Stolen by the Fairy Queen, I'm forced to nurse her great project: creating life! But her synthetic baby is...
Business solved the problem of cheap foreign labor: slavery's legal again. So our firm buys cheap losers...
At boot camp for sex slaves, a rapist makes me a surprisingly tempting offer. But it's really not about sex, is it?
CAUTION: ORAL SEX, OUTRAGEOUS COMPARISON
As Mars demands independence from Earth, Jovians enslave us all! Now freedom-fighting is personal...
Wayan: A sleazy brother calls the cops, blaming us for a fire he set...
Cecy: A sleazy brother calls in a fire while not even trying to put it out...
Sledding at night, I approached the speed of light, and the stars turned colors I'd never seen...
I dream I'm an insomniac trapped in a flat full of snoring writers and reporters. Wait a minute...
A girl lies dreaming in the street; no one can wake her. At last I yell
"Face it, she's dead!" But is she? I never try a fairytale kiss...
I'm at a physics conference. A new force has been discovered that may just
allow travel faster than light. Strange, how'd the Vikings know?...
I cross San Francisco on public transit--a network of children's slides. One leads into...
A wormhole full of aliens, where a goofy-haired reporter interviews a hacker...
An amber stream recurring in my dreams led me to meet a huge, strange being, Slithy...
Infected glass-cuts scar the vegan alligators in the park. As part of a cleanup, I'm told to EAT one...
A man who wants to love and respect all life has unwanted kitchen guests: a wave of slugs...
My friend and I are banana slugs on the forest floor. We wander out into chaparral, and across a bike path...
Things start materializing in my house: first three tiny naked scientists, then a huge impossible fruit...
CAUTION: NUDE SCIENTISTS
After Shaw's Arms and the Man eclipsed my own play The Land of Heart's Desire, I dreamt I was haunted by...
I'm a girl in the 1960s, but not a native--a time-traveler. I'm smoking with friends (not necessarily
tobacco)--but I have this strange sense smoking may lead to serious danger. I wake, get invited
to the film Terms of Endearment, and watch Shirley Maclaine and Debra Winger enact my dream...
"D" wants to renovate her house. A powerplant with twin stacks is ugly, but will power
the tools to get the job done. But her new therapist interprets the dream very strangely...
CAUTION: NEO-FREUDIAN PSYCHOBABBLE
A cigar-smoking tyrannosaur moves into our neighborhood,
upsetting us bluebirds and vampire bats. So we...
I'm a snake being hunted by the FBI. I know English, but I can only hiss.
So I need to find an indirect way to show I'm peaceable...
I tried to be like my classmates--use tools, control what I made. But I couldn't. It came alive, and...
Just a couple of soulmate snakes, entwined so totally I envied them...
I am given a dehydrated package of dried snake to insert in my vagina. Inside it will unfold and come to life...
CAUTION: KIDS, DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
In a desert, I find a tree with red purselike pods. But they all seem empty,
and I know they should each contain a vivid yellow snake...
As I recalled what I'd dreamed the night before, a snake, I looked down and saw my foot was poised to come down on...
A woman up a tree has white flaky stuff camouflaging her.
It cracks and peels like snakeskin. What tree is this, exactly?
Miriel dreams of a green snake under her bed. Meanwhile her brother
Wayan dreams of a green poisonous snake under his bed...
Two snakes fight as centipedes emerge from under rocks. I tell my friend. Next day her co-worker tells her the same...
I'm a werewolf-girl in love with a gender-dysphoric weredragon in love with
a man who's very, very patient with all our crazy shiftiness...
CAUTION: NUDITY (SKIN, FUR and SCALE), SHIFTY PEOPLE (BI, WERE and QUEER)
Samuel Pepys dreamt of kidneystones, pee, come, & snot--or did he? Thomas Macauley dreams his niece confesses...
Lost in the snow, I must give my baby to a stranger or let my dad put him in a box, safe, forever...
