I'm a big cat lonely in this human city. Wish I had a mate! But as soon as
I take responsibility for an orphaned boy, in walks an older girl...
by "Veronica Franco"; 2006/8/19, a dream of penned creatures and those who love them.
Alpine deer-hamsters, pigs, birds, children, even fundamentalists' daughters grow up and want to fly free...
All the runaways & homeless girls in town start calling themselves antelopes. I bring home
an antelope date. But my mom, who looks like my Reaganite grandma, sees a literal antelope...
We're orphans learning to fly by night, when others can't see and define us...
I'm an orphaned bat in an alley in a storm. I mistake a broken old umbrella's ribs & flaps
for... my Mom! I unfold Mom, and discover...
CAUTION: LIFE-THREATENING CHILD NEGLECT
Tax-funded child prostitution ends war--sex calms men down from
mean chimps to nice bonobos. Rough on street kids, though...
CAUTION: SEXPLOITATION, SATIRE HARSH AS JONATHAN SWIFT. UNICORNS, TOO!
A champion swimmer tells me how she turned a sexual humiliation into excitement and liberating power...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, SHAME, PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY
Cleo the talking kitten denies being a cat, so I invent Wolf-N-Puma Chow!
Must I play similar games to nourish that other feral critter... me?
VERY mixed media--the boat is warped wood. And the story is warped more...
CAUTION: SEX, SHAME FROM EARLY TRAUMA
I dreamed I was a classic hippie bus. My brother was a lovingly customized Mustang. We
were real collector's items. So our parents decided to sell us. Their asking price was...
A dream of exhibitionist girls playing with breast milk turns out not to be symbolic, but psychic...
CAUTION: BREASTS
Daily dream-poems in haiku style, nonstop for a month. A flood of animals, revenant ghosts, sex changes...
I'm worried an alien charity is brainwashing an ex-prostitute. When I wake, she's still there--at 2/5 scale!...
After trespassing in a staff-only part of Faerie, I'm cast out.
Only I'm cast like a seed, meant to grow a new elf circle...
In school, I'm seen as a freak--lied to, set up for little pranks. Not just by my classmates--my teachers...
I had an epic dream lasting subjective weeks--a true other life. It wasn't Earth and we weren't human.
I was a teenage lemur, sailing with two friends into unknown waters--a rite of passage. One night,
my friends curled round me, I saw I didn't WANT to pass the test, be declared a woman, marry, and have pups.
I loved my girl friends. In a world lacking the very word, I was groping toward queerdom.
Sailing into unknown waters! "Here be dragons," the old maps say. And they were right...
2600K loads slowly? Try it in parts: 1: HOME, 650K, 2: VOYAGE, 1200K, 3: BACK 750K.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, QUEER TEEN ANGST, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
Dream-elephants slowly bring John to terms with the early loss of his dad--and lead him out of a cult he’s outgrown..
On the Night Train out of my small-town life, I meet the town rebel. But she's misplaced her tongue...
CAUTION: PETTING; UNNERVING TONGUE
A boy offends his uncle the King, who transforms him into a fox. Grounded! But Fox-Boy runs away...
For two years, I sat at the desk in our co-op gallery, and
secretly sketched our bewildered, art-assaulted customers...
Advice of a specialist on the care and feeding of child prodigies, embarrassingly relevant for adult geniuses...
An abused girl survives grotesque situations to become a job/health counselor with a talking sofa...
CAUTION: BUTT-SNIFFING GIANT
My parents pray for my success, and arrange a great learning opportunity for me. Really.
I'm an orphan shapeshifter enslaved by a gold-eating monster. But I meet a cat-girl with a hammer...
CAUTION: BAD FOSTER-DAD; CAPITALIST MONSTER; VIOLENCE (TO VENDING MACHINES)
After 25 years I land on my native island of Wyre, to touch an ancient clay figurine, who grows young and wakes...
My sisters and I try to kill kidnappers by setting fires. Dumb, huh? The next day I fight a virus--with fever!
A sorceress trains a kid as a prostitute who'll spy on her powerful clients. But her training has side effects...
CAUTION: EXPLOITED KIDS
My earliest memory's a recurring dream: I'm a wild horse near Shiprock, recurrently dreaming
that I'm a human child! The two lives alternated for years, each a dream to the other...
I'm an orphan shot at by hunters. They shoot my sister! But no one believes me...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
The tale of a fawn named Fawn and her mom, a bank-robbing hippopotamus...
CAUTION: GLAMORIZES THIS ALARMING TREND
Liu Bang's mom dreams a spirit is making love to her. Her husband sees the spirit is a dragon! Her baby grows up to found the Han...
Yi Yin's mom dreams a spirit warns "if water pours from your mortar, run!" She does, and survives a flood, to help found the Shang...
