PREFACE

This dream-comic isn't plot-driven or even emotion-driven. It's a spiritual meditation--in REM! Most dream theorists (except Jung) deny such a thing is even possible in the REM state, but I'll say it flatly, just to be clear: this is a real dream. Or rather, it's the central thread in a tangle of at least five dreams with unclear boundaries that I recorded that night, totaling 1,760 words. It's why it took me ten years to draw.

AFTERWORD

Drawing this was a struggle. But slowly I figured out the dream is a map of long-term dreamwork, and the comic needed the same structure:

1. First you process memories (junk in the attic) and connect them to current situations (in 2007 when I dreamt this, the war between Bush and Osama bin Laden filled the news)
2. Then personal issues like sex (facing that I'm a fur, with a strong queer sensibility) and art (the bandleader torn between cartooning and music).
3. Then that strange section about catgirls with a catgirl sex toy. That was cryptic til five years later, when I impulsively bought a huge stuffed tiger on sale, and hand-sewed it, making a mer-tigress. Next I sewed a lifesize catgirl, and soon I was literally sleeping with giant sextoys--the Foam Furs.
4. Now we enter even stranger waters--spiritual life. I had to quit denying my real sensory world, which includes an energy plane not unlike the New Age concept of auras or Castaneda's 'luminous eggs'. I feel your moods and energy directly. But this is America, land of the relentlessly practical, so as a kid I learned to shut up about auras. I faked poorly, so I still got beat up. But I tried for decades. In recent years I gave up; now I tell the truth.
5. Finally, as I woke, came broader socio-spiritual issues--how we differ on those higher levels. The dream asserted two things:
   1. It's not one-size-fits-all up there! Our religions all push us toward stupid universalism. Even science shares this dogmatic flaw. Sorry, guys, I live in a different sensory world from you. Not defective reasoning, not credulousness, not superstition, but experience. Direct observation. You know, that thing you're supposed to value above authority?
   2. For daily life, the dream urged focus and striving for what you want; but in the visionary state, the dream changed tone: "Energy eggs come when they will." Yeats, who knew his mysticism, advised using the will to quiet the will, making room for visions to manifest as they need. That's the very core of Taoism and Zen--only the empty cup can be filled! It seems to me other faiths echo this idea. "Not my will, O Lord, but thine."

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