I flew over a forest. I noted the trees were all the same, and told myself to remember this...
Never mind an afterlife! What if, before life, we were spirits with no idea what happens after birth?...
Weird paintings cover a hill town in Africa, demanding I paint them when I wake.
Paintings on courage, flight... and defying tradition.
I dreamed I circumnavigated the entire Buddhist wheel of existence in a single night...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; two dreams (2016/11/19, 2017/1/18) on dreamwork, memory & amnesia
1: Ruins in India. Fascinating but age-blurred; wish I could see the carvings better...
2: Giving presents at a party, I hand a girl a vertebra from the abyss, encrusted with jewel-like barnacles...
The joyful animal-angel I feel myself to be in my happiest dreams.
Golden Gate Park's arboretum, in San Francisco, is home to feral cats, skunks, raccoons, people...
I dreamed that as a kid I saw two girls making love in the bushes, awakening my own sexual orientation.
Later, I saw the bigger picture, which wasn't about sex at all...
CAUTION: SEX
I learn to fly from Arenna the moon-girl and Crest the dragon, in the House of Deep Memory...
I'm a priestess from an island of women; I meet an angel
who charges me to harvest all the dreams of the world...
It was a dark and stormy night. I was lost, till I stumbled on God
in her underground control room. God was helpful. Too helpful...
Anxious about a big party, I dream of being crowded. But
a cat-centaur in the crowd attains sudden enlightenment...
My figure-painting class here in San Francisco has a diverse student body, but not THIS diverse...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I'm half-naked at an arty dinner party, talking to a man I really think I ought to recognize... who is he?
CAUTION: TOPLESS JUNGIAN
There's a large bear wandering the museum, and somehow I feel good about it...
My neighborhood becomes a Huck Finn Eden after global warming turns it into a tropical island...
CAUTION: NUDITY, AMBITOPIA
My kidnappers were desperate: no jobs. I fled them down the berry chute, to the underground
strawberry factory where engineers in go-go boots did the berry dance. And the berries...
CAUTION: STRAWBERRY FETISH
Tour bizarre worlds most exobiologists would dismiss as hopeless for life--and meet the natives...
CAUTION: SEXY ALIENS, WEIRD CUSTOMS, EVOLUTION
A man obsessed with blood and death disturbs me, but I have to admit I share his interests...
Next the blood comes home; a surgeon wants to flay my tongue...
Next, witch-children rebel against a bloody flossing ritual and fly away on broomsticks...
I dreamed of a bear playing a cello concert.
The next day at a concert I was surprised to see that the cellist...
Awkward newlyweds. Not a love match! Can they co-operate to save a woman from the Nazis?...
I keep dreaming of awkward but successful transitions into new life, and paint them all in one landscape...
A sequence of short dreams full of creatures. They warn I'll face leukemia...
Dreams warning of mania and paralyzing shame alternate with calm dreams of life and growth...
I'm an alien exchange student in Palo Alto High School. I get stared at--they wear clothes, they don't fly...
CAUTION: FELINE NUDITY
At a snake-weaving party I flirt with my anima, who tells me how the
cake fell off the roof. I think "At last we're really connecting!"...
I asked my dreams "What's my truest purpose?"
I dreamed my body was a tree, and a voice said "Chart the growth"...
Ballooning over Middle Earth with a metamorphosing butterfly-girl, we drift into forbidden territory:
What my home town will become, if you fools keep burning gas and spewing CO2...
Decision by decision, we made our way down immense rock crags. Below, I had to put out a deadly fire,
a fire as solid as wood or stone, with a white staff. What am I really trying to calm?
My foxy lover teases and tempts, but I can't let him into the patio for fear he'll hurt the rabbits…
CAUTION: UNFUNNY BUNNY PUNS
a 2015 painting weaving seven dreams (2014/5/4, 6/9, 7/1 & 9/4; 2015/5/23, 6/26 & 8/25)
A portrait of Clotho, the Greek Fate who spins our life-threads, by a pool woven of my dreams from this time...
I climb down a cliff before night strands me; but in town, risky adolescent games cause a crash...
Trapped on an island, spied on and controlled, we decide to jump off
a cliff and die; but as we jump, a spirit sneaks us off be reborn...
Bodies are laid out upstairs in a dirt bed. Potatoes will sprout.
The plants won't feed on the bodies, but they will support the vines...
My dream critiques a non-dream artpiece. Does it only count as dream-art
when your dream urges changes, or is creativity partly knowing when to stop?
My father is supposed to speak, but he falls asleep onstage. I rush up to try and rouse him, but...
I was an anorexic fox-girl, till this phrase galvanized me. Now I pump iron and eat what I like, and...
