A small, clear, simple precognitive dream... and its un-small, un-clear, un-simple cause...
When you really observe animals in language programs it's obvious WE'RE the dimwits...
DREAM: to stop an idiotic bout of war-fever, I have to take on the power of the Goddess herself...
NEXT DAY: I stumble on a fantasy book, Ariel, full of details straight out of the dream...
THAT NIGHT: I sign the Unicorn Commitment, but personalize the magical contract...
CAUTION: DISSES REAGAN & SOUTHERN MASCULINITY
I screw the lightbulbs in my ears again, and this time, they stay. I sit down at the piano, and as I play...
Reporters interview my pet rabbit without my permission. Have I neglected her? She says
"Things have been pretty good." I'm relieved, but ask why she never spoke before...
SITUATION: I'm in the rainforest, studying the red-throated caracara, a clever, elusive bird...
DREAM: Caracaras show up in Vancouver, speaking fluent English. At LAST I can interview...
I meet a big cat who seems invisible to most humans. She talks in Armenian speech balloons.
Too bad she already has a boyfriend! But her mere existence proves there's hope for me...
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
To help the King of Italy, I become a baker in Baluchistan--
learning Norwegian, levitating, meeting quaggas, riding landslides...
Our writing class meets in this Victorian home. I turn off my filters and describe what I really see around me...
Dream: wild animals race across Paris, but in my hotel lobby, a small creature on my shoulder murmurs "Je t'aime."
Awake, I know those racers from the themepark where I work. But the creature takes me way back--to Paris, 1918...
CAUTION: ONE-NIGHT STAND
In a darkened room of deaf women watching a slideshow,
I find no one can hear me in either English or Sign...
After a hard day in the recording studio, I dream of powerful yet obedient devil-angels;
quiet for now, but I fear they'll decide shamans like me are abominations...
CAUTION: ANGELS? GOLEMS? DEVILS?
Sex in a meadow? A protest march distracts us. But a friend warns me of a disease, Coitus Distractus...
CAUTION: (DISTRACTED) SEX
I get a job in China teaching bus-driving dogs how to fly. I don't know how. Luckily, the dogs...
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?
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...
This dreamer is starting to notice certain subtle signs that all
is not normal and this may be a dream. Well, not that subtle...
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...
We escape three trolls, but then our author Tolkien breaks in
to explain an Elvish word. Now we're really doomed...
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...
The Fairy Queen curses me, taking away my language. Recovery often takes years,
but I practice hard, and speak full sentences--the next day. The Queen is slipping...
Turns out humans communicate mostly by mental imagery; speech is just a carrier wave. But in most
cases, ESP is subliminal. I'm autistic, though; for me, background stuff jumps out. Like all six senses...
CAUTION: AUTISM, E.S.P. SPECULATIONS
Swedenborg fights a flying woman over a lake, then is in bed with another. After some
language and privacy problems, all goes so well he thinks they've made a child...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, SEX
My anima sends me on peculiar journeys--smoke rings, islands, conversations with a stone--
but at last it's just us. She has something more she wants to teach me. On that bed...
CAUTION: ASTRAL COME-ON
The two commonest sexual orientations have no names, or even concepts! Yet they're obvious, once...
CAUTION: THE TRUTH THAT DARE NOT BE TOLD
At 15 I misheard God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen and liked my version better. "Lit muffin, rude Esmé"...
I was having dinner with friends when I saw on the wall a huge skullbone
spider. But I lost the word for spider, and my friends seemed not to see it...
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?
I live through two teens' nightmares, then "wake" with them to find they were drugged by a third party! Why?
Then I'm with a cheery wagon-crew of flirting griffins & talking horses, pulling a cart made of grammar or logic.
Six days later... detailed images from both dreams appear on TV!
CAUTION: CREEPY, THEN SAPPY, THEN FREAKY
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...
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...
I must rescue Ann Soforth from righteous rapists, then Paul McCartney from a musical curse...
CAUTION: ABUSED CHILD, JOYCEAN LANGUAGE
In a flooded room, an indignant iguana scolds me, while
my wife Marnie checks her computer implant for water damage...
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
An Arabian prince kidnaps my girlfriend and me. We eventually escape his flying palace, but she gets trapped in
Victorian underwear, while I escape feuding politicians by turning myself into a truck tire. NOT a smart move...
