After watching the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, with their rape accusations,
I dream of a reckless driver named Kevin who runs down a skateboarder and blames everyone else...
CAUTION: KAVANAUGH SUPPORTERS WON'T LIKE THIS
A courtroom hostage-drama where I'm forced to commit... tracheotomy! And then the Gulf War begins...
CAUTION: CARTOON VIOLENCE
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
I was one of just three to survive a roller coaster crash. I dreamed of a playful, laughing girl who drove off a cliff.
Dead, she lay on a bier in a surreal cemetery. But she woke and looked at photos of her old self with curiosity...
Alien abductions upset us--being studied, treated like animals. But isn't that how we treat other species--
study, exploit, ignore their feelings? That night, I dream one dog on a leash paralyzes a civilization...
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
I'm Emily Dickinson reborn in 2100 as a breeder of hydroponic lilies, till my dad drafts me as
an Arctic energy-prospector, where I meet a ghost, a fiery Beast, a new me, and the girl of my dreams...
CAUTION: QUEER-POSITIVE, NUDE PROSPECTORS, GNOMIC DICKINSON QUOTES
I felt dread as I peered out my parents' window into the garden. My dad lay on the frosty grass, dead...
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
An idiot wizard lures car-sized spiders into town. I find a spellbook that repels them, but have to hide it
so my community college professors, Gandalf & Saruman, don't take it. For I'm no wizard, just a lizard...
CAUTION: HUGE SPIDERS, HUGE SELLOUTS
One of my first recorded dreams--how I foolishly turned away from Lobster Love...
CAUTION: CHITINOUS SEX
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
DREAM: a long green dog attacked Zhang from the south. He hid in his bedroom. He woke shaken but did not act.
SOON AFTER: General Gou Zhang (sounds like "Dog Long"), in a long green coat, attacked from the south...
I save our horses from a fire, but they run back in. Then it's
my family I must save from themselves. At last, it's my turn...
Elizabeth tried to tell her dream, but her husband didn't listen. When his dad didn't show up for dinner, it was too late...
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...
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...
Always ask permission to throw rocks at your date. No, not those big ones! Where's the nearest hospital?
CAUTION: SURREAL DATE ABUSE
My dentist (a Haitian Mafia leader) sends a message to my dad (also a Mafia don) by dental cruelty....
The Christian God vs Mahakala, Buddhist god of right anger! War in Middle Earth, as Pink Floyd sings...
Each time, I'm a young Elizabethan man in a grand, new-built country house. In the main room,
I find a man in black by the fire. He comes at me, and as he shoots me point-blank, I wake...
I'm just an ordinary guy, who beats his son so he'll grow faster, and sees tits on drinking fountains...
After finding marine geologists in my chocolate pudding, I'd rather be a Frenchman and insult my wife...
CAUTION: DECADENCE
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
On Old Mars, before it died, two rival families' teasing finally goes too far, despite the whale's warning...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
The comics industry degenerates into civil war. We peddle all night to avoid the Marvel...
A traveler dreams his friend's attacked, but he ignores it. Next he dreams his friend begs him to at least avenge him...
In a Mormon future, my baby climbs a tree and spontaneously disintegrates! I try repotting, but...
CAUTION: BAD PARENTING
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
My friend Mark does something I thought impossible: removes a snippet of my memory. Disastrous!
CAUTION: VIOLENCE... SORT OF
An ancient Mesopotamian city learned to make catapult-bombs of powdered
manure. But excessive stockpiles & bad housekeeping led to Armageddung...
CAUTION: BABEL-MYTH DEBASED
A priestess guarding a Thai temple in the forest has a strange problem:
her breasts rebel, escape and scurry round like hamsters
under her skin; they don't like that Buddhist restraint...
CAUTION: WARDROBE MALFUNCTION
God offers gifts to pilgrims, so my sister enters his door. Fierce light shoots out...
I'm a ghost dwarf in love with a Lady trapped in a magic Arabian castle. But our love is being used...
CAUTION: SEX, BETRAYAL, SACRILEGE
I'm Mattie, a pregnant girl on a Lewis and Clark expedition. I miscarry, and they tell me...
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...
I was an avian Mr Niceguy with sore knees, till I got some advice from my supposedly extinct big brother...
I'm back in the suburbs, but decades have passed. My mom's really old & blind.
