Hillary Clinton hid her cancer, but the GOP found out. So a monster kidnaps Rainbow Brite, and...
Examples of inexplicable moods that appear (after the fact) to be reactions to future events...
I dream my cousin and I ride out looking for his lost moccasins. Suddenly he's swallowed by mud
and drowns. It's so fast. I feel sorry for him but I'm helpless. Two months later, my cousin died...
I'm trapped in the scary show The Outer Limits. A man scolds me: "You think not, but you MATTER!"
I try suicide rather than face my worth! But my dream fences off the river, forcing me to confront...
CAUTION: SUICIDE ATTEMPT
Mistress Abbot dreams if she eats a jackfish her child will be great. Next morning one swims into her waterbucket...
I search rivers and lakes around the world for someone dead. But the living I meet act as strange as ghosts...
I botched President Clinton's taco. And on the way home, I fell in the river.
Luckily, Jesse Jackson happened by and pulled me out, restoring my faith in...
I wondered where a friend was, and felt as if I were walking at night near the Sphinx. Months later...
We're spirits over a volcanic fountain of energy. And some of us prepare to ride the current up to...
CAUTION: ASSUMES MYSTICAL LITERACY
On a cloud in space I met an ape molding a model of Earth, glancing at the original far below. We were much alike...
Closing my eyes I saw an old man and a red-haired girl in a shop. My workmate was writing home...
(1918 and 1996, twin images of our limited conception of dreaming)
What you call dreams are just the surf-zone between waking and dream!
Swim out past the foam to the dream-deeps and you'll find...
Agassiz, faced with a fossil he had to crack open, was unsure where to strike.
But for three nights he dreamed...
I'm to be martyred. I ask if the man I love can strangle me. Yes! I say farewell to our hermaphroditic genius baby...
I dreamed a plane took off northeast, and flipped by the main hangar, killing two men. I forgot the dream until...
The track gave way and many cars fell into the bay. People crawled out of the windows as waves broke on the wreckage...
I was always the weakest magic-worker I knew. But when demons threatened my grandchild...
I visit a Tibetan monastery with great cellphone reception from the gods.
But all their calls are messages to pass on to others--none for us...
Two giants wrestle in the Chinese mountains. Who'll win, Red or Yellow? But when I wake...
A bomb's planted on our ship! But when a teen finds it, rather than fetch a responsible adult...
I'm the First Lady. I have a dream that my husband's assassinated, and wake and try to warn him...
My eighth grade class is a flock of birds migrating south for the winter, but we don't migrate the easy way...
We sneak out of the movie to explore Upstairs. My friends hide from the staff
in storage nooks for rolls of fake-fur. They turn into kitsune, catgirls & deergirls...
I'm a homeless elf. We're a persecuted minority group. I know I'm dreaming and try to change it but...
I'm a flightless bird hopping down a line of marble columns rising from the sea, as they topple behind me...
The world is a whirlpool, a black and white spiral pulling me
down toward a black hole, and it's laughing...
My dead father said "We're looking for Howard any time now. We'll be glad to see him..."
I mail some letters that will solve everyone's problems, but a man argues we need problems...
In occupied Germany, Pat flags down two friends just before a truck crash. Except...
Pat was in England at the time. She sensed they were in danger, but...
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!...
I rescue a hummingbird who drinks nectar from my ear. It becomes an Internet star.
But then a girl rides a waterslide with her tits showing, and my meme is over ...
CAUTION: CARTOON BREASTS
ALYSE dreams Tim drives a motorcycle-book up a hill, but she doesn't LIKE riding so fast...
TIM dreams a wise woman tested him, but found him unqualified to play teacher to Alyse...
A dreamer I know dreamt she was fired by a Mr Bleeden. Baffled her, but made shocking sense to me! My dad...
On a cruise to Catalina Island, I find friends, a boyfriend and a magical sea of color...
I was about three. A big, luminous figure said he would be my guardian always. We went horseback riding in the sky...