I tried to date a nice young butterfly but was stopped by a monster who was... my own wings?
CAUTION: UNDERAGE BUG
The boy and I walk a spiral trail down the mountain to the caves of tears...
A doctor lures me into his office. What he turns out to be scares me less than how I defend myself...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, ARACHNOPHOBIA
A master criminal is tracked down by a hound in a monk's robe
who's introduced to me as... the President of the United States?
"If you put an ear to the door of books and the doors of the night,
if you pay attention, you can hear the conversation of poets..."
Dinner with Dracula goes well, considering, except for the mayonnaise. But suddenly I'm drowning!
No one sees or hears me. Am I a ghost, am I dead or alive? And how would anyone notice?
Rousseau's painting of that woman on a red sofa in a glorious jungle may be dream-based...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SLACKING
While we're making crop-circles in the field of psychotherapy, my hypnotist and I start to argue...
Girondé dreams she's floating through the oceanic abyss...
A nun-like figure shows me three arcs; two are forms of direct power,
but the third, innermost arc can lead to secrecy and manipulation...
After our trip to Turkey, I dreamed I was dancing in
a heavy black robe like those the Turkish women wore...
I sneak into a dance rehearsal. Huge colorful cloth goddesses dance,
while four fat women wearing only scarves weave round them...
CAUTION: NUDITY
An experimental helmet knocks me out. I'm groggy, miserable, till I learn what it did to others...
It's not easy to get a California driver's license, ever since the Dept. of Motor Vehicles went Jungian...
A young, naive, ethereal dream gets an Animus to guide her through the crazy material plane...
CAUTION: GRATUITOUS WILLIAM SHATNER
Every year, as Americans get fatter, the fashion gets thinner (and I look more normal)...
My spirit-wife and I spend our last evening together painting. Not with colors--with emotions...
I like the idea that a painting's a window into a world. That the window opens both ways. That eyes in paintings may be watching us.
In the Rockies, in winter, I was freezing until I found hot springs. In the steam rising, I saw a vision of an elk...
A crowd watches from shore as a great glowing meteor descends into the sea. I fear a tsunami, but...
One pays for soaring high with solitude of the soul...
I’m falling into endless darkness. I feel like screaming, but then I remind myself I’m dreaming. “What is for me here?” I demand. “SHOW ME!” I begin rising toward the stars. Huge metal discs with alien writing rise with me...
The dreamer overflows from her egg, spills out to become a waterfall, a stampede of horses...
A sophisticated composition for a sophisticated model. Or at least seasick...
CAUTION: NUDITY, NAUSEA...
In life drawing class, the model built a sort of green island/nest in the sea of grubby students...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
On the anniversary of 9/11, I dreamed a friend was welding nude. In his careful hands, the fire was harmless...
I'm talking to a friend while waiting in line, when a huge fish appears. It turns into an equally huge snake...
A watercolor portrait of Leaf and me on our boat in the lost city, from the dream FISHERGIRL...
CAUTION: TRIBAL NUDITY
Part an experiment in wild textures, part a "Where's Waldo" game to see if you'd notice my self-portrait...
A pod of whales in the sky and a circle of children dressed like seed-pods both beg me to interpret them...
I dream my foot has a huge bloody crevasse. But I study it calmly...
In the midsummer dream, I'm at a wedding in the Russian forest;
in winter, I dream I hold an emaciated girl as she breathes her last...
In our mutant future, a lovely horse-tailed four-armed girl sings her heart out--as clubgoers ignore her...
CAUTION: NUDE CABARET
I don't know if the fox-shepherdess ate all her sheep, or if she herded invisible and quite different things...
Frida Kahlo's battered sister Cristina dances nude--and gets jailed by the
Office of Homeland Security! Frida protests by painting her in prison...
A hulking, intimidating young man is at my door, with two scary dogs. Wait, is that Carl Jung?...
Previous dreamwork had made it clear my mother had betrayed me; I asked
my dreams how to protect myself from those who do not love me...
I'm a priestess standing on a stone terrace, holding a ritual axe. Before me kneels a sacrifice to the Goddess...
I meet a girl with a plant growing out of her head...
Someone prays to the spirit of a spring to heal me...
I watch people practice exercises with the ritual feel of voudun or candomble...
I was painting to a sad scary song by Laurie Anderson that goes "This is the hand... the hand that takes..."
At a party, I go hunting for my husband and find him on a terrace facing a Bengal tiger...
I was cartooning with a headache. It took over and started drawing for me...
A musical prodigy has a gorgeous, unplayable keyboard.
But serious creativity takes a dull, regular, ergonomic instrument...