Yet I insist she should drive the car, not me. She pulls out in front of a huge truck...
My mom confesses to a killing, says tearfully she had to do it--but her reasons make no sense. When I wake..
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!
I'm scheduled to fly the first antigravity ship to the moon--if I can just get to the pad on time...
ALYSE dreams Tim drives a motorcycle-book up a hill, but she doesn't LIKE riding so fast...
TIM dreams a wise woman tested him, but found him unqualified to play teacher to Alyse...
I meet my own mistrust: an angel who can't trust ME! So she turns me into a football-playing ant...
At last, I get shown in the museum! Sort of. Homeless people sell my art from carts in the lobby. Stolen!...
An actor-manager type is putting on Hamlet, and he offers me a role;
I'm breathless, my chance has come at last! He'd like me to play...
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.
MY DREAM: I was walking a hilly road, my uncle ahead, my stepdad behind; trying to keep them in sight. My mom appeared and I woke.
MY MOTHER'S: the same. She told me hers before I told her mine. She thought it meant my uncle would die first, then me, then...
CAUTION: APPARENT TELEPATHY, BUT MISINTERPRETED MEANING
I love a Naiad who's lost her God. Tragedy strikes us. I'm devastated till I meet the aliens who explain...
Natalius dreamed that angels whipped him for joining a heretic cult, and woke to find welts on his back...
Nebuchadnezzar dreams a voice from heaven commands a great tree be cut;
Daniel interprets this as a prediction the king will go mad for 7 years...
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...
DREAM: I'm in the White House. Nixon blows his nose on the curtains! I think "despite his crudity, he reached out to China."
DAY: my wife Ann has a cold--she's Nixon! The dream concedes she has private flaws, but she's pioneered dream research...
The world was ending. Volcanoes, floods. Refugees trudged by in the mud, carrying their belongings
on their backs. I think I better get dressed to go. But I can't find anything appropriate to wear...
Before I was born, I set up this life to learn loneliness, boredom and fear. Good move, soul! No vacations?
An orange tiger with wolf ears jumped on me. I was surprised but not scared, as if it were just a big dog.
The next day, shopping, my daughter thrust an orange wolf-eared hand-puppet in my face, jaws open...
My sister & I swim round a weirdly shrunken Pacific. Near Fiji, we blunder too close to the drain...
I was wrong. I didn't survive three assassins. It's been seven! Why'd I forget the others?
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...
DREAM: my bedroom clock's late by an hour. Must have been a power failure. I'll be late for that play...
AWAKE: my bedroom clock was right last evening, but now it's late by an hour. Outage! I'll be late for...
CAUTION: SUBLIMINAL OR E.S.P.?
Malaria nearly kills a talented young artist; he must retrain from scratch. Why? Well, he's not exactly himself...
Kate Wolf sings that ads are way dirtier than porn. But my memory slowly twists her message...
The poet e.e. cummings drew a book of astral fairytales with watercolors that felt a bit like my dreams...
I show an Ohio friend the latest California sport. But
we haven't quite worked out how to land just yet...
Under the surface of my comics panels, a tiny horde is having an orgy. I can't
publish this, it's too embarrassing! Wait a minute. That one is me...
CAUTION: MICRO-ORGY
My uncle mocks the racehorse he rides! Smears lipstick on this stallion, calls him a wimp... Why?
CAUTION: DREAM PUN, NUDE MARES
Now the Evil Empire's dead. We're all safe, safe at last. And all the bombs are gone... right?
An alien woman makes a mess of our economy, ecology, world--but insists she wants to be my friend...
I'm pulling a cart in the woods. At a bridge over a canyon, owls urge me to climb down into the misty abyss, but...
Three men torture my friend (or is he ME?) and try to keep me from intervening...
CAUTION: FAST-TALKING BULLIES
After lifeline and heartline, the palm-reader points to a rope ladder heading for Orion. I climb. But
it goes brittle, splinters. I flail. She reads, long-distance, one more line: "Wings", she calls. "Wings."
A hypnotist elicits a personality inside me who says he obliges my paranoia by giving me weird luck...
Jesus's disciples kvetch that Paul, who never knew Jesus, twisted his clean simplicity into a religion...
CAUTION: JARGON, HERESY (on one side or other)
DREAM: Surgeons cut off both my breasts--without my consent! I feel resigned, but the staff is upset...