I dream of snowdrifts too deep to get back home, even though...
I'm a peace terrorist trapped in Squaw Valley, herded like a mare by a huge stallion made of snow...
And then the dream shifts. I blurt out the truth behind our idiotic waking world! And wake believing it...
CAUTION: MERMAID AND HORSE NUDITY
My sexual orientation shifts arbitrarily, turned on one second, off the next. Who's at the controls?
CAUTION: SEXUAL CONFUSION
I had a horrible realization that computers are useless, and I tried to make it beautiful...
An art critic asks me what I think of a sexually explicit nude, and I
find myself blurting nearly the opposite of my conscious opinion...
CAUTION: NUDE SKETCH
In my drawing class it was antlers and bones and skulls, death death death till I was tired of MY bones...
I dream I'm suicidal; but I'm saved when I'm shown the flow of human development--the same pattern,
from souls to civilizations! Eddies and knots recur, but the challenges slowly get more spiritual.
NEXT DAY: I learn what my shaman-friend Dee just dreamed. And now I'm unsure whose dream this is...
CAUTION: IDEAS
The night before he met his greatest student, Plato, Socrates dreamed he nursed a baby swan who grew...
The pier jutting into the sea of dreams has an 8th chakra at the end, where a lonely woman fishes for, um, sole...
Guards in a museum confiscate my goofy purple-warted shoes, then lose them!
I fuss till they find them. For it's vital to retrieve my, uh, soles.
I set out in a dream / To go away / Away is hard to go, but no one / Asked me to stay...
I dream peaceful Rebecca Solnit turns into violent Valerie Solanis. Her excuse is, she was kidnapped and raped--
now she only trusts dogs. I mean, sexually, too... The dream warns that furries like me may relate to animals
better, due to abuse by humans. If so, I've got more therapy to do..
CAUTION: ABUSE ISSUES (text only; no abuse images)
As his reign begins, King Solomon worries he's inadequate. He dreams
God offers him one gift, of his choice--but what would help the most?
A demigoddess and a wizard meddle with humans. But do even THEY know what they're assembling?
Millay, suffering from nightmares, decides to speak from Nightmare's point of view...
Numb, sunk in a trance, I only woke when I broke through a wall to light and magical birdsong...
A joyful song about ignoring your critics. The last stanza came verbatim from the dream...
In a desert crawling with aliens who can absorb your mind, I propose a truce, and gain...
The lights go out, the world's ending. Roz tries to make party snacks and keep folks calm. At last
she notices lights out the window. Other buildings seem fine. Is it really the Apocalypse? Or...
The future. Humanity's trapped--no energy. Because aliens looted our world before we evolved! Now...
I discover a Sorting Hat, as in Harry Potter--and it moves in with us. Our cat crawls in and plays peekaboo.
She becomes a teenager eager to get drunk at Thanksgiving--like every adult in her life. But she's not
puking drunk like them, so she must be OK! Just as I think I am--I only overwork to exhaustion.
CAUTION: DRUNK TEEN CAT, SEVERELY ALCOHOLIC ADULTS
Africa. My horse trusted me as we faced lions and fire, but to face the Soul-Board, he must trust himself...
MY SOUL RESTORED: To hide me as I grew up, someone transplanted a shard of redwood-soul
into me, and part of my soul into the tree! But now I'm grown...
RED ROBE OF INITIATION: I came to play music, but I'm dragged to the magic-school portal & draped in...
CAUTION: MYSTICISM
I'm a wolf in an ashram studying astral travel with my spirit-wife. Our souls blend a bit, enraging
our guru, a minor Hindu god, who sends demons to make us stop this spiritual "contamination"...
I'm being hunted in Reincarnation Swamp, as I worry--the human population boom
means experienced souls are scarce. Are most folks you meet really dogs, cats... rats?
CAUTION: MYSTIC ELITISM
As I reread decades of dreams, I see Jung was right: even in crisis-times, soul-work goes calmly on...
