A nondream vision of an alternate Earth where continents are abysses, abysses continents...
Are dreams really so ephemeral? Lewis Carroll, who built the Alice books from dream-shards, wasn't so sure...
A painting of mountains, manes, mermaids, moons, mattresses, mouths, maples, mohawks, mice & men...
CAUTION: NUDE M-THINGS
The "Amazement Park", as I dubbed it, was a building long as a football field and three floors high; you fly,
suspended, round an oval track, through a galaxy of images teaching that "sharing" is what matters...
Johns dreamt he was painting an American flag. He woke, and did--
mixing pigment and beeswax, coating newspaper strips...
Action-painting cityscapes, but seen from far above--in flight. But
she keeps herself out of the picture, so you'd never guess, unless...
I show a friend my book of dream-art, but it's half-baked and embarrassing.
I'm no good at smuggling guns, porn or cash through customs, either...
CAUTION: LOW-RES SMUT IN THAT BOOK
Anti-ideological rant calling experience water and belief... ice.
Two DC-6s catch burn over New York. Me? I'm a naked child in a Babylonian temple in Jersey...
Tour bizarre worlds most exobiologists would dismiss as hopeless for life--and meet the natives...
CAUTION: SEXY ALIENS, WEIRD CUSTOMS, EVOLUTION
Inspired by Lynda Barry, I fill a black-paged book with 20 improv paintings.
They grow into a tour of my dreamwork led my anima Silky, a nightmare...
A sequence of short dreams full of creatures. They warn I'll face leukemia...
An experiment with digital textures that fascinated me. Not a dream, just feels like it.
Our writing class meets in this Victorian home. I turn off my filters and describe what I really see around me...
I meet a dancer who plays a stick figure on stage. She smokes
a cigar. I ask her how many a day she smokes, and she answers...
I was a man made of clocks trying to get a date with a hedgehog-hair woman...
CAUTION: ANOTHER HORNY GUY WHO DOESN'T GET FAR
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has a challenge--draw an image upside
down. Better or worse? So I drew this with a mouse, then flipped it and found...
I'm trying to jam together my dream diary and my first comics. My grandmother's
skeptical. But at last, with an audible 'click', dreams and comics suddenly merge...
Who sculpts landscape? So I tried a crag with a pool in a hollow on its knee, windows like red eyes...
My friend Zooop taught me to crayon onto heated paper--it's vivid, dreamlike...
I'm trapped in a cute cartoon universe! Worse, to judge this beauty contest,
I have to see past our style to our souls...
I always wrote some letters strangely--my 'd' was nearly illegible. So I set out to retrain my deep motor skills...
My father is supposed to speak, but he falls asleep onstage. I rush up to try and rouse him, but...
As a kid, when I had a fever I always had the same nightmare: a high brick or stone wall
shaking apart, faster and faster. This scared me very much. Finally, in my teens, I...
A doctor lures me into his office. What he turns out to be scares me less than how I defend myself...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, ARACHNOPHOBIA
Each morning when I wake, I write one dream as a poem. What’ll emerge by the hundredth day?
I was on one of those package dream-tours--an hour here, a scene there. But then in Patagonia...
CAUTION: CREEPING PAGANISM
Money, power, race and gender stifle my working friends less than hierarchical structures...
I turned off my conscious judgment and just drew. Two paths appeared--one led to
psychodrama, then parental prison; the other, into the underworld of dreamwork...
CAUTION: NUDE DREAM-SELVES
I met a colorblind artist with an amazing grayscale sense. He inspire me to
draw a huge eye full of abstract shapes in gray, trying to see his way...
I fall off a tower, but I can change size. Tiny things fall slower, but they also tempt the local falcons!
Be big & hit hard, or tiny & be eaten? There's a third choice, but I sorta fell into it...
From an ad. I recommend drawing photos as well as live models; some poses, models can't hold!
CAUTION: NUDITY
A sophisticated composition for a sophisticated model. Or at least seasick...
CAUTION: NUDITY, NAUSEA...
On the anniversary of 9/11, I dreamed a friend was welding nude. In his careful hands, the fire was harmless...
I read The Best American Poetry, 2007, but it just isn't, and I find myself writing a Savage Poetic Response...
Part an experiment in wild textures, part a "Where's Waldo" game to see if you'd notice my self-portrait...
