The jeweled fish over San Francisco grew and grew
until it landed and the crew told me the secret code...
I had a chronic illness doctors said was psychosomatic. So I called Alan, a therapist...
I dream I'm in his office. It's a nook in a basement. No windows, no door, no privacy.
I was so desperate I went to him for six months, while he ignored everything I said...
I'm one of a trio of swimmers in a pool, making out--under the surface only. Must we hide?
I'm near Shiprock with a flying-saucer girl who sees the nearby crags and far snowy peaks
as all the same size and distance... how to teach perspective?
CAUTION: SKINNYDIPPING, GROPING
Blake dreams he's a young queen with an uneasy relationship to her guardian angel...
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
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
The therapist my parents made me see as a kid got convicted of molesting his
child clients. But not all. I played an evasive waiting game for three awful years
under his leering scrutiny. So, can evading a molester still traumatize? Oh yes...
CAUTION: CHILD NEGLECT & ABUSE
Having psychic dreams is awkward. People bite you for seeing their secrets...
I hide a catgirl behind Japanese screens. We have hot sex now & then--but usually I ignore her...
CAUTION: SEX; NEGLECT
My mother begged me to stay in. I went out with Bill--who raped me. Mom later told me she'd dreamed...
CAUTION: DATE RAPE
Should Anna quit hiding her psychic dreams? She dreams a cat eats her bird & burglars loot an open house.
Maybe keep hiding?
Some men get squeamish about menstrual blood, but this girl's plight was extreme...
CAUTION: EWWWW!
My therapist changes into a good ol' boy? I can handle that. But that State Board of Kibitzers behind him...
I'm trying to bathe, but there are Boat People in the tub!
And my inner Grandma's spying on me, behind her fan...
I know I'm a murderer; what isn't so clear is what I killed and why...
CAUTION: DISMEMBERMENT, GUILT, DREAD
I'm a middle-aged British writer in a triad with a sculptor and a dairy farmer
who seem happy sharing me. But it's a small town, so we must be discreet...
CAUTION: TRIAD THAT WORKS
Biking, I stray into the steamy Brundibar Sea. My bike dissolves!
But hot-tubbers explain the Sea manifests what you visualize. Yay! Uh-oh...
CAUTION: MYSTICISM AND HOLOCAUST HISTORY
Fighting an absolutist theocracy, my dragon-soul burns the
church's dragon-nursery. The cost is terrible: a black vortex...
CAUTION: ROMANTIC THREESOME GETS BURNED
A certain intensity marks some dreams as predictive, whether they foresee a death or a crisis averted;
but I keep quiet about them, writing them only in a locked diary. Once I spoke up, and was shunned...
CAUTION: DISTURBING ANALOGY WITH SEX-ORIENTATION CLOSET
The day after my mom outed me to my dad, I dream a great storm has passed and everything's just glowing...
DREAM: a girl peers in my window & flirts with me. But why's she perched on a miniature clocktower?
NEXT DAY: on campus, I spot a girl perched on a ledge of a new miniature clocktower. Oh, that's...
CAUTION: CHILDHOOD TRAINING: "MEN ARE SCUM"
Trapped on an island, spied on and controlled, we decide to jump off
a cliff and die; but as we jump, a spirit sneaks us off be reborn...
I'm on vacation, but cultists lick my feet--then turn on me, casting stones. But they miss.
So I wander the steppe for centuries, until I come to the City of Texas...
I'm in an airport full of aliens who, when bored, crystallize until things get fun again.
My long planeflight glows like a dragon-hoard! But it's lonely...
I find the feminist principle "the personal is political" leads to some alarming consequences for privacy...
CAUTION: POLITICS
My co-worker Daphne is snappish and stressed. She meditates, seeking the cause,
and becomes a half-newt-half-koi in a giant fishbowl. Up shambles a curious AI...
My friend Dawn dreamed she crawled into a dumpster to live, and at last felt at home, secure...
Wayan dreams of surprising Dawn on the toilet while she dreams that flushing away evidence of Foul Play won’t work...
My doctor says (no exam, no tests) "hidden desires inflame you." I'm skeptical--suspect an infection.
Awake, I test both hints--repression and infection. Antibiotics work! I'm still weird--but not sick.
I dreamt a friend poisoned me. I "woke" and slew him in fury. But guilt gnawed me. I confessed and was due to hang...
CAUTION: NOT A CALM GUY
When I was 17, an older girl pushed booze at me and came on to me... in front of my parents and teachers!
