I overhear workmen talking of the devastation of 1914-1918. Pause. Then: "Just so they don't start..."
CAUTION: ANOTHER WAR
A Scotsman was playing a not-quite-bagpipe--an inflated man
bristling with pipes, as puffy as Picasso's Baigneuse...
CAUTION: GROTESQUE
DREAM: a zoo with ornamental pools. From such a pool, a lion erupts, clawing at his trainer.
MORNING: I learn that as I dreamt, a tiger escaped from Amar Circus, camped near my home...
Should Anna quit hiding her psychic dreams? She dreams a cat eats her bird & burglars loot an open house.
Maybe keep hiding?
Mobilization, war, troop transport, slogans, marching bands and orgies, all in an apotheosis of dough...
CAUTION: ENDS IN SEX
1933: I promised to box in the ring to benefit our museum, but as I face that I'm going to get pulped...
1947: In front of the museum, I duel a bull with wings. But soon I realize it's just an inflatable toy...
DREAM: A strange tour of underground churches, a banquet table, coffee cups and thorn-branches.
DAWN: My wife left a breakfast tray--with teacups and thistle branches! Not quite my dream, but...
DREAM: Hunt's mother points at a tall figure in the shadows and shrieks "Death! Death!"
ONE YEAR LATER: in Jerusalem, his hostess finds her young son dead, and shrieks...
CAUTION: BEWARE THE IDES OF JANUARY?
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
Rousseau's painting of a woman on a red sofa in a glorious
jungle really was dream-based--just not his dream...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SLACKING
Dunne dreamt of a fire with smoke so toxic it killed people on
a balcony in open air! Then came the evening newspaper...
I need money, so I sign up to be the sacrificial bull in a corrida. I've grown
the contractual five horns. But at the last moment I won't sign--it's suicide!...
CAUTION: WHERE'S THAT FIFTH HORN?
In prison, the midnight bell chimed. I dreamt I saw a cavalry column of men and horses skinned, gory, still marching.
Wagons of the dead passed for hours. As the guard changed, the gate crashed, waking me--just minutes after midnight!
CAUTION: PROVES NOT ALL DREAMS ARE REALTIME
My girlfriend and I are fans of a picture story in a kids' magazine.
The installments show our future life--all we'll be doing this week...
CAUTION: ESP TALK
My friend Georges was sleeping on my couch. I woke to find him fighting free of gauze that
tied him to the sofa. As he woke, it faded away. He'd dreamt of it. I'd seen his dream...
CAUTION: JUST WEIRD
Parking structures with spiral ramps are, secretly, screws harvesting motion from parking cars, slowly drilling
into near-impenetrable rock. Thus are skyscraper-foundations made...
The Nazis advance on Paris. We help refugees at the train station. An old woman has a pet goldfish
and a black cat. She can't carry a fishbowl across wartime France, and doesn't want to abandon...
CAUTION: DRASTIC SOLUTION
I dream it's after a great war; I hear the music I must write, and meet the girl I must marry...
DREAM: in my car, the window crank turns on its own; my invisible girlfriend is crawling
out the window! She's turned so quiet & private. Have I seen the last of her? Well, not seen...
NEXT DAY: I stumble on a one-off manga about an invisible girl; but the artist writes "I
decided not to make her a regular--too quiet & private, & I can't draw her feelings"...
CAUTION: GLASSY NUDITY, E.S.P. SPECULATION
After finding marine geologists in my chocolate pudding, I'd rather be a Frenchman and insult my wife...
CAUTION: DECADENCE
I was a young dream-artist out of place in the Silicon Valley...
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...
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...
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
As a child in Orléans, M. Deschamps got his first taste of plum-cake from a M. Fortgibu.
As a man in Paris, Deschamps saw plum cake again--but not to eat. M. Fortgibu had beaten him to it.
Many years later, Deschamps was given plum-cake. He said "All that's missing is M. Fortgibu!"...
CAUTION: TRULY POINTLESS AND THAT'S THE POINT
DREAM: My friend admires the writer Parny; I tout Baudelaire. Odd, since I dislike both!
DAY: A man in the newspaper shows his culture and taste by reading exactly two writers...
A little girl flirts with me as she grows into a teenage ballerina. We join an orgy, but my spinster
sister-in-law disrupts it. The sailors don't resent her, but they shoot at the voyeurs in the closet...
CAUTION: PEDOPHILIA, ORGY, GUN-HAPPY SAILORS
I'm a French revolutionary facing a firing squad. But palmistry predicts I'll be strangely saved...
1: I ask how to fly. "Breathe air from high levels; its light and purity will wash away earth's heaviness..."
2: To join a flying game, you must cut off your own head! Players acquire new heads and can work miracles...
3: I float up to reach a book in a shop. People call the police but I defiantly soar--over Paris, up to the stars...
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...
Hecuba dreams she gives birth, not to a child but a flaming torch! But she lets Paris live...
CAUTION: MORAL NO-WIN SITUATION
I murder my wife. I try to sell her body as meat to a firm that'll turn her into wine.
But the transubstantiation has already happened, and the paperwork's undone...
CAUTION: GRISLY