A small, clear, simple precognitive dream... and its un-small, un-clear, un-simple cause...
PATIENT: I dreamt of a dangerous cat and a mixture of cream and booze called 'appealing nausea'...
THERAPIST: I heard a lecture on feeding alcohol to cats til they choose milk laced with booze...
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
Are dreams really so ephemeral? Lewis Carroll, who built the Alice books from dream-shards, wasn't so sure...
DAY: Friends described JW Dunne's experiments with time. I decide to look for dream elements from the future.
DREAM: I meet Oscar Wilde & other writers I dislike. A nonsense word like TELPOE or PELTOE appears...
DAY: A letter arrives full of anagrams (based on my poetry) about Oscar Wilde & other writers I dislike...
I dream I'm reading an amazing comic about a bright red geometric dog named Question,
floating through surreal landscapes. I'm envious--until I wake in relief that it's just a dream!
DREAM: I write a book involving spies and Lord Snow, but give him a cover name: Artie Shaw.
TWO WEEKS LATER: My wife & I go on the Tonight Show; unexpectedly, Artie Shaw shows up!
I tell him the dream. He turns pale, saying "No one knows this--I wrote a book under the name..."
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
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"...
I finally admit who I am, and the truth is bitter...
CAUTION: GENDER DYSPHORIA, MENTION OF COPROPHAGY, POSSIBLE SITCOM SPOILER
I'm in bed with a witch and a piano who's come alive and wants to try sex with us. But I worry a stranger named
Linda will break in. I wake, write the dream--and a stranger breaks into our house seeking her son! Her name's...
CAUTION: BIZARRE THREESOME, BIZARRE PRECOGNITION
Traders were vanishing. Newly installed Viceroy Zhu fasted, focused, and dreamt
the gods sent him a riddling poem. Each line suggested one word--together, they...
CAUTION: BRUTAL ORGANIZED CRIME
DREAM 1: My date Lana changes to my housemate Alder to my dead friend Beryl, who talks of pastlife trauma...
DREAM 2: Sexy deer-girls and ice dancers get me and my sister hot, but a ghost disrupts impending incest...
TWO DAYS LATER: I see Boys Don't Cry--settings, situations, characters & even names from my dream!
CAUTION: DEER BREASTS, NEAR-INCEST, FILM ON TRANNYCIDE
I DREAM: I'm at the scene of a fatal car crash. They thought it was Johnny Carson, but it's his brother Dick.
I WAKE: On the news: Johnny Carson's son Dick died in a car crash. The scene looks like my dream...
CAUTION: WILL TROUBLE E.S.P. SKEPTICS
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...
An identity earthquake that just wouldn't stop. I transform half a dozen times, and so does everyone else...
I fall for a circus girl. Her brother is jealous, so all the dwarves show up with guns...
CAUTION: INCEST ISSUES
My skateboard-riding mermaid girlfriend and I bind ourselves together by the magical power of names...
I sought a dream of Helpers. But rather than give me gifts, they gave me a daunting challenge...
The crane toppled and fell onto the riverbank. I saw the number, but not if the operator got free...
A spinoff band sues the original group for playing their own songs and using their own name...
Holding a luminous crystal sword, I enter a crypt where a king lies--ill, not dead.
An old woman wants to punish him, but as he stirs, I sheathe my sword...
Troutmet the moon-pigeon, Burtra the blackbird, a talking acacia,
my dead father and my dead gardener all give me afterlife-advice...
I become a werewolf and climb into a strange attic. I find a grave marker for
an old friend--but her death date is two years in the future...
Four teens dream their moms are monsters: Patricia sees hers as a demonic doll, Fiona finds
her mom's a wolf, Lenore's is a grinning vampire, and Helen's is a bossy, punitive octopus...
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...
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...
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?
CAFTAN: My ultra-conservative brother wears a caftan. No way!
I woke amused. But later that day, he gave me a Christmas present...
DICKENS: A voice rants "I love Dickens! It has to be Dickens!"
Next evening on Night Gallery, Agnes Moorehead begs for...
Sex in a meadow? A protest march distracts us. But a friend warns me of a disease, Coitus Distractus...