For months, I had ambivalent sex dreams trying to process what Donna taught me--not all of it negative...
CAUTION: WEIRD SEX; ADULTS BEHAVE BADLY
As soon as I gave birth I had a nightmare my brother would be in a serious auto crash. When I warned my mom...
In Old Palmyra, I stumble on a dragon-hoard. Wizards and caliphs hunt me--how to get out
of town? Magic carpet? No. I put on a brown coat, borrow a delivery bike, and slowly pedal...
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?
This dream's not about a man whose dream lovers keep materializing till the bed overflows.
This dream's about who those lovers are and what the neighbors will think...
CAUTION: SEX
A nun-like figure shows me three arcs; two are forms of direct power,
but the third, innermost arc can lead to secrecy and manipulation...
I sneak into a dance rehearsal. Huge colorful cloth goddesses dance,
while four fat women wearing only scarves weave round them...
CAUTION: NUDITY
The police confiscate my therapist's copies of my dreams, and try me for obscenity! So why do I help?...
Artists have their own strange culture, and we can unintentionally mislead therapists unfamiliar with us...
CAUTION: THERAPESE
Granny's magic nipple helps me foil the yuppies dumping toxic
waste. But does it count if I did it just to save my own...
CAUTION: CRUDE TALK; STETHESCOPIC NIPPLE
I'm a time-traveling revolutionary seeking a coded message from Pancho Villa.
I find it in a music score... but what's an Ojo de Diente? When I wake...
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...
I dream my son the writer's living above our old family store, the one that failed in the Depression...
A yard sale in a small town turns out to be my family, selling porn. But they have more to push on me...
CAUTION: DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY, ELEPHANT ABUSE
Swedenborg fights a flying woman over a lake, then is in bed with another. After some
language and privacy problems, all goes so well he thinks they've made a child...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, SEX
My boyfriend's a student in an exotic monastery. But under his robe, he's gotten a bit exotic himself...
CAUTION: SEXUAL DREAM
I dream my Doors of Perception have four layered screens to keep out mosquitoes, when one is plenty...
I meet a tall bipedal talking fox. He has a human house. And a pet vixen--on a leash. But
she talks too! Tells me he mounts her--yet treats her like a pet. She's never come yet.
But she stays! Still, I'm as dysfunctional as either of them--if not worse...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
DAY: I reread Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. His own dreams feel petty, devious, status-obsessed... dull.
DREAM: I find Freud's bought my childhood home! I spelunk the Freudian underworld--a dark complex of tunnels,
sewers and rats. Cross the rivers of muck on stepping stones. Emerge into sun at last, swearing "Never again..."
Hypnotherapy is hopeless with these blind architects flopping all over the cafe, but my flying has improved...
Mrs Claughton moved into a house known as haunted. She dreamt multiple ghosts asked her for help.
She crossed England to pass messages to heirs, containing private details Claughton couldn't have known...
CAUTION: ENOUGH CORROBORATION TO MAKE SKEPTICS UNEASY
I'm at my favorite opera, The Magic Flute. When I hear the line 'That is the devil certainly,' I think
of Hitler. The Gestapo have a device that reads my thought, and come for me. Bystanders spit on me...
CAUTION: NATIONAL NIGHTMARE
An abused girl survives grotesque situations to become a job/health counselor with a talking sofa...
CAUTION: BUTT-SNIFFING GIANT
DREAM: My husband was slipping a gold necklace onto a slim, dark girl I'd never met. I woke and sketched it...
AFTER: He was having an affair with the girl, and gave her the necklace the night of my dream--her birthday...
I dreamt I gave birth to a white-hot stone shedding sparks. Most folk would find my son strange...
My mother's face took on a sudden expression of astonishment--possibly agony. She said "Your father
is remarrying." I laughed. 'Impossible. He'd have told me. I had a letter from him only a few days ago..."
I change sex to infiltrate a sinister castle, unaware its Lord can spot a shapeshifter--being one himself...
CAUTION: A DISTURBING BEDSIDE MANOR. I MEAN, MANNER.
During our final exam, my second sight tells me our dance teacher's really
a Greek goddess in disguise. But she has her own final exam to face...
A London Protestant dreamed Bloody Mary would find the congregation's member-list and burn them all...
Hillary Clinton hid her cancer, but the GOP found out. So a monster kidnaps Rainbow Brite, and...
I'm a Zen monk riddled with holes from a weird disease the government denies
is real. So as a protest, I stand naked atop a wall and let the air-sharks take me...