I was desperately arranging cut flowers for something important; the forces
that acted upon me seemed to say "Your life depends upon this assemblage"...
Drawn on a trip to the Southwest as a kid. Felt like I'd lived there in a past life. Or I would in a future life...
I was a missionary in South Africa, staying overnight in a remote village high in the Drakensberg. A man rode up;
Six nights ago he was told in a dream to find me here in six days. He gave me a single gold coin, and left. Why?...
CAUTION: FAILURE OF IMAGINATION?
In my dream, I flew upward. It was as though I was going to the place where stars are, for the stars
were showing in the daytime. I saw all around our world. Then I wished in vain to go down again...
I'm a kid again, gawking at the Space Needle. But a woman stands before it, who no one else can see:
CAUTION: NUDITY, A SEXUAL PERSPECTIVE
I'm a Latina crossing the border at a nightmare bridge,
while an Anglo rants at me about the Space Race...
I wake to find I have two penises, one connected, one free-floating! How do its sensations reach my brain?
CAUTION: WANDERING WEENIES!
A voice told me, "Human beings have a spark of the divine"...
I dreamt a sparrowhawk perched on my shoulder. Next day a friend was given a stuffed sparrowhawk. He...
I bike round the ring of women on the stage. Oracles! Whoever speaks, levitates.
One advises me, but I can't act on it--too ill. "Gotta heal!" I blurt. My own oracle..
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 2002/1/19, a dream-painting of a dream about dream-painting!
I'm teaching an art class full of strange masklike beings. We debate art
as spontaneous process, versus art as planned product...
A dead fern in my backyard starts sending me messages in some strange language...
I dreamed of speckled eggs, Caribbean drug traffickers and of
almost drowning near a sinking boat...
In a creepy castle on the Rhine, whenever I'm near three women, they blur
into one. A powerful spell! Now where have I seen this effect...?
CAUTION: DISSES PATRIARCHAL RELIGIONS
Jung walked against stiff wind and fog, sheltering a tiny light, generating a huge eerie shadow--his other self!
He concluded this was his life-task--to nurture his spark of awareness & rationality in the dark. But...
In hindsight his dream models four key Jungian ideas: Self, Ego, Shadow and Unconscious--at age 18!
CAUTION: REJECTS JUNG'S OWN DREAM INTERPRETATION!
My family moves into a damp, leaking basement. My dad just sneers at us for fussing
about the cold, the damp, the mildew, the leaks. "I'll show you REAL leaking..."
A great war shrinks to wrestling, then hopping from page to page! Once they were worlds to me, but now...
I'm a half-sphinx--human dad, sphinx mom--stuck in human form so far.
Will I ever learn to shift? I practice--sculpt my elegant feline future self...
CAUTION: SPHINX NUDITY
Trying to sculpt a dream-figure who's acting blatantly sexual
teaches me it's as hard to show lust as supposedly subtler feelings...
CAUTION: NUDE SPHINX
A sphinx with equine traits; probably a precursor of the Krelkin, a sphinxlike alien who befriended me later...
Tehura was a beautiful sphinx exploring our human world; she led me to a new way of seeing us...
CAUTION: SPHINX BREASTS
A preteen sphinx pleased with herself and her treebranch world...
A moody teenage sphinx treed by the hounds of her own disdain...
That moody teen sphinx has grown up at last, and relaxed again...
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..."
I find the sketch-journal of a beautiful winged sphinx who left her mythic isle
to explore a great city of crazy bipeds, called San Francisco...
CAUTION: SPHINX SEX, SPHINX ATTITUDE
After my dad lets me down I dream black may be white, and white, black--if you're a Sphinx...
Lost in the rainforest of Olympic National Park, I stumble into the wrong cabin:
the hut of Time herself. Or is she? She asks me to clean up, but spare her web...
First a lone image on waking, of a woman cradling a skeleton; ten days later,
a nightmare of spiders swarming out of my toilet, covering me...