In a domed tower, we all look up bewildered by a statue like an ancient herm, floating in mid-air...
I'm a heron working in the Civil Service. I want to blow the whistle, but then how would I support my...
CAUTION: BIRD-SLAVERY?
A portrait of my dream-friend Silky, using a technique learned from artist Camille Porter.
A huge white ovoid like a tethered cloud hangs over a city street. We enter it and search for the crew...
I meet a circle of students with up to five eyes. The lone three-eyed girl
is embarrassed, indeed ashamed she's merely attained enlightenment...
Is that a madwoman riding a horse, or a cougar pouncing on a deer,
or are these dream-creatures wildly making love?
I'm fascinated by Io's feverish colors and tumultuous landscape, so I sculpted
a detailed portrait and came to some tentative conclusions about what we see...
CAUTION: AMATEUR SCIENCE, OH NO!
Deep Duck's interview with Jasha the Krelkin goes rogue, as she urges tossing out human habits like... death?
CAUTION: REDWOOD-SPRITE SEX, PEEING ON TREES, DRUNK DUCK
One boring lonely day, I meet a cute teenage bunny who wants to play with me! But half an hour later…
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, INTERSPECIES FLIRTING, AND LOSS
In a Japanese house I met a charming red-headed girl and had this
weird urge to scratch her pointed ears. Oh! She's a kitsune!...
As a child, Paul Nash dreamt he flew over rural southern England.
As an adult surrealist painter...
I know we will cross the water surrounding the heart of Jerusalem, but not yet...
As we climb down the steep mountainside, clutching bushes to keep from falling,
I ask Laura "Do you want another child?"
This couple keeps appearing in my dreams--as equals, as mount and rider, as friends, as enemies, as lovers...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Illness is such a handy excuse when you need solitude, care, rest, or just time to think... but...
The dreamer becomes a horse, the horse becomes a unicorn.
Dreams have their own quests apart from the conscious...
"Freedom is a gift you give yourself." But it doesn't always involve seahorses or babycarriages covered in quills...
Three unicorns gallop out of the waves...
She didn't want to be there. She closed her eyes and went elsewhere. So I painted where she went...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I visit a friend's ramshackle cottage--trees grow through the walls. But glorious meadows! Spring at last...
We must hunt a man-eating lion to protect our village--our village full of slaves. But
we can't deal with our looming social crisis now--gotta focus on the lion in front of us..
CAUTION: SLAVERY, ILLNESS, DEATH
Honesty induces a joyful state with lucidlike powers.
So I bike across the Lake of Time, open the book of my future, and see...
CAUTION: SEXY SKETCHES FROM THE FUTURE
The dancers, in a frenzy, stripped themselves. Not just their clothes; themselves...
A colorful magic web I saw in a dream and painted; but I've been unable to trace the dream so far in my journals...
I stood in the desert preparing for a contest with a man and his snake. But he cheated! Then my cat Lulu intervened...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; Jan-Feb 2003, painting of a dream-series
My dreams were troubled by war. So I painted them in concentric rings--lotus, fire, children, animals, and nightmares...
Our dream-group's dreams had a lot of imagery in common: circles, groups, meditation. I fused them into this piece...
I met a woman whose art (and her love for the Earth) inspired me to start a series of paintings with creatures hidden in landscapes...
Two medieval women poison one another. One dies in my arms; the other may just survive. Why did they...?
CAUTION: MURDERERS
A jungle cat needs to take time out from a hard day's predation to have a quiet smoke...
I'm a puma with a night job as a cellist. But my day job with The Architectives is the bizarre one...
I was a mermaid summoning a great storm to carry my love to me--and my love was a red sea-mare...
I rescue some drowning kids by turning into a mermaid, but towing one girl has an unexpected effect...
From the punk clubs of Frisco to the Safeways of Si Valley to the vermilion sands of Mars,
Silky the were-nightmare fights for the Misfits against every cliche in science fiction...
A dragon-woman showed me a cache of art. When I painted her face I recalled seeing it in a dream decades ago in a mirror...
CAUTION: DRAGON BREASTS
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 14 dreams (mostly Jan-Mar 2011) painted on one canvas
A dream urged me to paint a big landscape with cutout movable (magnetic) dream figures
and liftable flaps revealing hidden dream scenes...
I climb a huge mushroom-shaped rock rising from a hotspring and prepare to dive in...
At first no one seems interested in my mural-design for the inside of the City Hall dome, but...
We stood meekly in line to be beheaded. I tried to accept my fate and commended myself to God... CAUTION: READ THE TITLE!
I swim with my daughter Naomi in a desert pool amid lemon trees. She may be able to help me...