DAY: I'm interviewing for a job offering $2,000 less than I make now. Told myself it's OK, but...
CAUTION: MALPRACTICE, MUTILATION
At a strange gate between worlds with high and low sea levels,
a meddling spirit prods me to clear a path for a salt torrent...
I dreamt I stepped on my engagement ring and crushed its pearl. Next I dreamt ink stained it.
Then I dreamt it fell in the sea, and the brine dissolved it. Then the telegram came: my fiancé...
I was on an island about to explode like Krakatoa. I warned the French colonial authorities "4,000
people will die if we don't get them out!" but no one listened. I woke. The paper came. "Mont
Pelée erupts, kills 40,000". I had missed a zero! But 40,000 turned out to be wrong too, implying...
A wizard into spots and dots invites me into his beach house, hungry for advice on his peculiar fears...
A man I loved goes into the Jungian depths, but when his anima appears in the mirror-pool, his nerve fails...
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
On a cloud in space I met an ape molding a model of Earth, glancing at the original far below. We were much alike...
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
Looks like this underground nuclear test will leak. Minutes from detonation,
we flee up the spiral stair and out across the sand. Can we run far enough in time?
A disintegrating board game reminds me to take time to enjoy things beyond work and activism...
CAUTION: NUDITY, TRANSGENDER, ASTROLOGY
Swedenborg's in bed with a woman, but she has teeth down there. Oh, now and she's not a woman, but
his political buddy Johan! Well, maybe it means not to get involved with women, or men, or... politics?
CAUTION: JUST WEIRD
The time-caves under Golden Gate Park lead to supervillains, magical girls, miniphants,
bamboo thugs, adorable dinosaurs, and... pandemics. But is there a way back home?
I meet the terrible Power Behind the Gods. I don't like it. So I get my squirtgun & shoot its butt.
The enraged Power chases me as blindly as I hoped! I jump into a secular universe, and...
CAUTION: SACRILEGE
DREAM: our car's been acting funny. Turns out it's a severe electrical drain.
NEXT DAY: my housemate discovers what's been making our car act funny...
a dream of flying, shapeshifting and spiritual advice.
When a flood traps me in my cabin, I dream I meet
an old man who warns me "Let your butterflies go"...
Captain Kirk (Starfleet, retired) saves us all from terrorists at a powerplant, but he forgot something...
I botched President Clinton's taco. And on the way home, I fell in the river.
Luckily, Jesse Jackson happened by and pulled me out, restoring my faith in...
A scholar on Middle Earth warns our obsession with public transparency keeps our psychology crude...
I'm shown a crystal egg with a model of my mind in it. The mapping is unmistakable. How embarrassing!:
My sister's avoiding our nosy parents, but I sense they'll run into her soon. I just didn't know HOW soon...
I was on a steamer run amok, in a boiling yellow incredible sea out of which great pylons rose...
My sister hoists us up to the Goddess's country too early, or too late: the ice is thawing, treacherous...
Bob is at the window asking to be let into my house. He is dressed as Santa Claus; but I think he's really...
CAUTION: MURDER ATTEMPT
I DREAM I buy a record I've wanted. But someone warns "You'll have trouble with it; you should have gone to another store."
I WAKE as my phone rings. "A clerical error in our records will delay the supplies you ordered." Wish I'd picked another store...
Trapped in elementary school, Julie is forced to study the alphabet
until she declares "I'm a professional cartoonist, goddammit!"...
Calmly, I watch a girl trapped in a lab try to escape, and die; and watch a man lose his head to a hungry thing...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
Wilkins visits his parents in a dream. Only they think he's a ghost, and panic--in the real world...
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...
The Rem Road I climb every night, from flesh to spirit, earth to sky. Though tonight, all these
wounded skateboarders worry me! And my own bruises say I overdid it in contact improv today...
I'm sitting in a car teetering in the front row of a theater balcony. By me, R. is licking a cherry-
flavored sucker. As the film crew yells "Roll it!" my foot slips on the brake and I do...
New moons appear. I try to mash them into a spare Earth, but botch the orbits.
So now, runaway moons rumble down a steep San Francisco hill...
CAUTION: ALWAYS SET PARKING BRAKE
It was way too late to call, but an irrational urge made me wake my friend up and pester her until...
I'm autistic; a TV host encourages me and another autistic kid to have sex on the air...