At college, my sheet music arrives from home, but vanishes when I try to play--or the piano does...
An dreams a scary woman pulls his guts out and fills him up with brush! He wakes, gets gutted in a feud, and then...
CAUTION: BLOODY VIKINGS!
Every night the same nightmare--the creatures take flight again, and I wake shaking...
I ask my dreams if my dad's influencing my divorce. I dream my dad warns me "You can't ride a
motorcycle." I mount the bike and zoom down the road. I love it. When I park at last, my dad says...
I ask my dreams to evaluate my current relationship. I dream I'm vomiting up big maggots, and a mirror
shows smaller maggots eating one eye! In dream group, I ask the maggots who they are, and they say...
CAUTION: GROSS, BUT POSITIVE UNDER THE HORROR SKIN
Ann had inflamed ovaries and faced surgery. She asked her dreams for a second opinion. She dreamt of voices and images saying
"there's plenty of time for all this." She bathed peacefully in a river, meditated, gave easy birth to an infant, climbed a ladder to
her law degree. She woke cured. Her next doctor said "you must've been misdiagnosed; you just thought you were in pain."
CAUTION: SEXIST GASLIGHTING
A great storm causes flooding. I'm knee deep in the surge. Women flee and flounder,
wearing different colors, forming a panicky rainbow. So much for God's promise...
She was headed for a rock wall. The brakes faded; she smelled burning.
Then she woke. Her friends laughed, but she asked a neighbor what to do if...
A London Protestant dreamed Bloody Mary would find the congregation's member-list and burn them all...
My friend F. saw a child whose every move was controlled by a weird figure behind her...
A revival meeting goes bad--suicides, 'long pig', a hell-pit. If you sup with the devil, carry a long fork!
I'm at a lecture on Art, Beauty and the Nude, but no one paid the model and he wants a drink...
I dream I live in Hayward, California. One day my family's murdered. Years later I find that dream-street is real...
I swim the flooded tunnels and pass the crocodiles to enter the house of mystics... but now what?
I happily meditated alone in a monastery. But when I woke, I saw no way to act on the dream. Then a friend...
The jug of chocolate sauce smashed on the floor, forming a dark pattern. Then the scene melted and, like a film
loop, restarted. Horrified, I screamed "Don't touch it!" But the pitcher fell, the sauce made its predestined shape...
I dreamed of an explosion--a stabbing pain in my left thigh, right fore-arm, and left eye.
Two years later, in World War Two, a grenade...
As a boy I dreamt of a war; officers marked the landing-spot of an unexploded black sphere. Years later...
Eleven years after I dreamt of that green dress and green riverbank and dreamy day, I was convalescing in...
I dreamt a farmer gave me 33 eggs in a bucket. On the stair, he handed me 3 more. I woke, told my family...
An orange tiger with wolf ears jumped on me. I was surprised but not scared, as if it were just a big dog.
The next day, shopping, my daughter thrust an orange wolf-eared hand-puppet in my face, jaws open...
I dreamt a sparrowhawk perched on my shoulder. Next day a friend was given a stuffed sparrowhawk. He...
I dreamed of a beggar in our house who had been stealing. It was a very small man with a hump. Weeks later...
I dreamed the bus lurched, cracking my skull. Next day, on the bus steps as in my dream, I braced myself, and...
My wife dreamt where to find her lost umbrella; the next day she did.
But the finder said word for word what she had in the dream...
I was at school, walking through the gate to the playing fields, when a boy crashed into me...
Two photographic developing tanks disappear. I assumed theft
until I dreamt they were in a room I'd never seen, in locker FJA 39...
I dreamt I hit & killed a small boy in the road. Weeks later in Manchester I swerved & just missed that boy...
All my life I've had sudden visions showing violent deaths accompanied by headlines naming the victims...
I dream of a garden in Italy. Arches, roses. Then a bat flies in! Next day I open a book of Pirandello's plays, to find...
