Alphabetized by author; group efforts are under title, including most films; a few 'auteur' films are under writer/director.
Boldface: Recommended. ALL CAPS: books, full-length plays and feature films. Capitalized Italics: short works.
Most works cited here are too long for the World Dream Bank; check Project Gutenberg or your library. WDB also has a few nondream booklists: for prodigies, geniuses & gifteds, for planetologists, terraformers & worldbuilders, and a new one for autistics and aspies. Other topics like parapsychology are included below, for now.

Stories About Dreams - Dream-Based Stories, Dreams AS Stories - Dream Journals - Books on Dreamwork

ALICE FROM DREAM TO DREAM, graphic novel, text by Giulio Macaione, art by Giulia Adragna

Alice inadvertently shares the dreams of nearby sleepers--a problem since her brother's a horror-film junkie, has nightmares, but forgets or denies them. She can't. The premise is powerful but gets used for slightly soapy drama--she must go into her best friend's coma to pull him out, or get trapped, and nondream family secrets are behind many of Alice's troubles. On that level, it works well. The same premise is explored more seriously in Zelazny's THE DREAM MASTER or Le Guin's story Social Dreaming of the Frin, below.

Anderson, Poul: The Visitor

A short story, inspired by a dream, that also hinges on a dream, a psychic one. Sad and fatalistic, though.

Bryant, Dorothy: THE KIN OF ATA ARE WAITING FOR YOU

A cult classic--a bittersweet utopian novel of a society centering on dreams.

Davison, Al: THE SPIRAL CAGE (graphic novel) and SPIRAL DREAMS (comics collection)

SPIRAL CAGE is a comics classic--the autobiography of a kid with spina bifida, whose parents were told he'd never walk. Well, he walks. And writes! Strong subject, strong writing, strong art--and jammed full of dreams and visions. SPIRAL DREAMS is a collection of shorter work including strong examples of psychic dreams; further vols, viewable at his site (see links), have a surreal/visionary bent, with Buddhist overtones. His MINOTAUR'S TALE is a foray into stark realism that's somehow more dreamlike than his dreams. Examples

Decur (Guillermo Decurgez): WHEN YOU LOOK UP

A kids' graphic novel rendered in paint (for the waking sequences) and Matisse-like cutouts (for the dreams). The plot's simple: a boy discovers a notebook of dream art and tracks its creator, who gives him art supplies to paint his own dreams. The dream-plots echo & exaggerate events in the dreamer's life, as if all dreams just rehash the day, with surreal frosting. Tasty frosting--in one, a bike-riding cat falls in love with a giraffe in a dress--but under the surreal surface, a curiously literal, limited model of dreaming. This dream-type is just one color on a wide spectrum.

Dick, Philip K: THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH and the early novels EYE IN THE SKY, UBIK

Many of Dick's books explore anti-lucidity: the inability to tell what's real, what's dream. STIGMATA is perhaps the strongest example of this uncertainty, but even his best known and popularly accessible book, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, has strong hints that the alternate world he paints so convincingly is just a bad dream--a bubble that wants to burst.

Dickson, Gordon: THE PRITCHER MASS

Earth's a mess, and we plan to leave it. But cartoon aliens that appear in our dreams--the only way they can reach us, it seems--tell us we're not welcome among the stars. "Clean up your own mess!" Though the main focus of this science fiction novel is our coming-of-age as a species, taking on adult responsibilities, Dickson also challenges Freud's assumption (largely accepted even by Jung) that dreams are personal, internal, and apolitical. What if they're wrong, and those tribal shamans were right all along? What if dream creatures are real?

DREAMBUILDERS (film, 2020)

Minna's new stepsister Jennie is manipulative and mean. One night Minna stumbles out of her dream-stage, and sneaks over to Jennie's set and meddles in her dreams. Of course the sisters end up in danger and must work together, learning Important Lessons in Family and Friendship. Like: don't give your dad a hypnotic craving for anchovies. This animation clearly wants to be the next Inside Out, but despite copying the look and plot elements, the writing and characters just aren't up to it.

DREAMSCAPE (film, 1984)

Dream-recorders are invented and promptly get misused. Our hero ends up facing a nightmare-journey, the promised Dreamscape... which frankly disappointed me. INCEPTION had at least surface wit; PAPRIKA, though animation, has realer characters; and both have better dreamscapes.

Du Maurier, George: PETER IBBETSON (1892)

This eccentric novel opens like a sweet, simple memoir of the author's childhood in 1840s Paris, but it morphs into a tale of lucid dreams shared by two lovers kept apart by day. First they build their own dreamworld, and then explore the lives of their ancestors back to cave times (anticipating Jung's notion of the collective unconscious by decades). You may find it too New Age (70 years before the term existed!) but I liked it. Find an illustrated edition--Du Maurier was a cartoonist for PUNCH and he obviously had a ball with these drawings. Compare with the roughly contemporary story "Brushwood Boy" by Kipling.

FORBIDDEN PLANET (film, 1956)

The science fiction version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with dreams as Caliban! A xenologist digs up relics of the long-extinct Krel only to find their ancient devices still work: dreams come true! Including nightmares: the Krel's own dreams, materialized, destroyed them. The disciplined Dr Morbeus, his innocent daughter Altaira, and their robot servant Robby (Prospero, Miranda and Ariel) are in fragile equilibrium till an Earth ship lands. The crew's rivalry for Miranda wakens "Monsters from the Id!" Half Shakespeare, half camp, all gorgeous, and more Freudian than Freud.

Gaiman, Neil: SANDMAN (11 graphic novels forming one epic, though individual volumes can stand alone.)

Sophisticated comics studded with dozens of dreams, showcasing every flavor of dreaming. Gaiman's personification of Dream slips from a brooding emcee of other's dreams to a flawed hero trapped in his own lonely dream-tale, doomed if he can't unbend and change. Gaiman cheerfully loots Classical and Shakespearean images, but builds a genuine tragicomedy of redemption that's very much his own. Skip volume 1; start with v.2, A Doll's House.

Gier, Kirsten: DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME; DREAM ON; and JUST DREAMING (translated from German)

Fantasy trilogy on shared dreaming. Liv's a lucid dreamer who finds her way into a shared dream with four boys from her school who've made a pact with a pre-Christian dream-god. She nearly ends up sacrificed. The dreams are done well. The series's core image is that ubiquitous, pan-cultural one of a corridor lined with doors to dreamers' private worlds. (Who first coined that? I ask because, in decades of dreamwork, I've NEVER seen that corridor or used its doors; yet I've still had lots of shared/telepathic dreams. Guess the ego's vault is flimsier than we think. At least mine is.) Gier says some original things with this image; in Dream On, she shows you can lock your door too securely!

Glaser, Nina: OUTSIDE OF TIME, RECOMPOSED, and MALE BONDING.

A San Francisco photographer whose surreal Butoh-influenced images affected my dreams strongly--see Eel Girls. I still don't know if her work rises from real dreams or just feels utterly dreamlike.

Goldstein, Lisa: THE DREAM YEARS

1920s Surrealists and radical French students in 1968 meet across time and start a pro-dream revolution against the death-machine. Feels too short and sketchy to me, but still fun--great wish fulfilment for any hippie. Historically educational, too.

Jones, Diana Wynne: Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream (short story, in Jones's MIXED MAGICS; also anthologized in DRAGONS AND DREAMS, edited by Jane Yolen)

A precocious dream artist gets in a rut, repeating her commercial successes until her dream-characters get sick of it and rebel. Quite funny, but as a dream artist myself I found, under the comedy, real depth--as is not unusual with Jones, whose surface sparkle can fool you. She fooled even Miyazaki, as anyone will learn who's seen his anime of Howl's Moving Castle and then actually bothers to read her strange subtle book on evasion's roots, costs, and benefits.

Keating, Lucy: DREAMOLOGY

Two teens dream of each other for years. What if you had a soulmate--but only in dreams? Max finally decides Lucy's unreal and finds a real girl. Lucy's lonely and still relies on Max--and dreams. When they meet for real and she finds he's not single... A sweet, fun romance, but despite the title, the dreamology's shaky. A researcher linked their dreams and, once asked, unlinks them just as easily (what? how?) Keating also claims dreamsharing can lead to madness. Teen drama, yeah, but insanity? Feh. Still, Lucy's dreams are delicious. Compare with Kipling's Brushwood Boy, below.

Kipling, Rudyard: Brushwood Boy

A sweet short story on shared dreaming, in which lifelong shared dreams bring together two soul-mates. Compare with George Du Maurier's roughly contemporary novel PETER IBBETSON.

Knox, Elizabeth: DREAMHUNTER and DREAMQUAKE

These two wonderfully strange books are set in an ambitopia reeling from the discovery of a physical dreamworld that only a minority (dreamhunters) can enter--bringing back dreams they can share with others in a sleeping operahouse. Fine worldbuilding, imagery, character and plotting--the tale succeeds as surrealism, Le Guin-style sociological science fiction, shamanic adventure, political thriller (if we dream collectively, here comes conformity!), and as a moral fable for creative artists. Compare to McNeil's DREAM SEQUENCE and Le Guin's LATHE OF HEAVEN.

Krentz, Jayne Ann: FALLING AWAKE.

Nominally a novel about dream research, but mostly just a romance-thriller; she lets sex, money and intrigue crowd out the dream theme. Still, Krentz isn't too misleading; high-end lucid dreamers really can do most of what she claims. Her worst slip is when our two lovers agree it's probable only humans truly dream. Oh, please!

Le Guin, Ursula K: THE LATHE OF HEAVEN

George Orr's dreams change things--so his therapist sets out to save the world, wielding the power of George. The tale of a man who can change anything but his shrink's ego! Simultaneously (1) a black comedy about rationalization, (2) a blacker comedy about the male American psyche, (3) a bittersweet love story, (4) a twisted telling of the worldwide fable "The fisherman and his wife", (5) a fine parallel-world story, and (6) a witty Taoist parable on why change never gets us far. Way better than the movie (and the low-budget eighties version is better than the big-name remake).

Le Guin, Ursula K: THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST

A colonial war against a dream-oriented culture. A grim parable about Vietnam with all the same flaws as AVATAR--brutality, preachiness, and taking the easy way out--focus on a threat to your utopia, so you don't have to fully envision it. I'd rather have read a (unique) utopia than a (standard) political sermon. But glimpses of utopia are better than nothing I guess.

Le Guin, Ursula K: Social Dreaming of the Frin (in her collection CHANGING PLANES)

What if we dreamed together as a community? Our desires and fears mingling in one big public stew? I was curious about the roots of this story and emailed her to tell of my dream-group's experiments with actual shared dreaming. Was her tale based on personal experience of shared dreams? She said no; it was pure science fiction with what she sees as a contrafactual premise; she doesn't believe dream telepathy exists!

Lee, Miye: THE DALLERGUT DREAM DEPARTMENT STORE (translated from Korean)

A fantasy about a store selling dreams (you pay in a small fraction of the emotions generated). Her first book; I never felt convinced it held together, or was clearly thought out. It has nonhuman characters and is clearly set in the dream continuum not ours, yet it feels like modern, mundane Korea. Parody? Failure of imagination? Maybe a translation problem and it makes more sense in the original? But the translator's experienced. Maybe I'm just grumpy about the idea of commercializing dreams. The Monsters, Inc. films have much the same schtick--emotion yields energy, and dreamworld beings feed off it--but there the analogy with fossil fuels is clear. This feels limp in comparison--and I'm no big fan of those movies.