CAUTION: UNDERAGE SEX ON NATIONAL TV; SERIOUS FINGER-POINTING
DAY: on the radio Carl Sagan calls those who've experienced ESP or UFOs "proto-fascists"...
DREAM: a flying pewter teapot orbits a round blue vase--like a starship round the Earth...
NEXT WEEK: My mom calls. She's selling that pewter pot after a century in the family...
CAUTION: DISSES SAGAN
I'm a faun, the oracle for a Greek village. But my predecessor set up rituals I want to change...
CAUTION: SEX, PAGANISM, SELF-SATYRE
Nightmare: flying saucers attack, and I only have a squirt gun to fight back with!
Next day I see the Simpsons Halloween special. Lisa Simpson has a nightmare...
I was on a terrace overlooking a waterfall, where a giant rabbit and a musical dragon told me...
Aliens, hypnotherapy, dancing molars, riots, witches, flying pianos, lettuce... yet there is a point.
Two souls coalesce from bars of light into human beings by the power of words. Words like stupid, ugly...
I'm in a crowd as a man lectures about sharks. He points at me and asks "Shall I throw him in with...?"
I ask my dreams how to find love. I dream of a 1920s bohemian girl
teasing stuffy folk. But her pranks turn dangerous, then deadly...
Shevek invents time-travel and discreetly alters the past. But the future alters
Shevek's present, to undo his changes! Who's sabotaging him? Or... WHAT?
A man frames his big brother, til their sister makes him shoot his own reflection. Neither one expects...
Jung and a little brown man shoot down Siegfried the German Hero, riding his chariot of bones. Wait... his what?
CAUTION: GRIM
I'm a trade rep for Terra, on a new world. But an old rival, a rep from another world, arrives, and...
Silla Kristos angered Saint Walatta Petros, so she cursed him. He got sick and died. She knew she'd overdone it,
and asked the Virgin Mary to revive him. Mary grumbled, but did. While dead, Silla Kristos got wise angelic advice...
CAUTION: BRATTY SAINT, BRATTY MONK
In psychodrama, my sister/lover did a happy childhood scene--till the actors took her
down a trap door into the underworld. And I knew I'd have to go down after her...
When I see two scary men on the trail, naturally, I swallow my skunk! I really don't recommend...
Stolen by the Fairy Queen, I'm forced to nurse her great project: creating life! But her synthetic baby is...
Business solved the problem of cheap foreign labor: slavery's legal again. So our firm buys cheap losers...
A girl lies dreaming in the street; no one can wake her. At last I yell
"Face it, she's dead!" But is she? I never try a fairytale kiss...
"D" wants to renovate her house. A powerplant with twin stacks is ugly, but will power
the tools to get the job done. But her new therapist interprets the dream very strangely...
CAUTION: NEO-FREUDIAN PSYCHOBABBLE
As I recalled what I'd dreamed the night before, a snake, I looked down and saw my foot was poised to come down on...
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...
I'm a wolf in an ashram studying astral travel with my spirit-wife. Our souls blend a bit, enraging
our guru, a minor Hindu god, who sends demons to make us stop this spiritual "contamination"...
I'm being hunted in Reincarnation Swamp, as I worry--the human population boom
means experienced souls are scarce. Are most folks you meet really dogs, cats... rats?
CAUTION: MYSTIC ELITISM
Leona's a fighter--she rejects compromisers like her husband,
her friends, that miniature catgirl she's been sitting on...
I love Splinter, but her mom insists I got BOTH of them pregnant. Then I notice I'm pregnant too...
CAUTION: SEX, NAGGING
I spy on a girl learning magic in a quilted ditch. She lets me join her telekinesis lesson! Can my mind move a balloon?
Then I tour a witch-world where normality's shameful. One kid's not witch or normal--he keeps turning into Donald Duck!
CAUTION: DISNEY = DISABILITY?
I'm a hot archeology student till I open the wrong tomb. A plague
turns us into green moldy monsters--at first...
CAUTION: DISEASE, DEATH, GRIEF, SHAME
A street poet preaches a gospel of smallness, until he pokes at capitalism in a slightly too personal way...
I'm a French revolutionary facing a firing squad. But palmistry predicts I'll be strangely saved...
DAY: I read Starhawk's Dreaming the Dark, on building unity, undoing capitalism;
DREAM: I'm forced to become Time Pilgrim, warning of the dangers of community--indeed, of unity...