My dreams urge me to build furry dream creatures with joints,
muscles & bones, then to heal myself by mating with them...
CAUTION: FETISHISM, FURRY NUDITY & SEX
I don't know if the fox-shepherdess ate all her sheep, or if she herded invisible and quite different things...
I might have been less cowed by the storm-face, if I'd seen it was made of little foxes just like me...
Early Euro and Indian art liked bilateral symmetry; old Japan liked careful asymmetry. I like self-similarity.
I've always loved curves, color, dreams, sex, texture... and planning, too.
So one day I drew 100 black boxes in ink--no color, no curves, no erasure! And then I began to seek...
I was single and tired of kissing frogs. Then I realized--I AM one. Or worse: a pretentious polliwog...
Starlets Zaza and Eva Gabor grow old shopping, smiling, covering their fears, until...
I was having dinner with friends when I saw on the wall a huge skullbone
spider. But I lost the word for spider, and my friends seemed not to see it...
Gryphon meets Dragon, mid-air, and they're both me--sometimes...
If it takes a whole village to raise a child, it also takes a lot of guts to raise a kundalini. Voila!
At a party, I go hunting for my husband and find him on a terrace facing a Bengal tiger...
I watched her dive into the lake... and fail to come up. Her golden cloak
floated on the water. I hesitated just a moment, and...
I must rescue Ann Soforth from righteous rapists, then Paul McCartney from a musical curse...
CAUTION: ABUSED CHILD, JOYCEAN LANGUAGE
An early self-portrait rebelling against my gender and trying on beauty to see what'd change...
An ink sketch in a magazine shows a new Ghost Dance invading city clubs.
But the (biased?) artist uglifies the Indians, horses and giraffes dancing...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY; JAUNDICED ART/REPORTING
I’m so sick of irony I decide to get my sense of irony surgically removed and replace it with...
CAUTION: PLAYING WITH FIRE
A library shows me surrealist Jean Arp's sketchbook. One Eschery sketch with repeated focal points is hypnotic.
But they also show me his lunch, and I try to eat it! I fail. Head & gut disagree. Stuck Arp-way...
CAUTION: NEVER EAT 12-YEAR-OLD SUSHI
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!...
In a general store on a High Plains rez, I find two surreal collaged postcards. If only
this were a dream they'd qualify for the World Dream Bank, but sadly, it isn't. Right?
CAUTION: STUPID, STUPID CONSCIOUS!
As we climb down the steep mountainside, clutching bushes to keep from falling,
I ask Laura "Do you want another child?"
A huge explosion knocked the earth off its orbit; it struck other planets and wrecked the whole
solar system. Where will the souls ready to reincarnate all go? Or do they even need a planet?...
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
I visit a friend's ramshackle cottage--trees grow through the walls. But glorious meadows! Spring at last...
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...
Four versions of an underwater meeting between lovers, one terrestrial, one marine...
CAUTION: ORAL SEX
Just a witchmas card spreading love and paganism to all, and to all a good night...
An ancient Mesopotamian city learned to make catapult-bombs of powdered
manure. But excessive stockpiles & bad housekeeping led to Armageddung...
CAUTION: BABEL-MYTH DEBASED
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...
Okay, you got your heaven, and your earth, and between, you got...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
A poem linking the dawn of digital art to early, tinny phonographs, cranky film cameras...
CAUTION: IDEAS
Inspired by Shaun Tan, I fill a black-paged photo album with 36 improv paintings.
They become a tour of my dreamworld, led by my anima Silky, a literal nightmare...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, WEIRD DREAM IDEAS
In an Oakland literary salon (no, not an oxymoron) I'm supposed to
write an ode. But it's so hot, and I have surreal dreams to sketch...
I'm biking over the English Channel. So mild & easy after the Greenland-to-New-York run...
Dreams of translucent fairies, centaurs, robots & gnomes prompt me to cartoon
on transparent overlays to show how dreamworlds overlay ours...
I dreamed I built a palace, but for fifteen years I kept silent, ashamed. Then
I tripped over a beautiful stone. I took it home. Next day I collected more...
A contest! Here's a wide, fertile world full of empty ecological niches for intelligent creatures. Design one!
Hypnotized in therapy, I saw AT LEAST five competing goals tugging at me like gravity fields.
Naturally I drew them. Come tour the Inner Solar System of our desires...
