Fleeing hunters, blocked by a cafe crowd, I fly up a long slope--but the cafe climbs on & on! At last
I perch exhausted on a peak, looking down on a now-alpine cafe above a sea of clouds. Next day...
I dreamed I circumnavigated the entire Buddhist wheel of existence in a single night...
I dream of a three-floor tower--but the Answer is up on Level Four!
No elevator, no stair. I can't even see it. Yet it's there...
The elevator man in funereal black said in a sepuchral voice "Are you ready?" I decided I'd wait...
Aristotle keeps marrying my friends and fucking them up. So I challenge Mr. Logic to a shamanic duel...
CAUTION: THE F-WORD. OOPS, TOO LATE! LESBIAN FISH, TOO.
All that spring I dreamed of climbing, cold, fatigue, risk, and fear.
But shamanic training involves toughening; ascent isn't always easy flight...
A host of Fred Astaires dance mid-air in an endless spiderweb,
then pound on typewriters randomly forever...
There are many astral planes--this world's just the cellar.
A cat and a bird in love, a literate bear and I guard the astral stair...
I swim the flooded tunnels and pass the crocodiles to enter the house of mystics... but now what?
It had been a weirdly mild winter day, but in my dream black storms loomed as I tried to build shelter...
I'm gigantic, stretching from Ceylon to Tibet. Grass grows from my navel to heaven.
Worms crawl on me. Birds flock to me and change color. I climb a mountain of dung...
CAUTION: PIOUS MISINTERPRETATIONS
By twisting strangely, humans can slip into a higher plane. Ten feet higher!
So unless you climb on the roof, you end up in the tunnels of the burrowcats...
Bart Simpson leads me down from the Cabin in the Sky back to being... grounded?
I'm in a huge colonnade. An army of blood-painted men sacrifice the dove of peace. Their masked leader drinks its blood.
But then I'm carried upstairs to meet... the prophet Daniel! I'm amid the angels, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel...
CAUTION: BLOOD-DRINKING THUGS
Why did I sign on as a crewman on the Cheapship, a freighter
that's falling apart? And yes, I do mean that literally...
I helped my aunt and uncle move upstairs from their rented downstairs flat. Absurd! They own a one-story house they love...
Decision by decision, we made our way down immense rock crags. Below, I had to put out a deadly fire,
a fire as solid as wood or stone, with a white staff. What am I really trying to calm?
I'm in the Mideast. No wonder it's a war zone--it's a vast pit BUILT for war!
But a spiral stair leads slowly out, to...
Twin dreams of ghoulish games backstage at a theater.
And they anticipated real long-term ghoulishness...
CAUTION: SLOW DEATH
I climb down a cliff before night strands me; but in town, risky adolescent games cause a crash...
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 Coyote, keeping the Business Prophet from taking over Dante's Peak. But it turns too personal...
CAUTION: IDIOTIC VIOLENCE
The House of Comics has a shabby annex jammed with self-publishers.
We make a human ladder and climb out a high window, but I don't fit;
as the tenement collapses, I must smash the windowframe to free...
The Cultural Revolution denies me the Himalayas--the spiritual heights.
So I flutter around the base of the Stairway to Heaven...
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...
The boy and I walk a spiral trail down the mountain to the caves of tears...
I lead my daughter up a thorny path; she’s getting scratched. She'd rather stay in that fishing village below...
I ride a recumbent bike up an exhausting slope past browsing bears.
Oh. Not bears. Dinosaurs. No wonder I'm so tired! Timetravel's hard...
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
DREAM: On a farm, I meet two sexy shapeshifting sisters. But mushroom clouds rise on the horizon...
NEXT DAY: at SF-MOMA, Susan Marie Dopp's paintings: shapeshifting sisters, mushroom clouds...
CAUTION: NUDITY; ESP
At death's door, my friend lets Cerberus devour her, so I can enter
Death's pyramid alive and expose the truth about the afterlife...