CAUTION: LIKELY JUST FOLKLORE
I fell asleep reading a book I'd read years before. I finished it in my dreams. Every word in place. How?
A book that kept me up late. Ariel and Robin get abused as subtly & deniably as me and my sisters...
CAUTION: RELIGIOUS/PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE
I'm Hitler's girlfriend. Not Eva Braun, just me--gentle, weak, thrown in among killers. What can I do?
I was a South Asian teenage girl. Strange men throw rocks at our house,
then explode into fire. I don't trust my dad to get my little brother out...
As a kid I was haunted by the parallels between Menolly of Pern and me...
I dream over & over of the same place, time, & woman. We fall in love. Strangely, I'm the one who gets pregnant...
I dream squatters build surreal towers in a city of junk. I wake, go to a movie, and see...
Robert Coles wrote a book on kids' moral sense, but his examples don't tell me what they tell him...
A child of radicals goes wild in Rio. When we bail her out, we find she's had a strange enlightenment...
CAUTION: UNSAFE SEX
A dream haiku telling of a dog-pack saved by the intuition of a mutt with a mangled ear...
A wild flying dream lands me among feral children fighting to live in a glass conservatory of lost flowers...
A doomed, orphaned ottercub meets the last Tasmanian Wolf, who makes a hard choice I couldn't. Or... did I?
CAUTION: BIRTH SCENE (MARSUPIAL/NON-GORY)
Mom's vanished, and our writer/bohemian dad's caring for us
alone now. But he's barely coping. And he's me...
I put a singles ad in our paper, but I just couldn't say what I really wanted to. Now, I can...
CAUTION: SEX, DRUGS, AND DOGGEREL
I meet Peter Pan grown up: a stark, fey prince in exile. Why do only I see him and the Lost Children? Oh.
I love the Twins. They love intrigue. But when a hired crocodile sabotages our Egyptian treasure-hunt...
CAUTION: BAD GIRLS
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
I had a dream I was exploring ruins in a forest, where
I encountered this feral girl with a porcupine head....
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...
I suspect we child prodigies and geniuses are as unlike the gifted as normal people. So here's a checklist...
CAUTION: BRAIN REQUIRED
News of a child prodigy who was given the support I wasn't, triggers a flood of envy and bitterness...
I walk home with a puppy to meet my mum, who addresses the dog by my name
and invites him in, while I head for my doghouse in the garden...
I'm an abused girl turning tricks to survive. But this is San Francisco: I join a prostitutes' co-op, and meet...
CAUTION: PROSTITUTES WITH SELF-RESPECT, OH NO!
A refugee girl crawls into my bed. We become lovers. I protect her. But over time... am I holding her back?
CAUTION: ABUSE? OR NOT?
I'm a kid in Nevada around 1950, learning that both my folks are lone wolves who gave me a genetic double dose...
CAUTION: RACIAL THEORY ABOUT... LIBERTARIANS?
My sister and I are runaways, developing psychic powers.
A cult of fish-selling witches wants to use us...
CAUTION: SIBLING INCEST, SPELL ABUSE
A man adopts two orphaned, talented musical griffins. But their previous guardians were
so traditionalist & stifling that the cubs want to BURN all their instruments...
My sister's beautiful; I'm plain. When she's murdered, I ride into the Interface Desert, where worlds meet...
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?
Deep in the strata inside you, gems lie waiting in the dark for this child to dig them free...
The ship carrying my mom to America sails on, as I drown in the sea;
They strap me down to pull out the pieces of my stillborn baby Obdale;
A family/gang called Thanotos invites me to join them...
CAUTION: MISCARRIAGE, DEATH
That day: I read of a young healer in rural Indonesia harassed by the local mullah.
That night: I dream she leads a revolution on a starship against her elders...
A strange creature slunk into our yard, carrying a skunk lunch.
But she dropped her fur coat, and I recognized a kindred spirit...
DAY: our ex-cat comes back, needing surgery. Dad doesn't want to pay. Big quarrel.
DREAM: Cats, birds, elf-girls; in their asteroid library, a tale of oath-breaking...
Now I'm the one who stole a tooth of jade from the volcano hall. Greed... erupts!
CAUTION: NUDE BIRD-ELF, DEATH BY LAVA
I dream I find a few 'extinct' watercats--in a slum! They talk. They say I'm one of them,
brainwashed to think I'm human. I wake, go to a dinner, and hear a tale of... watercats!
My face was leprous white like parchment; my eyes shone with
a cold blue eerie light. I shrieked "Papa, don't you know me?"...
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
After seeing 'Rear Window', Grace Kelly and I are wolf children in a pack that's quickly evolving into...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, CHILD SEXUALITY, WOLF-SLANDER