Mother & daughter both dream Mum runs over a little girl. Next morning she
spots the girl in the road--warned, she swerves. But bystanders see no child...
A dreamer I know dreamt she was fired by a Mr Bleeden. Baffled her, but made shocking sense to me! My dad...
I saw my husband come to my bedside, smile, visit our little son in his crib.
Then he vanished. But at dawn, my husband, dressed exactly as in my...
The opal fell out of my ring somewhere around town. I was heartbroken at the loss. But that night my husband dreamed...
I lost two rings. Searched hours; nothing. I hadn't touched the freezer all day, yet I peered into the icecubes...
I dreamt my mother visited, which she never does. The house was full of bedbugs! Three months later...
I dreamed of a valuable geode on a gravel bar in a nearby river, a place I'd never been. The next day I went...
I dreamed I drove through snow to my parents' home where my mother lay dead. Ten years later...
My mother begged me to stay in. I went out with Bill--who raped me. Mom later told me she'd dreamed...
CAUTION: DATE RAPE
The crane toppled and fell onto the riverbank. I saw the number, but not if the operator got free...
four death-omen dreamlets, one predictive
Every decade or so, I dream a loved one says farewell and walks
down an avenue of trees. I wake to find that person's dying...
The engine pinned a young man under it. A crowd gathered, but no one saw the girl on the far side of the tracks...
Months ago, I dreamed of that exact wall--I fell and was hurt. So today I told my foreman
I'd rather work on the ground. But by 11, I forgot. I climbed up to nail in some blocks...
I was a small boy living on Oahu. Out my front door I saw a 20-mile-tall wall of flames stretching across the horizon...
One patch of the night sky had a huge number of stars compared to the rest; there was no atmosphere in that portion of the sky...
I'm sentenced for a crime I didn't commit; then the bailiff beats me for "resisting", though I'm not...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, SWEARING
Multiple tornadoes touched down in the fields, but the farmer's wife sewed
in a rocking chair, oblivious. I moved to warn her but my lieutenant said...
I was fatally wounded in a Star Wars battle, so I shot myself in the head.
For a solid minute, there was nothing but blackness...
My Zen master keeps asking me koans. But every riddle is about insurance
forms. I always reply "I am thirsty." He asks another. It goes on forever...
I visit a tribe into simplicity, proud of the fact they limit themselves to 99 concepts.
I point out their limit is a concept, so they really have 100. They are not amused...
I was big as the world, so whole cars fit in my vagina. But men were selling women
to supermarkets, to be cooked & resold. So I crossed the Atlantic sea-floor on foot...
CAUTION: CAR SEX. NO, NOT SEX IN CARS...
Asparagus, wings, an unhinged hand, a boxed ghost, butter, sister incest, tomato-pincushions,
secret volcanoes, one-eyed integers, chickenleg dresses, mirrors and bananapeel beds...
In the recording studio, some background noise. Isolated and amplified, it's a chorus of
inhuman voices praising an unknown deity. The song becomes a mandala pulling me in...
I'm in psychoanalysis. A diagnostic chart maps which areas of my psyche are bad:
nearly all of them. My therapist says "My God, how did your parents raise you?"
Scuba diving, we find Atlantis. Beautiful Greek statues. But some kid painted a baseball in
Aphrodite's hand. And the bobcat diving with us has been holding its breath for an hour...
In a jungle river, I fish for giant kite-bass, then relax and have a drink. A lot of very drunk
porpoises dance on the bar. I worry their skin will dry out. Alcohol is so dehydrating!
Arboreal marsupials with megaphones narrate a Polynesian documentary, while
the rare translucent lobster sings its death song, sacrificing itself for lunch
CAUTION: WILL CAUSE VEGETARIANISM
You're in a subway station. You put coins in a coffee machine.
Down drops the Holy Grail. And begins to fill with blood...
I'm a rebel leader released from prison only to find my people beaten down
and malnourished. I swear to eject our oppressors despite the price of war. ...