I'm a Lapp boy in northern Finland, studying shamanism. So why do I pour coffee down a driveway?
Night. I'm scared of the men in the park--till I see they're all gay. I dance,
and as darkness flares to dawn, remember how to fly--regain my falcon-wings...
Leona's a fighter--she rejects compromisers like her husband,
her friends, that miniature catgirl she's been sitting on...
The world is a whirlpool, a black and white spiral pulling me
down toward a black hole, and it's laughing...
I drum on an ocarina-gong in the dark. My weird music summons a choir of
fierce angels, who send a wave of tingling energy surging through me...
I'm at the beach, collecting stones to make a gigantic face viewable only from the air...
A rant on over-disciplined Americans (NOT under; we just think we are) taking up spiritual disciplines...
As my dad lies dying, I dream my sister and I face spiritual tests
given by slacker angels who'd rather be on TV. Learn to let go!
Laying my timeline in a Fibonacci spiral, it's clear great changes come in a pattern--
as soon as I've digested the last couple, a new revelation/revolution appears...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, HEAVY ISSUES
My job is to set up portals to other realities, and
create secret routes through our world between them...
While I study how humans went extinct, my
daughter happily splashes in the sea...
Our physics project is top secret, but a stranger strolls into a meeting and opens a can of green light...
I love Splinter, but her mom insists I got BOTH of them pregnant. Then I notice I'm pregnant too...
CAUTION: SEX, NAGGING
I feel split into warring impulses who argue, advise, ignore, and snipe at each other...
On the freeway, my car and I split into quantum possibilities. I steer both entangled cars
till I split again--now I have to steer three cars with just one pair of hands and eyes...
In a dark classroom, my shrink was demonstrating atom-splitting
with a glowing ping pong ball. I was glad I wasn't in that class...
Lost in a dark maze of machine-shops, I follow Mr. Spock, who's drunk, and talks to tree-spirits...
CAUTION: ALCOHOL AS INSPIRATION?
I spy on a girl learning magic in a quilted ditch. She lets me join her telekinesis lesson! Can my mind move a balloon?
Then I tour a witch-world where normality's shameful. One kid's not witch or normal--he keeps turning into Donald Duck!
CAUTION: DISNEY = DISABILITY?
I want to drink the elixir, but negative 20 spoons block me! Can I remove them? With warped teacup logic & reciprocals…
I'm a hot archeology student till I open the wrong tomb. A plague
turns us into green moldy monsters--at first...
CAUTION: DISEASE, DEATH, GRIEF, SHAME
No dream, no plot. I saw myself as a horse grazing in a forest of giant mosses, lifting spore-packets...
Soon after I was given the name Spotted Fawn, I dreamed I was one,
fleeing faceless hunters under the full moon. There's history in this...
Divers made of ice win the Traffic-Leaping Olympics. But
I think they cheated! I seek my friend the Sphinx...
A street poet preaches a gospel of smallness, until he pokes at capitalism in a slightly too personal way...
DREAM: I meet a woman with a bun hairdo, black skirt, black & white striped blouse. I think she's a spy!
TWO DAYS LATER: I meet that woman--bun, skirt, blouse. And all the hotel guests here say she's a spy...
I'm a French revolutionary facing a firing squad. But palmistry predicts I'll be strangely saved...
I'm in a department store trying on clothes when I notice there's a large zucchini growing from my crotch...
CAUTION: SQUASHY PENIS, ICKY RECIPE
I couldn't find the motivation to do enough figure studies unless they were sexy, so...
CAUTION: SEX
Giant squid start surfacing at popular beaches and eating people. Not the form of first contact we'd hoped...
CAUTION: YOU ARE LUNCH
Just an abstract birdlike acrylic squiggle I liked. Sorry, no story...
Squirrel Girl and I try to find a private room, but Hal the mad computer in 2001
spies on us and our spaceship captain orders us to clean the ion tubes...
