
DAY: I have to read three academics who mock ancient, shamanic and modern amateur dreamwork as superstition.
DREAM: I'm learning to fly in the Temple of Dreamwork, next to a cute new colleague. NEXT DAY, I meet her...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.; DISSES ACADEMICS
A friend says lucid dreaming doesn't matter--you can even fly awake if you clearly will it. So I jump...
Doctors remove my upper skull and sew my scalp over my brain.
I can get around, if I stay upright, but I'm terribly vulnerable...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE REFLECTS REALITY
I'm biking on a crowded, steep San Francisco hill, but at the same time
an inexplicably terrifying office meeting gets superimposed. And
the AI feeding me the virtual office gets all snarky about my fear...
In therapy, I'm wrestling with sex. But workmen invade--hammer & hang pictures. MY pictures!
And my therapist keeps confusing me and her, and our sexual orientations! She means well, but...
CAUTION: NUDE PORTRAIT
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...
Thorhadd's been slandering his enemy Thorstein. He spars publicly with a dream expert
who interprets all his dreams as: "Your tongue just can't quit!" True. It can't...
CAUTION: VIKING EGOS (AND BODY COUNT)
I watch Disney animate the Legend of the Thousand Birds, who pull
a wireframe sleigh of light right through a dark, material Santa...
I dream I'm teaching my students that those willing to let evidence change their minds are rare.
Climbers seek fame and status, while iconoclasts seek to upset order without regard for truth...
CAUTION: SOBERING FROM A NOBEL PRIZE WINNER
Three dreams set on Abenaki holy ground, of weird shamans--one ashen, one pumpkin-headed, the
third goofy-faced--lead me to visit the site. Where I find the river's washed up that third shaman's face...
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
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...
DREAM: a car crash; my parents both die, though my sister & I are thrown free, unhurt.
DAYS LATER: Aunt & uncle invite me on a car trip; my dad says no, I have to study.
TWO WEEKS LATER: Aunt & uncle die in a head-on; their kids are thrown free...
In 1985 I was flooded with nightmares about heads and necks. They had an unparalleled intensity...
When I overwork, neglecting my body's wants, I dream of an angry tiger. Over
time, I've learned (mostly) to feed my tiger, and sometimes he's an ally now...
I'm a cat person, grooming. But not MY fur--it's a woolly mass of timelines!
We cats travel time, smoothing out snarls... Then I wake, go to a party, and...
I dreamed that huge nouveau-riche polar bears invaded San Francisco, evicting us locals...
CAUTION: CORRUPTION, URSACIDE, MATH!
A trail toward Freedom has extra markers, for it's three trails, superimposed! Not all the cues are for us...
A couple slips in and out of sleep, dreams, one another's bodies and dreamworlds, trying to connect...
CAUTION: FREUDIAN SYMBOLISM, LITERATE WRITING
I was walking on an endless plain, upright and tense, walking beside you,
hurrying. What were we doing on the burning plain? What war...
In an oneirophobic society, it's easy to forget that when you do dreamwork, you're doing basic science.
No funding, no team, no lab coat? Can't be science! Unless they mistaught us what science is...
I'm an exchange student at the Solar System's best university for
the magic arts; my classmates are methane-breathing foxtaurs...
The innkeeper insisted I try a strange-looking liqueur, a house specialty called "Tuccotine"...
1: I failed to save a magic tree. It fell and killed someone. I'm racked with guilt...
2: A giant pinball game on a tilted oval relief-map. But you can only win as a team of six friends...
3: A Caribbean girl with a weird aura tries to align two magic crystals to heal herself...
CAUTION: BREASTS, MY LITTLE PONY AS ROLEMODEL
DREAM: at a dreamgroup, I tell a predictive dream that my artist friend's front tooth will get infected. Then
we all chant "Loga-Shana!" THREE WEEKS LATER: my artist friend's front tooth gets a serious abcess...
CAUTION: WILL TROUBLE E.S.P. SKEPTICS
Khodasevich (1939): I dreamt a call announced my friend was dead. Really he was still alive--but not for long...
Sergey (1945): My brother died in January but the news took months to reach us. Just before it did, I dreamed...
Half awake, Nabokov interprets shadows as guillotines and believes he and his wife will be executed...
I dream my daughter's selling two unused guitars. They seemed symbolic until I told her the dream and...
