I flew over a forest. I noted the trees were all the same, and told myself to remember this...
DREAM: The future. A party. A woman spills her drink on my white pants. Off to Faerie, where fruit trees are mean...
NEXT DAY: I do not wear white pants to Sally's party. So? A woman spills her drink on Sally's white pants...
DAY AFTER: I open a book on musicals & see a shot from The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy baiting an angry fruit tree...
CAUTION: PREDICTIVE
The joyful animal-angel I feel myself to be in my happiest dreams.
My loud, spiky, tailed angel of change and potential, and
my calm, skeptical devil of gradualism--a star-nosed mole...
I was anorexic for years; I only mastered it when I saw it was a hunger for the spirit world...
On an alien world I meet a judge from the newly discovered
galaxy of Antlia, and learn distance can lend objectivity...
I'm a hobbit in Silicon Valley, stalking Ring-wraiths down El Camino. But one of them's stalking me...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, HYPNOTIC GASLIGHTING
A burglar-girl and I spy on the neighbors together and we learn a weird Zen lesson on commitment...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
We're orphans learning to fly by night, when others can't see and define us...
There was a tall man wearing a mask standing at the door.
At least I think it was a mask...
Night. Home alone. A huge bear breaks in! To defend myself, I have
a chainsaw. Curiously, an electric not a gas-powered chainsaw...
I’ll win a house if I can survive a night in the Haunted Pavilion! But it turns out I’ve been here before--before I was born...
CAUTION: GHOST ORGY
George Bush leads a hill-tribe raid against the hill-tribe led by Osama bin Laden... and I'm stuck between...
CAUTION: ANTI-HEROES, POLITICAL PREDICTION
After days sick, I open myself to unseen spirits and let a black wavefront
go through me--and the healing begins. But what did I let in?
CAUTION: MYSTICISM & FETISHISM DON'T MIX
Inspired by Lynda Barry, I fill a black-paged book with 20 improv paintings.
They grow into a tour of my dreamwork led my anima Silky, a nightmare...
A sexy encounter with two robotic girls hopping a night train outside Portland...
CAUTION: THREESOME
Touring Bretagne, I lodged in a nunnery. At 1 AM I saw by moonlight an old woman at my table.
I later learned that old woman died at 1 AM that night; for many years, my room had been hers...
That night: I dream two teenage girls behind me mockingly croon the Girl Scout or Campfire Girls theme song...
Next evening: the two teens next door invite friends over to smoke, snicker and sing "Join the Campfire Girls"...
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER ESP SKEPTICS
DREAM: Outage! I bike through dark streets. One bay window glows--room lit by a glowing woman reflected in many mirrors...
NEXT EVE: Outage! I bike home through dark streets. One bay window glows--room lit by candles reflected in many mirrors...
CAUTION: NUDITY; APPARENT E.S.P.
In the woods outside a modern art museum, I'm being stalked by Giacometti's huge skeletal cat...
I'm a centaur. I never left Eden. I'm still in the Garden. You are too, every night, in dreams...
CAUTION: BREASTS
I'm walking through Harvard Square late at night. Buildings are lit up festively, but
it's pretty deserted. I notice creatures scampering around up on the roofs....
I climb down a cliff before night strands me; but in town, risky adolescent games cause a crash...
Night. Rain. A hansom cab. The horse slips on the wet pavement, toppling the cab with my husband inside.
I woke sure it happened. Next morning a postman tried to tell me of the crash, but I told him...
I've turned into my sister; and she's turned into me. We try sex. A wolf lopes by and joins us.
The energy from our orgy lifts us into space. Moons planets stars swim by as we float and fuck...
CAUTION: CARTOON ORGY IN SPACE
Night. Rider and mount gallop in a ring, leaving a luminous spiral wake of glowing
flowers. Power builds, but when the spiral gate opens, where will it lead?
A quiet, mysterious dream image that turned out to refer to the future, not the past...
Round the ring of twelve worlds and their twelve gods, seeking one god who's giving me grief...
4 AM. A train wakes us all. We watch it pass, thinking of lost friends. And then I wake again to find...
I go back 3000 years to the Judgment of Paris, then at Babylon's height see King Nebuchadnezzar,
then the doomed lovers Antony & Cleopatra, then Triton and the Nereids celebrating a divine birth...
CAUTION: DENSE CLASSICAL REFERENCES
I find my lover sharing our secret joke with another. But I already knew
I'd lost her! Why'd my dream salt the wound?
