I'm a fox-woman. A human man courts me--insultingly. I dream my brain grows till my head hurts,
till it splits open, till light gets in. I rant at the last dragon. Strange but kindly, he gives me a picnic...
She was headed for a rock wall. The brakes faded; she smelled burning.
Then she woke. Her friends laughed, but she asked a neighbor what to do if...
Last night, as I slept, I dreamt--illusion blessed!--that I had a beehive, here inside my heart...
I dream I've carried a photo with me 17 years, but now... I BAKE it. The next day, I meet...
I don't know beans about right action, so Kokoro, master chef
of the Bean Bar, teaches me the stages of true mastery...
My neighborhood becomes a Huck Finn Eden after global warming turns it into a tropical island...
CAUTION: NUDITY, AMBITOPIA
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
A fantasy bazaar full of wolf, cat and rabbit shoppers. But my human friend Mark has a booth
by the exit, and grabs a rabbit girl's tail! She glares daggers, but seems resigned to harassment...
CAUTION: SEXISM OR SPECISM?
Worried Earth's warming a degree or two? Well,
Capsica's mean temperature is 35°C (63°F) hotter than Earth.
But that's quite pleasant--if you're a Capsican...
I was never sure where her winter cloak ended and her winter coat began...
I'm warily crossing an avalanche chute in winter, when my worst fear happens. Then the slide speaks up...
What my home town will become, if you fools keep burning gas and spewing CO2...
A visit to the Conches, a strange race of molluscs who are people only seasonally...
My sister gives birth during a killer heatwave. The baby's dead. I play with the body, like a chimp...
CAUTION: GROSS
Delboeuf, ignorant of botany, dreams of feeding lizards a fern called Asplenium ruta muralis;
years later he finds both lizards and fern in books he read and forgot years before the dream...
A gang of slavers catch my family. I flee on a bike but it breaks down. Stranded. Replay! This time I have a gun...
CAUTION: GANG, SHOOTING
I'm in a car with Walt Disney. A blonde comes in out of the rain.
He promises to make her a star, and puts his hands...
CAUTION: NOT GRAPHIC, JUST UGH
Dr Who kills his best friend, a huge white tern, on a whim. Furious, I demand a rewrite...
CAUTION: WANTON MURDER
I'm cold, tired and wet, and I have to take this dog to college. But when I touch him,
he howls in horror. I'm not having a nightmare, I am a nightmare. His nightmare...
A doorway not taken (for the most sensible of reasons) provoked a magical dream of what I missed...
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...
Dancers in weird costumes from around the world audition for a contest, but
the judge lets them all in, from silly to obscene. Next day, on Doctor Who...
CAUTION: POSSIBLY PREDICTIVE; CERTAINLY EMBARRASSING
What Earth will look like 1000 years from now, with doubled CO2, flooded coasts and melted poles...
CAUTION: CALLS GEORGE W. BUSH A BIG FAT LIAR
I'm a small planet in an eccentric orbit: a one-day summer, a two-day winter. Rest and hibernate, or...
CAUTION: SLACKER ETHIC
In the Rockies, in winter, I was freezing until I found the
hot springs. In the steam rising, I saw a vision of an elk...
I'm the Incredible Hulk, forced to do emergency brain surgery. For the patient's burning from within...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND UNLICENSED MEDICINE
I'm playing 'Drop Me Anywhere' with a friend: I pick the latitude, he picks the longitude.
Can I survive naked one day? I pick the equator as my best bet...
After a hard day in the recording studio, I dream of our wiser successors,
after we drown America: the sentient equines of Greenland and Nunavut...
CAUTION: SKINNYDIPPING UNICORNS
I visited Europe while suffering from malaria. The local spirits helped me, cooling my fever. They prefer to live
high in the mountains where the air and water are still clean. White people ignore them, but they're still there...
In a world where ice contracts & sinks, birds freeze in winter, thaw in spring. But one swan knows better......
My fever-dreams manifest physically and mess up my whole neighborhood. Seismic inspectors arrive...
While my body expels a kidney stone, weird scenes happen on the astral plane. At least I get to dip the pope.
CAUTION: PAIN, PEE, POPE
On the anniversary of 9/11, I dreamed a friend was welding nude. In his careful hands, the fire was harmless...
I'm in the High Plains, at a huge powwow on climate change. This could become, not a new
dustbowl, but a firebowl. As I wake, I find I'm running a fever! And the dream hints what caused it...
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...
My eighth grade class is a flock of birds migrating south for the winter, but we don't migrate the easy way...