CAUTION: SURREAL SUICIDE
A man in a castle plots against his enemies, while his rebel-daughter meets her lover outside...
Fat Max eats with Heinrich the guard on Tuesdays. He talks too much. You and I are hungry. Tonight...
The poem appeared in the dream as it appears on the page--words, even punctuation...
CAUTION: DEATH CAMP, DEATH PLOT
A woman in prison loves her counselor, but she's a barely literate hooker--she knows he won't love her back...
I dream my friend's amused that I date women to steal work-secrets; I get rich off
insider trading, while they get fired. Only... I don't! Where'd he get this idea?...
Cilda Spitzer and Hillary Clinton sentence America's bimbos to a shitty fate. But what of their cheating husbands?
I'm in World War II, asking a reporter to keep quiet about our secret weapon.
But it's already gone off, melting and distorting the whole cartoon world. It's...
Swedenborg struggles to grasp the King's broken French. He wakes to realize he's trying to learn
a greater King's difficult language. Still relevant today, for he saw the problem's twofold: the
difficult language of images, but also issues the waking mind missed--or wants to deny!
Sunset. Walking home from work. A smiling, creepy American offers a ride. I back away until I'm against a tree.
I don't give away the Arab hiding in its branches. I have a knife, and I know I will kill this American...
CAUTION: FIGHT TO THE DEATH BREWING
I'm told "Your lives are not in order." The golden crown's too heavy. And
I win my lover's hand--only the hand. What are my dreams accusing me of?
CAUTION: SEVERED HAND, SUBTLE GUILT
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
Dreamt of locked room, door-knob fell off in my hand when I...
My husband was standing against a wall with both arms around this woman's waist, and they were laughing...
On the show Finding Your Roots, it turns out my dad's a genetic experiment born in...
1880?! The experiment worked; my sisters and I are slow-maturing, long-lived mutants...
An avian friend of mine researches a whirlpool. But it doesn't want to be studied, and it has friends too...
Dream: tourists in our town use brainware to navigate & translate, but it's infected. Turns you fascist. Whaaaat?...
Next day: the FBI knocks! Our web provider fingered us as a nest of internet criminals. Thanks, Comcast!
Talk about malware...
Our dream-group's dreams had a lot of imagery in common: circles, groups, meditation. I fused them into this piece...
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
I'm inside a magical novel by Patricia McKillip, amid tricksters, cosplayers, spooks, sex changes, levitation and (sigh) cops...
CAUTION: COYOTE SEX
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 dream explaining why everyone with any moral vision gets filtered out of politics now...
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.
The full moon rises: I become Weregirl, do the Moondance, and gnaw open the lock on my heart...
CAUTION: MOONING
I dream the real issue in your life isn't the one you complain about most, but the one you hide...
ESP is like having neutrino detectors for eyes: what radiates from people's cores blinds you to their surfaces...
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...
A joyous day with a strange woman who seems not to be his wife, until he touches her hand and knows...
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...
After a class in nonverbal communication, I meet
Richard Nixon under embarrassing circumstances...
My new bedroom has huge windows, but no blinds. I pin up bedsheets for now--flimsy.
A girl walking by peers in. Wait--we're 50' up! She's in my room--and transclucent.
I yell "WHO ARE YOU?" She looks shocked I can see her, says "No one really" and fades...
Beverly dreamt her party guests all wore masks. What were they hiding? Next she dreamt they passed around a
breadbasket. In it was her husband's penis! She woke, asked around, and found he'd had affairs with half their guests...
CAUTION: GENITAL SYMBOLISM
I'm shyly making love with a classmate, Cynthia. Classmates gawk & point, through
the pie-hole in the ceiling. But our perspective reveals that under our critics' skirts...
CAUTION: UPSKIRT NUDITY
I'm detective Hercule Poirot, but I'm losing my case and my brain--
because my story isn't by Agatha Christie, it's a knockoff...
CAUTION: PINK DILDO HATS
A scholar on Middle Earth warns our obsession with public transparency keeps our psychology crude...
In the Cave of the Ant Ambassador, I meet his mate, a beautiful translucent fox named
Raethe. Way happier with her mate (& body!) than in that dream just two months ago...
Jung Chang’s exposé of Mao's brutal deeds and legacy
provoke dreams of leaders who don't listen--till I scream...
Dreams and other revelations shouldn't be dissected--they need to be reveiled, not revealed...
