INTRODUCTION

When I first built the World Dream Bank I favored story-like dreams showing dreamwork was more magical, beautiful and fun than people think. But now I'm transcribing old journals and finding a lot of apparently predictive dreams like this--dreams not resolving neatly as stories, but evidence that the waking world is rather more magical than people think. Too.

DREAM

I'm at a lecture in a stadium seating 50,000. I think the speaker's avoiding an awkward issue, but I'm too shy to speak up in such a crowd. But one guy does--underground cartoonist Dan O'Neill stands up to ask the obvious question no one else had the guts to.

Later, O'Neill sits at a card table at the exit. Selling merch or checking tickets? I go up and say "That was brave, what you did. I want you to have this." Pull off a round plastic pale-yellow St Christopher medal. He looks at it, says "Uh... thanks..." and puts it on the table. Clearly has no idea what it is, to him it's just some cheap kids' prize.

But I join him & the Air Pirates--his band of cartoonists challenging Disney Corporation.

Night. We climb a winding mountain path. Watch for spying helicopters. I see one, though it's not spying too well: streamers on the rotor-tips form wild eye-grabbing spirals. Pretty. The paper did say the government is trying stunts in the sky. It had a photo of an odd cloud formation: a squarish window opening over Middle America. A literal Launch Window! I'm skeptical and wonder if it's like the Medfly scam.

We ride a funicular around the mountain, above manyfingered lakes (or lobes of one huge lake). Dry pine forest like around Lake Shasta. Black basalt boulders in one valley, vivid on yellow dry grass. A huge full moon SO big & SO bright we can see color; almost day. The funicular car halts at a viewpoint. Snowy mountains, valleys and lakes. Linking the two main lakes is a low, lurid green flat--a tule marsh? I'm excited--important to me that boats can go from one to the other. Boats dot all the fingers, a scattered flotilla.

That surreal moon's both luminous and numinous. Feel like I've entered a midnight world of magic.

At dawn, I find it's true. Marinas and resorts looked normal by moonlight, but daylight reveals this is the future. A planned community around the reedy lakeshores. Low bamboo homes with veg gardens, flowers, walkways; villages linked by monorail. We--Dan has vanished, it's just the other cartoonists in the Air Pirates now--walk down from the station into Faerie. I realize now that's where we are. Reachable only through a night journey.

A bar/cafe or dance-pavilion. Big, light, friendly. My parents show up, but I gradually slip away from them, back to the Air Pirates. They buy me a beer. Though shy, I enjoy the crowd. I'm in white pants, not my usual blue jeans, and someone spills a glass of beer on me. The air's warm so I say "no problem". Wring them while they're on me--I'm skinny enough I can. Amazed I can squeeze so much beer out of my leg. Can even spray a little stream at people. Including my dad. Enjoy it--as insulting to him as if I spat or pissed on him, but he can't complain cuz it's "all good fun".

Evening. The Air Pirates lead us all up to a house on a hill. Gardens. My mom says "Ooh! Bell peppers!" but are they? They hang from a tree like apples. She picks two red and two green, without asking permission--of the gardener or the tree. In Faerie that seems unwise. I apologize to the tree and try to fit the fruit back on. They won't go.

But when I apologize, a door opens on the porch. Empty arch into the dark...

I decide since this is a magic land, maybe I can work some too. I try to summon light in that dark. No. Dim moonlight leaks in from outside, same as before.

Not as before. My eyes go nocturnal, seeing in pitch dark! I can't witch the world, but I can witch MYSELF. It's not perfect; without shadows, things look flat--hard to separate objects. Spangly black inside the arch--the flashes must be random individual photons. I go in.

A hollow hill! Inside is another house with a glowing garden on an inner. In the garden, folk are locked in some strange drama; but I quickly pick up the gist and fit myself in. I play a Hound, a canine person with a preternatural nose for tracking. Sniff out their trails, learn their backstories, deduce the villain of the drama...

My old housemates Barbara and Kenny live here. They're a warm (though bickering) gnome-couple straight out of 'Neverending Story'.

We climb to a peak about a sea of cloud. This is the Air Pirates' secret base. They sail ships into the sky.

At midnight Earth time, we all drink a toast in Grog. Tastes like normal booze to me. Check the labels. Each bottle's a different brand with different ingredients. But all imports--mortal brews. No ambrosia, sigh!

I realize I'm bored. The Pirates aren't as wild as I hoped. Just as the Gnomes were easy-going but... a bit dull and settled. Once Dan O'Neill the risk-taker was gone, Faerie went a bit flat.

NEXT DAY

• Air Pirates: four 1970s underground cartoonists who drew parodies of Disney characters as horny, gun-toting revolutionaries, and were forbidden by a judge to draw mice (no, really!) Do they mean uncensored creativity? Confrontation?
• Medal: on Love Boat, a woman sent a guy her swim medal, kept as a charm since childhood.
• Medfly scam: to stop the spread of the Mediterranean fruit fly, helicopters sprayed pesticides on California cities, when small bait stations hung in backyard trees were safer, cheaper and more effective. But someone wanted those chopper contracts...
• It's the future: the dream may be warning it's predictive, about the party tomorrow? [Turns out it was.]
• Place only reachable through night, but not night itself: dreamwork! Go through shallow sleep stages to the shamanic depths where you can see possible futures.
• Spill on white pants: well, I went to Sally's party. She was in white pants. Leona promptly spilled her drink all over them. Deja vu!
• Night vision, flat and noisy from individual photons: I think it's saying dream-shamans really can train their minds to see what others can't--but such visions, based on scant data, are hard to interpret.
• Magic door opens when I apologize to tree: proper dream manners, unlike my parents who (as good scientists) are rude to trees.
• In Faerie, I'm a scent-hound: again, dream-shamans really can train their minds to sense things others can't.
• Magical future's dull: tomorrow I'm going to a party mixing psychodrama actors and Stanford's queer subculture. I hope to meet people as weird as me. But the dream says... don't bet on it.

THE DAY AFTER

• Woman plucks red-green fruit off trees without permission: not Eve, but Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz! At work, I sort the new library books and open one on Hollywood musicals at random, and see a still from The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy & the angry appletrees. Weird that I opened to it, but weird they chose it too: not a musical scene at all, let alone a classic song. Anyway... deja vu all over again.
• Strange night-vision: was the dream trying to signal its foresight? Like a lucid dream where dream figures mention lucid dreaming, or a diagnostic dream where your doctor adds "now this isn't symbolic--check your thyroid", this predictive dream may be self-flagging. If so, dreams are more self-aware than most people think.

YEARS LATER

I slowly got involved with more artists, dancers and musicians in the San Francisco improv scene. It was a better fit than these comfortable suburbanites; though even in SF I was pretty far out and often felt lonely. Even big-city bohemians blink at psychic dreamers.

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