I live in a huge half-hotel. The only way into the other half is through a fireplace.
It's forbidden. But one woman steps through the fire--do I dare follow?...
Qu'lad, dying of flu in the pandemic, dreamt a wolf told him cold-water baths would save him. He staggered to the river. He lived. He told others.
They lived. The shaman Togumalis dreamt his spirit helper, a squirrel, prescribed the same. A century later, hospital records show why it worked...
CAUTION: ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE SHOWN AS SUPERIOR
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
I'm a guard on a train crossing the desert who falls in love with a refugee fox-girl,
despite heavy specist peer-pressure and the archaic Railway Code...
CAUTION: NUDE FOX
I dreamt I gave birth to a white-hot stone shedding sparks. Most folk would find my son strange...
My sisters and I try to kill kidnappers by setting fires. Dumb, huh? The next day I fight a virus--with fever!
After a day of troubling conflicts over race & art, I dream I'm handed a hot, heavy, mossy head--is it art, or alive?
I bear a Ring of Power meant to corrupt me. I cleansed it, at a cost, but can't wield it till I've read its spell...
Who built the tornado in the Heartland, that sucks anyone who opens their spirit-wings down to Hell?
CAUTION: BAD THEOLOGY, WORSE PHYSICS
Kat Hepburn burns inside, as fierce aliens take over our souls.
But these parasites forgot they're now bound to our bodies...
MIKE'S DREAM: A volcano erupts. The lava pours into my hotel...
WAYAN'S DREAM: Our hill erupts in flame from a gas explosion...
1: I try to grow feathers and fly, but half-fail, half-succeed--experience two bodies at once...
2: I fly to escape a hippie cult. They fire heat-seeking missiles! But I may be too cool to track...
I'm in a restaurant at a round table. Waiters wrap me in hot towels. I laugh "If I were
chilled, I'd love this--but I'm NOT!" I wake to find I am too hot--too many blankets...
The latest MeToo meme is to leave a door open at night with a heater on, so a hot-air plume marks
a refuge for women in danger--or, of course, burglars! So I stalk our neighborhood locking doors... CAUTION: DECRIES HOT-AIR NAÏVETÉ
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
After a bad writing class, I meet a shy catgirl guarding a Mongolian Hot Pot, and discover who I am...
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...
A skater so hot, she tears her clothes off and starts melting the ice! I'm shy with her: thin ice, you know...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I'm a slave dancer. I run for it, and make it over the border. But my owner comes looking for me...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SLAVE SOCIETY
Psychodrama seemed like a way to meet cool people. But when I dreamed they were ice-skating rioters...
I lost two rings. Searched hours; nothing. I hadn't touched the freezer all day, yet I peered into the icecubes...
I tour the heart of a red supergiant, where dreaming souls explore
their fears and heart's desires, unconstrained by solid matter...
CAUTION: SWEDENBORGIAN VISION, UNICORN NUDITY
I'm so sick of irony I decide to get my sense of irony surgically removed and replace it with...
CAUTION: PLAYING WITH FIRE
I admire a baby, and talk the tired mother into washing it. I go get some
clean baby clothes and return to find she's roasting her baby in the oven...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, DENIAL
My family has shackled my little sister in the dungeon
in the hot tub full of carcinogenic bubble bath...
CAUTION: INCEST FEELINGS, TOXIC PARENTING
I tilted the Earth to create a tropical supercontinent from Bali to Tierra
del Fuego. What will evolve there--and on the new tropical Antarctica?
When the school district goes bankrupt, students flee creditors into a hell-cave.
But Joe Cool can skateboard even on lava in the Pit...
I dream I'm visiting a friend who's moved to a high equatorial peak. I'm shocked to find no trees. Next day,
I stumble on a book about Mt Kilimanjaro. Its treeline is below ours in California! A high-altitude desert...
I dream of a scary king who offers to bake my dreams to strengthen them. Then my friend Mark calls...
On a scorching world not built for people like us,
I find someone who seems to be a lot like me...
DREAM: I run into a couple I know. I get gridlocked. R.D. Laing gives me a transpersonal message.
DAY: I bump into that couple, get gridlocked, and hear R.D. Laing speak on transpersonal messages...
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
Worlds orbiting small stars need to huddle so close for warmth that tidal forces make one side always day,
one always night. But if the orbit's eccentric, the sun wobbles--and broad regions are Earthlike...
Recycling used paint to lighten pavements could lower continental temperatures a fraction of a degree...
She didn't want to be there. She closed her eyes and went elsewhere. So I painted where she went...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I felt dread as I peered out my parents' window into the garden. My dad lay on the frosty grass, dead...