CAUTION: (DISTRACTED) SEX
I dream of a future where blondes are a too-cute endangered species. How can they survive? Like this...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Wayan dreams of petting an adorable cat-dog. The same night...
Cory dreams of meeting an adorable dog-cat. Later that day...
At the beach, Cory meets a woman with a dog named... Oh. You guessed.
Lured to a parallel, feudal world by a marriage-vow, I'm trapped in my double's arrogant, twisted mind...
Ebon Ebon Thalud, a woman blended with darkness, tries to gouge out my right eye. I wake screaming. My right eyelid...
I asked my dreams to show me my Shadow--what I deny. It showed me at least FIVE! And in every
time-branch, a runaway truck crushed me--the Truck of Ideology. Not that I seemed able to avoid it...
CAUTION: RECURRING DEATHS
In the middle of Nowhere Desert, I meet a telepathic unicorn who's stuck with a false safety-tag...
A pig led me off my path to meet a lady. I told her my true name, and felt something shift...
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'm a delicate little ermine-chinchilla whose best friends are all sewer rats.
They push their food and drink on me, and I nibble to be polite...
1: I'm starving in a lush valley; a cult claims all the food, the water, even the air.
2: I'm drowning in a cage but find a corner with water I can breathe--just barely.
3: I'm a merman with a wise friend who hints I need to leave those who starve & drown me...
CAUTION: DOMESTIC BATTERING (OFFSTAGE)
In the great race up Everest, I become an e-snake, cross 3 eco-bubbles, beg a
wary deer-taur to splice my spine, help Ariane my childhood crush, and solve
the Dream Equations. Climbing Everest takes not strength but... trust?
The flock of cranes called to the boy but he could not hear what they were telling him...
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!
DREAM: I hike up my Career Path into the hills. On a snowfield,
a bird and a fox create the eye of God, who banishes all evil!
NEXT DAY: I read a novel full of images out of the dream...
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
After an article suggests we roam the multiverse in sleep, I dream of three strange names. Awake, I google them...
I grope for the name of an island. I dream I crash a car on a bridge; it hangs with one wheel over. I wake & recall a friend who moved to Canada.
Breakfast. That island's on the front page. Inside's a photo of that hanging car. A letter comes--the first from my Canadian friend in years.
Each might be coincidence, but what do we call it when coincidence goes on and on?
I read Stephen Hawking, and dream I'm in the Quantum Desert, full of bridges, holes & loops--
like the microstructure of spacetime. But it's not counter-intuitive at all--it's HOME!
I'm Mary Ann on Gilligan's Island. But the theme song repeats endlessly--not the later version with
my name, but the early one dismissing me and the Professor as and the rest. I wake up screaming...
She dreamed she'd written a wise and beautiful poem. Half asleep she scribbled it down. Awake, she found...
CAUTION: HOGGEREL
A student of Elsie Sechrist reports a dream in which Bob Hope came jumping
down the street on a pogo stick, expressing the dreamer's feeling that...
A telepathic unicorn-lion says my true name is Wayan. And my true species? I'm like him!
I wake, change my name to fit the dream, move to a new city. Near my new house,
my dream-name is scratched into the concrete sidewalk...
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...
I learn my book A Void, supposedly written without the letter E, has lots of them--
crawling with errors. But at least I can spy on the neighbors...
Soil turns to air for me; I float in the dark between tree roots
and stones, thinking "If only I could remember my name"...
My friend put an ad on her gown, so I try one on our house. I have big ideas for more, but a pickpocket...
A bewildering dream of a boy's borrowed bath, absconding renters' furniture and fly-eating turns real a few weeks later...
AL repeatedly drew a bizarre, recurring dream-guide named Kolchec; years later he met
SARA, who'd painted her dream-guide, a distinctive spook named--oh, take a guess...
CAUTION: WILL DISTURB ESP SKEPTICS
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...
Li Bai's mother dreams of Venus shining, and names her unborn son Bai, 'white'. She dreams he'll ride a
red dragon, too: greatness, but what kind? Li Bai when young dreams the answer: his brushpen flowers!
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 realized I was dreaming, and flew. My friends were skeptical and held me down a while, but
soon I had them flying too. At a party in Valhalla, I made love with a mer-angel named Ealswa...