A mysterious night-encounter with a shapeshifting spiritwoman as elusive as Roethke’s poetry...
A woman rides draped over a giant rabbit
who somersaults through the night sky...
A high place at night. The lights of a great city below. I step off into the air, and dance...
The goddess of Night is in love with me, but I'm married, and tired, and just full of excuses...
I'm in Hell. No fire, no guilt. Just endless forests under the moon. My mother paints
endlessly but never gets it right. A sunny day, but I can't go out to play. Cut off...
CAUTION: DEPRESSION
"But what is wrong with my friends' faces? Why have they changed that way to wood?"
Terse dreamlets quietly catch World War I's effect. Faith died in the trenches...
Night. Heads shaved, in loose-fitting gray robes, the young men swing from eave to eave. Two lose their grips.
Hard fall. Blood. Assistants call ambulances. Others swing on, house to house, before dawn...
Night thoughts. Are they eggs? Dreams? Worlds? Phases of the moon?
CAUTION: NEGATIVE BREASTS
I meet a man who's lived centuries on an all-cannibal diet. He has ethics, though: he sticks to roadkill! Except...
CAUTION: EEEUUGH!
Night, downtown. A unicorn in tears, chained to her... barker? owner? pimp?
"Just $300" he yells. But for what? Magic? Sex? Healing?
CAUTION: PROSTITUTION? SLAVERY? GIG ECONOMY?
One patch of the night sky had a huge number of stars compared to the rest; there was no atmosphere in that portion of the sky...
I met a colorblind artist with an amazing grayscale sense. He inspire me to
draw a huge eye full of abstract shapes in gray, trying to see his way...
WAYAN: I wake deep in the night. From the black square of a curtainless window, eyes are peering in at me...
MARK: I wake to find a black square trapdoor in my bedroom ceiling. From the dark above, eyes peer in at me...
The dreamer overflows from her egg, spills out to become a waterfall, a stampede of horses...
A bug with a horse-skull face reappears all through this nightmare of betrayal. I only know I feared it...
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 had to prepare the house for a party, but the basement was flooded. I thought I could
decorate it with some floating flowers anyway, but they kept dissolving or sinking...
I'm in Mexico. The mountain of the gods looms over Coyacan. Around it, silhouetted
on the rising moon, wheel terrifying griffinlike winged horses wearing capes...
A recurring dream of a fourway marriage of animal people. I don't think it's symbolic, but predictive...
CAUTION: FURRY SEX
Long ago I saw a marvelous Hiroshige print of a fox convocation, lit by moon and foxfires...
CAUTION: LESBIAN SPOOKS
The white horse, Earth, ambles on between the stars, and then unfolds into a swan...
Every full moon, kidnappers jump me. Sometimes I escape, but when they succeed, they torture me till
the moon wanes. They're careful to leave no physical scars...
My sister Althea meditates. Her aura gets so quiet that
I mistake her for furniture! I'm that blind to the physical...
CAUTION: ABOUT AURAS
How's it feel to be an anima off the job? Is it lonely, when no one even believes you're a real person?
WAYAN: I dream a transparent ghost steals my sister Miriel's white VW bug...
MIRIEL: I dream about a ghost and my old white VW bug that was stolen...
CAUTION: E.S.P. CLAIM
Dream: a woman wants to drive my old hippie bus. But a tire's missing! She pushes. I don't think it's safe...
Next evening: my housemate wants to drive my old hippie bus. She pushes, but I don't think it's safe...
My house is a bar that never closes. You know what a gay bar is. Well, we're the opposite: a....
CAUTION: BAD VIBES
We're children seeking gold in a fairy wood. We meet some elf-kids,
chase them off, and dig where they played. Then their parents show up...
CAUTION: INTERSPECIES BULLYING
Nightwalkers lured our empath away. We come to their castle to rescue her.
But she's pregnant with magic. Will she come or stay?
I want to meet my friends' spiritual teacher, but he cowers, runs from me in horror.
I chase him yelling "BOO!" Why am I acting as his nightmare? I don't know...
Night. Broken metal sculptures, a welder too horny to weld safely, and a steel panther longing to be whole and loved...
CAUTION: KINKY SCULPTUROPHILIA
Every good party leaves a corpse or two. Cleaning up, I behead this one and drag it across the street to the
empty lot where we leave them. But its throat forms a toothless mouth and starts biting--well, gumming me...
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...
Surely the dinosaurs were as vocal as their little cousins, the birds.