WAYAN: My housemate Linda shows me her weird navel--and pussy, to compare...
LINDA: At Christmas, I run through snowy streets, naked except for earphones...
CAUTION: NUDITY & AWFUL DREAM-PUN
Dream: my family carelessly locks me out of my own home. Try every window & door...
A few days later: my new housemate carelessly locks me out. Try every window & door...
CAUTION: PREDICTIVE
I was officer of the watch in the Southampton. I knew that as we passed an islet a mile ahead, a man would fall overboard...
A volcano erupts in San Francisco! No human could survive the blast, but one researcher does--what IS he?
Mars as it will be 1000 years from now, terraformed. A guided tour with photos...
Jaguar Mask: a were-jaguar stuck in human form asks me to sew a new jaguar face on."But won't it hurt?...
Martian Airlock: I'm suitless on Mars. Freezing, choking, I dive into an airlock & slam the switch--but it's sabotaged...
They were swimming in the glowing, molten pool of the Melting Pot, and beckoned me to join them...
CAUTION: SUICIDE SOUP?
Mercury didn't spin! One side fire, one side ice. We farmed in domes, between--until the sun brightened...
CAUTION: RETRO SCIENCE
A mermaid friend invites me to see an underwater experiment in the Golden Gate...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
I'm cold and dark and disoriented! What am I doing wrong? Nothing--I'm just halfway to Alpha Centauri...
I'm a shaggy primitive whose tribe's outgrown our caves. We migrate, and meet two new species of people...
DREAM: Gay boys, underage girls & my own sister all mock me, sure I want their forbidden sexual fruit
at a beach where grotesque trees make their own precipitation and salt-dunes spill into saturated, toxic brine...
NEXT DAY: I read Margaret Atwood's The Salt Garden--sex, guilt, and grotesque trees in saturated, toxic brine.
CAUTION: SEXUAL GUILT, EXHIBITIONIST TWEENS, APPARENT E.S.P.
Tibetan prayers for good weather are answered too well. Heat wave! Tourists fly in, but planes can't land--
melting glaciers flood the airstrips. So tourists eager to sunbathe in Tibet strap on parachutes, prepare to jump...
You say you're leaving me. I go to grab an ice pick to stab you, but my hand
freezes to the ice block on the stair--I dare not even dream of murder. Since...
CAUTION: RESPONSE TO SPOUSAL SUICIDE
I climb a huge mushroom-shaped rock rising from a hotspring and prepare to dive in...
Nazis call my simple architectural drawing a social protest, take it at gunpoint,
and toss it in the ovens. The commander mocks me with its ashes...
I fall in love with my sculpture of a mythical Southeast Asian creature. Then a mad yogi breaks in...
CAUTION: SEX, TANTRA, AND GENERAL WEIRDNESS
Erica dreams that during a protest she's caught in a radioactive flood...
Michael dreams a nuclear forcefield makes his fingertips explode and congeal into weird knobs...
Joanne dreams she meets nuclear mutants with curling black nails great for peeling potatoes...
Scott dreams the world goes silent and white, bleaching out. His hands dissolve...
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...
I'm biking over the English Channel. So mild & easy after the Greenland-to-New-York run...
A model of a moon, half-Europa, half-Mars, with (intelligent?) life in seas under a skin of ice...
DAY: I see Avatar: the Way of Water. Two films in one: Blue Lagoon alternates with Mad Max...
DREAM: As an oracle, I have to go topless so the magic mini-ravens can perch on my nipples...
CAUTION: BRR, OW!, BREASTS, and SNIPING AT JAMES CAMERON
I'm in a movie version of prehistoric Baja California, mining nuggets that howl,
when pterodactyl-worshiping pirates glide in trying to snatch our ore...
Osento is a bath house that my friends all love. But women only. So I dream I change sex just to...
CAUTION: NUDITY, GRATUITOUS HAPPINESS
I slept on an island in a scalding hot spring, praying for a dream. I got one--and woke up on the shore...
A suspicious exobiologist warns me that otter from Titan may not be the amiable, nerdy celebrity it seems. But...
The artcops search-and-destroy our flying band, and my wings are shorn. But ten years later,
songless, apathetic, I climb through my TV--and the women of Vietnam show me a new way to fly...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, ATTITUDE, ALTITUDE
Plato never did say what shed the light that cast those shadows on his cave wall. I find out.
CAUTION: CUT-RATE APOCALYPSE
I froze to death trying to climb an icy peak. But I try again, and this time,
no holds barred. Wow, am I selfish! But alive...