CAUTION: SQUIRREL NUDITY
A mom & daughter caught a squirrel robbing their guaranteed rodent-proof birdfeeder. He
speaks English so they demand to know how he did it. But he knows they won't hurt him...
I'm slow to catch on that this skunk's slidetalk isn't a business pitch; it's about seduction...
CAUTION: ABSURD LOVE TRIANGLE, KINKY SKUNK
I went to bed with a stuffed wolf, and found myself in a hot tub with a
cute wolf guy, only now I seemed to be the plush one...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
By a midnight lake, I comfort an abused girl in the mud. But two figures with long knives loom...
I defeat the knife-wielder, in spite the blade in my belly I can't pull out. I may have to let it be...
My daughter got a tattoo that spread and became blue feathers growing from her arms. Wings start to bud...
ESP? Weird luck? Subliminal perception? Whatever it is, it kicked me right out of a bad day...
I'm on stage. I have to sing. They just stare. I try dancing. Stony silence. At last,
a second me leads me offstage, saying "You can only fail so many times"...
I froze in dance class when I followed anyone else's script. Was it fear? A dragon inside said no...
A slightly surrealized San Francisco landscape--not that it needed much help...
CAUTION: PINK PAGAN TOES
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!
I found myself on a stone pillar in a valley. Invisible people sat on other stalagmites, but my voice didn’t reach...
DAY: a stranger screams "BITCH! Plant a TREE!" Thinks I'm female and wants to fight over an old bumper sticker?
DREAM: I'm a horse detective. In shades, lipstick, & high heels I try to pass as a mare. Absurd! A stallion in drag...
CAUTION: HORSE NUDITY. OH WAIT, THAT'S NORMAL.
As a kid, my Ecotopian fantasy city was hollowed out of living rock, with hanging gardens and terraces...
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?
A sacred starfish piloting a Cessna plane survives a crash. But can it survive a boy's clumsy rescue efforts?
I squabble with my body so much! But now & then, in orgasm, we dissolve into stars and become...
CAUTION: SEX POETRY
DAY: I read Starhawk's Dreaming the Dark, on building unity, undoing capitalism;
DREAM: I'm forced to become Time Pilgrim, warning of the dangers of community--indeed, of unity...
I meet the Red God of Running and Holly Golightly; we're in the triathlon up the world's greatest peak...
On a poster of a model who's around my weight, someone's scrawled STARVATION IMAGERY...
CAUTION: DEFENSE OF SKINNY PEOPLE
Weird blue snow covers a dump of unwanted historical statues, but they seem
less political than... strange. Is that a griffin? What's really getting covered here?
I'm playing poker with a dragon. But we barely dare move: we're both crackling with thousands of volts...
John Lee, sentenced to hang, dreamt he walked to the scaffold but the trapdoor stubbornly stuck.
He woke, told his jailors the dream, walked to the scaffold, and...
He said "Oh, Mom, I had a terrible dream. A car ran me down."
I said we could not live by dreams or we live a life of horror...
I dreamed the Stealth Bomber wasn't a machine, but a gigantic Owl-god. And Stealth was worshiped...
CAUTION: CREEPING PACIFISM
As the steamroller flattened me I became quite a lovely stained-glass window...
Wang dreamt a man cut his belly open and implanted a big mirror inscribed with stars. It hurt,
even when he woke. For a month! But his belly now had a hunger to learn about astronomy...
Two big spoiled realities pester me to take care of them. At last I go on shamanic strike...
My unconscious sabotages a lunch date with my friend Stephanie. The tricks get weirder, till...
A man in a blue coat on a white horse delivered papers from a nearby wrecked ship, signed Stephenson and...
I dreamed my stepmother moved in with my dead grandparents...
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...
Stevenson’s dreams changed over decades: from childhood nightmares into
creative collaborators dreaming whole stories...
The tollman on the new bridge to the Land of the Dead revives a beheaded woman by RANDOM action...
A woman masturbates constantly at work, then greets businessmen with her hot sticky handshake...