CAUTION: INTENSE MYSTICISM
I dreamed my lover was metal inside. I was sure it meant he had no passion.
I told him. Why did he bitterly ask me to stare into my dream like a mirror?
CAUTION: TROUBLED RELATIONSHIP
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...
My neurotic sister and I both lust for a girl named Sky; then I flee a gang of popes and lamas and mullahs...
I cross San Francisco on public transit--a network of children's slides. One leads into...
A wormhole full of aliens, where a goofy-haired reporter interviews a hacker...
I dreamed of speckled eggs, Caribbean drug traffickers and of
almost drowning near a sinking boat...
DREAM: I meet a woman with a bun hairdo, black skirt, black & white striped blouse. I think she's a spy!
TWO DAYS LATER: I meet that woman--bun, skirt, blouse. And all the hotel guests here say she's a spy...
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
ESP? Weird luck? Subliminal perception? Whatever it is, it kicked me right out of a bad day...
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
Multiple tornadoes touched down in the fields, but the farmer's wife sewed
in a rocking chair, oblivious. I moved to warn her but my lieutenant said...
Swedenborg stuns the Queen of Sweden by whispering a secret only she and a dead man knew;
A widow begs him to ask her late husband to find a lost receipt. Swedenborg reveals a secret drawer;
Swedenborg, at a dinner party, grows alarmed by a fire that nearly burns his home--500 km away!
In a near-future dictatorship, Democrats are afraid to take any action. But in a suburban lot,
I find a burned-out tank. I need to find these rebels who can defeat military-grade repression...
CAUTION: GRIM
I was warned Wolf-Cats turn on people, but I still befriended one. Now I'm looking down its throat...
A black separatist commune hides two little girls who are psychokinetic.
They fear I'll expose them. But I've spent my whole life passing too...
CAUTION: PARAPSYCHOLOGY, RACIAL SEPARATISTS
I'm on the border of human territory. Beyond is the land of the unnerving
Telepaths, each one different but every one creepy...
The Lone Star Planet--worldwide Texas--is weirdly empty. No kids at all! Instead, teens
ping into existence pre-formed. An alternate Earth with no concept of change?
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
1: Three sisters flash me; one has a third eye in there! Clothed, it's blind. Was she just enlightening herself?
2: In the future, most cars self-drive. I'm the last driver using my own muscles and mind. Can I hold out?
3: A friend charts all of history's wars to prove: democracies don't fight each other. So to get peace...
CAUTION: NAKED EYE
1: Crystal-skulled wizards, dino & lionfolk parade by. 2: I curl up with three skittish beasts. Patience!
3: My friend Mark tries to rape me. I tie him up, seek a restraining order. Will the cops believe me?
CAUTION: RAPE ATTEMPT
An alien tiger and his human girlfriend herd me to their house
and show me a cube of raw flesh... but why?
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
I wake up in a weird sexual situation. But I'm still dreaming--I wake again
to find I'm in an even weirder sexual situation. But I'm still...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, (ANTI?)ROMANTICISM
Changelings invade our orbital station, selling drugs, kidnapping teachers--but Constable
Odo can handle that. What's weird are the beans pouring out of that kid's tuba...
I'm shown a mysterious two-faced carving;
I shush loud people disturbing my therapy;
I'm told of a documentary on the archetypal mother...
The All-American Family visits the fabulous Un-American Fantasy Store, where Mom is in for a shock...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY, LANGUAGE
My family home's invaded by ancient Egyptian architects. So
I put on my unicorn mask and eavesdrop on their plans...
All I know about humans, I learned in psychodrama. I gawked as caterpillars grew wings. Except me...
1: A nature spirit's physics experiment proves that time forks. But how much? How dense is the multiverse?
2: I sculpt a model of this multiverse. A physicist likes it; the nature spirit likes it more. So she swipes it...
3: A 'friend' offers refugees my bedroom, crowding me and my work into a corner. I wake. The phone rings...
After seeing Julia Wertz's cartoon history of her entire dreamlife (on one big page!) I dream
Wertz style all night! I don't mind the nightmares--what gets me down is comics' black & white...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARES, SEX
In a class, asked to share a bit about myself, I lie. Why? Not only are people like me
illegal, my particular story would be seen as impossible...
We're exploring the English farm we inherited, when The Wild Hunt storms over the hill...
A writer's found in his office mating with an ash-covered creature! But could she be his muse?
CAUTION: NUDITY OR NOT? SEX OR NOT? NO ONE QUITE KNOWS...
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...