Lewis, C.S.: VOYAGE OF THE DAWNTREADER: The Dark Island

This kids' classic contains a startling chapter, Dark Island, in which the voyagers land on the Isle where Dreams come True. They flee in terror before anything's even bitten them. It's clear Lewis generalized from his own dreamlife; in PERELANDRA, Lewis equates dreams, pagan spirit worlds (fair enough), and... Hell! This deeply imaginitive writer feared his own dreams. "Here Be Monsters" indeed! Compare with the film FORBIDDEN PLANET.
(In fairness, I should add that Lewis himself denied he feared his dreams; in fact his lion-god Aslan came from a dream.)

Lovecraft, H.P: DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH

Lovecraft's horror leaves me yawning, but I like this early book--a turn-of-the-century dream-fantasy like Lord Dunsany in a fey mood, with a flood of vivid dream-images. Logic? Who needs logic?

McCay, Winsor: LITLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND, and DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND

LITTLE NEMO, written and drawn as Sunday newspaper comics early in the 20th Century, has now been collected into a multivolume graphic novel. It works surprisingly well as such--McCay wrote it as a continuous story--simple but quite Jungian, as Nemo slowly grows from a timid child to a master of his dream realm. Clunky word balloons, but otherwise many decades ahead of its time graphically (Wild Art Nouveau dream images, the most visually gorgeous comic of all time) and oneirically (rather than quarrel with Freud, McCay simply ignores him to follows his own path: Jung in Oz on acid). Samples: Little Nemo, Little Nemo's Bed. RAREBIT FIEND has a different dreamer each week, letting McCay play with bizarre dream imagery with no plot restraints--except of course turn-of-the-century newspaper censors!

MacDonald, George: LILITH (1895)

A pre-Surrealist surrealist novel, asserting the world is a nested dream--a dream within dreams--and one difficult, but essential, to wake from. One of very few Christian writers to confront dreams' full depth and complexity--most were hobbled by echoes of medieval Church doctrine: dreamwork is witchcraft (true enough) and witchcraft is devil-worship (false). A multileveled, humane, weirdly modern book--Lin Carter's intro to my paperback copy says its "use of dream symbols... bears close comparison with the best of Kafka." I agree. Belongs in any lit course on dreams.

McIntyre, Vonda: DREAMSNAKE

Her first novel, and a strong one--a feminist adventure of a healer wandering through a postnuclear world, whose working tools are strange snakes that give healing dreams. The dreams aren't the core of the story, but no survey of dream-related literature should omit a book this fun. Remember fun?

McNeil, Carla Speed: FINDER: DREAM SEQUENCE (graphic novel)

FINDER is a series of quite brilliant graphic novels from Lightspeed Press. The recent volume DREAM SEQUENCE stars an apolitical artist reluctant to face how his dreams get exploited in a commercialized world. A shadow-figure starts gleefully, brutally ejecting tourists from his dream-Paradise. A tale with implications for any world-creator, whether shamanic, literary or artistic. Further, in the footnotes, McNeil says "the basic plot of Dream Sequence came from a dream". Compare to Elizabeth Knox's DREAMHUNTER and DREAMQUAKE.

Malkasian, Cathy: EARTHA (2017)

A surreal graphic novel of Eartha, a giant, naïve girl in a land where dreams come to act out and dissipate. When dreams stop coming, she rows across the sea to the City, to find out why. A bakery has addicted the citizens to fake-news biscuits--all bad news of course, is there any other kind?--and deprives them of sleep and dreams. Malkasian brilliantly physicalizes both social media addiction and the dream-famine it creates.

Miesel, Sandra: DREAMRIDER (revised and reissued as SHAMAN; either edition is fine)

A Midwestern historian's weird dreams initiate her as a shaman and tell her to change her society (a scary parody of today's security-obsessed America). Rock-solid research, showing how to tackle the problems shamanic dreamers face--better than Castaneda. Good parallel worlds too. And the otters who teach Ria in her dreams are marvelous characters. Not just educational--it's great fun watching Ria slowly tear loose from her narrow life (with a little help from her friends). An amazing first novel.

MONSTERS, INC. and its sequels (films)

These have the same idea as The Dallergut Dream Department Store--emotion yields energy, and dreamworld beings feed off it--in this case by scaring the crap out of you and me. The analogy with fossil fuels is clear, at least to viewers. But our hapless, apolitical monsters workin' the nightmare shift seem to be written stupid--way too slow to see the immorality (and danger) in fueling their world on others' pain. Of course millions of working people show exactly that cluelessness--as killer heatwaves, wildfires and tornadoes devastate their towns, they go right on voting for a clown yelling "Drill, baby, drill!" So I guess these films are really Social Realism.

Moore, Alan: PROMETHEA (series of five graphic novels)

An epic steeped in Gnostic mysticism, about a girl in a near-future New York who gradually becomes an avatar of a goddess/principle trying to free our souls. She undergoes a gradual shamanic initiation, moving deeper into dreamspace. Full of feverish psychedelic art and grating apocalyptic humor (though not as harsh as Moore's WATCHMEN, where Richard Nixon is president for life.)

Morrow, James: THE CONTINENT OF LIES

A science-fiction novel about a new artform: dreambeans. Eating a bean induces a carefully composed dream lived first-hand. Our hero, a dreambean reviewer, faces a crisis of conscience as he starts to suspect his beloved medium is just too involving, too prone to abuse--or hijacking.

MY LITTLE PONY (kids' TV series, and spinoff comics)

Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep? (season 5)
A cloud haunts Luna's dreams, and since she's the princess of dreams, it infects others. Twilight suggests they fuse all the dreams of the village into one shared dream, so they can resist the monster--everypony can remind others they can have any power they can dream of. A lucid group brainstorm-dream! Though in the end Luna has to integrate not defeat it, since it's her own guilt; more precisely, her dutiful self-punishment. Pride coming round to bite her own tail!

A Royal Problem (season 7)
Celestia and Luna, the divine sisters ruling day and night, quarrel--each thinks the other has it easy. Starlight, a reckless magic student, switches their powers/jobs for one day. Not so easy! Soon both goddesses are trapped in Starlight's nightmare of what'll happen if they DON'T reconcile... Most memorable for Daybreaker, Celestia's rebellious side who's sick of being ever-patient and responsible.

Princess Luna and Discord (a spinoff comic in MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDS FOREVER, v.5)
Discord (spirit of chaos and creativity) ravages Ponyville without meaning to--he's sleepwalking, having nightmares. Why? Princess Luna (the literal Night Mare) tours his crazy dreams with him, trying to diagnose his fear. He's evasive--ashamed? Discord fears he'll hurt those he's coming to care for. Luna can't just dismiss that--she fears it too. They're both proud, willful types who took years to realize they were bored and lonely; that love IS worth it. Eye-candy kids' comic with surprisingly deep writing by Jeremy Whitley.

Nolan, Christopher: INCEPTION (film)

An action flick on dreams? Oxymoronic! Or is it? In the future, dreams are used for espionage, so our Dream Team must enter a dream within a dream within a dream--but of course they end up FOUR levels in. Four caper movies nested like matryushka dolls--and all work! On the surface at least. But their core mission is silly, and women are all Film Noir (Mal was a dream researcher yet her dream-self's a femme fatale saboteur; Ariadne's the Spunky Girl, One Of The Boys, and the Group Mom all at once). Worst of all, Nolan treats dreams as mechanistic, stupid, and hostile to outsiders, even loved ones; that's just false. My experience is that the conscious worries way more about boundaries than dreams do. Sorry, Jung was right about that.

Norton, Andre: STORM ON WARLOCK and ORDEAL IN OTHERWHERE

Two 1960s science fiction novels about a matriarchal, dream-based society. OTHERWHERE, in particular, had a big influence on me. Near-pulp in pacing and color, yet not fluff--the books tackle a host of issues pop culture of the period ignored--fundamentalism, sexism, reverse sexism, lucid dreaming, and capitalism's looting of native cultures.

Nylund, Eric: PAWN'S DREAM

Fantasy novel of a recurring dreamworld that's real. The dream dynamics are convincing, but are just the frame for a disappointingly conventional fantasy plot within the dreamworld--the dreamer must take charge of a family power struggle. Failure of imagination, or failure of nerve?

PAPRIKA (film; director Satoshi Kon also did the wonderfully surreal MILLENNIUM ACTRESS.)

Experimental recorders allow realtime dreamsharing--and healing. Dr Atsuko Chiba, on the research team, uses them illegally to help patients; but she may have become addicted to her dream-persona, Paprika, who lacks her inhibitions. Some devices go missing, and dreams of psychotic patients get planted in researchers' minds. By the end, a psychedelic nightmare-parade invades the waking world--if there is one! PAPRIKA's a wild colorful ride, with sounder dream-theories, realer characters (in particular, it takes women seriously) and a warmer heart than Hollywood films on dreams like INCEPTION and DREAMSCAPE.

Robinson, Kim Stanley: Before I Wake (short story)

A science fiction tale in which Earth drifts into a region of space with subtly different energy and we suddenly are dreaming awake. Civilization burns as a result. Unusually for Robinson, it ends sadly; no cure. We just have to learn to live with it. Or not. Many of the story's surreal images are from his actual dreams.

Shakespeare, William: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and THE TEMPEST (plays)

Not about dreams per se, yet rife with dream-elements: illusions, wish-fulfillments, tricksters, spirits and transformations. One's a playful young man's farce on love's delusions; the other an old man's fable about disillusion--and, in the end, disillusionment from disillusion as Prospero faces that he'll be humanly imperfect, and takes up the mantle of leadership again.

Silverberg, Robert: LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE and sequels

A science fiction ambitopia: a world where dreams are encouraged, acted on, and regulated by government bureau! An aborted masterpiece--all too soon it drifts away from dreams to more conventional politics, but the first half is fascinating. How do you interpret insanely megalomanic dreams if there's evidence they're true? What are an exceptional person's responsibilities?

Starhawk: THE FIFTH SACRED THING

A utopian novel of her vision of a future witch/pagan/green/anarchist San Francisco, with psychic dreamers playing an interesting though not central role as the City's early warning system.

Storm, Hyemeyohsts: SEVEN ARROWS and SONG OF HEYOEHKAH

Plains tribal dreamwork and shamanism taught in subtle, humane, beautifully told teaching-stories. Dreams within dreams, lives within lives, tales within tales--as cleverly nested as Sheherazad's. A success both as literature and as non-European dream-theory, clearly explained. Compare: Jung's MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS.

Tennant, Emma: HOTEL DE DREAM

The dreams of the Hotel's tenants come true. And interfere with each other. And rebel against the dreamers... High literature? Maybe yes, maybe no. Funny? Oh, yes.

Thomas, D.M.: THE WHITE HOTEL

Sigmund Freud treats a woman with psychosomatic illness and eerie dreams. Doctor and patient are equally unaware they're premonitions of the Holocaust... A novel with humor so dark it pounces on you like the monster under your bed.

Tolkien, J.R.R., Leaf By Niggle (novella in his collection TREE AND LEAF and elsewhere).

A long, personal, peculiar (even for Tolkien) fable of a man's dreamworld becoming his heaven/hell. A nice little art project can take over your whole damn life! It's personal of course: Tolkien dreamed this story while he was struggling to finish The Lord of the Rings. He turned his nightmare into a strangely positive vision of the afterlife--and an artist's duty to ordinary life and ordinary people as well as the vision. Compare to George MacDonald's LILITH.

Turgenev, Ivan Dream Tales (four long stories linked only by theme).

Four tales concerning dreams, which, if these are examples, are all Gothic and unhealthy and better left alone. Clara Militch, The Song of Triumphant Love and The Dream all fit this Gothic mold pretty well, but Phantoms, my favorite, is more mysterious--is Alice a ghost, angel, devil, vampire, succubus, soul seeking incarnation, what? And who's that goddess/sorceress chasing her? Not that we ever find out...

