After reading a booklet of dreams about money by Wayan, Althea has four such dreams of her own
challenging family ideas of class, gender, inheritance... and then practical investment advice!...
The Engineers make Eden... logical. But the blimps go blind, and a demon
goes viral. How can I escape the their ultra-efficient hell?
A shy woman's belt slowly comes alive, but like most snakes, it has weak eyes. Would glasses help?...
Why's Jade the bitter artist throw me at her happier, calmer daughter? Wait, is Jamie the new ME?
CAUTION: SEX
I'm a Fast-Food Detective tracking down a kidnapper-sorceress.
I find castles, monsters, magic carpets... and unexpected love.
CAUTION: SEX
I'm gigantic, stretching from Ceylon to Tibet. Grass grows from my navel to heaven.
Worms crawl on me. Birds flock to me and change color. I climb a mountain of dung...
CAUTION: PIOUS MISINTERPRETATIONS
I was led into the future, where all the buffalo disappeared, to meet a frail old man by a ranch house...
DAY: I thorn-puncture my hands while gardening, and write stupid poetry about it...
EVE: I watch Little Darlings, a teen sex farce that turns weirdly serious...
DREAM: a Mysterious Pussy guards us librarians from stinky alien dinosaurs...
CAUTION: SEXUAL INNUENDO???
Why did I sign on as a crewman on the Cheapship, a freighter
that's falling apart? And yes, I do mean that literally...
That day, I met a wildly neurotic therapist; that night, I met a woman forced to get discount
ob/gyn exams from her stingy husband's doctor buddy... can you say "boundary violation?"
CAUTION: SEXUAL HUMILIATION
CECY: In a desert, a thirsty dog jumps out of a tree--the first known dog suicide...
WAYAN: I'm a talking dog. Our owner denies us enough water, so we protest...
Their bodies shift, and alter. Antlers sprout... much has been taken, and something terrible is grafted...
CAUTION: HUMAN SUPREMACISM
On a volcano's rim, watching the lava fountains, I interview a huge blue alien bird who never planned to be a monk...
Famine in the monastery. We add weather charts, leather laces
and walking sticks to the menu. Even the ghosts are hungry...
Gandhi and I must run barefoot across a burning racetrack miles wide... the Ascetic Desert?
Perched on a huge sandpile by the train track, I wrote. Then met a narcissistic
hipster chasing happiness and sex. But this globe's austere and full of hurt...
A swimming pool game with color-sorted broken glass. It's social, it's fun! The whole family can play!
CAUTION: BLOODY IDIOTS
Gopa dreams the earth shakes, stars and meteors fall. She's naked, her marriage bed is broken, her husband
Siddhartha's treasures lie scattered. He says "How auspicious!"--and prepares to abandon her and their son...
CAUTION: SEXISM
We build a huge hard disk that's a virtual pond--a gate to other worlds! But not for reptile brains...
A single dad loves his daughter, but is so pathologically cheap he's teaching her an unintended lesson...
CAUTION: CHILD NEGLECT
I'm a holy man sneaking into a sewerpipe at the beach, to pop anxiety pills in shame. Do they even work?
CAUTION: CHEMICAL CRUTCHES
Hilda, founder of two monasteries, dies in one. Begu, in the other, 13 miles away,
dreams Hilda's been taken to heaven. She tells her sisters. Messengers arrive...
A poor planet with one city. Urban technocrats and hick ecologists have conflicting development models...
CAUTION: TOO REAL TO BE FUN
A cranky nun wants fish. Ilarya, the monastery's cook, sets out to buy one--a long walk, and unsafe after dark.
So Ilarya asks the sun to halt! She buys her fish, cooks, feeds her patient, and forgets to tell it to set...
CAUTION: PETTY, GOOFY, COMMUNITY-BAFFLING MIRACLE
When I compare Julia Butterfly up her tree with those hermits who sat atop columns in the desert...
Swayed by sinister surgeons, I go all Buddhist and give up my attachments, including various organs...
CAUTION: DIVESTABLE GENITALIA
The Mayan cave was a door between worlds. But also a model of the character you need to walk through that door...
I'm in the cellar, petting a tiger-cat. She speaks inside my head: "I'm tired of living on bread. I need meat."
I make excuses--it's pricy--then see big hanging quarters of meat. I hide them! She says "Call me Mistress
Touttmouss"--well, something like that--I know it's English, but can't make it out til I wake, when I see...
