Writer Alice Miller tried painting her childhood monsters. I tried it and got surprise messages...
CAUTION: FRANK LANGUAGE
Our starship crashed on an alien world. Humanoid aliens attack us. A witch saves us. A second kind of alien
attacks; again she saves us. A third--ugly, monstrous--and the witch goes off with them! Turns out they're friendly...
There was a tall man wearing a mask standing at the door.
At least I think it was a mask...
Four guys plot to enslave my girl and kill me; I have lucid powers, and kill them instead.
My girlfriend Attahuah gets poisoned, but...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, DECEIT
First, in a maze, I meet a huge bison with her calf; then, in a school gym,
I meet an even bigger alien, twiggy, spindle-shaped, mysterious...
I'm a Fast-Food Detective tracking down a kidnapper-sorceress.
I find castles, monsters, magic carpets... and unexpected love.
CAUTION: SEX
If artists do this with ink, what makes you think genetic engineers will do any better with flesh?...
CAUTION: DON'T DO THIS AT HOME
As I wrote a poem on Caliban, I dreamt I was him: taken to Shakespeare's England,
shown as a freak, I must escape to save Miranda and Prospero from assassins...
A mysterious old woman with cat-face and claws threatened me; she seemed
to be guarding a treasure. Sometimes she appeared as a praying mantis...
A woman's stalked by a clay monster that eats heads. But it has a proposition for both of us...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL MONSTER
I fight a clay golem of resistance, until inspiration hits, and I do what it may have had in mind all along...
I'm in bed sleepily petting my cat, when I see my cat across the room! What's on my legs? It's big.
My cat chases it off... through the wall? My room is sealed. Where did it come from, where did it go?...
In the far future, I relive Odysseus' tale. To save my life I must give up realistic hope, and focus on...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL MONSTERS
I dreamed I saw what looked like an ink sketch by Dali of a horse--but I was dead wrong...
CAUTION: YUCK
I used to dream of this violent anthropomorphic being. At times I'd put on his deer-skull head
and become him, inflicting and inciting violence. Naming him gave me some control...
1941. My dad and I are denounced to the SS. We're put in with monsters; I'm a snake or fish myself.
But the Nazis become a photo album, I go to a memorial, I cry, it's 1947, peace...
CAUTION: HOLOCAUST MEMORIES
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?
Winged things lurk in the shadows. When I focus on them, they attack! Castaneda's teacher watches amused...
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
There was this giant creature in the water along with a bunch of sharks.
The creature turned out to be nice though, much nicer than the sharks...
A green monster guards the divine egg; with the right prayer, it
explodes in a fountain of mad color, half grenade, half freed jinni...
Egyptian archeologists dig up a living god. He sees us as dolls to play with, but we've grown up...
CAUTION: GOD AS A RAPIST
The Emperor dreamt a monster hedgehog terrorized his city. On waking, he ordered the slaughter of
every hedgehog in town. People started seeing him as the killer hedgehog! Soon he was deposed...
Lucifer throws firebolts from a Montreal tower; monsters stalk us; next comes the flood...
Hide-and-seek on an alien world ends in a sexy encounter--and a startling insight on BELIEF...
CAUTION: SEX
A gang of young men breaks in. I lure them outside and lock my door. They break in again, and
this time they're scaly, tentacled monsters. But I ask why they're here, and to my surprise...
My body is a residential tower sheltering centipedes, basilisks, dragonflies, bagworms,
skeletal cranes; without my blood's heat and the moist caverns of my soul they would die...
I fondle the noses of two masked girls in red leotards--parodying part of a Clockwork Orange...
I'm excited to see Last Year at Marienbad, but either the actors mumble or the sound is bad...
Night. I fly, as in Fellini's 8½, but out of control. The wind takes me, I'm terrified...
My grandmother attacks me with her crab-claw, then retreats, chanting the film title Shoeshine!
I meet a monster--half earthworm, half giraffe. Then I realize she’s kind of cute...
I'm a monster working in a shopping mall in Stockton, California, when I smell smoke...
CAUTION: FILM NOIR SEX
As a child, landscape artist Paul Nash dreamed of flying over the countryside
of southern England. But he was threatened by the legendary Black Dog...