My unconscious sabotages a lunch date with my friend Stephanie. The tricks get weirder, till...
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
I kill with an angry wish, just pointing my finger! No one sees, but I secretly pray
others will stop me before I snipe again. Yet when I meet a telepath who can
see my guilt, I start to wonder just what my crime was--beside guilt itself...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, GUILT
I meet a woman on an oxcart who's sure we all want to poison her--
but in a way her affliction's made her forgiving, even noble...
CAUTION: MADNESS
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
I turn shy with women I like. So I wish for a dating coach, who appears! Then I feel dumb: how come I...
I'm Doctor Who, being chased by an air-surfer who demands we give up a reserved, proud man named...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
To avoid being stabbed, I flee the Psychodrama Circus. Wisely--the place explodes!
But it's the filling of the sushi roll that really upsets me...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL MAKI
An ancient pictograph inspires me to try a meditative technique: shrinking and letting myself be eaten...
CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
Swedenborg gets in a duel, but his beautiful silver hilt has no sword attached. Uh-oh...
Then he's in bed and realizes he's been sexually boasting...
CAUTION: PHALLIC SYMBOLISM
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...
I'm in Japan, where Rumiko Takahashi tells me of a tragic chicken
who longs to be a lounge singer...
My friend Tanya tries hard to save her marriage, but in her dreams Isidora Duncan,
Carl Jung, even the gods themselves warn her to face their deep incompatibility...
My wound's taped up, but hurts bad. I peel off the bandage. Nothing! Gone. So I check my other body...
Well, Tarzan and Jane are living in suburbia now, but though Tarzan's given up so much, Jane complains...
The Conference on Love has two sexy speakers. One says
"my teacher's stalking me" but she clings to him. Love? Hate? Both?
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM--but what are these two exhibiting?
A weird identity-confusion at a dance hints I'm simultaneously psychic, autistic, and... really stupid.
High up a scaffold, I was beating the chaff off a huge seed, unable to stop. I was beating my own heart...
I'm at a Robert Bly camp for men only. But I'm no man--not even human--some faun or satyr-like species...
CAUTION: THIS 'TEMENOS' IS A SACRED PHALLIC IMAGE
Nightmares can warn. But when awake, what warning can you get from nonstop ill-luck?
An artist I know dismisses her (gorgeous) art as just therapy... while the museums are full of trash. Why?
I misname my feelings: depressed for sad, paranoid for wary, phobic for scared. It has consequences...
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
I'm in Theremin's lab, around 1930, trying to play one of his experimental instruments. Why won't it work?
My dog and I are abducted by aliens who turn us into cats. We escape & go feral to survive.
How we got back, and what happened along the way, even my own shrink refuses to believe...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUID AND KLEPTOMANIAC BUGS
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
Those Hollywood lovers in the tub seem perfect together, until... oh, read the title!
CAUTION: RACE- AND GENDER-BENDING
I live in a beehive. We must mate with dogs. I'm assigned a bitch. But I'm allergic to gods! Oops, I mean...
CAUTION: SEXUAL THEME, DOGGESS WORSHIP
Two gunmen break in, call me by a strange name, and demand I repay a loan I never borrowed...
I was barren. I asked Asklepios, God of Healing, to make me pregnant. Soon I was--for 3 years, until...
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 overcharged at a grocery store--the checker confused my food with someone else's.
I grab him, fly high up and drop him, splat. I chant "Thus be: Splat! Squashed flat..."
CAUTION: DEATH PENALTY SEEMS A BIT MUCH
A woman in Tibet disassembles herself! A local god hires her spirit,
but she uses the office equipment to backup her memories and...
CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
At the beach, a biology teacher shows me how bottles smashed on the rocks by jerks lead to
slow death for the tidepool creatures. I'm afraid the warning is both personal AND planetary...
CAUTION: CAUSTIC TOWARD RECKLESS G.O.P. CUTS
DAY: I hear Angela Duckworth (writer of Grit) talk on positive thinking. She thinks we're our own worst enemies.
DREAM: I test my grit an African savanna--and outbluff lions! Unfortunately, that Siberian tiger won't be bluffed...
CAUTION: TROUBLING ASSESSMENT OF... PUTIN? BULLIES IN GENERAL?