But bass to the birds' soprano! So when dinos sang to the moon...
A disowned heiress and I sneak onto the family estate, but they'll go pretty far to hide their skeletons...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
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...
A man in a castle plots against his enemies, while his rebel-daughter meets her lover outside...
I love a girl who wants to settle in a radioactive jungle, a scar from an ancient war. Stay or go?
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...
Deep in Jupiter's atmosphere it's dark as a moonlit night, but warm; we sail a
world-sea. And mutiny against our commanders! Clouds clear to a red dawn...
CAUTION: RED POLITICS, GREEN NUDITY
Jung's visions of dragons evolve from fiery destroyers
to thieves who can be forced to give up treasure
to peacful, luminous guardians of the sacred...
The will named a strange executor: a kangaroo. Turns out there's some logic to it:
executors need burglar-skills, and few quadrupeds can climb in bedroom windows...
The moment I find the Key, I'm possessed! I wake to find it's just a nightmare. Only who's broken into my house?...
CAUTION: DEMONIC POSSESSION & EVERYDAY PSYCHOPATHS
In a Japanese house I met a charming red-headed girl and had this
weird urge to scratch her pointed ears. Oh! She's a kitsune!...
In a general store on a High Plains rez, I find two surreal collaged postcards. If only
this were a dream they'd qualify for the World Dream Bank, but sadly, it isn't. Right?
CAUTION: STUPID, STUPID CONSCIOUS!
In the dark, a dragonlike god of fire stretched out
one claw to courteously light my own small torch...
Little Nemo's bed gets restless and takes him for a wild ride through town and up onto roofs...
In dark, grimy, rainy Liverpool, a friend shows me a park with an islet
in a pond, where a great magnolia tree shines--an oasis of light...
A glowworm and nightwatch beetle help out a lost crying ant-woman. It's not always a bug-eat-bug world...
A tribute to Hiroshige's moonlit landscape prints of the lonely roads of old Japan...
My lover's face is shadowed and we are never alone together. Things slip from film-noir to open nightmare when...
CAUTION: SEX, DEATH, GUILT
Day Me curls up and Night Me unfolds: a girl with dark moth-wings, not angel-white but camouflaged...
The Lynx, my dream-god,
comes for me at last...
Wayan makes love to Martha's double, then sees her soul watching from the shadows...
Barbara can't reach Wayan to say farewell...
Martha falls off a mountain and decides to let herself die, just to see what happens...
CAUTION: SEX, ABUSE ISSUES
The comics industry degenerates into civil war. We peddle all night to avoid the Marvel...
A park in San Francisco has melted into a bizarre mutation-zone. Its guardian is a lonely elf-woman...
CAUTION: ELF NUDITY
Slightly based on a print in our bathroom when I was growing up--Picasso or Mary Cassatt?
Everyone has a personal moon. At first, mine disappointed me, till a bard dumped his trash on it, and...
I miss all sorts of cues I'm dreaming, but I ignore my conviction I'm awake and try to fly anyway...
A sea-scape somewhat in the style of Edvard Munch: midnight-sun madness with a hint of suicide...
I lie on the bottom of the pool. The life guard lifts me in his strong arms. We flirt till my legs fuse, ready to go deep;
but he says "It's only a part-time job" and turns away. In day, the highschool pool lies empty, widowed of water...
The full moon rises: I become Weregirl, do the Moondance, and gnaw open the lock on my heart...
CAUTION: MOONING
My sister Miriel asks me to ask my dreams if it's safe for her to get cataracts removed.
I find myself in her body, biking at night--near-blind. Surgery has risks, but this is riskier!
Like a lot of playful beasts, I like a friendly nip in the evening...
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
Inspired by Shaun Tan, I fill a black-paged photo album with 36 improv paintings.
They become a tour of my dreamworld, led by my anima Silky, a literal nightmare...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, WEIRD DREAM IDEAS
I rise in animal form, and fly to a world as coherent as this one, guided by a greenhaired girl...
CAUTION: NUDITY
The first two dragons numb my pain. I demand it back, and soon regret my haste.
But the third dragon I seduce, for I'm a dragon now...
As I bike home at night, strange doings--a rat is sacrificed; gemstones delivered;
an astronaut shows glowing alien objects; a second rat becomes a... firefighter?
I'm trying to get a moontan when my mom appears.
My astral body starts orbiting her like a moon. Uh-oh...
I DREAM I'm in the mansion of my favorite film producer, Otto Preminger. Then I learn it's my home!