I DREAMED my friend's father died, and a music shop had Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music;
NEXT DAY I learned my friend's father died. I went to a shop, and there was Metal Machine Music.
I don't even have a turntable, but I bought it anyway.
Someone is giving birth, and we're panicky. Fortunately, the Postal Service has
issued stamps with helpful advice like "Stay Calm" and "Boil Water"...
I was in a sort of commune. A girl snuggled up to me and I got an erection. I felt
embarrassed and apologized. She said "NEVER apologize for THAT..."
CAUTION: SEXUAL SHAME/HEALING
THAT DAY: I landed in Japan, but felt an outsider, cut off.
THAT NIGHT: I dreamt a haiku expressing my loneliness...
I felt dread as I peered out my parents' window into the garden. My dad lay on the frosty grass, dead...
Reaching into her coat pockets, my sister pulls out fistfuls of bottlecaps.
Silly dream! Then my sister visits. Reaching into her coat pockets...
CAFTAN: My ultra-conservative brother wears a caftan. No way!
I woke amused. But later that day, he gave me a Christmas present...
DICKENS: A voice rants "I love Dickens! It has to be Dickens!"
Next evening on Night Gallery, Agnes Moorehead begs for...
My husband had to go to Cleveland. I FOUGHT to keep him from flying out of Cincinnati; he took a night train.
I dreamt I was flying, falling, and woke feeling the house shake. Later that day, my sister called to tell me...
CAUTION: DID SHE SAVE HIS LIFE? WIKIPEDIA CASTS DOUBT.
Four lines of comic nonsense composed in a dream...
I was tired and sad and mired in routine. I asked for a dream to restore my soul.
I found myself under a tree as a chorus of gorgeous birds sang classical music...
An experiment to see if pie can substitute for REM seems to work at first, but after the third slice
the subject grows less enthused. By slice six, he dreams he's forcing that pie down the experimenter...
Five short playful dreams exploring sex. Because too many therapists
get in the habit of thinking all dreams must wrestle with unhappiness...
I was a missionary in South Africa, staying overnight in a remote village high in the Drakensberg. A man rode up;
Six nights ago he was told in a dream to find me here in six days. He gave me a single gold coin, and left. Why?...
CAUTION: FAILURE OF IMAGINATION?
On New Year's Eve, I 'woke' to find my room full of light. A coffin lay on chairs; inside was my father.
My watch read 12:40. I woke again. A day later the letter arrived. My father had died at 12:40...
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
Anselm dreams God orders King William's death by an arrow of fire; the
King dreams his blood covers the sun. Waking, he mocks a third man's ominous
dream, goes hunting, and dies bloodily at sunset, an arrow in his heart...
I dream it's after a great war; I hear the music I must write, and meet the girl I must marry...
I dream I play 7 and win three times at Monte Carlo. I wake and head for the casino with witnesses...
A traveler dreams his friend's attacked, but he ignores it. Next he dreams his friend begs him to at least avenge him...
To help the King of Italy, I become a baker in Baluchistan--
learning Norwegian, levitating, meeting quaggas, riding landslides...
G.K. Chesterton was a leopard, and he ambushed George Bernard Shaw... Oh, the blood! Why didn't I intervene?
I was held hostage in India by courteous revolutionaries who avoided spelling out that we were soon to die...
I'm offered a spy-mission to Macedonia, and recall I dreamt this last night--a prophetic dream! Then wake...
A literary agent proposes a novelization offer from a writer I've barely heard of. Twelve weeks later...
The innkeeper insisted I try a strange-looking liqueur, a house specialty called "Tuccotine"...
At the zoo, Archer's friend found the tigers caged but the lions roaming free. The reason? Lions fear hell, but tigers...
I had a dream about a beautiful dragon. It is not easy to put something from your dream onto paper...
I show the Royal Society how to fly! Confidence is the key. I teach a hesitant Fellow to lift off...
I was the new girl among rich students, then an adult among snobs, then a girl again--always craving freedom...
