While I've cartooned a zillion individual dreams, I never had the nerve to try and sum up the whole arc of my dreamlife on one big page. Whew! Impressive.

Her obvious lifelong patterns: recurrent dreams, nightmares and frustration. Until I'd read this several times, I overlooked five more themes, because they're in my lifelong dreams too and I took 'em for granted: surrealism, sex, animals, and humor; and lucidity. These really are rare--I once read a collection of over 1000 college student's dreams (by Calvin Hall, I think) and was shocked to find zero talking animals, flying, magic, (good) sex or lucidity. Borrrrrrinnnngg...

But two kinds of people often do have dreams like Wertz's or mine: artists and schizophrenics (place your bets!) There may even be a physiological reason for vivid dreams with bizarre content: high serotonin levels. Yep, artists may be born weird.

After reading her dreams, I had a night of vivid, surreal nightmares that apparently explored her themes--trying them on for size. See Wertz!

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: JuliaWertz.com. As far as I know Thing About Dreams is only online, not collected in any of her books (but I strongly recommend Impossible People, available through her site.)

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