I WAKE realizing I'm the producer of my dreams--not some impersonal, instinctive Unconscious...
We're spirits over a volcanic fountain of energy. And some of us prepare to ride the current up to...
CAUTION: ASSUMES MYSTICAL LITERACY
A giant luminous guardian owl baffles and intimidates me
but after seeing a play next evening, it makes more sense...
My dreams mix sex with warmth, grief, even silliness, but what's with the owls? Bewildering...
CAUTION: WEIRD ORGY
One night I meet a robot and an alien staring in a shop window at a photo of a Gothic chapel.
They're shocked--it's a Galactic legend, the Palace of Good Policy. Pure myth! Or is it?
A man I loved goes into the Jungian depths, but when his anima appears in the mirror-pool, his nerve fails...
I often dream I'm lost in a strange city, wandering the unfamiliar streets
in search of something unknown, and possibly unknowable...
I wish I could be as body-free as my neighbor Jenna, hiking nude under the full moon...
Smallpox is extinct. No need to worry. But the pocked face of the rising moon reminds me
malice, madness, incompetence and black-market greed, our four horsemen, aren't extinct...
CAUTION: ODE TO SMALLPOX, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT?
My sister hears a prowler. I go out blind in the dark, and learn she's right. But what a strange intruder!
We drive into a zone of perpetual night to see Sweet Melinda, but veins of light burst
across the landscape, and our time-path splits! I'm living two lives at once...
In one night Descartes had three dreams convincing him he had to change the course of his life...
A large airship crashed onto a hilltop and burst into flame, silhouetting people who tried to escape, but...
A precognitive dream about levitating snake girls, raccoons, and lunar eclipses.
CAUTION: MY SNAKE BREASTS
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?
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
A mad scientist sneaks me into a museum that holds the Ring of Power I made at 14. I put it on, and
slip into the spirit world--as a dragon! An ice-drake sent by Sauron comes to duel me for my Ring...
Night. A jungle full of prowling lions and leopards. So naturally, I get up on a rock and roar back...
As Roger, I can't get enough of Tina, though I know she lies and steals. After she vanishes with
my leather jacket, I hunt for her. Spot her shoplifting, and I want to catch her, but let go at last...
Camping in strange mountains (Australia?), I can't sleep. So I nightwalk, and find I'm changing...
A friend nags me to be lookout as he steals a cult's papers. I know it'll end in murder, but foresight paralyzes me!
In a videogame that keeps freezing unplayably, I find a button calling up a secret screen of second chances...
I'm lost in a grim basement, but two kids show me a cobwebbed glass door you can walk through like air...
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
WAYAN: I'm a cat climbing on sea-cliffs. Fear I'll fall. Run into Silky, an archer firing
a line across to an islet. Now the Deer People can build their gossamer bridge...
LIZ: I was hiking along a trail atop sea-cliffs. But I feared I'd fall...
An astral travel advisory. You'll fly better, if (before you leave your body) you...
One night I meet a giant talking skunk and its pup, who asks how to walk to Thailand...
I dream I'm an insomniac trapped in a flat full of snoring writers and reporters. Wait a minute...
Millay, suffering from nightmares, decides to speak from Nightmare's point of view...
The lights go out, the world's ending. Roz tries to make party snacks and keep folks calm. At last
she notices lights out the window. Other buildings seem fine. Is it really the Apocalypse? Or...
Jung walked against stiff wind and fog, sheltering a tiny light, generating a huge eerie shadow--his other self!
He concluded this was his life-task--to nurture his spark of awareness & rationality in the dark. But...
In hindsight his dream models four key Jungian ideas: Self, Ego, Shadow and Unconscious--at age 18!
CAUTION: REJECTS JUNG'S OWN DREAM INTERPRETATION!
I find the sketch-journal of a beautiful winged sphinx who left her mythic isle
to explore a great city of crazy bipeds, called San Francisco...
CAUTION: SPHINX SEX, SPHINX ATTITUDE
Night. I'm scared of the men in the park--till I see they're all gay. I dance,
and as darkness flares to dawn, remember how to fly--regain my falcon-wings...
In a dark classroom, my shrink was demonstrating atom-splitting
with a glowing ping pong ball. I was glad I wasn't in that class...
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...
By a midnight lake, I comfort an abused girl in the mud. But two figures with long knives loom...
My daughter got a tattoo that spread and became blue feathers growing from her arms. Wings start to bud...