On my quest I find magic portals, snarky flower-fairies, undersea redcoats,
reassembling bodyparts, living chess, and Nosferatu the Cheating Vampyre...
THAT DAY: I test my hearing range; it turns out to be more dog than human...
DREAM: To banish a teacher & her giant fly, I summon a musical goddess...
I was the first woman made High Commissioner of Baseball. One day a team of mutants begs a franchise...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, BAD TEAMWORK, HORNY BEES
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing
he had put together; I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out...
I face a barrage of deadly challenges out of every action film I've seen and every game I've ever played...
I was a giant carefully & guiltlessly flattening San Francisco--just following orders
to recycle it! Killing how many? While my mind inside the giant's mind was appalled...
I'm at a vaudeville for gods. Cthulhu the squid-god nearly tramples me--and then gets horny...
CAUTION: GROSS GOD, GROSS GOO
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)
I'm in Venice. The police chief (armored) and Goldie Hawn (near-naked)
ride a skittish monster. Turns out bareback works better...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
Day: my dad's paralyzed, and my car's stolen.
Dream: a harpy made of steel, like a living Calder statue, holds three girls hostage...
I was two-thirds of a love triangle, but I always lost out. Flying was some consolation...
CAUTION: RAT DEATH, EVIL WHALES AND ADULTERY
Hillary Clinton hid her cancer, but the GOP found out. So a monster kidnaps Rainbow Brite, and...
I cross the Mushroom Desert, meet a blue-tailed squirrel & a horse-size dog, then zombie-vampire suburbanites.
NEXT DAY: an artist sends me a flyer with a new dream painting--a huge dog whose fur-patterns depict a horse...
CAUTION: SYNCHRONICITY
First I met an assassin girl who could raise dust storms; then a monster-hunted named Rho;
then I was the hunter, with a futuristic hovercycle and low-tech bow and arrows...
My first memory is of being a wild horse and waking up to find I was suddenly a human child...
Sybelle & I climbed the cathedral spire. Bravely she kissed the monstrous guardian, exhaling
blue light. My own challenge was to leap across an abyss, under the luminous eye of God...
Green snakes fly over Elkhorn Marsh. My mom says "They're just cockroaches." She's not fooled by my... friends?
They sneak off from a party to have a thresome, but monsters try to harvest their organs! Inept monsters...
CAUTION: SEX (OFFSTAGE)
The Mummy chases me, then unwraps his bandages to show the mutilated face of my boyfriend.
"I'm getting out of jail!" he says. Then the phone wakes me. My boyfriend. He says "I'm getting out of..."
CAUTION: CODEPENDENCE, MUTILATION, GUILT AND GRIEF
One wizardry-classmate summons strange beings; another's learned how not to.
Because some things need to be dealt with alone, where they can't harm......
Kitty, exhausted, stops fighting what's inside her, and lets herself die.
Crystalline alien worms burst out, growing till they loom over the spaceport...
CAUTION: ADDICTION ROOTED IN AVOIDANCE
Leather boys flap down from the sky, feeding from giant mustard pots. We fight them with honey & boomerangs.
A blind girl had trained for years to get revenge against a winter god named Lük or Lock, who took the form of an ice wolf.
By defeating the god, she would get her sight back, but she didn't know she'd also send the world into an endless winter...
A vast sea-world with 7 times Earth's mass, whose isles are home to at least 19 intelligent species...
CAUTION: CUTE ALIENS, WEIRD SEX CUSTOMS, GODLESS EVOLUTION!
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
I've got too many obligations, an elderly relative to care for, and now giant birds are invading my house.
CAUTION: STALKING, KILLER BIRDS
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.
How'd that spider, dragon and T. rex get in my soup? I skip lunch.
Dig in the garden, but scaly heads pop out to nip at me. Persistent!
If you sense auras, every singles event feels like a scene from Halloween Hell...
CAUTION: HORNY MONSTERS
I'm hiking through the Catskills when a gigantic amoeba comes slipping over the hills...
I help a mutant boy find others like him, and learn why some prayers are ungrantable...