Twain, Mark: THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER

This uncomfortable novel isn't just a black version of Faust or one more Twain critique of Christian dualism--Twain was a serious dreamworker, and it's prescient science fiction too! It extrapolates how lucid dreaming without solid ethical grounding can go terribly wrong. The Stranger, Traum [German: 'dream'], acts like a lucid dreamer, idly helping or hurting us, secure in the certainty we're mere dream figures--his to play with. A very dark Buddha! Next time you go lucid, remember the Stranger's casual cruelty. Compare with Le Guin's THE LATHE OF HEAVEN.

TWICE UPON A TIME (animation, 1983)

Synonamess Botch kidnaps all the dream-deliverers and tries to give us all nightmares, but is foiled by Ralph the All-Purpose Animal, dim but persistent (all the others are just dim). George Lucas produced (and Leonard Maltin loved) this Monty Pythonish collage-animation full of visual & verbal gags... but every shot drags. Feels like they did the whole thing stoned. Nothing of substance to say about dreams.

Van Allsburg, Chris: BEN'S DREAM

A children's picture book telling (with vivid line illustrations) of two kids' shared dreams of floating round the world in a great flood. Fictional, but pretty true to real shared dreams. I especially like that the imagery is so vivid it can easily distract you from the evidence the dreams are shared. I missed the clues, but our protagonist Ben didn't!

Wiesner, David: FREE FALL

A wordless children's picture book of a boy's dreams, with superb illustrations (it's a Caldecott Honor Book) that cleverly wrap around from page to page; they could form one long undivided scroll. But as a story, it's less engaging than the previous entry, BEN'S DREAM. This nameless boy just witnesses; never really connects with anyone he meets.

Willis, Connie: LINCOLN'S DREAMS

Prizewinning science fiction I found disappointing. Little connection to Lincoln's real (psychic!) dreams [example]. And as a psychic dreamer myself, I felt insulted. Annie (our psychic dreamer) is a classic fainting 19th Century anima, sleepwalking her way thru the book, doomed to a droopy death from page one. And Willis's picture of the Civil War is weirdly apolitical--she empathizes with Lee's pain, but I'd be more impressed if she made me care despite the immorality of Lee's cause, instead of simply ignoring it. Does she mention slavery once?

Zelazny's THE DREAM MASTER

A therapist in the future can enter clients' dreams, and, with luck and training, shape them, leading them back to health. Unfortunately they shape him as much as he shapes them... can the conscious master dreams or is the title a trick, are dreams the master? I found this a compelling if dark read, and an interesting thought-experiment hampered a bit by out-of-date (essentially Freudian) dream theory, assuming the conscious really needs to keep tight control.

Almond, David: Where Your Wings Were (short story in COUNTING STARS), and SKELLIG

An autobiographical childhood tale of a magical recurring dream. It also became, in expanded form, the seed of his best-known novel, SKELLIG.

Altman, Robert: THREE WOMEN (film)

Altman based this feature film directly on a dream of his.

Anderson, Poul: The Visitor

A short story, inspired by a dream, that also hinges on a dream, a psychic one. Sad and fatalistic, though.

Bell, Gabrielle: Cody and THE BOOK OF SLEEP

The Book of Sleep I haven't yet tracked down. Many of Bell's comics are dream-based; such as On the Seashore from her collection When I'm Old. Cody, anthologized in Best American Comics 2013 (ed: Jeff Smith) is a dark comic of murder loosely inspired by a nightmare.

Bergman, Ingmar: WILD STRAWBERRIES (film) and NAKED NIGHT (film; also titled SAWDUST AND TINSEL):

He's claimed all his films are dreams, though I take that metaphorically. But these two have scenes straight from Bergman's dreams, staged as accurately as he could.

Blavatsky, Madame (Blavatskaia, Helena): The Ensouled Violin

Blavatsky is best known as a mystic (she founded the Theosophical Society) but she also wrote fiction, like this story based on a nightmare. A musician traps his teacher's soul inside his violin and strings it with his guts, in an effort to rival the prodigy Paganini, who he thinks made a deal with the devil--or is one! (I found it ironic, since science writer Sam Kean (in THE VIOLINIST'S THUMB) argues Paganini was a mutant--the first identifiable case of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Which I have too.)

Carroll, Lewis: ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

These aren't just dreamlike, but dream-based. Carroll said he pieced them together from bits of what we would today call hypnogogic dreams.

Charnas, Suzy McKee: Listening To Brahms (award-winning science fiction story anthologized in VANISHING ACTS and elsewhere)

A lizard in a dream told her this whole tragicomic novella about music, survivors' guilt and redemption. Powerful. Recommended.

Cocteau, Jean: ORPHEE (film) and KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE (play)

The play "Knights" was directly inspired by a dream. Cocteau's film of the Orpheus myth also borrows heavily from dreams. Ann Faraday points out that the mirror-world in "Orphee" shows the non-REM state, which is rare in art--most artists mine REM, for its vivid imagery and passion. Cocteau did something subtler in Orphee.

Crespi, Giuseppi Maria: PAVONATTO (painting, early 1700s)

What about paintings based on dreams? Crespi dreamed of a blue cat with green feathered wings, and painted it for his daughter three centuries ago--one of the oldest visual records of a dream I've found. "Pavonatto" is in a museum in Pisa, Italy.

DREAM SCENE MAGAZINE (five issues, 1993-1996)

This bizarre zine took readers' dreams and published them as news stories; contributors' names were listed at the end, but, to preserve privacy, individual dreams had no bylines (sigh). Treating them as news events really did show dreams in a different light--daylight--subverting our post-Freudian obsession with interpretation, and deflating Jungian pomposity too... Examples

DREAMWORKS, an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (5 vols, c.10 issues? 1980-1988)

This hard-to-find literary journal wasn't really quarterly--intermittent at best. Some accounts here have a creator's raw dream, then editing/composing decisions, then the finished work based on the dream--insightful! Big names--Ferlinghetti, Le Guin, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, WS Merwin, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov. Some poets' essays on their dreamwork got reprinted in Night Errands below. Examples

Farmer, Nancy: THE EAR, THE EYE AND THE ARM

YA book. It began from a dream, though it quickly went its own mad way... to win the Newbery Prize. A romp through a future Africa--science fiction, surrealism, or farce? Oh, all of them.

Gaiman, Neil: Feeders And Eaters, a short story (anthologized in KEEP OUT THE NIGHT)

A tale based on a nightmare Gaiman had in his twenties. Creepy. And Gaiman knows creepy.

Gälawdewos [Claudius]: THE LIFE AND STRUGGLES OF OUR MOTHER WALATTA PETROS (biography, 1672-3)

An Ethiopian monk, Mazgaba Haymanot, dreamed repeatedly in 1665 that the saint who founded their monastery needed a biography written while those who remembered her still lived. They hired a scholar, Gälawdewos [Claudius], to interview the community. The book isn't just dream-provoked, it's full of visions and bizarre, petty miracles. WP comes across as a feisty, unsaintly saint whose enemies called her "that witch", for she cursed as often as she blessed. But she resisted colonization (Jesuits converted the king, who persecuted her and thousands of others for sticking to the Ethiopian church) and at last ran the Jesuits out of the country. Examples: Silla Kristos, Ilarya

Gotfryd, Alex: Appointment in Venice, a dream-based book of photos

"Gotfryd had a memorable dream of trailing three figures through the mist-shrouded, dawn streets of Venice; he hired three models and set off to capture his dream on film."--Deirdre Barrett in The Committee of Sleep, p.21. I haven't yet seen a copy of Appointment.

Grass, Albert: The Adventures of a Dreamer, dream-comics

A book of short dream-comics in pencil & watercolor, interpreted in a Freudian style. Unless the whole thing is a prank by "editor" Zoe Beloff and she did it all last year, which I suspect. Sample dream: A Creature

Gurganus, Allan: It Had Wings (short story in his collection WHITE PEOPLE)

A tale about finding an angel in the back yard, based on a childhood dream. For an oddly parallel dream-inspired short story and novel, see David Almond above.

Jemisin, N.K.: THE BROKEN EARTH trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky)

The series arose directly from a dream of an enraged woman who could lift mountains--and Jemisin's struggle to envision what sort of world would create such power... and such rage. Each individual volume of this future-Earth saga won the Hugo Award, and deserved it. Grim but gripping.

Jemisin, N.K.: THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms and The Kingdom of Gods)

Jemisin's 2010 debut novels also arose directly from a dream of "two gods. One had dark-as-night hair that contained a starry cosmos of infinite depth; the other, in a child's body, manipulated planets like toys." These books have all the strengths of the award-winning Broken Earth series that won her fame; I even prefer them a bit; heavy, but less angry.

Keating, Lucy: LITERALLY

Teen metafiction. In Annabelle's writing class, guest speaker Lucy Keating says she's writing a love story and Annabelle's her character. "But don't worry, I'm sick of tragedy! Happy ending!" Somehow not reassuring. Especially since Keating's absent-minded; new boy Will is (literally) made for her, but his eyes change color as the writer forgets. Annabelle revolts, and comic relief Elliot breaks role too, and they start writing their own story... Amusing, but is it dream-based? Yes--just not Keating's dream! She thanks her friend "Josh Bank, you weirdo, for having a dream where I kidnapped one of my characters; the impetus for this whole crazy thing."

Kindl, Patrice: OWL IN LOVE

A surreal, funny (and surprisingly moving) YA novel about an owl stuck in an American high school (with a crush on her science teacher!) The first edition says it came straight from a dream. I believe it. Kindl's other books are well-written but OWL's bold strangeness stands out.

King, Stephen: IT

The scene in the junkyard with the flying parasites is straight from a dream. In an interview, King said he was stuck and asked his dreams for a way out; he dreamed he was the girl in the junkyard, looking into an old refrigerator, and...

Lindquist, Rowena Cory: Prelude To A Nocturne (a short story in DREAMING DOWN UNDER, a collection of Australian speculative and slipstream fiction)

A bittersweet tale of two sisters, one of whom matures while the other, due to a controversial treatment, stays young. Lindquist's afterword says "Amazingly, the title and attitudes of the main characters came to me fully formed in a dream."

Mahfouz, Naguib: THE DREAMS

104 dreams recorded while Mahfouz was recovering from getting knifed by a religious fanatic. Either the translation’s poor, failing to give enough context, or his style’s deliberately evasive--or just more interested in atmosphere than clarity. Hard to say. Guess it says a lot about me that I prefer clarity and resolution to mood pieces. Still, they are compelling--even if I can't figure out what they're saying. Examples: Clown, The Leap, Rubbish

McGregor, Dion: SOMNILOQUYS and FURTHER SOMNILOQUYS (CDs recording his sleeptalk) and DREAMA (hourlong Fringe Festival play)

Dion McGregor talked in his sleep. A lot. Loudly. And then denied it. At last, to prove it, his much-harassed roommate recorded him. The resulting sleep-rants are surreal and wildly funny. I haven't searched the Web for them but at least two CDs are out there.
At the 2010 San Francisco Fringe Festival, Annie Paladino tried staging McGregor's monologs as a play, DREAMA (well, a dozen nanoplays in an hour). Grotesque, funny and nothing like MY dreams--or those of my friends, or maybe, anyone else's, ever. So emotional, even panicky, as he talks himself into surreal crises...

McKean, Dave: MIRRORMASK (film)

A feature film (dialogue by Neil Gaiman) based on a series of dreams McKean had. Visually spectacular, though I don't think the story resolves psychologically in the end--Helen's mirror-twin gets stuffed back into the care of her smothering mom. A bad idea if she's a Jungian shadow, and she sure acts like one. She's bound to break out again, and you can hardly blame her. Each Helen should end up with more of her opposite's life and energy. But as failures go, it's a fascinating one.