Two friends send energy through me, transforming me. Now that
my legs are detachable, I can sit comfortably on my eggs...
At our commune's new house, pandemonium breaks out when
our matriarch meets a spook. Can we live together in peace?
I am given a gift of "Nibbling Fruits" which only I may eat--because I've been feeding everyone but me...
My friend Catherine dreamed she was a flying mare with golden hooves. But in real life, she lost them...
Festival night in a strange town, where, one night a year, dancing in the street transforms you into...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
An alien beach scene--as seen through eyes that see bodies' energy fields more than surface forms...
A child of radicals goes wild in Rio. When we bail her out, we find she's had a strange enlightenment...
CAUTION: UNSAFE SEX
I salvaged a door. When I painted it, a fox-woman wanted to open it and get out...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
At the beach, wading with my fellow dreamworker Stephanie.
The waves are getting bigger--are they a hazard, or can we ride them?
While visiting a friend in New Orleans in my dream, I saw a pangolin. I was very excited...
Haiku by Roswila of a dream of meeting a winged horse, illustrated by her late friend Janet...
At a party I meet a friend I thought was dead. She's become a small talking rabbit made of cake, and I...
CAUTION: UGH
When Perissa, an exhibitionistic centaur, bares her body in a crowded Coliseum,
she also bares a human-supremacist plot...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM
A pigeon with a head like Queen Victoria's keeps fastening onto
my clothing with its beak, and this nagging feels familiar...
A dream that'd explain why I quit taking Western medicines--
(and why haven't you?) Only I didn't dream it. Just lived it.
I'm shown corn plants growing from skulls, and it seems like I must plant some skull-corn myself...
I'm detective Hercule Poirot, but I'm losing my case and my brain--
because my story isn't by Agatha Christie, it's a knockoff...
CAUTION: PINK DILDO HATS
Among the family portraits in the hall of my ancestors was this one of a formidable old... woman, I guess.
I wish I could be as body-free as my neighbor Jenna, hiking nude under the full moon...
a dream of flying, shapeshifting and spiritual advice.
When a flood trapped me in my cabin, I dreamed I met an old man who warned me to let my butterflies go...
"Our resurrection is not entirely in the future; it's also in us, it begins, it's already begun..."
A huge spiral nautilus needs healing; its coils are coming undone, and if it dies, all on earth may die with it...
I dreamed our family's black cat Persephone had to make a life-decision...
by Jenny Badger Sultan, 1999/5/15, 6/12 & 7/14, a painting based on 3 dreams
I'm in the Hypogeum, an ancient Maltese dream-temple. I join some women
staging a ritual; a little girl draped in a web plays the role of an insect...
I was just sitting, minding my own business when these golden wedge-birds divebombed me...
20,000 years from now, a deer-harpist named Razi finds the Holy Wino's not quite the ruin he seems...
CAUTION: BAD PENGUINS, DEER NUDITY, RUDE DRUNK
Mt Everest is snowfree and red; in the next dream I redden a sandstone cave with ochre. I feel uneasy...
The mysterious glyphs above the model's head are dream-language, warning me to...
CAUTION: NUDITY
When whites invade, two shapeshifting Native American cubs resist architecturally...
A proud angry picture-poem during a hard time, when great gifts flowed through my hands...
In a Scythian church, a painting says:
"Little St Bridget was bound so hard that when they released her she flew"...
Night. Two moons. I go lucid! Find a knob adjusting the dream's color saturation.
Dial it up--and find I'm not alone! Ghosts of pure color...
I find a shy sphinx hiding in the corner of a painting in a dull art class. But maybe she's right to hide...
After I fled my batterer, I was afraid to love--afraid I'd give up my freedom again for mere kindness...
My anima the singing horse was encouraging a shy werewolf boy to give it a try...
CAUTION: UNCLAD HORSE CHANTEUSE
My anima, a black mare, is upside down, hanging on the ceiling! Rears downward.
And she's changed sex! Not a mare today, a stallion! A gay, humanophilic stallion...
CAUTION: VERY QUEER FLIRTATION
I am given a dehydrated package of dried snake to insert in my vagina. Inside it will unfold and come to life...
CAUTION: KIDS, DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
In a desert, I find a tree with red purselike pods. But they all seem empty,
and I know they should each contain a vivid yellow snake...
A woman up a tree has white flaky stuff camouflaging her.
It cracks and peels like snakeskin. What tree is this, exactly?
In my drawing class it was antlers and bones and skulls, death death death till I was tired of MY bones...
A voice told me, "Human beings have a spark of the divine"...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 2002/1/19, a dream-painting of a dream about dream-painting!