I'm in a loving animal dance troupe, but wake to find I'm alone.
For consolation, I eat at The Terrace, and meet stars. Not film stars...
A mob of kids chases me chanting "Lyin' Wayan!" I get dizzy and fall off a bridge... THEN comes trouble!
CAUTION: FATAL FALL
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...
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.
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 comics industry degenerates into civil war. We peddle all night to avoid the Marvel...
A TV crew invades the house, setting up for a special. I didn't expect to see a president on the work crew...
My home's a huge maze. Find a clinic and a cafe. Cops appear, & claim I'm a woman named Mem Loi
& confiscate weird masks off our walls. Ugly masks, so who cares? Wait, one looks like a covid virus...
CAUTION: DREAMER'S A DOORMAT
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...
Joyce, in Paris, dreamed he was attacked by three madmen, Minos, Eaque and Rhadamanthe. Three weeks later,
a madman mailed explosive packages around Paris--signed Minos, Eaque and Rhadamanthe, the Judges of Hell...
Strange oaths are proposed for the first expedition to the Uranian moon Miranda...
I dream I meet a lady in red named Miss Napier. I know no such person. Senseless! Next evening,
after I read onstage, friends enter my dresssing room to introduce me to the lady in red--Miss...
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...
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.
A woman with two teenagers breaks in and says she's my ex-wife and they're my kids.
I'm in my twenties; I CAN'T have teenage kids. And I have no ex-wife! Just my girlfriend Cassandra.
Forty years later it all makes sense. It's not about me then, but John now...
CAUTION: ADULT THEMES--TRULY STUPID ADULT THEMES. E.S.P., TOO.
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
A voice calls to me by name--but not the name I now bear, evoking memories of another life...
Giant worms put me on trial for wearing a nameless hat, but I like their punishment so I taunt the judge...
In a psychodrama scene, I try to stop a furious guy from hitting an exhibitionist girl. But I'm bleeding...
At our commune's new house, pandemonium breaks out when
our matriarch meets a spook. Can we live together in peace?
DREAM: a man tries to break into my house. I call for help; the operator says "Oh, that's Nisrock."
DAYS LATER: I open a book on the unconscious. It says Nisrock was a Babylonian god of dreams...
CAUTION: BAD MYTHOGRAPHY
I dream my theatre friends are particles dancing inside an atomic nucleus--
particles that reveal their character, motivations and power. And I'm one too...
I meet the original Adam. He complains Eve neglects him, but he hopes to meet one of his cleverer descendants...
On the street called Old And In The Way, I meet a psychic I crushed on as a kid,
and then, in a hearth, fight the tentacled alien who's been stalking me...
I'm in my papa's waiting room. I beg him to take a break from his patients now that he's dead, and walk with me...
We're stuck in an empty town whose streetnames are all emotions. And they change.
Rage becomes Giggle. Tedium, Terror! Devious town...
Thrice I saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer shot in the House of Commons. I nearly went to London...
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
I sat thinking "Now that boy will jump the fence"--and he did; "that boy will chase the dog"--and he did...
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
Our son woke in the night crying "Poor Mrs Timms; poor Mrs Timms!" We knew no
such woman, but it turned out she lived nearby. That day, her son had died in France...
CAUTION: IMPLIES WE'RE TRAINED OUT OF A 6TH SENSE
First I try to break the sound barrier like my girlfriend. Nope!
Then I fly slowly to her apartment. Nothing flashy, but I make it.
Last, I zoom back to ancient China, where I find a candle-lit shrine dedicated to... me?
DREAM: I see the leaves outside turning from red to green, not green-to-red as usual in fall.
AWAKE: I've been dating two boys called Red and Green. Guess my dreams have chosen...
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
After a living Barbie doll dies while campaigning for niceness, I find myself invoking her
to shock people into decent behavior: "In the Name of Saint Barbie!"...
CAUTION: BARBIE, UNICORNS, IMPLICIT TRUMP CRITIQUE
DAY: Rowland needed papers for a legal case, but couldn't find where his father had stashed them.