I saw a vast transparent plane inscribed with pictograms and symbols. Through it, at an unknown distance,
lay a second plane of less clear shapes and colors, but with great mass, depth, and unknown currents...
A TAILOR'S APPRENTICE: I become her to fight back against his abuse...
DAMSEL ON THE PYRE: I become a girl being burned alive, but get
so distracted by my beautiful body I forget to escape until it's too...
UFOs hover near enough so I can see they're truly lenses--lenses projecting images.
I judged UFOs to be projections from our minds, but now I see I am their projection!
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.
In my dreams, a co-worker tells me HER dreams. Their
focus is so unlike mine! Dream goals really differ...
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...
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
1: A nature spirit's physics experiment proves that time forks. But how much? How dense is the multiverse?
2: I sculpt a model of this multiverse. A physicist likes it; the nature spirit likes it more. So she swipes it...
3: A 'friend' offers refugees my bedroom, crowding me and my work into a corner. I wake. The phone rings...
After a class where students are forced to vivisect anesthetized dogs
I dreamed I'd made a mistake; I was sawing open my daughter...
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM, CREEPY DISMISSAL
God speaks in surreal images from the sky, and I hurry to write down
what God says. But I find I wrote mere squiggles on the page...
I'm on a mesa, looking down in terror. I try to pull back but a compulsion
overrides my will--I crawl helplessly forward until I go over. As I fall...
CAUTION: PRE-FREUDIAN DISMISSAL OF WARNING
There is a war between liberals and reactionaries, but the dream makes no
sense: friends claim to be hit, to be wounded, but I see no bodies, no blood...
CAUTION: ANTICIPATES THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
A murder case. But the suspect had gone to an interpreter and told of an ominous dream.
The investigator saw its strange images might be puns, naming the real killer--and they did...
I'm the new manager of the watermelon mine. And to free the trapped minors--
oops, miners!--I have to plan. So I cover the floor with My Little Pony post-its...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
Why am I an outsider? Can I change? Even my dreams don't know. I wake to find my
meditation was a dream, and as much of an answer as dreamwork can give...
Attacked on the ground, in the air, even in space, I fight back effectively.
Not lucid, yet in my dreams I now have real power...
I meet a man in a box. A mob wants to attack him. But five white horses defend him! Well, one's really a unicorn. I know each horse is a talent, but only recall one when I wake: clairvoyance...
A dreamer I know dreamt she was fired by a Mr Bleeden. Baffled her, but made shocking sense to me! My dad...
Here's an incantation to induce flying dreams. "Bring me wings NOW, or forever hold your peace..."
First I dream the neighbors are powerful witches offering dog-collared children
to the local men. Later, on a train, I meet two kids who managed to escape...
CAUTION: CHILD ABUSE, NUDITY
After his dad's death, a boy dreams he's an orphan facing cannibal witches--every night! Therapy helps;
his recurring dreams shift to a manhunt for a criminal who hides on the ceiling. The dreams shift again, to
a tiger hunt. That is, the tiger hunts you. The boy jumps in the sea. Swimming with sharks...
CAUTION: INTENSE NIGHTMARES, PARENTAL LOSS
Night. The Nile; the Pyramids on one bank; minarets and domes on the other.
But if the dream's comparing antiquity to modernity... which does it condemn?
I'm in a college class studying a bizarre alternate Earth where
anarchist co-ops never evolved and (of all things) money rules all...
CAUTION: SCORNS CAPITALISM
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...
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...
Sharks unicorns and moonbeams / Lost loves and karma chocolate I-beams
Raw telepathic bundles of beans / Write a little dream with me...
A man dreamed he was the River Xanthus at Troy. I interpreted it to mean he'd bleed for years, but not die of it...
A warning from my spirit wife, Silky, about the World Dream Bank.
Building a cathedral of classic dreams is all very well, but what about NEW dreams?
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
Night street. Two masked assassins attack a woman. I intervene. But I need a weapon!
I picture the Turkish sword on my mantel. The yataghan appears in my hand and I...
Hiking, I come to a chapel where a yogi is meditating--on me. Creating me! And when he stops...
You say you want to remember your dreams, but do you write down what you DO recall? And ACT on it?
A hermit spends his life wrestling with shadows. His only disciple becomes famous. Who was happier?
I wander a sunken maze, meet a playful woman, find a hidden treasure. Meanwhile, my friend Zooop...