I can always fly in my dreams, so the military command asks me to levitate across war-torn Belgium as a courier...
I sink into a book on a murderer who rationalizes away all guilt, but pull out thinking "How morbid!"...
On my way to a wedding, I dream I'm in a war. I liberate a camp of prisoners. But one man's so injured
he can't be moved. We have to leave him behind. My rescue of his fellows has effectively killed him...
CAUTION: GUILT AND LIFE-QUESTIONING
Xerxes twice dreams a god orders him to attack Greece. So he asks his uncle to dream of the god to confirm...
A man dreamed he was the River Xanthus at Troy. I interpreted it to mean he'd bleed for years, but not die of it...
I ride my tricycle all round Sydney trying to get bureaucratic approval
to feed bananas to my friend the grizzly bear, gooey though he gets...
I fly through treetops, a lion chasing me. For him it's a game;
he smiles at my tiring. And death is his name...
My Japanese friend Kotaro looks at me sternly and shoves his phone inside my chest. In my dreams, a phone
can mean ESP, so when I wake I check the news. A huge quake and tsunami have devastated Japan...
I'm told "Your lives are not in order." The golden crown's too heavy. And
I win my lover's hand--only the hand. What are my dreams accusing me of?
CAUTION: SEVERED HAND, SUBTLE GUILT
Augustus was ill, but a friend's dream prompted him to leave his tent before Brutus's assassins...
Action-painting cityscapes, but seen from far above--in flight. But
she keeps herself out of the picture, so you'd never guess, unless...
At 14, B. dreamt a stranger attacked her and hurt her badly. She said "but I'll hurt you worse." She did:
a week later that man attacked and nearly killed her. She survived to identify him--and get him hanged...
CAUTION: HARSH JUSTICE
In the woods outside a modern art museum, I'm being stalked by Giacometti's huge skeletal cat...
My lover's face is shadowed and we are never alone together. Things slip from film-noir to open nightmare when...
CAUTION: SEX, DEATH, GUILT
The old man sang in the empty church, then looked at me and snapped his fingers. I was filled with voices...
Mr Bai dreams his son the mandarin is a tiger leading a pack of wolves--all man-eaters,
at least until two angels knock out his fangs and predict he'll get beheaded soon...
CAUTION: CANNIBALS, REVENGE KILLINGS
Joseph as a teen dreams sheaves of his brothers' grain bow to his; then the sun, moon & stars bow to him.
Eleven years later, in prison, Joseph interprets two cellmates' dreams as premonitory, and gets both right.
Two years later, he interprets two bizarre dreams troubling the Pharaoh, thus saving Egypt from famine...
CAUTION: BRONZE AGE FUN! NEAR-FRATRICIDE, SLAVERY, EXECUTION, FORCED MARRIAGE...
Playing Mario Kart, I stray into a darkness where Earth floats, burning.
And then Jesus speaks up! But I carelessly hit the OFF button...
I witnessed strikes in Brighton and Devon through the eyes
of others; but I felt the Cheltenham impact in my own body...
I was teaching a class on democracy in Africa when Idi Amin walked in. The crowd turned violent, but then...
I flew through a huge space habitat with ten chambers and thousands of people unaware they were caged...
A sacred starfish piloting a Cessna plane survives a crash. But can it survive a boy's clumsy rescue efforts?
In 1985 I was flooded with nightmares about heads and necks. They had an unparalleled intensity...
I dream my daughter's selling two unused guitars. They seemed symbolic until I told her the dream and...
I dream my son the writer's living above our old family store, the one that failed in the Depression...
I was half-drowning, holding our son up in the pool, while my husband tried to take a
photo. I kept gasping "Did you get the picture yet?" but he kept saying "Not yet"...
Wayan makes love to Martha's double, then sees her soul watching from the shadows...
Barbara can't reach Wayan to say farewell...
Martha falls off a mountain and decides to let herself die, just to see what happens...