DREAM: his long-dead dad told R.J. a lawyer R.J. he'd never heard of had them, 'but the man may need
some reminding', and gave details of Portuguese gold and a drinking bout. Next day, it worked. But how?
CAUTION: GHOST? E.S.P.?
I wake up dreamnesic but singing a nonsense line about "samphires"--whatever
they are. Half an hour later, I encounter the word for the first time in 45 years...
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
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
DREAM: chased by a sniper, I trick him into blowing himself up. Then, in the Watchtower,
I know every name & address in Shropshire, but must hide them till all the snipers are caught...
NEXT DAY: at work I run across a book with every name and address in 17th-century Shropshire...
CAUTION: FATAL EXPLOSION
Soon after I was given the name Spotted Fawn, I dreamed I was one,
fleeing faceless hunters under the full moon. There's history in this...
Divers made of ice win the Traffic-Leaping Olympics. But
I think they cheated! I seek my friend the Sphinx...
A man in a blue coat on a white horse delivered papers from a nearby wrecked ship, signed Stephenson and...
A stone bridge, at the crossing of a road and a river. A signal sign indicates the name of the place: (YOU)...
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...
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...
DREAM: a stranger tells me "The Teacher" won the Handicap. AWAKE: At the track I meet the man in my dream! He
says The Teacher is now called Aldrich. But Aldrich's owner discourages me. A friend trusts my dream & wins £1,000...
I DREAM I'm a kid again, in detention after school. The teacher eyeing me is familiar, but... what's her name?
I WAKE and go to art group. One member says "I visited my retired sister. She talked of you. She taught you!" It's...
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
I misname my feelings: depressed for sad, paranoid for wary, phobic for scared. It has consequences...
I dreamt again of that mountain east of Concord where no hill exists. I ascended that long
rocky ridge where wild beasts haunted, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity...
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
I ask how my relationship with Scott was going. That night he asks me to sail on the Titanic. I say
"That ship will sink!" but he won't listen. I see a skeleton-baby and know I have even more to lose...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE, UNFIT DAD, ABORTION
In an idle moment I held a pencil and asked the air who'd win the Derby.
'Trigo' meant nothing to me, but was listed at 32 to 1, so...
The innkeeper insisted I try a strange-looking liqueur, a house specialty called "Tuccotine"...
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...
Two photographic developing tanks disappear. I assumed theft
until I dreamt they were in a room I'd never seen, in locker FJA 39...
DREAM: I'm a Soviet Potato Fest. Reds, grannies, food. A girl's told a life-and-death lie about a canine...
NEXT DAY: I read a version of Red Riding Hood, and the dream's weird elements suddenly make sense.
CAUTION: SOVIET CLICHÉS, E.S.P. SPECULATION
VAUGHAN'S DREAM: I visit Kurt Vonnegut. Kids all over. He's going on a trip soon. Mentions of 'Jerome' and an island...
VONNEGUT REPLIES: "That night, childrens' author Jerome B visited; we discussed my upcoming trip to England..."
I'm the referee, or 'Vartena', of a violent high-school
game of waterpolo. A friend nearly drowns! Next day...
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...
My friend's ignorant of our local Congressional race. I loathe Pombo
and like his rival McNerney, but can't pronounce his name right...
At ten, I fasted a long tedious time. I dreamed a bird offered me showy gifts, but I kept to my grandmother's advice: never take the
first offer. At last a big, strange bird from the north, a white loon, offered me long life and health; that I accepted! So now I'm called...
A dreamer I know dreamt she was fired by a Mr Bleeden. Baffled her, but made shocking sense to me! My dad...
DAY: I work way too much--art projects plus helping a friend get her lost data back...
DREAM: A gun nut threatens me, so I claim I bent his gun. Really I just bent spacetime.
He flees atop his toy car, letting it steer--it's smarter than he is. That car winks at me...
I wake up praying for love--and then realize my wish is contradictory, and revise it to...
I live in four consecutive bodies: I'm a Bose-Einstein condensate, a cloud of particles moving as one--
unless overheated. No, I'm Witch's Butter, a mob of amoeboid cells who unify into a quasi-slug--temporarily.
No, I'm a person, but soft and yellow as Witch's Butter. No, I'm firming up, but still entangled...