CAUTION: SEX
When I start feeling worthless, I paint myself. But which me?
CAUTION: NUDITY, PAGANISM
First a mutant doe with stilt legs has trouble finding a mate, then
a centauroid buck with a parasol shows us he means... business.
I envy and resent a rich family's mansion so much I break in and sabotage their giant meat freezer...
CAUTION: HOSTILITY, ENVY, WASTE OF BAD FOOD
I dreamed a small plane crashed and burned, but also how the pilot
might be saved. I asked my husband to direct the firetruck...
Greenwood dreamt her murdered neighbor's ghost gave her tips helping her catch his three killers...
I dream I'm a runner named Silky; but straying outside the crowd can get you stomped by giant aliens...
Just a soft sketch of two dancers...then this loud slutty stomping woman leapt into the center...
WARNING: NUDITY.
A stone bridge, at the crossing of a road and a river. A signal sign indicates the name of the place: (YOU)...
I love curves, not the chunky forms of this machine-ruled world...
Not a dream--one night I just found myself painting Potatohenge. For two weeks I fussed..
Repeated attempts to move a gigantic, sacred, saucerlike stone all failed; but now,
with the world's biggest cranes, we get it on a truck. It crawls past adoring crowds...
In a alien sports stadium, watching a game where a slender reptilian man pitched rocks...
I kill with an angry wish, just pointing my finger! No one sees, but I secretly pray
others will stop me before I snipe again. Yet when I meet a telepath who can
see my guilt, I start to wonder just what my crime was--beside guilt itself...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, GUILT
Two child prodigies fail to stop the killers stalking President Obama, but a geek with a homemade laser...
I'm sentenced for a crime I didn't commit; then the bailiff beats me for "resisting", though I'm not...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, SWEARING
The first drop struck about four miles away, with terrific force and thunder, breaking and drowning the land...
Thirsty deer invade the hall. Children play in the dunes encroaching on the city.
Will those ominous red clouds drop rain? Or sand?
Wei Linggong was an autocrat heeding only one minister. A dwarf bravely told him "I dreamt
you were no imperial sun warming all, just a stove, and your crony hogs all your warmth..."
I dream the actors auditioning for George Bernard Shaw’s play are blends of human, avian, and lion.
Next morning I find a card from Shaw asking if I'd fancy playing a lion in his...
This strange girl reminds me "I rode your bike recently but you forgot." She's right! Rode it in an earlier dream...
The old man sang in the empty church, then looked at me and snapped his fingers. I was filled with voices...
I dream I'm an otter, and wake into a dream about sculpture--and learn my style's due to my species...
I'm a bike courier. I take a packet of fifty potent dreams
up Dream Street and deliver them to the year 1980...
DREAM: I was a cheetah seeking a book of cheetah rolemodels, but this specist librarian harassed me...
PAINTING: months later, dream forgotten, I painted myself as an intellectual cheetah stretching...
A vivid nightmare that turned out a week later to be devastatingly true ...
A picture-poem experiment: one dream per stanza!
Five short dreams exploring the weight of culture on our animal selves...
I meet a woman on an oxcart who's sure we all want to poison her--
but in a way her affliction's made her forgiving, even noble...
CAUTION: MADNESS
Girls flash and strip and crawl into bed with me, but I'm blind to their interest--
till I become a snakeboy and discover the real limitations of phallic symbolism...
CAUTION: NUDITY, STUPIDITY
Half our religion-founders were just one guy, repeating till he got it right. Practice makes perfect!
The Crocodile King & the Geisha Queen, the couple who guard
the bridge over the River Styx, seem to quarrel a lot...
Earth scientists ignore the natives' tales of abyssal monsters, but the locals easily track a Terran sub...
I'm holding a pornographic novel, trying to keep it dry, as huge waves
flood the room. The book and I are both going to get drenched...
In bed asleep, the dreamer discovers this seemingly empty room hosts a
fairy ball, full of luminous half-seen beings serenaded by a monstrous band...