I buy a charming ruin in the woods. Newlywed tigers prowl! The tiger bride
tells me "He expects predictability. But I'll show him what a tiger really is..."
A tiger-couple on an ice floe must choose: swim for land, or
ride the current full circle back home, risking starvation?
A toy's delivered, unasked. A jumping jack. It tries to eat me! I defeat it but then peer in the box to be sure...
I provoke a shooting! Wandering through time, I forget how much some cultures fear witches...
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
14 years before the Titanic sailed, Robertson wrote of a great liner, the Titan,
with 3000 people aboard, that strikes an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic...
I loyally served a demon who punished me until at last he sent me to hell. And STILL I didn't rebel...
CAUTION: BLOODY ABUSE
My German friend resolved to commit suicide, so I agreed to poison myself to keep him company...
A hero has solved all Earth's problems. Now what? A trucker friend invites him on a road trip to Mars...
Hecuba dreams she gives birth, not to a child but a flaming torch! But she lets Paris live...
CAUTION: MORAL NO-WIN SITUATION
I was enjoying an evening with this generic guy. Although there were two cats
as big as bobcats in the room, I let Poodle, my tortoiseshell, in...
CAUTION: GRUESOME CATFIGHT
My sisters want to see Trading Places in the nearest theater. I ask to go to a more distant theater
but can't explain why. We arrive to find the showtime had a typo. Gotta wait an hour. At last we file in,
the lights go down...and out. Totally out. Power failure! They can't fix it. I never did see that movie...
Silicon Valley goes enthusiastically fascist. I hide in a berry patch. They build a shining world, and then...
Daniel thrice dreamt of money hidden under a great stone in a nearby field. He dug and found a surprise...
CAUTION: IRISH HUMOR
I climbed a tree with a beautiful view, but climbing down I fell, and woke. I visited the people under the
river. A beautiful ayocora bird danced for me. But so did the moon spirit, baring its fangs. Terrifying!
My girlfriend and I find ourselves naked in my neighbor's yard! A second neighbor spots us, and
knowing my house is empty, she breaks in! The first neighbor, seeing her home's empty, breaks into
hers. We go home, stomping loud so our burglar flees back home, driving her burglar out, and...
CAUTION: UNINTENTIONAL NUDE PICNIC
A man mocks a turtle he caught, calling it "inept"--he knows adept turtles, then?
I distract this fisherman-ranter while the turtle quietly tiptoes...
My brother Henry lay in a metal casket. He wore a suit of mine. On his breast were white roses, with
one red at the centre. A few days later, the boilers of the riverboat Henry worked on exploded...
A TAILOR'S APPRENTICE: I become her to fight back against his abuse...
DAMSEL ON THE PYRE: I become a girl being burned alive, but get
so distracted by my beautiful body I forget to escape until it's too...
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...
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...
My uncle Mac has a secret scheme to free us all from the Rat Race, but
his dancing mouse-headed robots (and climate change) get out of hand...
Exploring a sunken sub, my buddies salvage a something ticking. Toss it back, but it won't stay sunk...
A telepathic unicorn gives me some subtle advice. I wake, and tell a friend, who easily proves my account
is distorted by my own biases. Telepathy's confusing! Wake again. Her correction was part of the dream...
After over-editing a weird poem to Silky, my night mare, I dream that
well-meaning surgeons think a unicorn's a defective horse, and try to dehorn her...
"I believe, O lord/ Help thou mine unbelief"--as a kid I thought this meant "God, keep me skeptical"...
DAY: I'm an experimental subject given a drug in hopes it'll induce ESP. I just babble stupidly. Humiliation!
DREAM: my vacuum cleaner comes alive to attack my terrier & me. I flee, but there's an explosion...
TWO DAYS LATER: at the movies, a cartoon: a vacuum cleaner comes alive to attack a terrier. Then, BOOM...
CAUTION: WILL REALLY BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
Our landlady was a friend, but she broke our rental agreement. Talk, compromise, or rent strike?
Kingsford meets a girl who burns herself as a protest. K flips out! She rants "This is wrong!" when help is what's needed...
CAUTION: RANT MIDWAY YOU'RE BETTER OFF SKIPPING
Blondie Wiggle builds a Video Igloo. But I'm allergic--TV kills me! A BAD omen for our video project...