CAUTION: FATAL DOG ATTACK
Painting an abstract watercolor, I drifted into trance, and found myself climbing a
thorny slope. Deer in the brush. Great peaks around. Had I gone wrong?
Dream poems laid out like a calendar. Themes? Horses, camels, abused girls, vampires--all want their freedom...
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...
After trespassing in a staff-only part of Faerie, I'm cast out.
Only I'm cast like a seed, meant to grow a new elf circle...
In a world where ice contracts & sinks, birds freeze in winter, thaw in spring. But one swan knows better......
Patagia dreams she fakes a Hindu rite, causing Electra to dream she fakes leadership in a refugee band. But are they faking?
I had a dream I was climbing up a bunch of tiny shanty buildings and I got stuck. There was a wall full of
giant Koi Betta fish I couldn't climb across, and when I looked down, I could only see the top of the sky...
My friend Xanthe steals a sorceror's magic feathers and creates a police force
to curb the misuse of magic. But I'm no featherholder; I'm the dispatcher...
That levitating bear's not tightrope-walking--she rides a goat strung like soap-on-a-rope. A goat that's me! I'm eating...
CAUTION: UGH!
A jaguar tracked me. I ran, but never escaped; it pounced on me and I woke crying. I tried climbing trees, but
it climbed after me. The only escape was to jump from the highest branch, flapping desperately. And I flew...
I've climbed a cliff and cower on the brink; but for for the first time I need not
fall or retrace my dangerous path down. I know I'm dreaming, and wake...
Climbing out of Childhood Abyss, I literally get a leg up from a girl seeking the Ledge of Teens.
A shy girl has to hide she's a were-creature. Gay men make out in the witch-registry to rattle its
homophobic guardians. My sister stripteases while scolding me for a mess I didn't make...
CAUTION: DUH, SEX TABOOS! KIDS, FURS, GAYS, SIBLINGS
We sneak out of the movie to explore Upstairs. My friends hide from the staff
in storage nooks for rolls of fake-fur. They turn into kitsune, catgirls & deergirls...
I was in the Mission with friends. A giraffe saw me as narrowminded, and lifted me up
to show me HIS viewpoint. No insights--till we topped the roofline...
Dream-skeptic Cicero dreamed a youth descended from heaven on a golden chain.
The next day he first met Octavius, and exclaimed "but there is the actual boy I dreamed of!"
The boy became Augustus Caesar, presiding over Rome's golden age...
Just singing about the antigravitree lightens me. I bound around town. But then I find a diseased antigravitree is
holding me down. It's become a gravitree! Gotta clear out that deadwood, no matter how messy, if I want to fly...
I climb a small-town water tower. The tank holds a reedy marsh where sentient herons live! They say
the Heartland below them is a nest reserved for greedy, screechy, flightless, half-grown souls like us...
CAUTION: DISSES SMALL-TOWN VALUES
I paddle through the grim streets of Karachi on my belly, on a skateboard,
with my flipper-hands, until at last I reach the border to a Higher Realm...
I'm a hisa, a primitive alien who solves a high-tech crime for the humans. Then I hike home,
step by step, down a great shield volcano. Because shuttles leave your soul behind...
In Ireland, in Yeats's stone tower, he leads me up the spiral stair toward a thyme-scented portal...
From age six on, Simon nightly climbs mountains and faces roaring floods in a sort of naptime bootcamp...
I dreamt I was an adult, and male. I was hiking in the snow with my girlfriend or wife. I felt protective--and
utterly at home in this quite different body. If dreams process our daily experience, what did this dream draw on?
At 14, B. dreamt a stranger attacked her and hurt her badly. She said "but I'll hurt you worse." She did:
a week later that man attacked and nearly killed her. She survived to identify him--and get him hanged...
CAUTION: HARSH JUSTICE
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...
An Arabian prince kidnaps my girlfriend and me. We eventually escape his flying palace, but she gets trapped in
Victorian underwear, while I escape feuding politicians by turning myself into a truck tire. NOT a smart move...