McNeil, Carla Speed: FINDER: DREAM SEQUENCE (graphic novel)

FINDER is a series of quite brilliant graphic novels from Lightspeed Press. The recent volume DREAM SEQUENCE stars an apolitical artist reluctant to face how his dreams get exploited in a commercialized world. A shadow-figure starts gleefully, brutally ejecting tourists from his dream-Paradise. A tale with implications for any world-creator, whether shamanic, literary or artistic. Further, in the footnotes, McNeil says "the basic plot of Dream Sequence came from a dream". Compare to Elizabeth Knox's DREAMHUNTER and DREAMQUAKE.

Mansfield, Katherine: Sun and Moon (short story)

Mansfield dreamed this short story--even its title. But she didn't read it in a dream or observe the characters--she lived it, through the uncomprehending eyes of a 5-year-old boy as he watches adult doings at a party with bafflement and wonder. Reading this story today, I still do...

Mukherjee, Bharati: JASMINE and WIFE

The endings of these two novels, as well as a number of her short stories, come from dreams. In each case, just as she was about to write the final scenes according to her conscious plans, she dreamed a different and better ending.

Pierce, Meredith Ann: THE DARKANGEL TRILOGY: The Darkangel, A Gathering of Gargoyles, and The Pearl at the Soul of the World

A fantasy in three novellas based on a set of dreams--not Pierce's own, but the dreams of a mad patient of Jung's! And you can feel it. Compellingly dreamlike--Pierce had the wisdom not to water down the dreams with too much logic. Aeriel, a girl on the Moon, must stop an angelic vampire determined to return to Earth, no matter what it costs the struggling lunar ecology. Gothic romance, mythic creatures vividly realized, primal mother-daughter scenes. Unique.

Pogue, David: Abby Carnelia's One and Only Magic Power

Kids' book with amusing premise: if Abby tugs both earlobes and looks at a hard-boiled egg, it spins. By the book's end she suspects we all have pointless little powers we mostly overlook. Magic is real--and STUPID. Pogue says, in the afterword/interview, he dreamed the whole thing--woke with the book's premise, character, plot, even the title.

Prelutsky, Jack: THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN RIDES TONIGHT and NIGHTMARES: POEMS TO TROUBLE YOUR SLEEP

These two collections of comic/scary poems for kids almost all come from dreams. In fact many poems in his other books are dream-based, like Forty Performing Bananas

Robinson, Kim Stanley: Before I Wake (short story)

A science fiction tale in which Earth drifts into a region of space with subtly different energy and we suddenly are dreaming awake. Civilization burns as a result. Unusually for Robinson, it ends sadly; no cure. We just have to learn to live with it. Or die. Many of the story's surreal images are from his actual dreams.

Sayles, John: THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (film)

Sayles says, in "Writers Dreaming," that BROTHER was provoked by three consecutive dreams. But if he'd stopped at dream one, the film'd be called Assholes From Outer Space. He said "Nah," but his dreams came back with a rewrite, with more sympathetic characters: Bigfoot In The City. He said "Better, but it's only good for a half-hour short." So his dreams tried a third time, and that version became a strange and wistful feature: The Brother From Another Planet.

Schreiner, Olive: DREAMS

I still don't know if these fables are actual dreams, or if Schreiner crafted them consciously, or something in between. In any case, they're powerful shamanic visions, with scorching imagery. Schreiner was an early 20th century writer whose present obscurity is probably due to her fierce political radicalism--it's sure not because her stuff is dull or poorly written.

Tolkien, J.R.R., Leaf By Niggle (novella in his collection TREE AND LEAF and elsewhere).

A long, personal, peculiar (even for Tolkien) fable of a man's dreamworld becoming his heaven/hell. A nice little art project can take over your whole damn life! It's personal of course: Tolkien dreamed this story while he was struggling to finish The Lord of the Rings. He turned his nightmare into a strangely positive vision of the afterlife--and an artist's duty to ordinary life and ordinary people as well as the vision. Compare to George MacDonald's LILITH.

Twain, Mark: short story The Great Dark (in TALES OF WONDER and other collections)

August 1898: "Last night, dreamed of a whaling cruise in a drop of water. Not by microscope but actually." He turned the dream into a vivid and tragic story. For these whalers are being watched: their waterdrop is under a microscope. Its light dries up their drop, stranding the crew and the dreamer in a desert of light surrounded by the great dark. Brilliant and creepy--it haunted me as a kid. Decades before physics faced the problem of observer effects, Mark Twain turns them brutally personal--if God really does watch over us, the light of his scrutiny would be fatally desiccating!

Twain, Mark: 3,000 Years Among The Microbes (in TALES OF WONDER and other collections)

Another tale from a dream: "I dreamed that the visible universe is the physical person of God; that the vast worlds that we see twinkling millions of miles apart in the fields of space are the blood corpuscles in His veins; and that we and the other creatures are the microbes that charge with multitudinous life the corpuscles." In the tale he built from the dream, the microbes, some of them deadly diseases, dismiss as crazy the idea they're motes in a much larger being, with the power to heal or kill their own home--their God. As we deny our smallness--and deadliness.

White, E.B.: STUART LITTLE

In the spring of 1926 White dreamed of a mouse in a suit with a hat and cane. Twelve years and many drafts later he published STUART LITTLE, in which a human couple inexplicably have a son who's a mouse... Apparently CHARLOTTE'S WEB was not dream-based; but I wonder about TRUMPET OF THE SWAN...

Yeats, William Butler: CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN (play); numerous poems too

Yeats was, besides a poet of great technical skill, a visionary of equal dedication. He worked with dreams, induced visions, Tarot, automatic writing, you name it. The play "Cathleen" is dream-based, as are dozens of his poems, which constantly wrestle with the basic shamanic task: how to embody complex visions, both in art and in life. Examples: Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers - The Smiling Shaw Machine - Towards Break of Day - Cycles Ago

Barasch, Marc Ian: HEALING DREAMS

Mostly a how-to book, but effectively his biography in dreams, too. Beside dreams with health advice, Barasch covers 'big dreams' of all sorts--dreams healing families or communities, telepathic and predictive dreams, political dreams--all the dreams that Western psychology from Freud on declared impossible. Barasch argues you can't separate personal and communal, symbolic and literal, healing and spiritual, body and mind; a single dream may work on all these levels at once, so dream theory MUST be many-layered. Some of the best dreams are his own: dreams warning of cancer may have saved Barasch's life.. Examples: Barasch

Birkhäuser, Peter: LIGHT FROM THE DARKNESS (1980)

A posthumous collection of dream art by Birkhäuser, who started as a formidable realist painter but in the 1940s was driven by intense dreams to study (and eventually to befriend) Carl Jung; his dream-painting The Cat hung in Jung's office. The book has about forty plates, though it turns out only a handful are really dreams; many just portray Jungian ideas and archetypes. His therapist, Marie-Louisa von Frantz, provides notes, though she only summarizes most of his dream texts. I wish we had his own words, but it's still a powerful collection. Examples: Birkhäuser

Burroughs, William S: MY EDUCATION: A BOOK OF DREAMS (1995)

The title's half-ironic: see his dream My Education. This compilation contains entries going back decades, but few are dated or in sequence. Not his thing. Burroughs is in some ways an advanced dreamworker--often lucid, often flying, occasionally predictive, with magical transformations (especially cat to human or human to cat)--but his dreams are mostly set in what he calls the Land of the Dead--gray jumbled cities full of guns, drugs, cops and bureaucrats, where he's lost, hungry, unsure where to go and where he belongs. Yet he says "I am by and large a very happy man. People and critics like to think of me in despair because they hate to think of anyone whose way of life they disapprove of as being happy." Examples: Burroughs

Chast, Roz: I MUST BE DREAMING (collection of dream-comics, 2023)

While these dreams are rendered in her signature self-deprecating New Yorker style, they span a wide range from farce to nightmare to heartrending. One of the few cartoonists to have published a whole book of dream comics or art, and one of VERY few women to manage it--I can think of only two others, Julie Doucet and Katherine Metcalf Nelson. Strongly recommended. Examples: Chast

Cixous, Helene: DREAM I TELL YOU (2006; dreams 1990-2001)

Fifty short, raw dream accounts without explanation or interpretation in a Kerouac run-on style. The subject matter is mostly prosaic to mildly surreal; few shamanic and no lucid dreams. The style, at least in the English translation, feels elusive, even evasive; the translator's intro warns there's wordplay here difficult to translate.
Examples: High in the Mountains, Papa, A Delivery, De Gaulle

Davison, Al: THE SPIRAL CAGE (graphic novel) and SPIRAL DREAMS (comics collection)

SPIRAL CAGE is a comics classic--the autobiography of a kid with spina bifida, whose parents were told he'd never walk. Well, he walks. And writes! Strong subject, strong writing, strong art--and jammed full of dreams and visions. SPIRAL DREAMS is a collection of shorter work including strong examples of psychic dreams; further vols, viewable at his site (see links), have a surreal/visionary bent, with Buddhist overtones. Examples: Davison.

Doucet, Julie: MY MOST SECRET DESIRE (collection of dream-comics)

Dark, dense, and intense, Doucet's dreams are full of sex (and sex changes), birth, cats, crazy guys, nightmares, recurring dreams, surreal touches, and flashes of lucidity. One of very few cartoonists to have published a whole book of dream-comix, and one of VERY few women to manage it--I can think of only two others, Roz Chast and Katherine Metcalf Nelson. Outrageous and strongly recommended. Examples: Doucet

Dunne, J.W.: AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME (1920s-30s, several editions)

    Dunne looked for precognition in everyday dreams, not spectacular cases. He simply compared his dreams to waking events a few days later as well as earlier. He found dream images echoing the future just as frequently as the past. His examples are quiet and small--a gate and field, a particular house. But anyone approaching his data fairly has to concede he found a symmetrical pattern--rich connections to events one day off (past or future), sparser references two days off, and so on, forming a bell-shaped curve: ordinary Gaussian distribution centered on the present, but spreading into past and future equally! It's as if the dreaming mind were in a balloon, looking down on the timescape: things directly below (both past and future) are quite clear, but quickly foreshorten as one looks further into the distance. Whether there's a horizon beyond which we can't see, Dunne couldn't say--he had at least one precognition years before the event (a vivid peak experience: flying in an early plane). Like a peak on the horizon? Or looming over it?
    Dunne had trouble recognizing even obvious predictive echoes. Only if he pretended they were in the past, reading his own journal backwards, would backward echoes suddenly come clear. He describes it as a trance he had to shake himself out of, over and over. Precisely the opposite of the credulous eagerness so many skeptics attribute to psychics and parapsychologists! It takes effort to strip off cultural brainwashing, even when your experience proves it false.
    Dunne also points out how Einsteinian spacetime fails to explain why we experience time as a flow; that requires at least one more time dimension. To be fair, I find Dunne's own theory of infinite "serial time" inadequate, too. But his experiment still poses a real challenge to physics and psychology--and when I bothered to replicate his experiment (unlike most of his critics), I got his results--as did Vladimir Nabokov and Nancy Price below.
Examples: Dunne

A FLOCK OF DREAMERS, an anthology of dream-inspired comics

The only anthology of dream art I've found yet. The strongest pieces are by Kjartan Arnorsson, Bob Kathman, Luke Walsh, Danijel Zezeli & Jessica Lurie, Jim Woodring and Rick Veitch. Others have vivid images but weak plots and ideas. Like other published dream art, nearly all the contributors are male. Still, it's a great how-to book proving that dreams don't have to be presented artfully or prettily to be powerful. Examples: Kjartan's Dream?, Veitch's Doppelgänger!

