At 17, Xiao Dao dreamt he rode a black dragon as the sun set. A dream interpreter said sunset
meant the end of the Liao Song dynasty, and that Xiao Dao would rise to found the next dynasty...
Giving up a circle of friends is like the collapse of a sun--do you dry up like a raisin... or explode?
Bruno flew through space--not crystal spheres, not Heaven, not even the Copernican solar system, but
interstellar space. He saw the stars were suns, those suns had planets, and those planets bore life...
CAUTION: BURNED ALIVE BY THE INQUISITION
Worried Earth's warming a degree or two? Well,
Capsica's mean temperature is 35°C (63°F) hotter than Earth.
But that's quite pleasant--if you're a Capsican...
Fear anorexia? Gain weight, yet stay slender--be a centaur, like model Paulina Porizkova...
CAUTION: NUDITY; BODY IMAGE/ANOREXIA ISSUES
That moment when you tire of your old trauma and suddenly turn to the sun. Or fun.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
I cross a hostile continent to a magic commune, fall in love with a flying girl who slaps a
soul-spark into my head, and follow an alien goddess leading the Dance of the Sun...
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...
Round the ring of twelve worlds and their twelve gods, seeking one god who's giving me grief...
I'm a small planet in an eccentric orbit: a one-day summer, a two-day winter. Rest and hibernate, or...
CAUTION: SLACKER ETHIC
Escaping the tiny red plush room inside a star, I dive back to earth. Oops. A beast eats my broken body. My soul waits...
I had an epic dream lasting subjective weeks--a true other life. It wasn't Earth and we weren't human.
I was a teenage lemur, sailing with two friends into unknown waters--a rite of passage. One night,
my friends curled round me, I saw I didn't WANT to pass the test, be declared a woman, marry, and have pups.
I loved my girl friends. In a world lacking the very word, I was groping toward queerdom.
Sailing into unknown waters! "Here be dragons," the old maps say. And they were right...
2600K loads slowly? Try it in parts: 1: HOME, 650K, 2: VOYAGE, 1200K, 3: BACK 750K.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, QUEER TEEN ANGST, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
Gopa dreams the earth shakes, stars and meteors fall. She's naked, her marriage bed is broken, her husband
Siddhartha's treasures lie scattered. He says "How auspicious!"--and prepares to abandon her and their son...
CAUTION: SEXISM
High in the Sierra during a thunderstorm, I dream aliens steal the gold, and the sun's
going nova. But Life wants us to conquer space, so we all grow wings...
James Hillman is the first psychologist on the moon! He sees a shadow and
panics like a groundhog--mistakes it for Death. Not his own shadow, but MINE...
In the park, long lines of worshipers wait to meet a guru. But I'm naked, so I hide in the reeds...
CAUTION: NUDE SUNBATHING
After I drew this I dreamed I was chasing stars with a long-tailed friend, and in the end we caught the Sun...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
A cranky nun wants fish. Ilarya, the monastery's cook, sets out to buy one--a long walk, and unsafe after dark.
So Ilarya asks the sun to halt! She buys her fish, cooks, feeds her patient, and forgets to tell it to set...
CAUTION: PETTY, GOOFY, COMMUNITY-BAFFLING MIRACLE
I tour the heart of a red supergiant, where dreaming souls explore
their fears and heart's desires, unconstrained by solid matter...
CAUTION: SWEDENBORGIAN VISION, UNICORN NUDITY
Poem by Emily Dickinson on fighting depression, which I get when my neuroallergies are severe...
On a scorching world not built for people like us,
I find someone who seems to be a lot like me...
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 dream I'm a woman possessed by spirits with yellow eyes that tint the whole world lemon...
I wake, the sun rises, and for a single minute, the world turns that exact, strange yellow...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
Worlds orbiting small stars need to huddle so close for warmth that tidal forces make one side always day,
one always night. But if the orbit's eccentric, the sun wobbles--and broad regions are Earthlike...
Recycling used paint to lighten pavements could lower continental temperatures a fraction of a degree...
Creatures in the primal sea touch my third eye, dragons cry their eyes out, I fight the Sphinx, and arrive at last in...
Linda Evans of Dynasty survives a shapeshifters' war, though her mansion's wrecked.
She meets a caped superhero--and superdog, and supercat, squirrel, hamster, mouse!
These micro-heroes make me see I too have been minimizing my own bravery...
I'm cold and dark and disoriented! What am I doing wrong? Nothing--I'm just halfway to Alpha Centauri...
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...
ESP is like having neutrino detectors for eyes: what radiates from people's cores blinds you to their surfaces...
CORY: I'm in a government complex. Tired, but guards harass me. At last they let me nap on a floor pad.
WAYAN: I'm in the Student Union. Need to study, but guards harass me. Yet they let my friend sleep on a...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
I froze to death trying to climb an icy peak. But I try again, and this time,
no holds barred. Wow, am I selfish! But alive...
The rest of us heavenly bodies have each other, but from the Sun's viewpoint, we're just rubble. Alone...
Lounging in the sun, I do a magical make-over--molding my bones to give myself more room for
intuition, judgment, nerve--all the while feeling shallow & indulgent for self-improving!...
Sunbathing on Saturn's rings with a girl who's preparing for reincarnation--like me.
She's cute, but she chucks litter in the Bay of Rebirth. Maybe not Ms. Right, then...
An version of the Egyptian Ship of the Sun with a mutant Osiris at the helm,
in a monster-infested sea: image of the spark of consciousness in a sea of...
Thutmoses napped in the shade under the Great Sphinx--then buried to the neck in sand.
The resident sun-god complained of the sand; "the throne is yours if you'll clear it off..."
After my dad lets me down I dream black may be white, and white, black--if you're a Sphinx...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 1997, a collage on a dream-idea
A phrase from a dream, "the remains of men and women," led to this image
of a black sun in the underworld amid strata of time and the psyche...
I find the cure for an alien plague, then visit its homeworld, to find it has a curious variant...
CAUTION: SEX CUSTOMS OF THE NEWT PEOPLE! MY COUSIN'S GAY WEDDING!
During Tiananmen, I was in Beijing for a conference. I heard chaotic noise outside, and the muffled sounds of gunfire.
I dreamed a star painted the sky an eerie purple-green. Children sang, marching over snow, rifles fitted with bayonets...
The card of revolution! The old towers of strength come down, not via war but obsolescence...
Captain Kirk is testing vampire myths on a world where they don't bleed you dry.
At the moment, three vamps are sitting in a tent in a sunny meadow, queasy but alive...
CAUTION: FINANCIAL VAMPIRES?
Tour Venus as it will be in 1000 years, after terraforming: paradise for dozens of intelligent species!
A murder case. But the suspect had gone to an interpreter and told of an ominous dream.
The investigator saw its strange images might be puns, naming the real killer--and they did...
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?
My girlfriend and I ride out the Great Flood in the White Submarine,
but there are romantic complications. Some things never change...
I'm a Chinese kid fleeing the Japanese Occupation in 1938. As we near San Francisco,
I wake to find it's all my dad's dream. Wait--he's alive again? But he was never a refugee.
Is it a pastlife memory? If so, whose--his or mine?
A writer I meet is either flirting with me obscenely, or
advising me about eyecare, or... are those the same?
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM
A world-mind I never really liked dies generously, helping others; so I make my peace with it...
You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river
with darkness coming over / and salt has lost its savor...