I hide a chip of secrets from thugs, fight a running light-gun battle, and hide in my workplace's
crawlways, amid live cables and pipes. As the factory burns, I run a gauntlet of goons. A girl
leads me into the underworld. Fires glow and mutants dance. I marry the leader of the pack.
I'm a sexy monster, but my sister sells me to the Devil as his bride...
CAUTION: SEXY CREATURE, ROTTEN SISTER
For a week the same dream-figures and settings have been recurring:
shapeshifters and sea monsters. What are they hiding? Or guarding...
Every night the same nightmare--the creatures take flight again, and I wake shaking...
Sexy dreams of Chinese archeology, authorized by the fairies, make me face that my family abused me...
Had sleep paralysis early one morning while trying to wake up, and "saw" this creature or woman looming over me.
She had two spider legs (if more, I couldn't see) and was smiling--with no face. Terrifying. Amazing...
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...
Janet's obsessed with a creepy guy till her pixy friend Kay decides to "knock some sense into her cunt"--literally...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, NASTY LOVE SPELL, PIXIE NUDITY
An itchy patient of mine insists he's turning into a four-
headed, man-eating plesiosaur. He left one thing out...
I dreamed I saw this statue of a woman wearing a round hat or bowl that covered her entire head.
When I got closer, a bunch of arms sprouted from under the hat/bowl, moving like spider legs...
A monster's out to eat my dog--and maybe me. We get cornered in the barn...
I was timid. Red scared me. But this huge confident dream-beast hinted at a new energy...
An version of the Egyptian Ship of the Sun with a mutant Osiris at the helm,
in a monster-infested sea: image of the spark of consciousness in a sea of...
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 huge rubbery mass of skin complains I made it sick. I get tired of its whining, and...
Stolen by the Fairy Queen, I'm forced to nurse her great project: creating life! But her synthetic baby is...
After Shaw's Arms and the Man eclipsed my own play The Land of Heart's Desire, I dreamt I was haunted by...
Squirrel Girl and I try to find a private room, but Hal the mad computer in 2001
spies on us and our spaceship captain orders us to clean the ion tubes...
CAUTION: SQUIRREL NUDITY
I dream I'm a runner named Silky; but straying outside the crowd can get you stomped by giant aliens...
Two nude women (drawn Wally Wood style) dance ritually in a
forest, summoning a worm-snake-dragon with a ring of fangs...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Eileen rose out of her body. A man dared her "How far away can you go?", then stole her body!
Jony and their daughter Kim had nightmares of invasion too; all three woke up shaken...
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...
As a kid, my nightmares were of Sesame Street characters. In my teens I graduated to
slasher nightmares and recurring lucid dreams. Alcohol trashed my dreams for years, but
now they're not nightmares--just surreal. Hitler wrecks my sex life! What a spoilsport...
CAUTION: (MOSTLY FRUSTRATED) SEX
Night. A hill town. Temples with huge stone statues. But the original figure looms
monstrous over the hills. Which is the threat? The giant, or the cult appeasing it?
Stuck in a horror movie, I get to meet the triceratops-headed monster
who scriptwrites all my nightmares. But he's open to suggestions...
Two witches, maiden and crone, ride a flying monster made of two magically fused trolls.
But I know somehow that the two are really just aspects of a single powerful sorceress...
My partner and I were hunting for spirits with a camera designed to photograph them. Warned
away from the Niigata waterfront, we try to catch a bus out. But what comes isn't the bus...
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
This black wolf thing named Venom often shows up in my dreams.....
CAUTION: SCARY WOLF. OR OILSLICK. ONE OF THOSE.
The vulture people are fucking in the city dump. I end up their guest, given putrid food
in their cold stinking house of rancid grease. I'll become a vulture too...
CAUTION: UGH!
War, monsters, plague and bombs are just thrills spicing up
this city rising from a tropical sea on an alien world...
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...
1: Dad picks up Bigfoot; he bites off my ear. 2: Dad abandons me in a canyon full of wolves. 3: The man who
killed my family hands me his ax. 4: Bees move into my pillow. 5: A marionette with razor-nails lures me close...
CAUTION: OUCH