After a rainy hike I'm cold and muddy. In the camp's hot tub, six girls splash and play.
They welcome me, but I feel shy. They slowly become winged ponies! Were-Pegasi...
CAUTION: HOT-TUB NUDITY
A quarrel between psychic adepts heats up to a war,
thawing Pluto. What will the ice-tribes wish for?
Emotionless pod-people surround the last free humans. I fight for humanity, but I'm not human or pod--I'm...
I walk home in cold rain; my hooded robe soaked. It has holes for my long pointed ears.
Hit a thriftshop to buy a dry one, and run into two girls I crushed on but ran away from:
Danielle is comforting Cary who's crying. Their ears are pointed too. Wait--who are we?...
CAUTION: GUILT FOR SINS OF OMISSION?
I'm a Martian revolutionary, making the glaciers grow. The equator's still dry, but change is coming...
In our steamy future, after the cities drown, I'm hiking through Rainbow Tunnel, when I meet a holy man...
My sister hoists us up to the Goddess's country too early, or too late: the ice is thawing,
DREAM: I climb a stair to a surreal space where kids dance in tights spattered with wet red paint.
NEXT DAY: I watch Wednesday--Wednesday Addams dances & gets spattered with wet red paint...
CAUTION: NUDITY, ESP SPECULATION
Night. A mirror-maze of contradictory preachings. But in the secret mermaid pool, I find love.
Then... sphinx-angels war in the air! A war of riddles. Can I, a batwinged devil, make peace?
CAUTION: SEX, NUDITY, MEAN ANGELS, AND ONE HAPPY DEVIL
I'm a raft guide on a circular river that may just be reincarnation. A girl in my
tour group jumps ship: she dreads the white water of rocky relationships ahead...
CAUTION: METAPHYSICS, SEX, WEAK SOULS...
Earth has rainbow rings. They're braided like Saturn's, so their shadows create tinted microclimates...
Leading a party out of slavery, I got off the road when God warned me to. He insisted I must ford a cold river.
Turned out the slaveowner had posted a reward at the station ahead; we were saved by divine guidance...
I dreamed of a woman whose jeep stalls on the Antarctic ice. Along comes the ghost of a Volkswagen...
I find myself sitting on toy trains and fake snow as I'm told a fable:
how a herd of department-store Santas got tragically lost in a blizzard...
The feud between our magical families is getting ugly. Hawk-Head's dad throws boiling water on me, so I...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I smelled scorching paint; my heater was about to burn the house. But I'd moved--my old house was six blocks away...
Tilt a globe so neither pole has land to build icecaps on, and extrapolate.
Earth becomes a warm, flooded world like and unlike ours...
A Finnish shaman/witch gives me a lesson in night flying; in the waking world
I meet Ram Dass and sense him speak astrally before his body can get the words out...
CAUTION: HIGH MYSTICAL QUOTIENT; IF ALLERGIC, AVOID
A writer invents an absurd setting for his Utopia, a lens of ice floating atop
Saturn's atmosphere--but then such sessile lenses turn out to be real.
The dream's details suggest buying a certain stock. I do, and...
Yuppies with a lighter set me on fire--not even out of malice, just idly.
I'm a shaman, I can survive it, but I'm not immune to pain...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE, UGLY POLITICAL COMPARISONS
A summer love affair with a shapeshifting alien turns awkward when she gets a high fever, and...
CAUTION: UGH!
I tilted the Earth, and worked out its new ecology--part Mars, part steambath. Visit the Mediterranean Abyss
ruled by giant ravens, and Patagonia, ruled by mammoths, and Antarctica's jungles, ruled by lemurs...
My childhood home explodes into a vast pyroclastic cloud that comes boiling toward me, miles away...
CAUTION: DOOM
I wake in a strange frozen bedroom. Oh. My bed is Siberia! That means
there are tigers. Clearly the way to defend myself is with giant stuffed toys...
First, suck up 90% of Earth's seas. Now wait 90,000 years for life to adapt. The continents are now
Tibetan plateaus above steamy new Deeps, ruled by giant parrots, ravens and otters...
1: Purple squid saboteurs flood our cliffhouse. 2: My oyster-ranching girlfriend has a snobby aunt.
3: I wake in a stranger's bondage fantasy--ugh! 4: Shepherds on the sea-floor watch for gliderwolves...
CAUTION: EMBARRASSING BONDAGE DREAM
While watching two rooftop actors (one a chicken) I noticed the icebergs in the sky were melting at last...
I dream of snowdrifts too deep to get back home, even though...