Nerds built the blues. Rick Moranis, famous blues-nerd, makes a groupie suck his ice cream cone...
CAUTION: MOCKS MUSIC, RACE, VANILLA ICE (CREAM)...
I was anorexic for years before I found I was allergic to many foods--I had good reason not to eat!...
I’ve had premonitory dreams of friends’ deaths, but never ones clear enough to spur action...
I spontaneously change sex! At first I'm happy, but I find unexpected disadvantages...
My clinic's euthanasia program is so warm and cuddly I barely notice I'm drifting toward death
til I reach the final form... and it's in Russian. They think I'm a refugee! Don't know me at all...
CAUTION: FLAMES ANTI-ABORTION AND HEALTHCARE IDEOLOGIES
My sister and I are on a ship abandoned by its crew, heading full-steam for the rocks, when...
I'm a teenage girl diving for treasure. In an eerie coral grotto reeking of sulfur,
I spot a diver in trouble... and wake to find the grotto is real..
I turn shy with women I like. So I wish for a dating coach, who appears! Then I feel dumb: how come I...
I meet a flutist I like, but she's busy playing. So I conjure a second her with free time to listen to herself with me...
Two nude women (drawn Wally Wood style) dance ritually in a
forest, summoning a worm-snake-dragon with a ring of fangs...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I had to sell my horse Shadow, but I missed him so much I painted him. As I finished, a strange impulse led me...
I dreamed a short story--even its title. Not that I read it. No, I lived it, through the eyes of a 5-year-old...
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...
Bishop is being driven mad by insomnia... until predawn birdsong wakes her,
and she discovers she's been dreaming of insomnia... maybe.
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!
Multiple tornadoes touched down in the fields, but the farmer's wife sewed
in a rocking chair, oblivious. I moved to warn her but my lieutenant said...
I careen from a shamanic laboratory
to a shattered ring round an alien world
to (gasp) an honest politican!...
A mom in the Black Forest photographed her young son and took the film to a lab in Strassburg. War broke out; she never got back.
Two years later in Frankfurt, she photographed her young daughter. The film came back with both her kids--superimposed.
The film with her son's latent, invisible image had wandered across wartorn Germany to be sold mistakenly as fresh--to her.
CAUTION: TWISTS "COINCIDENCE" INTO A PRETZEL
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...
I'm a married couple--the cook and laundress for an English observatory in 1948.
Why are we testifying to a Labor Party committee that we WANT to be servants? Well...
(1918 and 1996, twin images of our limited conception of dreaming)
What you call dreams are just the surf-zone between waking and dream!
Swim out past the foam to the dream-deeps and you'll find...
Through twin gates of dream--not ivory and horn any more, but fear and trust...
Three castles on the sea: a Mock Kremlin, a Ship of Toiletpaper, and a Ship of Brick and Beer...
A mad old surfer of the San Andreas Fault, impossibly riding earth-change...
Skimming over the lake on surface tension as two sharks prowl beneath, I'm not sure who's fishing for whom...
I hijack a Lacewing Chopper to install a new rubber-band engine, but the motor becomes a talkative penis, and...
CAUTION: ONE WEIRD WEENIE
I'm Doctor Who, being chased by an air-surfer who demands we give up a reserved, proud man named...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
A gigantic herd of buffalo stampede toward me. I panic, then surrender in peace to what is surely my death...
As we cross a scary ledge, my tough survival-guide, always no-nonsense before,
finally willing to consider... intellectualism, dating, ethics... fun?
To avoid being stabbed, I flee the Psychodrama Circus. Wisely--the place explodes!
But it's the filling of the sushi roll that really upsets me...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL MAKI
The past. Summer. Sunset. I want to sneak in a final
swim--in someone else's forbidden backyard pool...
The tale of the most truly sincerely religious revelation I've ever witnessed...
CAUTION: REAL WITCHES
The ruins of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco were the setting for an otherworldly dream...