CAUTION: BOGUS VICTORIAN SEX-EUPHEMISMS
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!
A huge explosion knocked the earth off its orbit; it struck other planets and wrecked the whole
solar system. Where will the souls ready to reincarnate all go? Or do they even need a planet?...
I pray to the Love Goddess for help, but then realize there's a problem with my phrasing...
CAUTION: UNROMANTIC
To investigate a criminal couple, I have to lie. And that's hard, since all my lies turn true...
CAUTION: NEW AGE AND FILM NOIR DON'T MIX
After fighting off an electrified Orson Welles, I meet the twelve
vulture-pine-politicians climbing Mt Sinai, looking for librium...
DREAM: a weird-looking guy says he's a Private Nose, who can read my
life history by sniffing my lunch. He gets a lot right--but just as much wrong.
NEXT DAY: My sister takes me to lunch & orders tea-leaf salad. Our waiter is...
Dream: tourists in our town use brainware to navigate & translate, but it's infected. Turns you fascist. Whaaaat?...
Next day: the FBI knocks! Our web provider fingered us as a nest of internet criminals. Thanks, Comcast!
Talk about malware...
I don't want to kill my friend, though his clothes say I must. But
a sculptor lets us sit on her metal trees and drink tea instead...
My friend Lily misuses the word 'Mareotic'; I know, because I once saw it in a Yeats poem, thought
the footnote explaining it was fishy, checked it myself, and found the editors hadn't even bothered to...
The Mayan cave was a door between worlds. But also a model of the character you need to walk through that door...
I dreamt of a better translation of Nebuchadnezzar's name, since universally accepted...
I dreamt a priest of old Nippur told me two agate pieces, long separated, formed a pair...
Wayan dreams he and his sister grope toward sex in the kitchen, when two of her friends burst in...
Miriel dreams she's having sex with a boy from her choir, when two of her friends burst in...
CAUTION: FRUSTRATION, INCEST, CAUGHT IN SEX
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...
In a world of wizards, many have gone silent. They seem to forget speech exists. A toxin, a disease? But what explains
people's calm as more go mute? No, it's an insidious spell--with a penumbra making us take its spread for granted...
CAUTION: IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR WORLD
I'm at the beach, seeing it through English linguistic filters. Or do I? Is there a language under language?
At our commune's new house, pandemonium breaks out when
our matriarch meets a spook. Can we live together in peace?
My mom and I road-duel an alien beetle, then investigate a deepspace Marie Celeste;
then I spy for the Angevin Empire to protect the Crown Jewels...
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?
I hung the dream-net over my bed. It worked. A blue-winged man with a leg of silver came to me,
drummed, danced, offered to teach me secrets. Awake, I found a blue feather caught in that net...
A coy, giggling giant orange bounces onto a man's bed, trying to seduce him, and...
Age 7 to 11, I often dreamt I inhabited a consistent geography of mountains & deserts. I was an adult of dark
complexion in non-European clothes; I spoke a tongue (and read a script) that I didn't recognize when awake...
CAUTION: ADULT DRUG EXPERIMENT; PAST LIFE MEMORY?
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
Refugees flood the spirit worlds! War looms. Wolf, Silky, Dr Who, even the Bug-Goddess of Love are alarmed.
I'm just a blonde ditz, but I help inspect realities till we trace the source: a Tlingit potlatch! Why?
Only at age 33 did Marc Liblin at last meet someone who spoke his dream language.
He married her, and moved to Rapa Iti, the only place in the world it's spoken...
DREAMS: 1: I can't afford language classes. 2: A beautyqueen rigs a stargate; I kill monsters & sell their bones...
NEXT DAY: I'm asked "Why don't you get a language degree?" I can't afford it! I go home & watch Dr Who...
A stunning girl fixes a spacetime portal. Smugglers kill alien monsters & sell their ashes as a drug...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND CREEPY DISPOSAL OF BODIES
After too much TV, I dream I'm plotting against a regime of suave, treacherous magical beings. But
a unicorn sorceress suggests I enlist the robots. She's right--they find plutocratic thaumocracy ugly...