CAUTION: BOGUS VICTORIAN SEX-EUPHEMISMS
Jacob dreams of angels climbing to heaven. He meets God, who promises
the Holy Land to him and his tribe. Jacob uncritically accepts...
Soon after my friend and mentor James Merrill died, I had recurring, elusive dreams about him...
After watching both Star Trek & Doctor Who, I find I'm held prisoner by the Rani
and her laser-toting tiger guards. So I meditate--and manifest a jetpack and a laser gun!
I never deduced I'm dreaming; it's not lucidity. It's simpler. What have I got to lose?
Ko said "Now we have come to where we die." I thought it looked just like the land we'd been traveling,
and couldn't see why we should have to die. Ko grabbed me and pulled me over the cliff...
CAUTION: DYING IN DREAM
Huge gold construction cranes loom over medieval castles. Not rebuilding, but
hoisting knights to the heights. I get a ride up, and see a wide timescape...
MIKE: A reckless friend races up a hazardous ladder. I follow slowly, reluctant, scared. Almost a nightmare...
WAYAN: Mike recklessly climbs an outdoor ladder as lightning strikes. Scary! Wait--this dream feels psychic...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
Tiny people ride a herd of levitating ladders--badly.
One seems to have gotten bucked loose...
I'm caught in a surreal traffic jam--balky horses, teeny cop cars. Get so stressed that I split
into a big creature guarding a small human sleeper. But even sleep is now a crime...
CAUTION: PREDICTIVE?
As we climb down the steep mountainside, clutching bushes to keep from falling,
I ask Laura "Do you want another child?"
I'm pushing a safe off a roof in Berkeley so it won't be pushed off the roof
(yep, you read that right) but it pulls me with it! Either die, or go lucid and fly...
Little Nemo's bed gets restless and takes him for a wild ride through town and up onto roofs...
Creatures in the primal sea touch my third eye, dragons cry their eyes out, I fight the Sphinx, and arrive at last in...
I had this near-nightmare about climbing a DNA stair up to the sky, and stepping off...
CAUTION: NUDITY, INCEST ISSUES
The Christian God vs Mahakala, Buddhist god of right anger! War in Middle Earth, as Pink Floyd sings...
DREAM 1: On green grass, a red & blue boat with a net draped atop. Predictive.
DREAM 2: Climbing a ladder with square rungs in a space w/o walls. Predictive.
DREAM 3: A small boy with a toy boat. A sail's laid out flat for washing. Predictive...
Manta Moths pick us off us explorers... or do they? An old scroll spoke of fear leading to transformation...
My friend Mark and I climb the Path of Righteousness to the summit where he finds a big red watermelon.
He rolls it down the Path of Righteousness, knocking businessmen aside like bowling pins! Why? Well...
My "friends" pull me away from the girl of my dreams, push booze & pot at me,
and won't even try to climb the rope to success. But Marvin saves Evel Knievel
from a motorcycle crash. Sounds good--until, ten years later, I hear how Marvin died...
CAUTION: GRIM AFTERMATH
I'm a kid imprisoned in an empty stone castle. Squeeze through a stone slit, and prepare to drop ten feet
down the face of a great stone gate. But I go lucid, and my dream and waking body-senses conflict...
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'm a mouse with a protest banner saying "FREEDOM!", having a slight argument with a cat...
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.
I commute to my dreamjob on a four-story bus; then my baby brother
(who I wouldn't let eat any chocolate pudding) utters a new poem by William Blake...
While rehearsing our circus act I mentally saw Nina's ladder breaking loose.
Next day, a supporting ring snapped. Being forewarned, I pulled hard...
I wander New York City, a homeless ageless child, unnoticed--unless I climb stairs. Then people panic--see a huge cat!
But today I meet a crew lugging big paintings, who seem blind to cat or child. I think they're art thieves, mid-heist...
CAUTION: SHAMANIC INTERPRETATION
A man's stalking me and my friends. We try to escape but a circus is in the way.
My friends shrink to babies, so I pop them in a stroller and flee over steep hills,
bouncing down stone stairs! "OW!" the babies howl! Hey... why do I feel deja vu?