CAUTION: NUDITY (BODY, HEART, BRAIN, SOUL)
I'm photographing lifesize furry statues. How explicit, how sexy? If I get shots they like,
souls will be lured to enter their bodies and bring them alive...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
I'm shyly making love with a classmate, Cynthia. Classmates gawk & point, through
the pie-hole in the ceiling. But our perspective reveals that under our critics' skirts...
CAUTION: UPSKIRT NUDITY
What if comics panels and layouts weren't so square? I try triangles,
pentagons, hexagons, circles, spirals--and some serious stuff pops out...
CAUTION: IDEAS, OCCASIONAL NUDITY, MENTIONS ABUSE
At a museum, a weird art project shows me how observing and documenting life
in art can improve that life--just from being taken seriously...
The moon's a sailing ship propelled not by wind but light: the light of night-movies. Dreams...
Blake was broke. Couldn’t typeset Songs of Innocence and Experience.
But in a dream, his brother advised him...
Night. Two moons. I go lucid! Find a knob adjusting the dream's color saturation.
Dial it up--and meet ghosts of pure color, invisible til I luridified...
I'm more a dream artist than a realist, but one day I set up a mirror and looked in it...
Animal poets at an open mic. My turn! And I find... I'm one. A creature without grammar...
I dreamed I'd made a set of woodblock prints showing a scene from varied times & angles:
my anima Silky, part girl part mare, contemplates another set of prints--famous Zen ones...
(a poem answering Wallace Stevens's 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)
As the beast in question (and recalling the fable Six Blind Men and the Elephant)
I don't mind letting six half-blind humans have their say--as long as I get my own...
CAUTION: UNICORNS
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!
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...
Dream-inspired landscape with herons and wild horses in a vaguely Japanese style...
1987/8/15, 1990/3/31 & 6/10, 1993/8/10, four dreams prompting Planetocopia
I dreamed I took a globe off its stand, drilled new poles, and put it back on tilted, so that
most continents are greener; Tokyo, Alaska and Tierra del Fuego are now all tropical...
Over a decade later, dreams forgotten, I start what I think is a nondream art project, by tilting...
It's Thanksgiving but my brother won't come in; he's digging up red earth. In our family he always digs up...
Only up close do I see that the map of these mysterious continents is made of moths. I wake
in Polynesia. By the bed, in a jar, floats one of my hands. For no reason, I begin to cry...
Twenty-four panels of improvised comics in unerasable ink,
letting the shapes and themes in each panel suggest the next...
You get 26 dice with letters on every face. Roll them all. Your haiku must use every letter. Go!
I twirled pinups into surreal not-quite-abstracts, to see just how twisted sex could get...
CAUTION: NAKED PRETZELS
I see two gorillas in the field. One waves at me and approaches. I feel excited but a little scared...
The stained-glass unicorns were stunning, sexy... but veiled by a bland, tasteful,
flowery inner stained-glass window. 18 months later I saw the dream window...
Jealous of newlyweds, I grind my teeth. But the Ice Age ground the Sierra's granite teeth, and they're lovelier for it...
All I know about humans, I learned in psychodrama. I gawked as caterpillars grew wings. Except me...
Make silhouettes of your beloved vegetables; then listen to the spaces between...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUASH
My friend Verity's given a beautiful set of wings. I'm envious until I consider what angel wings imply...
In my sister's house I saw a magazine cover showing that famous
national monument in the Black Hills: Mt Walrushmore...
A stylized waterfall--a distillation of all those childhood summers camping in Yosemite...
Maybe the web like a shining dove will lead me from my lonely cave
into the light. The glaring light... Wait! That can't be right!
CAUTION: SEPIA HALFTONE NUDITY
A portrait of Snow White's eighth dwarf, the one Disney had to leave out...
An art experiment--the only rule is DRAW without preconceptions--
no models, no ideas, no plans, not even dreams. Drawing from the void!
Here's an incantation to induce flying dreams. "Bring me wings NOW, or forever hold your peace..."
After teaching a class on color, I had a series of vivid dreams
about color, and tried fusing them into one painting...
Cartoony self-portrait as I paint with Persephone's pomegranate paintbrush. A mock woodblock print...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
I dreamed of a dragon-woman on a reef. She was my guardian, but she let me drown! She had her reasons...
CAUTION: SCALY NUDITY