I'm a peace terrorist trapped in Squaw Valley, herded like a mare by a huge stallion made of snow...
And then the dream shifts. I blurt out the truth behind our idiotic waking world! And wake believing it...
CAUTION: MERMAID AND HORSE NUDITY
Divers made of ice win the Traffic-Leaping Olympics. But
I think they cheated! I seek my friend the Sphinx...
I went to bed with a stuffed wolf, and found myself in a hot tub with a
cute wolf guy, only now I seemed to be the plush one...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
I envy and resent a rich family's mansion so much I break in and sabotage their giant meat freezer...
CAUTION: HOSTILITY, ENVY, WASTE OF BAD FOOD
Thirsty deer invade the hall. Children play in the dunes encroaching on the city.
Will those ominous red clouds drop rain? Or sand?
On a cruise to Catalina Island, I find friends, a boyfriend and a magical sea of color...
The card of revolution! The old towers of strength come down, not via war but obsolescence...
My cold-sensitive dinosaur friend makes a find at our archeological dig by thinking like the Old Ones...
Those Hollywood lovers in the tub seem perfect together, until... oh, read the title!
CAUTION: RACE- AND GENDER-BENDING
Did sex turn creepy because I sensed the madman stalking us? Or did our sin (casual sex) summon him?
CAUTION: CREEPY SEX, CREEPIER PREMONITIONS
I watch Disney animate the Legend of the Thousand Birds, who pull
a wireframe sleigh of light right through a dark, material Santa...
1: Crystal-skulled wizards, dino & lionfolk parade by. 2: I curl up with three skittish beasts. Patience!
3: My friend Mark tries to rape me. I tie him up, seek a restraining order. Will the cops believe me?
CAUTION: RAPE ATTEMPT
A Bengal tiger slips into my room. Others panic and want to call the police, but I feel protective...
A tiger-couple on an ice floe must choose: swim for land, or
ride the current full circle back home, risking starvation?
I drilled new poles in my globe and tilted the Earth. Ice Age or Carboniferous? Flood or drought?
Come visit tropical Antarctica, the Thai Desert, the Hawaiian glaciers, the jungles of France!
How the world was really created. God said "Let it be well done" and it was well done.
CAUTION: TECHNOLOGICAL BLASPHEMY
I dreamed that huge nouveau-riche polar bears invaded San Francisco, evicting us locals...
CAUTION: CORRUPTION, URSACIDE, MATH!
I bike up a Hawaiian hill toward a lava fountain. A house catches fire, but it's blocks ahead.
I go a bit closer. Then a heat-shimmer shows deadly gas has crept ahead of the flames...
CAUTION: FATAL MISJUDGMENT
Climbing a mountain on Mars, I reach a hall where I'm transformed into a cryophilic being.
Then I feast on methane soup with the heroic Martian dead...
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...
We flee a tsunami. Inland. Up a hill. Onto a roof. One by one, the flood plucks us away.
Long past hope, I climb a flagpole. As I cling to the very top and the mud rises to my lips...
CAUTION: GRIM PREDICTION
Jealous of newlyweds, I grind my teeth. But the Ice Age ground the Sierra's granite teeth, and they're lovelier for it...
Unshade trees are ugly. But my friends list their uses: casting shadows lighter than
sunlight, keeping land clear of other trees, and the fruit. Fruit? WHAT fruit? Am I blind?
Captain Kirk is testing vampire myths on a world where they don't bleed you dry.
At the moment, three vamps are sitting in a tent in a sunny meadow, queasy but alive...
CAUTION: FINANCIAL VAMPIRES?
Tour Venus as it will be in 1000 years, after terraforming: paradise for dozens of intelligent species!
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
This symposium, airing a dispute between geologists & astronomers who just don't read each others' papers, had multiple revelations--big hazards, bigger holes in our knowledge, and bigger opportunities...
CAUTION: CHART! WITH NUMBERS!!
I take a shortcut with the Warm Fuzzies, boating on lava through the earth's core,
and now when a volcano erupts, I know who it is that's quarreling beneath..
Huge balloons labeled "Waymo" in bad Chinese are taking over San Francisco.
But the sexy balloonists seem to be more into masturbation than conquest...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM OR OBJECTIFICATION?
Hot air rises, right? So there's a monsoon from Hell,
lifting souls. Lucky for us that gravity balances it...
An alternate Titan, Titan as it should have been, with ethane seas full of life...
I walked into a 19th century home--and family quarrel. Decades passed in seconds; then
the house burned--with me in it. Two years later I learned the house and its history were real...