CAUTION: TV KILLS (BUT YOU KNEW THAT)
I ask to see my past lives, and dream of a viewpoint where I can--but this Mormon ranger...
Junk in the attic? Treasures! The cat musicians shift from cartoons to life as I ascend,
til in the ultimate attic--the astral beach--I meet a cattaur made of pure (de)light...
CAUTION: SEX-CRAZED CATS, NEW AGE FINALE
After a class where students are forced to vivisect anesthetized dogs
I dreamed I'd made a mistake; I was sawing open my daughter...
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM, CREEPY DISMISSAL
Half-mad with fear, I massacre a cult, till my gun manifests stigmata: a gory miracle.
Then I'm a cultist, resisting the Voice of God pushing all us mortals to murder in His name.
I woke up haunted, and wondered for weeks what this was about... until the Waco Massacre.
CAUTION: CREEPY VIOLENCE, CREEPY GOD, CREEPY PREDICTION
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 make a weird vow--while I absent-mindedly slice up other people's cars! The next day...
CAUTION: DREAM VANDALISM
My life was a sex disaster. I felt ugly and sick. Then I dreamed I found a counselor
who really helped. But my parents warned me against her. Why? They explained:
WARNING: NUDITY
I dream I find a few 'extinct' watercats--in a slum! They talk. They say I'm one of them,
brainwashed to think I'm human. I wake, go to a dinner, and hear a tale of... watercats!
On a gene-engineered world, the Prime Minister tries to assassinate
the Bug Princess by tricking a well-meaning smartlawn...
The real pursuit of happiness: she pursues me, and I run in shame and hide! But she's persistent...
My sister and I get into an argument about different kinds of incest, in embarrassing circumstances...
CAUTION: POST-ORGY HYPOCRISY
Lost in an industrial maze, my memories hopelessly outdated, I resign myself to the Wheel...
I'm a conscientious saurian who feels obliged to duel with a hot-tempered friend.
Preparing, wanting to fight fair, I don't just file my spurs blunt, I...
I'm a hardboiled detective wincing as I grill a meek little psychic
(probably me) about squish-softboiled topics like unicorns and love...
CAUTION: SMUTTY UNICORN MAKES EVEN COPS BLUSH
My dad steals my furry girlfriend! The maid and I spy on them;
we get hot and do it, but it's just not the same...
CAUTION: SEX WITH THE WRONG PERSON
At age 90, the first female high-rise steelworker tells me
why she did it--and why she regrets it now...
I wake up praying for love--and then realize my wish is contradictory, and revise it to...
I'm stranded on an alternate Earth under strict rationing--of wishes!
But you need to wish a few times a year to keep the system greased...
CAUTION: INSULTS BOTH CAPITALISM AND ASCETICISM
Trapped in segregation-era Florida, I force a racist waitress to go bother someone else.
Disastrously, she does. Someone more vulnerable. Self-assertion's not always wise...
CAUTION: KLAN THREAT
After his dad's death, a boy dreams he's an orphan facing cannibal witches--every night! Therapy helps;
his recurring dreams shift to a manhunt for a criminal who hides on the ceiling. The dreams shift again, to
a tiger hunt. That is, the tiger hunts you. The boy jumps in the sea. Swimming with sharks...
CAUTION: INTENSE NIGHTMARES, PARENTAL LOSS
I slay the beautiful dragon attacking us, despite my regret.
And then, as I sleep, glowing eyes advance on our keep AGAIN...
I visit Earth during an all-female era. I'm a woman, can pass for local--so why do I lie to fit in?
CAUTION: SEXIST SLUR
I'm an elephant working in a diner. In the bathroom, I inadvertently summon the Genie of the Urinal...
CAUTION: PISSED PACHYDERM
In the castle of a wizard who's a were-worm, I let myself become
my businessman-friend's chair! Generous, huh?
In a dream, a dead friend told Mrs. Cl. how to cure her daughter's chronic illness: the yew tree. But yew is toxic...
In a busy, shorthanded market, the store owner's running a checkstand.
He mistakes me for an employee and starts ordering me around...
CAUTION: AGE & GENDER... BIAS? OR INFORMED JUDGMENT?
A yuppie idealist discovers her boyfriend's a cheerful opportunist, and they disentangle their lives...
CAUTION: SEX IN REVERSE
It's true: after death, angels advise you where to go next.
But what if you get an over-eager travel agent?