My friend Stanley is a social icebreaker: blundering in where I'm too shy, and
too thick-skinned to worry much. He is what he is. So why am I mad at him?
I squabble with my body so much! But now & then, in orgasm, we dissolve into stars and become...
CAUTION: SEX POETRY
Tracking two cats at night, I watch amazed as they dive in and swim gracefully across a swimming pool...
Dusk. A plain. A troop of swordsmen approach me, draw their weapons...
and toss their spinning, shining swords up to the stars...
A bounty hunter stalks me through a jungle, but lucidity turns a potential nightmare to joy...
Giving up a wall of material treasure for the moonlit path...
The card confirming those silly fears are true. The nightmare is real. You're in trouble...
Some folks are dogs, bullying underlings, fawning on superiors. But when the Wizard's a Humbug...
Hokule'a, the "Star of Gladness", guided Polynesians across thousands of miles of ocean...
I dream I'm giving a friend a Tarot reading, and the card she picks for herself is one I've never seen:
A couple slips in and out of sleep, dreams, one another's bodies and dreamworlds, trying to connect...
CAUTION: FREUDIAN SYMBOLISM, LITERATE WRITING
The Well of Emotion, guarded by the Black Unicorn, the shadow of all the feelings you deny...
Kaleidoscopic constellations? No thanks! A nudist town in Italy? Ugh.
Ah, but singing vaudeville in a monk's robe & roller skates...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
The animal goddess of peace, stubbornly raising her sign, my sign, as you all slide into your nice holy war...
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?
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've never done railway work, but here I am signaling a train to approach a station at dawn. A second train hits it head-on...
CAUTION: EIGHT DEATHS
The cosmic egg nests in the branches of the tree of life, glowing with
Muspel-fire. But the tree must periodically burn to regenerate life...
We were inseparable: the tiger, the fox, and the wolf.
Together our magic lit up the darkness around us, until...
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...
A night-fiend strove to open the door I held shut between us--
until I realized I too was terrible, and opened it to find a great...
CAUTION: THE DREADED PROSE OF HENRY JAMES
A tribute to Hokusai's sketches. A crane and a fairy were out drinking, and now can't fly home...
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...
Night. A London suburb. A UFO big as a city block looms over us. It's seen all over South England. Yet we go blank--
forget! Though not quite--for years after, Steve has recurring dreams. When he tells me one, I recall the same event...
CAUTION: INTENSE UFO EXPERIENCE
Yellow fireflies circling round the horn of a reclining red unicorn, in the evening...
After a visit from our landlady's angry, crazy son
I dream hungry velociraptors invade our house...
A friend explained she planned to be a human viewfinder, bendng into
an arch for a male spirit to dive through. I didn't want to risk it...
Robot wolves with videocamera eyes prowl our block, freezing me
in their headlight glare. Why do I think one's my ex-girlfriend?
The world needs Zen cards, to balance out the Tarot.
So here's my Zen pack--all one of them. One too many.
I dreamt I could clearly see the sun's corona, like a lion-mane of fire. But the
corona dwindled; then the very sun dimmed, shrank, and went out. I thought...
CAUTION: POLITICAL?
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
I'm a cowgirl in Nevada circa 1900. In the canyon below Haunted Mansion,
I meet a broccoli-green lizard girl. Naturally I help a lady in distress...
CAUTION: QUEER-POSITIVE
My sister's fiancé Billy died a year ago. I didn't realize how deep the grief ran till I dreamed...
A huge wolfhound tore past me. My blood froze. The Wild Hunt was carrying off a soul...
I'm lucid but paralyzed. A weird child spies on me; is she controlling me?
Then I'm having sex--but if I come, I'll wake up! Then some thugs jump me.
I make sure they won't bother me again, but... is everyone in this dream out to distract me?
CAUTION: SEX, MUGGER-STOMPING
I slay the beautiful dragon attacking us, despite my regret.
And then, as I sleep, glowing eyes advance on our keep AGAIN...
Night. The Nile; the Pyramids on one bank; minarets and domes on the other.
But if the dream's comparing antiquity to modernity... which does it condemn?
Drew all night in a trance and only learned at dawn what this flirting otter and wolf were trying to tell me...
CAUTION: NUDITY AND SEXUAL THEME
I often dream of words forming on a page as their images dance around me. Here's an example...
You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river
with darkness coming over / and salt has lost its savor...
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...
Wading a river at night, I fall in. I'm drowning! But my friend Edward pulls
me out. "But Eddie, you're dead!" "No" he says. "You'll grow out of that!"...