CAUTION: ANTI-CAPITALIST
I search rivers and lakes around the world for someone dead. But the living I meet act as strange as ghosts...
A doctor tells Ellis to try "selvdrolla", but he's so focused on the strange name he forgets the prescription...
Animal poets at an open mic. My turn! And I find... I'm one. A creature without grammar...
a dream exposing what my brain's up to when I forget my dreams!
I wander the galaxy in my dreams, finding and testing crowds to see if anyone reacts
to the sound of shouted English or Chinese. One in a thousand does! This implies...
CAUTION: SCIENCE AND SHAMANISM DON'T MIX (or do they?)
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...
A dead fern in my backyard starts sending me messages in some strange language...
My clinic's euthanasia program is so warm and cuddly I barely notice I'm drifting toward death
til I reach the final form... and it's in Russian. They think I'm a refugee! Don't know me at all...
CAUTION: FLAMES ANTI-ABORTION AND HEALTHCARE IDEOLOGIES
On a cruise to Catalina Island, I find friends, a boyfriend and a magical sea of color...
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...
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
A workmate said "They feed they lion"; two dreams later, the poem emerged as you see it...
CAUTION: POLITICAL RAGE, SURREALISM
THROATS: Men put babies into giant throats inset in a funhouse wall;
SLOT MACHINE: I see a slot machine generating random art-speak phrases...
I meet some alien wolves, and see the social scene as they do--pack, status issues. But then...
I cross a pasture & slip thru a barbwire fence, as I explain cows, wires & organic life to an energy-being...
I paint my thumb with bitter aloes to break my habit of sucking it at night. I dream of
wormwood, ox gall, mineral salts. I consult Dr. Save Me and even the Pope, but...
I'm a spirit flying over the dead, blessing them. They're in mass graves, sorted & grouped
only by their life-stages--kids, adults, elders. Wait... is this how to structure my book?
In a world where speech is in Mayan glyphs, comedian Tina Fey (dressed for prom night)
climbs a Tibetan peak to learn levitation. But the flying monks are scared of women...
CAUTION: COOTIES; ROWDY JESUS; MAY FLUNK THE BECHDEL TEST
Four lines of comic nonsense composed in a dream...
Psychics give me an incomprehensible reading. A book from the tree-library gives only Victorian dating advice.
At last a madman gives me a treasure-box holding a tooth that unfolds into slices carved in unreadable symbols...
I'm carried off by a crane to meet birdfish, singing sheep, fell-spirits, mad shopkeepers and devil-bulls...
After my mother died, I dreamed I was a girl living after the Apocalypse. I rode my elk
past cars full of corpses, saw friends die, and never could find a single fertile mate...
A "friend" gives me her TV. No wonder! Turns out it's haunted
by a small-minded devil who cheats on all his deals...
You get 26 dice with letters on every face. Roll them all. Your haiku must use every letter. Go!
My mind and my soul both apply for a job in Stanford Cathedral. Their rivalry grows to a shamanic duel...
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...
I dreamed my mouth was full of typewriter keys and a typewriter ribbon issued from the back of my head. Joan
was hanging out the window by the ribbon. I reached for her, but my hands kept hitting the space bar, and down...
DAY: the crew of the Enterprise sings about love & career(ism). DREAM: I'm taking a test at Starfleet Academy.
But my teacher's a gorgeous unicorn, & my answers are filled in! I try to change one but my eraser breaks...
CAUTION: MOCKS LA BERGE'S LUCID DREAMWORK? NUDE PROFESSOR, TOO
I was on a spiral stair. The walls had scrawled messages, not sprayed,
carved or painted but living tissue--and getting fresher as I descended. Whatever was growing them was still below me, and still writing...
I'm the referee, or 'Vartena', of a violent high-school
game of waterpolo. A friend nearly drowns! Next day...
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?
I'm a wizard's horse, trying to warn him about a toxic spell on a roadside corpse...
Wake into a second dream, but try to return to being a dream-mare and warn my rider...
And then wake to realize my Nightmare was warning about a home-renovation project!
I often dream of words forming on a page as their images dance around me. Here's an example...
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
I was in a small room with a single bare lightbulb and an old man at a desk writing. The phone rang.
He answered--said, 'Yes, Emma, one pound onions, a dozen oranges." Two days later...