I dream my friend Suvy introduces me to a man who just took a class I'm considering.
Weeks later she introduces me to him--but just as in my dream, he feels a bit insipid...
I dreamed I drew our dog and me mating, then found the drawing on a gallery wall for all to see...
CAUTION: CARTOON BESTIALITY
Swedenborg cuddles a talking dog who asks after its old master, Swab, and then kisses
Swedenborg, grossing him out. But he wakes knowing just what his doggy pest represents...
Chapman dreams he must walk 100 miles to London Bridge; on the bridge, a stranger says
"dreams are nonsense! Why, I dreamt of buried treasure 100 miles away, in some town called..."
An ancient pictograph inspires me to try a meditative technique: shrinking and letting myself be eaten...
CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
I was late for something, so I opened my pocket watch and swallowed a bunch of numbers...
Navaho country felt like home--the land, the art, the animals, the language. Trapped in suburbia, I drew...
I wake amnesic in a cabin in Alaska, in a dress printed with self-putdowns.
I track down the wizard who cursed me. He turns me into a swan! Worse?
No! His first curse was on a human being, and now I'm a bird. My mind is free!...
Not easy to fly without a plane, but I practice over a lonely lagoon.
Even if I panic some nesting swans. They'll get used to me...
I pull my mom's sweater onto my legs but get tangled (and bits of anatomy dangle).
Worse, I'm emulating Jesus. Is this any way to get a date?
CAUTION: WARDROBE MALFUNCTION, GENDER MALFUNCTION, MOM MALFUNCTION
Swedenborg stuns the Queen of Sweden by whispering a secret only she and a dead man knew;
A widow begs him to ask her late husband to find a lost receipt. Swedenborg reveals a secret drawer;
Swedenborg, at a dinner party, grows alarmed by a fire that nearly burns his home--500 km away!
A lonely little girl plays on a swing in her yard. A shy young faun or satyr
who has a crush on her conjures up a strange gift: a translucent wall of candy...
Swimming down among the tentacles didn't bother me. I wanted that ball. But I didn't see the BIG eye...
I have recurring dreams of figures broken up by hair the color of the background...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
Tracking two cats at night, I watch amazed as they dive in and swim gracefully across a swimming pool...
On a cruise to Catalina Island, I find friends, a boyfriend and a magical sea of color...
I met an elfin girl who's tattooed realistic vaginas all over her body, as... decoys? For she has...
CAUTION: NUDITY, TATTOOS, TABOOS...
A boar attacks Swedenborg's late brother, alive again. He tries to help, but the pig
eats his brother's head. That's what you get for drinking, partying, and gluttony...
CAUTION: VIOLENT DEATH
I visit my friend Xanthe's lungs, where I meet a swordswoman in a red bikini. I get a unicorn pendant,
go lucid, and become a heron too, but next day, it's the red-bikini-swordswoman I actually meet...
I slept late and felt a bit stiff, but until my friends pulled it out of my neck I had no idea...
Swedenborg gets in a duel, but his beautiful silver hilt has no sword attached. Uh-oh...
Then he's in bed and realizes he's been sexually boasting...
CAUTION: PHALLIC SYMBOLISM
Dusk. A plain. A troop of swordsmen approach me, draw their weapons...
and toss their spinning, shining swords up to the stars...
I'm Sybil Sue, a hard-boiled shapeshifting shamus, on the track
of the most wanted bankrobbers in LA: the Bad Girls...
CAUTION: IN BETWEEN GUNSHOTS, THE BAD GIRLS SWEAR
Sylvia, the fabulous Dog Singer, leads me through a spy film, a French romantic farce, Fellini's Rome...
A comet grows hair, a girl named Rosalie becomes a bed of roses, writing in a beautiful
hand appears on a beautiful hand, and Sylvia becomes a talking forest bird...
I dream my watch is way off and I'll be late. When I wake, I check
my daughter's watch. They agree. Can't BOTH be wrong... can they?