Jenks, Kathleen: JOURNAL Of A DREAM ANIMAL

Fascinating--at once a dream-journal, a literary work (her raw entries are better than most polished writing) and a spiritual autobiography. Jungian but with a raw passion most such journals lack. Far more personal and passionate than Sheila Moon's ideologically similar DREAMS OF A WOMAN, below.

Jung, Carl: MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS and THE RED BOOK

The first book's an autobiography so full of dreams and visions it shows Jung to be a working shaman in all but name. Of the dream experts who matured before the discovery of REM, Jung is the most modern. I do think he has rather traditional notions of gender, but then I live in San Francisco. The Red Book, his personal notebook, published only posthumously, looks like a medieval Bible--calligraphy & intricate decoration. Even in translation, it's a hard read--he wrestles wiith European & especially Christian brainwashing, and he doesn't distinguish clearly between dreams, waking fantasies and later waking interpretation. Start with Man and his Symbols or Memories, Dreams, Reflections instead. Examples of Jung's dreams

Kerouac, Jack: THE BOOK OF DREAMS (abridged ed. 1960s, full ed. 2001)

Turns out this famous sixties book was highly abridged; a full edition came out only in 2001, with hundreds more entries; nearly 450 total. A typical entry mashes together a whole night of dreams, in no particular order, preserving the process as Kerouac recalls them (or half-recalls, or doesn't). They're in his signature run-on style; separate dreams aren't marked or titled. But if you do parse out the individual dreams, there are well over 1000--the largest dream journal ever published in hardcopy that I know of. What are they like? Examples: Kerouac

Kingsford, Anna: DREAMS AND DREAM-STORIES (1888)

Two dozen long, coherent, mystical, fascinating dreams, plus half a dozen (published) short stories based on similar dreams; the best of the latter is probably Beyond the Sunset--and it's no coincidence that's the most openly dream-based. The dream-plots behind the published tales are interesting but Victorian commercial conventions stifle them. Kingsford's raw dreams, however, are amazing.

Kingsford, Anna: CLOTHED WITH THE SUN (1888)

Whole text available online. Mystical visions, about half of them dreams, the others trance-channeled. She influenced the Order of the Golden Dawn, and thus shaped New Age mysticism. But she's a lot steelier than her flabby descendents--a pioneer of radicalism, feminism, Wicca and animal rights. Our three great sins: sexism (and suppression of intuition), fundamentalism (and faith itself, instead of mystical experience), and violence (stemming from the belief we can't transcend matter and animality). Examples: Kingsford

Linkhart, Carl: SUSPENSE ABOVE THE POOL (1998)

Most dream artists can't write; most dream writers can't illustrate. Linkhart can and does. He paints his dreams, Fauvist style, with colors as primal as Chagall. The book has about forty such paintings, each with a prose-poem telling the dream inspiring it--sometimes rather elliptically. For me the results ain't pretty but they tell the dreams in a way neither medium alone could. Examples: Linkhart

Mahfouz, Naguib: THE DREAMS

104 dreams recorded while Mahfouz was recovering from getting knifed by a religious fanatic. Either the translation’s poor, failing to give enough context, or his style’s deliberately evasive--or just more interested in atmosphere than clarity. Hard to say. Guess it says a lot about me that I prefer clarity and resolution to mood pieces. Still, they are compelling--even if I can't figure out what they're saying. Examples: Clown, The Leap, Rubbish

Moon, Sheila: DREAMS OF A WOMAN (dream journal)

Long, coherent, literate, mythic dreams. But the title's true. Moon writes like she's some generic "woman," not an individual. She'll tell some outrageous weird-ass image, then only say "it was an archetype" or "it was an aspect of me." OK, but who are YOU? And WHICH you? A subtle cowardice--instead of exposing her private life, she gets cosmic on us! She may go deeper in private, but the book leaves a false impression. It's a bad guide for beginning dreamers, worth reading just as a warning--she's not the only dreamer to hide the heart of her dreams behind safe, solemn, impersonal Jungianism! Contrast with Jenks above, or Nelson below.

Muir, Edwin: THE STORY AND THE FABLE (1940)

A autobiography full of spiritual dreams and hypnogogic visions. He finds himself inside stars, traveling through time, undergoing transformations and meeting strange deities. "I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about 200 years old... in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901... No wonder I am obsessed with Time...I was brought up in the midst of a life which was still co-operative, which had still the medieval communal feeling. We had heard and read of something called "competition," but it never came into our experience. Our life was an order. Since the Industrial Revolution there has not really been an order except in a few remote places..." Examples: Muir

Myoe Shonin: MYOE THE DREAMKEEPER (1195-1226)

Myoe was a Japanese monk living in a time when Buddhism (and many civil institutions) had decayed. Priests were corrupt (some were robbers); temples had been burned, and lines of oral/experiential teaching (vital in many Buddhist sects) wiped out. Myoe was determined to reconstruct the early purity of Buddha's teaching from scratch if need be; and he used ecstatic dreams and visions to access what had been lost. Myoe's dream journal is one of the earliest extant; the surviving portion covers about 1195-1226, with about 180 dreams. A good English version is Myoe the Dreamkeeper by George Tanabe. Examples: Myoe

Nabokov, Vladimir: INSOMNIAC DREAMS (dream journal, early 1970s)

Nabokov tried JW Dunne's dream experiment (above)--looking for predictive material. His journal's now been posthumously published. Nabokov's dreams are a bit like Georges Perec's, below--the anxious dreams of a refugee haunted by Europe's wars and revolutions. His results aren't spectacular--more mixed and ambiguous than Nancy Price's or my own--but still, some suggestively predictive dreams. It's fun to see an iconic realist like Nabokov dipping his toes into shamanism. Examples: Nabokov

Nelson, Katherine Metcalf: NIGHT FISHING (dream/art journal)

Each dream's a one-page prose-poem facing an illustration in clear light pastels. Low contrast, so they lack punch for me. Her writing's vivid, literate if a bit elusive. Her dreams? Advanced! Enlightened, humane, full of animals, especially fish. Often her dreams contrast two choices, and dream figures often give explicit advice. Compare to Kathleen Jenks or Sheila Moon, above. KMN's one of very few women to publish a book of dream-art or dream-comics; see also Chast and Doucet, above.
A note on gender: As I read, I thought female characters dominated Nelson's dreams about 60/40. Then I counted. Near-exact gender equality! I'm a feminist and I STILL mistook parity as slanted toward women! Brainwashing goes deep. Then I tried a sample of my own dreams and found 55/45 women--more than Nelson! Of course, I grew up surrounded by sisters. But what's network TV's excuse for shows with 70% male faces? Guys, wall-to-wall!
Try tallying the balance in a month of your dreams. Not just gender; you can look for age, race and species diversity too. If any.
Examples: Metcalf Nelson

Perec, Georges: LA BOUTIQUE OBSCURE (dream journal, early 1970s)

Perec, mid-20th-century French novelist, is an uneven recaller with drifty, mundane, anxious dreams haunted by Hitler (the Nazis killed his mom). He writes with a deadpan humor that takes for granted we're all mad under the skin. Dreams are our underbelly; you can't expect morality or transcendence. He's sure that's universal; just how dreams are. Nope. Just his! Examples: Perec

Price, Nancy: ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT (dream journal, 1948)

About my favorite published dream-journal. Price was a busy actress, theater-company manager and writer. Long dreams (she has superb recall), intense, well-written (verging on poetry, as in Dead or Alive?). The content's often magical, and bristling with shamanic elements--prediction, telepathy, communication with animals, messages from the spirit world. Examples: Nancy Price

Ramón y Cajal, Santiago: THE DREAMS OF SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL (journal from 1920s only translated 2017)

Ramon y Cajal got the Nobel for discovering the neuron. He loathed Freud as unscientific and intended to publish this dream-journal to counter him. His own dream-theory is simply that neurons suppressed during the day get some exercise at night; so dreams mean nothing (for Cajal, these are our only choices: Freud or nonsense!) Yet his own dreams disagree--they address issues, they concoct their own four-layer theory of the mind rather like Jung's, they predict the Spanish Civil War... Examples: Ramón y Cajal

Reklaw, Jesse: DREAMTOONS (comics: a collection of 4-panel strips: 1990s)

Reklaw draws dreams contributed by his fans, in a simple crisp Zipatone style. Surreal deadpan humor, emphasizing dream-absurdity. They're little comic masterpieces of 4-panel compression, but I'd love to see him draw longer, more continuous dreams he'd have to treat meaningfully, where he couldn't milk surrealism for easy laughs.
Examples: Dreamtoons

"Lady Sarashina": AS I CROSSED THE BRIDGE OF DREAMS (dream-journal, c.1020-1060)

One of the earliest dream-journals to have survived; contemporary with the events of the Icelandic sagas! As I Crossed... is a translation by Ivan Morris of Sarashina Nikki by Takasue no Musume [just "Takasue's Girl"; we don't know her real name], a court lady who has lifelong dreams calling her to leave court life and join a religious community. She's rather shy and unhappy, so it's hard to say if it's a spiritual calling or just a misfit facing that she feels she's wasted her life, lost all she loves. But her losses are literary history's gain. Examples: Amaterasu's Mirror, Reborn as a Cat, Amida.

Shaw, Jim: DREAMS (artist's dream-journal, 1995)

Intricate shaded pencil drawings of raw dreams with their texts--surreal, manic, insane dreams! Shaw's a working artist, and it shows, both in the vividness of the graphics and in his obsessions--he dreams about art and its meanings more than personal concerns. Strange intricate knots of images and ideas--vivid, and nothing like my dreams at all! Or anyone else's I know. The largest dreamjournal in print (some 385 dreams) until the uncut edition of Kerouac's Book of Dreams came out in 2001. Examples: Jim Shaw

Swedenborg, Emanuel: JOURNAL OF DREAMS 1743-1744

Swedenborg worked for decades as a scientist (especially metallurgy and mining, but he designed gliders and wrote on medicine.) Yet his reputation today is primarily as a mystic. He kept a dream journal during the period of his great change from engineer to visionary, early 1743 to late '44; one of the world's oldest surviving dream-journals. (The 1989 edition is best). It was never meant for publication--scrawled, with scratch-outs, abbreviations and highly personal references--difficult even before translation. However, Swedenborg's scientific habits serve him well--dates are clear, dreams are in sequence, and he regularly attempts interpretation; he's practical, reasonable, and sometimes records multiple possibilities.
Yet he was determined to emulate Christ, purging all selfish and worldly urges to become, essentially, a saint. Odd ambition for a scientist! Odder still, he achieved it--at least his practical demonstrations of miraculous knowledge (see Swedenborg's Visions) were the best-documented of his century; he influenced Blake and Emerson, and troubled Kant. He's a strange, powerful figure making both scientists and conventional Christians uncomfortable. Good for him! Examples: Swedenborg

Veitch, Rick: RABID EYE, POCKET UNIVERSE (1990s), and CRYPTO ZOO (1973-4); three volumes collecting the comic "Rare Bit Fiends"

Surreal dream-comics, a bit like Jim Shaw's DREAMS or Julie Doucet's MY MOST SECRET DESIRE (see above). Veitch's dreams are mostly of his buddies and, well, guy stuff--work, fights, comix, monsters, war. It's a vivid, courageous baring of this man's churning, surreal dreamworld. The format (usually one page per dream) is limiting--Veitch mostly shows the climax, the shock-value panel. Only in RABID EYE'S appendix do we learn these dream-scenes, in context, meant things for him that aren't evident to us readers--some dreams are even predictive. CRYPTO ZOO has fuller notes explaining his dream-process, and for me it's the strongest. Highly recommended. Examples: Veitch