I'm teaching an art class full of strange masklike beings. We debate art
as spontaneous process, versus art as planned product...
I'm at the beach, collecting stones to make a gigantic face viewable only from the air...
While I study how humans went extinct, my daughter happily splashes in the sea...
Just an abstract birdlike acrylic squiggle I liked. Sorry, no story...
I'm holding a pornographic novel, trying to keep it dry, as huge waves
flood the room. The book and I are both going to get drenched...
I had to sell my horse Shadow, but I missed him so much I painted him. As I finished, a strange impulse led me...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 1997, a collage on a dream-idea
A phrase from a dream, "the remains of men and women," led to this image
of a black sun in the underworld amid strata of time and the psyche...
A gigantic herd of buffalo stampede toward me. I panic, then surrender in peace to what is surely my death...
I dream Edward Abbey shows me a secret grove of telepath trees.
That night, in my dreams inside my dream, they meet me...
I was a mermaid trying to find Count Coyote's stolen dreams, so I could marry my human girlfriend...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, LESBIAN MARRIAGE, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
The animal goddess of peace, stubbornly raising her sign, my sign, as you all slide into your nice holy war...
Dream-inspired landscape with herons and wild horses in a vaguely Japanese style...
It's Thanksgiving but my brother won't come in; he's digging up red earth. In our family he always digs up...
Tuba Man plays from the top of a tower, even when Loveless Man opens fire; for music is life to him...
I'm climbing a tower, as my dad, Apollo, drunk, throws bottles at me from the top, breaking bones...
CAUTION: DENIAL ABOUT ALCOHOLISM
I'm shown a mysterious two-faced carving;
I shush loud people disturbing my therapy;
I'm told of a documentary on the archetypal mother...
I see two gorillas in the field. One waves at me and approaches. I feel excited but a little scared...
One of my first tries with paint--part Tibetan, part medieval, part hippie, part Navaho...
Yellow fireflies circling round the horn of a reclining red unicorn, in the evening...
An improvised painting-series exploring my obsession for Utopia--and your deafening silence...
CAUTION: IDEAS, FURRY NUDITY, THAT GOSH-DARN MODERN ABSTRACT ART
Make silhouettes of your beloved vegetables; then listen to the spaces between...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUASH
A dream voice announced "The verdure is accomplished." Green is a healing color for me...
In the next dream we sat round a green pool, talking of healing. But the snails troubled me...
My friend Verity's given a beautiful set of wings. I'm envious until I consider what angel wings imply...
A friend explained she planned to be a human viewfinder, bendng into
an arch for a male spirit to dive through. I didn't want to risk it...
I dream my mother takes over caring for my sick daughter; I feel pushed aside.
When I wake, I try to paint a more positive image of mothering.
For a week, dream after dream has opportunities for patience and letting go of jealousy...
A stylized waterfall--a distillation of all those childhood summers camping in Yosemite...
In a camp, women wove mats. I was tempted to try. But it was
months before I learned what they'd really been weaving..
I dreamed I was a whale swimming against a Christian ebb tide,
trying to lead humans to a cleaner spiritual current...
CAUTION: HARD ON AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY
My friend's ignorant of our local Congressional race. I loathe Pombo
and like his rival McNerney, but can't pronounce his name right...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 2000/3/23 & 2000/4/19, twin dreams of carved women
A woman is knifed by the sea. I cradle her, but she's probably dying...
For my intitiation-ordeal, I have to cut designs in my own back! I can't reach, so...
I'm in a ring of seven white-haired women, our arms all interlocking.
When I woke I had fun working out the pattern of those interlinked arms...
DAY: we're preparing for a trip to Malta to see ancient sites.
DREAM: Hiking, I discover a gigantic white snake. It feels like a good omen...
My sister's fiancé Billy died a year ago. I didn't realize how deep the grief ran till I dreamed...
I'm holding a pornographic novel, trying to keep it dry, as huge waves
flood the room. The book and I are both going to get drenched...
Share? And who? And WHAT? Who knows who's your mate... and who's NOT?
Some shy folks don't even know they're dragons....
A friend who's fought lymphoma invites me to sleep in a cave, but I fear a rattlesnake will bite me...
I'm a part-owner of Eden, harvesting windfalls.
But a renter says his Landlord promised him all the apples...
After teaching a class on color, I had a series of vivid dreams
about color, and tried fusing them into one painting...
At the beach, a barrel of huge snails somehow heal my legs.
In the next dream, back on the beach, I give birth to our son...
I'm to be beheaded. Guards chant "It's important to enjoy what you're doing."
I know my spilled blood will create a work of art...