CAUTION: INTERPRETATION INSULTS BOTH RUSSIA AND NATO
On terraformed Mars, we set out to climb Mt Olympus without
oxygen masks. The first miles are OK, but the air thins until...
CAUTION: ANTICIPATED DEATH?
I meet my true love during a coup. We go through Hell together, like Orpheus and Eurydice--only we...
Ann had inflamed ovaries and faced surgery. She asked her dreams for a second opinion. She dreamt of voices and images saying
"there's plenty of time for all this." She bathed peacefully in a river, meditated, gave easy birth to an infant, climbed a ladder to
her law degree. She woke cured. Her next doctor said "you must've been misdiagnosed; you just thought you were in pain."
CAUTION: SEXIST GASLIGHTING
We're spirits over a volcanic fountain of energy. And some of us prepare to ride the current up to...
CAUTION: ASSUMES MYSTICAL LITERACY
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 girl becomes a raven to cross a pond. Asks me to fly across carrying her (flightless) pet parrot
in a bag. I do, but later the parrot falls downstairs. So yuppies call me an irresponsible pet owner...
A deer-girl turns into a talking mare. We make love. Then, relaxed, she
leads me over a pass from suburban isolation into a wider social world...
CAUTION: TALKING HORSE SEX
Dad's human, Mom's a weird owl-lynx, the kid's a baby Pegasus... and I,
W.C. Fields, that fat cynical drunken old actor, am the babysitter...
I work the info desk in a futuristic library. But one question leads me into a DNA-helix, a tornado of doubt...
My heart's desire was a new piano, as hopeless as owning a yacht. The dream: a huge space in the air, full of wonderful...
by Wayan; 2017/2/5, an advisory dream fusing Aldous Huxley & My Little Pony.
My new housemate Pinkie is a party animal, but she's really nice. She climbs a high ladder to help wash my
Windows of Perception. Then our unicorn friend Rarity walks in. She warns me to pace this renovation project...
CAUTION: PONIES
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
I find myself clinging to a pole as tall as the Empire State Building. Can I slide down
without falling? Or burning from friction? And... what's down there?
What if comics panels and layouts weren't so square? I try triangles,
pentagons, hexagons, circles, spirals--and some serious stuff pops out...
CAUTION: IDEAS, OCCASIONAL NUDITY, MENTIONS ABUSE
Night. A massive crash on the highway. Bodies strewn. Sickened, I descend a spiral stair to the Pool
of Truth. It gives no answers. Women spout platitudes. I go on, in pain, down past the polar bears...
CAUTION: THE DEAD
"Our resurrection is not entirely in the future; it's also in us, it begins, it's already begun..."
My sister hoists us up to the Goddess's country too early, or too late: the ice is thawing, treacherous...
DREAM: I climb a stair to a surreal space where kids dance in tights spattered with wet red paint.
NEXT DAY: I watch Wednesday--Wednesday Addams dances & gets spattered with wet red paint...
CAUTION: NUDITY, ESP SPECULATION
A friend's tragic accident confines him to disco roller skates for life! Worse yet, he's in a Rocky Relationship...
CAUTION: "ROCKY HORROR" REFS, SEX
Three successive attacks! I escape the Roadrage Nut, I withstand the mob of Angry
Ghosts, but the Tsunami floods all. Strange--that angry, glowing, blue Sea-Sphinx
who summoned the flood is really sexy. Why is she mad at me?...
While watching two rooftop actors (one a chicken) I noticed the icebergs in the sky were melting at last...
A woman up a tree has white flaky stuff camouflaging her.
It cracks and peels like snakeskin. What tree is this, exactly?
I'm a Latina crossing the border at a nightmare bridge,
while an Anglo rants at me about the Space Race...
I find myself in armor, sheltering from a hard rain in an English undercroft.
As I climb out, I meet a second knight on the stair. But he won't step aside...
An underage girl comes on to me, and begs me to... throw her down a stairwell?!
CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
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?