Vigon, Larry: DREAM (artist's dream-journal)

A big art book of raw dreams (handwritten) each with a painting facing it. Visually striking, but they rarely illustrate the dream directly--if at all! At first Vigon's dreams seem grandiose and name-dropping, but he does art design (like album covers); these celebrities are just clients & friends. He's married, but the dreams show a lot of sexual temptation, frustration; and less magic than many dreamers on this list--not much flight, mythical beings, explicit advice, lucidity, or shamanic dreaming-for-others. But there's one mildly predictive dream, Hummingbirds, and a vivid nondream synchronicity--The Golden Egg. Examples: Vigon

WIMMEN'S COMIX #1, #4, #13 etc (Last Gasp Comics, 1972-; some issues spelled Women's, Womyn's, etc)

The occasional comics about dreams in this long-running anthology were the first women's dream-art I'd seen. They looked much more like my dreamlife than men's dreams. Michelle Brand's There I Was (in WC #1) inspired me to start drawing my own dreams; Joey Epstein's Beyond Reason (in WC #13) made me tackle taboo issues like ESP.
Eight books with dream art by guys are on this list, plus one overwhelmingly male comix anthology (A FLOCK OF DREAMERS), but I've found only three books of dream art by women: Julie Doucet's MY MOST SECRET DESIRE, Katherine Metcalf Nelson's NIGHT FISHING, and Roz Chast's I MUST BE DREAMING. Girls dream, girls draw--but they don't get art published easily. Comics historian Trina Robbins says the comics industry's as sexist today as 40 years ago, and MariNaomi has online stats proving it. And is the fine art world any better? Ask the Gorilla Girls! If YOU know of women's dream art and comics that should be on this list, or are interested in building an anthology of women's dream art and comics, EMAIL ME! Or do it yourself. Way overdue.

Woodring, Jim: Jim (comic book: Vol.2, #1, from Fantagraphics Press)

This second half of this slender comic book is a long shadowy tale that Woodring says is a recurring dream--he finds himself in ancient times, working on a mysterious sacred sculpture project. It's hard not to suspect he's sculpting himself. Moody and powerful, it wrestles with the central issues of any creative artist--images, ego, dreaming, discipline, soul-sculpture. Much of Woodring's work (like FRANK and THE BOOK OF JIM) comes from dreams.

Zograf, Alexandr (pen name of Sasa Rakezic): LIFE UNDER SANCTIONS and PSYCHONAUT; co-editor, A FLOCK OF DREAMERS

Zograf's a cartoonist trapped in Serbia under the UN embargoes of the 1990s. He just wants to draw his dreams, not report the social misery outside--but his worlds can't help fusing.

Archer, William: ON DREAMS

William Archer was a playwright and critic in the early 20th Century who based one hit play (The Green Goddess) on a dream. In On Dreams (1935) he wittily challenged Freud's claim that every dream censors repressed wishes. Archer felt many dreams are largely chance, momentary influences, and simply the mind at play. To prove it, he quoted dozens of his own dreams, and challenged Freud to make Freudian sense of them. We wish Freud good luck. Examples: Archer

Ariadne, Patricia: WOMEN DREAMING-INTO-ART

A showcase of seven women who turn their dreams into... no, not flapjacks! Ariadne's not a great writer or interviewer--her feminist and Jungian views tend toward wordy abstraction--but the artists themselves are interesting. Examples: Women Dreaming-into-Art

Artemidorus: THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

This two-thousand-year-old guide puts down even earlier Egyptian or Babylonian dream-dictionaries for their fixed interpretations, just as Jung rebelled against Freud's rigidity. For Artemidorus, context is all--similar dreams coming from two people can have very different meanings. And within the culture, his interpretations make some sense. But only some. He ignores the dreamer’s personal feelings, which any competent modern interpreter asks about first, to look at social and legal status. Yet... I can't quite dismiss him. Few modern people face the dire restrictions of poverty and slavery he constantly mentions. I suspect his methods work--in a slave culture, where role is all.

Barasch, Marc Ian: HEALING DREAMS

Far broader than the title suggests. Beside dreams with health advice, Barasch covers 'big dreams' of all sorts--dreams healing families or communities, telepathic and predictive dreams, political dreams--all the dreams that Western psychology from Freud on declared impossible. Barasch argues you can't separate personal and communal, symbolic and literal, healing and spiritual, body and mind; a single dream may work on all these levels at once, so dream theory MUST be many-layered. Some of the best dreams are his own: dreams warning him of cancer may have saved Barasch's life. Examples: Barasch

Birkhäuser, Peter: LIGHT FROM THE DARKNESS (1980)

A posthumous collection of dream art by Birkhäuser, who started as a formidable realist painter but in the 1940s was driven by intense dreams to study (and eventually to befriend) Carl Jung; his dream-painting The Cat hung in Jung's office. The book has about forty plates, though it turns out only a handful are really dreams; many just portray Jungian ideas and archetypes. His therapist, Marie-Louisa von Frantz, provides notes, though she only summarizes most of his dream texts. I wish we had his own words, but it's still a powerful collection. Examples: Birkhäuser

Campbell, Joseph: FLIGHT OF THE WILD GANDER

His most interesting book for dreamers. "Flight" argues that since shamanism's roots are pragmatic and future-looking and most importantly nomadic (you never knew what was over the next hill!), its worldview handles social and technological change much better than hierarchical, orderly, past-based dogmas like Christianity and Islam. And dreamwork is shamanism...

Delany, Gayle: LIVING YOUR DREAMS and SEXUAL DREAMS

Living Your Dreams (1979, rev. 1988) is a course in practical dreamwork; in reaction to Freud's and Jung's ideological excesses, she repeatedly warns against "leading the witness". Her cautious, respectful techniques are equally usable in solo work, one-on-one therapy or group workshops. She focuses on therapy and problem-solving more than creativity or spirituality (or sheer appreciation of dream experience for its own sake, as life or as art) though she doesn't exclude these aspects entirely. Her Sexual Dreams (1994) is interesting if not comprehensive; the chapter on the dreams of the abused is powerful and recommended. I haven't yet read her Breakthrough Dreaming. Examples: Delaney

Dement, William: SOME MUST WATCH WHILE SOME MUST SLEEP (1972)

A short book by a Stanford sleep researcher who does not (astonishingly) assume dreams are (only) a mechanical process but can have meaning, and provides some quite strong examples--historical, current (one straight from his sleep lab) and in one case personal. Examples: Dement

Dunne, J.W.: AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME (1920s-30s; several editions)

Dunne looked for precognition in everyday dreams, not spectacular cases. He simply compared his dreams to waking events a few days later as well as earlier. He found dream images echoing the future just as frequently as the past. His examples are quiet and small--a gate and field, a particular house. But anyone approaching his data fairly has to concede he found a symmetrical pattern--rich connections to events one day off (past or future), sparser references two days off, and so on, forming a bell-shaped curve: ordinary Gaussian distribution centered on the present, but spreading into past and future equally! It's as if the dreaming mind were in a balloon, looking down on the timescape: things directly below (both past and future) are quite clear, but quickly foreshorten as one looks further into the distance. Whether there's a horizon beyond which we can't see, Dunne couldn't say--he had at least one precognition years before the event (a vivid peak experience: flying in an early plane). Like a peak on the horizon? Or looming over it?
Dunne had trouble recognizing even obvious predictive echoes. Only if he pretended they were in the past, reading his own journal backwards, would backward echoes suddenly come clear. He describes it as a trance he had to shake himself out of, over and over. Precisely the opposite of the credulous eagerness so many skeptics attribute to psychics and parapsychologists! It takes effort to strip off cultural brainwashing, even when your experience proves it false.
Dunne also points out how Einsteinian spacetime fails to explain why we experience time as a flow. To be fair, I find Dunne's own theory of "serial time" inadequate, too. But his experiment still poses a real problem for physics and psychology--and when I bothered to try his method (unlike most of his critics), I got his results. Vladimir Nabokov's journal Insomniac Dreams is a Dunnean experiment, with weaker but intriguing results. Examples: Dunne

Epel, Naomi: WRITERS DREAMING

A collection of interviews with writers on the role of dreams in their creativity. Admittedly, in a lot of cases the answer is "not much", but the very question forces even writers who think they ignore their dreams to look deep into the nuts and bolts of their creative process. Compare: Townley's Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams

Faraday, Ann: DREAM POWER; THE DREAM GAME

Dream Power is a solid introduction to dreamwork much like the books of Patricia Garfield's CREATIVE DREAMING, emphasizing the views of different cultures around the world (unusual for the 1970s). DREAM GAME is something else--my favorite how-to book on advanced dreamwork. Faraday started not as a therapist but a sleep researcher whose subjects wanted to know what their dreams meant, and she retains a scientific clarity even while discussing the outrageous. Open-minded, entertaining, full of sample dreams, with original theories on literal dreams and dream warnings, visual and verbal puns, and the notoriously spotty nature of psychic dreams (Briefly: most of us picture ESP as like vision, but it's more like radar or sonar--without active scanning, no echoes come back. And we scan for what concerns us now, not what in hindsight looks important.) Examples: Faraday

Feather, Sally Rhine: THE GIFT

A popularization of her mother Louisa Rhine's study HIDDEN CHANNELS OF THE MIND, which sampled the 14,000 accounts of apparent ESP sent to the Rhine Institute over decades (examples). But Sally emphasizes the practical results of ESP, arguing it's a naturally evolved sense as useful as any other. She focuses on 400-plus cases where it was possible for the subject to act on ESP's warning; only a minority did, but the outcome in those cases was clear: action paid off. Accidents avoided or mitigated; lives saved! Profound implications: time is not a linear track; fate is not fixed.

Freud, Sigmund: THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

I plowed dutifully along, not enjoying his pomposity, but gritting my teeth because it's a classic... until Freud he concluded an otherwise plausible dream analysis by explaining away an apparently psychic element by saying the dreamer censored the REAL dream--her reported dream is wrong! That twists "real" into a pretzel even Moebius couldn't follow. And it's not just one dream. Freud rejects whatever won't fit his schemes--dreams, data, disciples. Read him for the fountain of ideas, consult him as a historical reference (he's my source for the famous dream Guillotine by Louis Alfred Maury)... but as a guide for dreamers today, Freud's next to useless. (And on rereading him decades years later, he seems even worse.) Examples: Freud

Garfield, Patricia: CREATIVE DREAMING and others

How-to books in the vein of Ann Faraday. No radical innovations, but reliable as practical guides. She defends the so-called Senoi technique, says "it may or may not be ethnographically accurate, but it works." I agree with that--assertion and self-defense really will cure nightmares--but she goes a bit too far for me, a bit too Me Decade: dominating, even killing dream figures is okay, since they're just parts of you. 40,000 dreams have taught me some figures are you, some aren't. Extorting gifts, beating, raping or killing might just be you disciplining unruly bits of yourself... or you becoming someone else's nightmare. Examples: Garfield

Gendlin, Eugene: LET YOUR BODY INTERPRET YOUR DREAMS

The book pioneering the concept of "felt shifts": the "click" you feel when a dream or part of it suddenly makes sense. He validates this subjective sense--an excellent antidote to all those great dream-theorists who'll push their interpretations on you...