Inspired by a bird who weaves her nest of dollar bills, I become a sort of monk,
sweeping, renouncing wealth--but my monastery's a Silicon Valley BART station...
All my life, from age three or four, I've dreamed of being a young monk named Stefan
somewhere in southern Europe. And aspects of his short life have shaped my own...
CAUTION: SEXUAL EXPLOITATION
I sympathize with visionaries whose gift is so urgent and extreme, most would call it illness...
A creepy visit to the Leather Nuns: as fierce as Beorn in The Hobbit, but less hospitable...
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 her kitchen she offers me shortcake. She's short herself, for she gives away all
to everyone--only her bodiless head is left...
Mom's vanished, and our writer/bohemian dad's caring for us
alone now. But he's barely coping. And he's me...
19 nondream imaginary worlds rendered in text, art, & sculpture. Most teem with intelligent life--alien Edens!
CAUTION: ANARCHISM, NUDITY, MATH, SOCIALISM, EVOLUTION
A living camera edits us all: the dappled hawk-man, the slutty candidate, the blue businessmen
who give such bad advice when you pull the thorns from their feet. And my sweet sad hell-hound...
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...
Suddhodana dreams of great upheavals; no courtier can interpret the dream.
An ascetic claims the upheaval will be for the good, then... turns into an owl?!
CAUTION: PERHAPS NOT ENTIRELY ACCURATE
The jewels in the hoard had strange powers, but the advice of the dragon guarding them was even stranger...
In a Scythian church, a painting says:
"Little St Bridget was bound so hard that when they released her she flew"...
I meet a 140-year-old hermit in her black chadoor,
skateboarding down a hill near her sacred dream-spring...
A strange transforming thing appeared in the sky--a light, a sheep, a man. It told me to stop burning my head...
I took my cellphone into the shower. I couldn’t find the shampoo, and idly typed SHAMPOO in, and...
CAUTION: NOW YOU KNOW WHO STOLE YOUR ODD SOCKS
A rant on over-disciplined Americans (NOT under; we just think we are) taking up spiritual disciplines...
A boar attacks Swedenborg's late brother, alive again. He tries to help, but the pig
eats his brother's head. That's what you get for drinking, partying, and gluttony...
CAUTION: VIOLENT DEATH
Giving up a wall of material treasure for the moonlit path...
The card of excessive self-denial, whether compulsive or artistic or spiritual...
Tour a rugged, scenic moon with air and water in deep canyons sheltering a dozen intelligent species
CAUTION: ANARCHISM, NUDITY, SCIENCE
1: Three sisters flash me; one has a third eye in there! Clothed, it's blind. Was she just enlightening herself?
2: In the future, most cars self-drive. I'm the last driver using my own muscles and mind. Can I hold out?
3: A friend charts all of history's wars to prove: democracies don't fight each other. So to get peace...
CAUTION: NAKED EYE
I'm shown pictures of three different magical ways to fly. But the third
shows no actual flight--just someone giving away the magical means...
Silicon Valley goes enthusiastically fascist. I hide in a berry patch. They build a shining world, and then...
Junk in the attic? Treasures! The cat musicians shift from cartoons to life as I ascend,
til in the ultimate attic--the astral beach--I meet a cattaur made of pure (de)light...
CAUTION: SEX-CRAZED CATS, NEW AGE FINALE
I'm a one-legged hopping hermit in the ruins of LA, and my only hope
for love is to conjure up a girl out of a trout and a puppy...
An empire of creatures asexual most of the year has affected its human neighbors--or bred a new type.
I'm stranded on an alternate Earth under strict rationing--of wishes!
But you need to wish a few times a year to keep the system greased...
CAUTION: INSULTS BOTH CAPITALISM AND ASCETICISM
DREAM: I witness a murder on a farm. So I hide in the fields as assault-gun bullets fly...
NEXT DAY: I go see a love story set on a farm. But suddenly killers show up
to eliminate a witness to a murder. Assault rifles in the cornfields...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE & APPARENT E.S.P.
A mystic postman delivers a letter on the world's best glasses and a reply from me, telling how to find them...
A dream telling how to acquire mystic power: raw food, no sex, meat, or booze; just meditate in rural solitude...
CAUTION: EXTREMISM
I'm an elephant working in a diner. In the bathroom, I inadvertently summon the Genie of the Urinal...
CAUTION: PISSED PACHYDERM