DREAM: a weird footbridge of twisting tree-branches; with steps made of wood-cased stereo equipment!
NEXT EVE: a birthday potluck with a twisting papier-maché trees. Steps lead up to a treehouse full of...
A picture-poem experiment: one dream per stanza!
Five short dreams exploring the weight of culture on our animal selves...
As we cross a scary ledge, my tough survival-guide, always no-nonsense before,
finally willing to consider... intellectualism, dating, ethics... fun?
A murderer was stalking Mt Tam. I dreamed I met the murderous spirit; only
by allying with small dancers from inside the mountain could we defeat it...
CAUTION: NEW AGE
DAY: I have to read three academics who mock ancient, shamanic and modern amateur dreamwork as superstition.
DREAM: I'm learning to fly in the Temple of Dreamwork, next to a cute new colleague. NEXT DAY, I meet her...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.; DISSES ACADEMICS
I dreamt a farmer gave me 33 eggs in a bucket. On the stair, he handed me 3 more. I woke, told my family...
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
Clarence the sappy angel from It's A Wonderful Life and Milton's Lucifer land on Earth, offering treaties.
Who to sign with? Clarence thinks we're fine as is, but the Devil's a tinkerer, learning from failures. Failures
like me and my girlfriend Titania, the first android with a full palette of feelings. Like the feeling she's fake...
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...
Climbing a mountain on Mars, I reach a hall where I'm transformed into a cryophilic being.
Then I feast on methane soup with the heroic Martian dead...
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!
I ride a magical self-guiding canoe, seeking the right beach and cove for me.
Even when the boat climbs hills so I can explore inland, I expect it to fail...
I cling alone to the cliffs of Lands End, so when the tsunami hits,
I survive. Had I been in the low, crowded Sunset district I'd be dead...
I'm climbing a tower, as my dad, Apollo, drunk, throws bottles at me from the top, breaking bones...
CAUTION: DENIAL ABOUT ALCOHOLISM
In our plot to kill the Tyrant, we used his wife. Or... did she use us? She goes mad, but--she's HAPPY...
I'm a girl living alone in a forest. I go patrolling after a storm and find a red cable
strangling a tree. Though scared, I climb up and tear it off. But there are more...
CAUTION: POLITICAL INTERPRETATION
I was on a spiral stair. The walls had scrawled messages, not sprayed,
carved or painted but living tissue--and getting fresher as I descended. Whatever was growing them was still below me, and still writing...
After fasting for six days, I dreamed of three spirit helpers who aided my village,
guiding hunters toward game and healing others. But I lost so many loved ones...
CAUTION: SPOUSE MURDERED; CAREER BURNOUT
I'm a demon girl out to sabotage a pirate radio station by climbing a tall
wall of glowing wax, carrying a comatose mountain lioness on my back!
1940s reporters almost trap me in a mob shootout. I shelter in a gender-segregated hotel.
The owner of Wharton Tower shakes the hotel so it swings between its butch & femme halves.
I fall off the Hudson Palisades, but I land safely on the Glass Ceiling...
When my friends and I learn to fly, all of Middle Earth turns against us!
Fleeing from Saruman's army, I discover the backstage truth about our world...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, DOOM, PHYSICS! YODA IN THE TUB!
Swedenborg fights a monster but lacks strength. Yet later, on a higher plane, he learns the beast did die...
CAUTION: VIOLENT
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
Miniaturized, smuggled over a border inside a she-wolf's mouth, I long
for where I got briefly hidden--her labia. But healing first, sex later!
CAUTION: FURRY SMUT; WEIRD SCIENCE (BUT REAL!)
When I was very small I dreamt a pack of wolves climbed the tree outside my window and
somehow got it open. Freud told me I must have seen my parents having sex doggy style...
CAUTION: REALLY, DR. FREUD?
My mild yuppie friend Lou climbs a bank tower to reach his rich mentor,
and wins an internship. But as he swears his oath to Get Rich Quick...
CAUTION: DISSES CUTTHROAT CAPITALISM