Green, Celia: LUCID DREAMS (1968) and LUCID DREAMING (1994)

Lucid Dreams was the first popular work on lucidity; the update, Lucid Dreaming, has some assumptions I question. Two examples:

• Much debate about how vivid and/or realistic lucid dreams are, vs. nonlucid; for me, they're perceptually indistinguishable--only my insight differs. How many more dreamers are like me?
• Is a lucid dreamer as clear-minded as when awake? "...the lucid dreamer tends to be intellectually 'present' to an extent which is remarkable when compared with ordinary dreams, but is liable to show certain deficits in comparison with his or her cognitive abilities in waking life. In particular there is occasionally evidence of a failure fully to appreciate the wholly unreal and inconsequential status of the dream content." Yeah, I fail to appreciate that--this Total Unreality Principle is an unproven, extreme claim that no other society has ever been crazy enough to hold. Some dreams are purely internal? Sure. Every single dream ever dreamt is totally unreal? Hundreds of dreams with verifiable external news made me see this generalization as not just arrogant but false. Stephen La Berge started out sharing the T.U. Principle, but his later work's more cautious about treating all dream figures as mere props. But Green?

Hammond, William: SLEEP AND ITS DERANGEMENTS (1869)

Dr. Hammond means derangements both ways: "stuff that disturbs healthy sleep" AND "whenever you dream, you're an utter nut case". He was what Freud was up against--dreams were insane, meaningless, triggered by night noises, itches, indigestion, etc. They were instantaneous, too, explaining away dreams that climax with some waking-world event they couldn't have predicted by the physics of the time--so shamanic and psychic dreams are mistaken. And dreams were so inherently irrational that Hammond claimed lucid dreamers were all mistaken too--they had to be awake! Yet Hammond collects some fascinating dreams, including his own. Just don't trust his conclusions! Examples: Hammond

Hillman, James: THE DREAM AND THE UNDERWORLD

A slightly pessimistic Jungian book on the rock-bottom depths of the human psyche, which he thinks never, ever change. My dreams characterize him as a Groundhog afraid of his own shadow, but what do they know? Dumb ol' dreams.

Hobson, J. Allan: THIRTEEN DREAMS FREUD NEVER HAD

The science in this sleep-and-dreaming book may well be good, but it’s so poorly written, who can tell? Makes assumptions of context--he'll write a sentence like “Hispanic women were an issue at Harvard then.” What issue? Who says so? We're told no more. Even the neurology is weirdly vague--not even a brain map labeling the regions he’s talking about, or a chart showing their known functions so the general reader has a baseline. He disses people like Jung as credulous and unscientific, but his own fact-checking and editing are sloppy--typos, wrong details.

Hunt, Harry: THE MULTIPLICITY OF DREAMS

A solid idea badly written--Hunt's academic jargon obscures a simple, useful model I'll try to summarize. Dreams are so hard to generalize about because dreamers have different purposes. Hunt pictures the possibilities as being like a cornucopia, a funnel spreading up and out from rudimentary dreaming. Dreamwork's like climbing out of a gravity well--repression and amnesia narrow the possibilities at first, but the further you climb, the wider dreaming gets. Or like learnng math--all the early classes are cut-and-dried, and then around calculus and analytical geometry it opens up. A dream on Hunt's theory: Unresolved, or just Different?

Kimmins, C.W: CHILDREN'S DREAMS (1920)

Beyond the usual factors that generate nightmares and techniques to mitigate them... what factors improve overall dream recall for kids as well as adults? One's innate: intelligence. But several are easily changed: quiet, ventilation, travel, and hard mental work--skills or issues for the mind to review! Kimmins sees many dreams as not about fears but skill-bulding; and I think that's right.

Kripal, Jeffrey: MUTANTS AND MYSTICS: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

A study (academic but lively) of writers in fantasy, science fiction & comics whose fiction depicted real paranormal experiences in their lives, and whose art was aimed at readers who'd experienced the inexplicable too--though their "fiction" kept up the pretense of hypotheticality for mainstream intruders! Kripal isn't trying to be comprehensive, covering only some of the writers of the Golden Era, but later writers and artists have similar experiences, such as writers Marc Clifton & Diana Wynne Jones and cartoonists Al Davison and Barry Winsor-Smith .

Krippner, Stanley: EXTRAORDINARY DREAMS AND HOW TO WORK WITH THEM (2002, with Fariba Bogzaran & Andreé Percia de Carvalho). Extraordinary Dreams discusses over a dozen advanced types: creative, lucid, out-of-body, pregnancy, healing (both diagnostic and curative), dreams within dreams, collective (a community tackles an issue), telepathic dreams, clairvoyant, and precognitive, past-life dreams, initiations, spiritual & visitation dreams... The list is not comprehensive--I'd include

• oracular and advisory dreams
• shamanic dreams (admittedly a broad category; it overlaps his 'initiation dreams' but contains much outside that concept)
• genderbent, identity-bent and species-bent dreams--step outside yourself!
• cledonic dreams (dreams with messages meant for others)
• self-flagging dreams (dreams identifying their own type, whether literal, symbolic, or paranormal)
• dreams about dreams or dreamwork, especially dreams meant to aid dream research

But as a connoisseur of exotic dreams myself, I appreciated his focus on more advanced types that start popping up once you've mastered the basics. Examples

La Berge, Stephen: LUCID DREAMING and sequels

Several books by the foremost researcher of lucid dreams. His thought's evolved. His early books viewed dreams as a new space for scientists to explore and experiment in and take control of, much like Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger, where a lucid dreamer run amok essentially becomes demonic. But in his later books, La Berge concedes that dreams have their own agendas and urges lucid dreamers to limit their meddling to changing themselves and using the dreamworld to safely practice and build skills. I still think he jumps too readily to the assumption that dream worlds are unreal, mere simulations. But he's hardly alone in that. Example: The Highest

THE LANGAGE OF THE BIRDS (anthology)

A book of interviews with shamans and articles on their practices. Fun! Much of it is first-person shop talk, with less secondhand anthropological (or Jungian, or New Age) blather than is usual in books on shamanism.

Loebel-Fried, Caren: HAWAIIAN LEGENDS OF DREAMS

Nine traditional tales hinging on dreams, plus brief examples of similar Hawaiian dreams today. The book's gorgeous, with woodcut illustrations. I wish the modern examples were told with the same care and detail, and their dreamers were credited by name, but those are quibbles. Most dreams are guides to action, though the problems run the gamut from to mundane (placing a well) to romantic (finding a soulmate). Nearly all would today be called psychic. Yet twisted dreamers get twisted guidance: in "The Poisonwood God", a bitter loser dreams how to found a cult of poisoners that darkened life on the Islands for generations. "Smoke" also shows Old Hawaii's dark side: a lost boy turns out to have been sacrificed by vicious priests; he begs his dad in a dream, "Steal back my bones and free my spirit." Almost makes missionaries look good...

Mackenzie, Norman: DREAMS AND DREAMING (1965)

A collection of dreams, but unlike The Oxford Book of Dreams or The Dream World by Megroz, it's essentially a coffee-table book to leaf through--but one going beyond culling existing art illustrating dreams. In at least one case they commissioned staged color photos acting out the scenes of the epic and comic dream Thumbsucker! More examples: Chagall's The Dream, Palais Idéal, The Night My Number Came Up

Megroz, R.L.: THE DREAM WORLD (1939)

At first glance, another collection of dreams, like The Oxford Book of Dreams, Norman Mackenzie's Dreams and Dreaming or The New World of Dreams. The historical sections aren't unique. But Megroz also solicited dreams from his contemporaries, and he seems to have known every writer in England. So a large fraction of its hundred-plus dreams are elsewhere unpublished, and many are impressive. This aspect of the book is closer to Priestley's Man and Time below--a pre-Web experiment in soliciting crowd wisdom! I think it's the richest of these dream-compendiums. Examples: Megroz

THE NEW WORLD OF DREAMS (Woods and Greenhouse, eds., 1974)

A collection of dreams, like The Oxford Book of Dreams or The Dream World by Megroz, it largely overlaps those compendiums. But it contains some those dream-encyclopedias overlooked. Examples: Aberfan, Severed Head, Guntram's Snake

O'Connor, Peter: UNDERSTANDING JUNG, UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF (1985)

O'Connor's a Jungian therapist in Melbourne, writing (I think) mostly for other therapists. He highlights dreams at the start of therapy, inspiring me to build a list of those in the World Dream Bank. Examples: Mom in the Driver's Seat or (epic!) The Occupation. I must say the latter shows a classic weakness in Jungian therapy--O'Connor sees every figure as archetypes and animas. Unjustified. Reading it naïvely, I came to different conclusions.
His dream examples of positive Shadows intrigued me--I've had dreams featuring them, yet other writers seem to treat shadow figures (what you're sure you're not, what you deny in yourself) are always repulsive. Not at all. You can admire or envy them too, yet despair of incorporating their strengths. Example: Envying Lynn

THE OXFORD BOOK OF DREAMS (ed. Stephen Brook, c.1980)

A collection of hundreds of well-written dreams, often by famous writers. Entertaining though flawed--editor Stephen Brook doesn't distinguish between genuine dreams and made-up dreams in novels! So it's hard to be sure what's fiction, what's not. He does list his sources, but you'd better know your writers or be willing to research a lot. Compare with THE DREAM WORLD by Megroz, above.

Perls, Fritz: GESTALT THERAPY VERBATIM (1969, reprinted 1992)

An entertaining, in-depth look at Gestalt dialog. Perls insists you take on the voice of each character in a dream, voicing their concerns, forcing underdogs to stand up for what they want and topdogs to quit blustering and get real--or face a fight. Even if (like me) you doubt his assumption that all dream characters are always parts of yourself, his dialog techniques are flexible--and useful. Examples: Gestalt

Priestley, JB: MAN AND TIME

In 1963, Priestley put out a request on a BBC-TV show for examples of strange experiences with time. Over a thousand responses came, mostly predictive dreams and visions of varying clarity, accuracy and credibility. The following year he published many examples (though withholding most dreamers' names for privacy reasons) in the second part of his book Man and Time. Part One merely compiles philosophical views of time over the centuries; but this latter half builds into an original theory: everyday linear time is just one of three experienceable temporal dimensions. Time 2 is Dreamtime--the time in which we can wander through Time 1, seeing future and past. Time 3 is alternate/branching/sideways time, many-world time--the time in which we make choices and change the world--or at least our paths through its meta-landscape. It's a clearer version of J.W. Dunne's critique of conventional physics' 4-dimensional spacetime. Priestley's model has the virtue of plausibly explaining some of the peculiarities of dream ESP--the relative scarcity of predictions about large personal issues, with hits mostly about either trivia nobody'd try to change, or disasters too big to change. In between, where the wills and choices of observers are focused (and most effective), the future's hard to predict: it's in flux. Priestley thinks that word observer is, in temporal theory, wrong; we're sculptors. We shape the future--or steer our awareness to preferred paths across a timescape, if you prefer that image. Forgetting choice limits us to theories of a fixed timetrack we ride along, though we may perhaps peer ahead as well as behind (Time 2). But he argues that just as the bare fact of prediction requires a 2nd time-dimension, premonitions you act on to avoid disaster require a 3rd: some version of the many-world theory--what shamans call the Tree of Time. Examples: Priestley

Rainer, Tristine: THE NEW DIARY

This 1978 book is about the techniques and benefits of journaling in general, but has an interesting chapter on dreams and a short section (in my edition, Diary Magic, p. 256-7) containing brief but cutting-edge insights: 1: the normality, almost ubiquity, of predictive dreams. "The ability to dream the future is neither unique nor uncommon among diarists." Example: Marcoux's Dreams. 2: The passing mention, at least, of the idea the dream-generating function may be aware of itself. This is distinct from lucidity, where you the dreamer/ego may figure out you're dreaming. "Most predictive dreams seem to foretell ocurrences or images that materialize in the following day or two. But some dreams seem to predict the future well in advance--months, even years before the materialization in reality. Such far-reaching dreams often have a particularly vivid quality, as if crying out to be remembered until life catches up with them." I thought (feared, really) that I was the only one to note what I call self-flagging dreams.

Ramón y Cajal, Santiago: THE DREAMS OF SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL (journal from 1920s only translated 2017)

Ramon y Cajal got the Nobel for discovering the neuron. He loathed Freud as unscientific and intended to publish this dream-journal to counter him. His own dream-theory is simply that neurons suppressed during the day get some exercise at night; so dreams mean nothing (for Cajal, these are our only choices: Freud or nonsense!) Yet his own dreams disagree--they address issues, they concoct their own four-layer theory of the mind rather like Jung's, they predict the Spanish Civil War... Examples: Ramón y Cajal

Henry Reed: GETTING HELP FROM YOUR DREAMS

This 1970s book has fine examples of group work that are still cutting-edge. But the "Me Decade" values trouble me: Reed says "demand gifts from dream figures and show them who's boss"--even kill your enemies and trust they'll return as allies or servants. This so-called Senoi tradition (which the Senoi people disown) assumes that those you hurt or kill are just shadowy parts of you, other masks of God. Charlie Manson assumed that! Reed's not alone--much American dreamwork underrates fairness and community. It's not proven dreams are only about the self!

Rhine, Louisa: HIDDEN CHANNELS OF THE MIND

A sampling of the 14,000 accounts of apparent ESP sent to the Rhine Institute over decades, plus Rhine's attempt at a taxonomy of ESP experiences. I disagree with some of her judgments, but thousands of anecdotes stop being just anecdotes--they're a solid portrait of the breadth, ubiquity and practicality of ESP in real life as opposed to the lab--or people's preconceptions of it as something mystical or mysterious. Fully half her examples are dreams. See also Sally Feather Rhine's THE GIFT, which mines the same data testing a single thesis: is ESP useful in real life, can we change what we foresee? (Short answer: yes!) Examples: Rhine

Ribeiro, Sidarta: THE ORACLE OF NIGHT: the History and Science of Dreams

1: The "history" is scattered, not coherent or consecutive; yet has many dreams of interest, some of them new to me (and I've read a LOT of dream-compendia).
2: The "science" chapters are mostly electrodes and mice, useful only to doctors with brain-damaged patients. Picture a travelguide where half its pages explain how planes and knee joints work! What dreamworkers want is a guide to the full territory of dreams. He just says "get a notebook and write." Ohhhhkaaaay...
His basic theory is sensible. He admits depth psychology's claims have proven true in the lab--dreams aren't illusory, some instantaneous creation of adventures we never had, whether 'asleep' a la Maury or in the moment of waking and thus not a sleep thing at all (a few modern idiots posited this; no, they really do happen in REM); nor meaningless, nor random, nor passive memory processing (they actively weed, emphasize, evaluate & judge), nor entirely about past & present; dreams are therapeutic and problem-solving, and can be lucid or predictive. Dreams run scenarios to help you plan--his term is "the probabilistic oracle". And many dreams fit his model--just not all.
Ribeiro omits the long history of ESP research, and clinicians like Faraday, Garfield and Green, who weren't mere popularizers. Errors: he accepts predictive dreams but insists they're all probabilistic extrapolation from present trends, not sensing (to help us steer through) a timescape ahead. Both types are real; but the latter implies the Western worldview of time is just wrong. He omits other ESP types entirely--telepathic, clairvoyant, or cledonic dreams. Like a world atlas with whole continents missing. Examples: Ribeiro

Russo, Richard: DREAMS ARE WISER THAN MEN.

Lots of psychological blather. The only interesting dreams for me were a few Native Australian ones... that Russo promptly claims no Westerner can understand and no Western dreamer could dream and be judged sane! His first claim's true enough--in this book! For he presents only the dream-text, without context, or the dreamer's comments on what it meant: presented like that, of COURSE they're baffling! Mine would be too.
But his second claim's insulting. The longer dreams in this book are intense coherent journeys among nonhuman spirit animals--that is, they're just like MY dreams. I'm a Westerner dreaming like that. So I'm insane. Russo has spoken!
Russo seems to view non-Westerners and nonhuman dream characters as inherently alien/other (plus, he kinda made that otherness sound not cultural but racial). Since my dreams make me experience being other genders, races, cultures, even species, I naïvely assumed all experienced dreamworkers get forced out of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and specism--kicking and screaming, maybe, but dragged out of their birth-boxes.
Silly me! Some dreamworkers--even published scholars--quite literally wouldn't dream of it.

Saint-Denys, Hervey de: Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger, or DREAMS AND HOW TO DIRECT THEM (1867)

Hervey de Saint-Denys was known mainly as a Sinologist; he published the above book anonymously. His dream-theories are empirical, grounded in years of dreamwork including experiments with sleep stimuli; a bit like his contemporary Alfred Maury, but with no mechanistic preconceptions. He felt plenty of dreams didn't come from physical stimuli but from chains of associated ideas--quite modern in this respect. He's the earliest European I know ever to describe and advocate lucid dreaming, but this was just one aspect of his pragmatic work.
After just a small run, his publisher failed and the book got hard to find. Freud wrote "...d'Hervey, whose book I could not lay hands on in spite of all my efforts". A shame--if he'd had to confront Saint-Denys, Freudian theory might have been more evidence-based! Thanks to a 2021 translation by Daniel Bernardo, Saint-Denys is finally readable in English. And he's worth it, especially Part 3, telling his dreams. Examples: St-Denys

Samuels, Andrew: JUNG AND THE POST-JUNGIANS (1990)

From my viewpoint as a shaman, therapist Samuels is comically odd. His client D's initial dream is of rebuilding her home; a distant two-stack power plant is ugly but she knows it'll power the tools for the job. She recognizes this as encouraging therapy despite warts in the process; Samuels calls this her "subjective" interpretation, and says "But she did not accept the objective interpretation that the two chimneys represented my breasts and that particular interpretation was probably mistimed." Ah, it was a mistake to VOICE it, but not to THINK it. It was objective! I have to laugh (at his arrogance, not his giant man-boobs. That would be... objectifying.) Samuels isn't post-Jung. He's pre-! Stuck in Freudville--that maze of funhouse mirrors. Psychoanalytic certainty!
Makes me wanna Listen To Prozac.

Sinclair, Upton and Sinclair, Mary Craig: MENTAL RADIO (c.1930; reissued as part of the e-book edition of his Collected Works)

This documents a husband and wife team's experiment in ESP, rather like the Maimonides experiments in THE TELEPATHIC DREAM (see Ullman below). Strictly, it shouldn't be here as they explore a waking altered state, not dreams. But it's too delicious to omit. The Sinclairs kept it simple: he drew a sketch at one end of the house, sealed and dated it, as she sketched her best guess at the other end, with witnesses. Repeat hundreds of times--and then don't have judges argue over them, just publish them side by side. Seeing really is believing! Adding to my pleasure, this really is THAT Upton Sinclair--who my English teachers treated as a hard-headed muckraker. But in between exposing meatpackers' corporate crimes, he was also writing this. Mad science at its best.

Starhawk: DREAMING THE DARK

A solid how-to guide to visionary work and the cultural blinders we need to shake off--including Jungian apoliticality and the bland assumption we all dream/are the same. Her other nonfiction books are equally strong, but Dreaming the Dark prompted a spectacular dream of mine, Starhawk the Witch.

Stearn, Jess: EDGAR CAYCE, THE SLEEPING PROPHET

A bio of a very effective American shaman who probably never heard the word. Not exactly dreamwork, but not exactly not, either. I wonder if such trance-channeling in the service of diagnosis and prescription could be one of NREM's forgotten functions? If so, "normal" NREM may be like a radio tuned to no station--we think that static is all the sleeping brain can manage. What if we're wrong?

Storm, Hyemeyohsts: SEVEN ARROWS and SONG OF HEYOEHKAH

Plains dreamwork and shamanism taught in subtle, humane, beautifully told teaching-stories. Dreams within dreams, lives within lives, tales within tales--as cleverly nested as Sheherazade's. A success both as literature and as non-European dream-theory, clearly explained. Compare: Jung's MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS. One of his dreams, plus a dream inspired by Storm: The Lady Bathes in Grief

1001 EROTIC DREAMS, a dream-interpretation book

A thousand and one sex dreams, and not one like mine! Whole themes are missing: cross-gender dreams, transformation dreams, dreams of animal people, sex as spiritual connection. A spicy curio of a book, shallow in its interpretations, being particularly ignorant of shamanism and spiritual sex. I list it as a warning and as an example of dream dictionaries in general--books trying to interpret dreams via fixed, universal meanings. Five thousand years of this, and the premise is still wrong. At least this one's not serious. So many are.

Townley, Roderick, ed.: NIGHT ERRANDS: HOW POETS USE DREAMS

A 1998 book with dozens of essays, poetry's answer to Naomi Epel's Writers Dreaming. Many wander way off-topic (these are poets, not journalists) but read Rachel Hadas and John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, and Robley Wilson.

Ullman, Montague: WORKING WITH DREAMS (1979)

A solid dreamwork tutorial similar to Ann Faraday, Gayle Delaney or Patricia Garfield, emphasizing the strengths of group work. As a pioneer in scientific study of dreams, he has decades of stories to draw from (all the way back to the 40s and 50s); if he's cherry-picked the most vivid, I'm not complaining! Examples: Ullman

Ullman, Montague: THE TELEPATHIC DREAM (1973)

This isn't quite what the title says; it centers on the Maimonides experiments, attempting to verify or debunk dream ESP in general, testing for clairvoyance and predictive dreams not just telepathy.
Contrary to skeptics' claims, the Maimonides study was well thought out, and protocols were as rigorous as any in their day. A must-read: the account by Robert Van de Castle, highest scorer of the original experiment and sole subject of an attempted replication in Wyoming, that skeptics claimed was a failure, proving Maimonides was flawed. Van de Castle shows it didn't replicate the original; he objected to multiple changes made to save time and money. And the judges were biased--guesses any reasonable reader will call successes, they scored as failures.
The experiments as a whole suggest that only experienced dreamworkers do well at whatever dream ESP is. That has a converse: in a sleep-starved society devaluing dreams, most dreamers will score only modestly above random, since they're struggling to recall at all, or lost in detail; they can't spot underlying, recurring themes. Examples: Ullman

Van de Castle, Robert: OUR DREAMING MIND

The best single modern reference book for dreamers. Comprehensive. Van de Castle is a pioneer of modern dream research--no great prose stylist, but cautious, always reliable, and fair-minded on controversial topics. Solid bibliography too--many of these listings derive from it.

WHEN BRAINS DREAM by Tony Zadra & Bob Stickgold

This team of sleep and dream researchers are solid on the physiology of dreaming; commendably, they sample the long pre-Freudian history of dream research; and they're sensible about the joys and limits of lucidity. They've even read the classic ESP studies and admit there's a real case to be made, and are frank that the main reason the consensus is negative is that their colleagues won't read the data--dismiss it out of hand. In short: on technical matters, from elementary to arcane, they're consistently good. But...
Zadra & Stickgold claim that so few dreams get remembered, and so few of those are understood, that dreams can't be trying to tell us anything; their job must get done during sleep. Come on! Our society's just crazy--sleep-short, distracted, data-flooded and oneirophobic, unlike any other in history--let alone our long prehistory. American dreamnesia proves nothing.
Their own theory, called NEXTUP, claims the dreaming brain explores weak associations. I find it worse than no theory at all, for it denies any need to act on dream-warnings. If I'd done that, I'd be dead! But decide for yourself--here's the only sample dream & interpretation in the book: Vivisection.