CAUTION: SEX, ABUSE ISSUES
I dreamt ghosts visited us, and for each scream, a relative would die.
Two of us cried out. That morning the first letter came...
I was in a jungle, seeing birth, growth and death--the entire web of life at once...
I'm walking through Harvard Square late at night. Buildings are lit up festively, but
it's pretty deserted. I notice creatures scampering around up on the roofs....
I'm a kid again, waltzing with my dad, though he's long dead. He hands me the trumpet inside his chest. When
I wake, I feel it still. My mom just died; I've reclaimed a playful part of him she condemned all her long life...
I'm hiking through the Catskills when a gigantic amoeba comes slipping over the hills...
Our neighbors keep dropping by with gifts and favors for our cat.
Why? He'd gained magical powers by amassing 10,000 dead mice...
DREAM: a great bird carries me to Mecca, Yemen, India, the south sea islands, China, the snowy north...
AWAKE: My host says it means I'll travel the world--but he adds "in India, my brother will save your life"...
I, sleeping me, watch dream-me find a third me who saw too much
in the kitchen. Unconscious or dead? I just don't know...
Caedmon can't sing. But he dreams an angel makes him try. Soon he's the first great English poet and singer...
King Ethelfrid bribes Redwald to turn over his guest, Edwin. Edwin dreams an angel warns him, swearing to save him if
he'll convert. Redwald's wife tells him "Don't betray a guest." Once Edwin's king, that dream-angel demands his fealty...
CAUTION: SHODDY SPIRITUAL BARGAINING
Egbert decides to go convert the Germans. A brother monk dreams twice that God wants Egbert in Scotland, but he
sails--and nearly drowns. At last he gives in. Another monk sails to Germany. Two years later he returns defeated...
CAUTION: STUBBORN MONK, DEITY, AND GERMANS
Fursa the preacher, sick, dreams flaming devils & angels are trying his case; one
failure to coax a deathbed repentance gets him scorched. He wakes with burns...
CAUTION: DREAM HAS PHYSICAL EFFECTS
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...
I dreamt I stepped on my engagement ring and crushed its pearl. Next I dreamt ink stained it.
Then I dreamt it fell in the sea, and the brine dissolved it. Then the telegram came: my fiancé...
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...
Reporters interview my pet rabbit without my permission. Have I neglected her? She says
"Things have been pretty good." I'm relieved, but ask why she never spoke before...
I'm on a beach in Mexico with a baby--my only souvenir of an affair I can't recall.
I'm a mom? My whole life will change! Wait. Is this real, or...
Dream: wild animals race across Paris, but in my hotel lobby, a small creature on my shoulder murmurs "Je t'aime."
Awake, I know those racers from the themepark where I work. But the creature takes me way back--to Paris, 1918...
CAUTION: ONE-NIGHT STAND
I fly, send dreamails, discuss dreams with dream folk, punch a wall to test dream-pain, reach into mirrors...
Birds enchant me, and they long have frequented my dreams.
Sometimes, as in The Beach, I am a bird/woman...
At the beach, facing down a wave taller than you,
the only thing to do is levitate discreetly...
Embodying that upsetting feeling
when you're crawling on the ceiling...
The red string tying that creepy puppet to
the child sitting on the moon has broken...
Bennet's daughter dreamt her husband drowned after wading too deep (he couldn't swim). He promised
he'd avoid deep water, but his best friend played a prank, treading water to make it seem shallow...
CAUTION: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE...
I don't understand this poem's symbolism or even its style. It came to me whole, in a dream...
Saint-Denys pushes a strange theory of dream-incompetence, using as an example
a woman's dream of grief over her brother, killed in a war. But her case suggests
a second explanation a 19th-century scholar isn't equipped to see ...
Our son woke in the night crying "Poor Mrs Timms; poor Mrs Timms!" We knew no
such woman, but it turned out she lived nearby. That day, her son had died in France...
CAUTION: IMPLIES WE'RE TRAINED OUT OF A 6TH SENSE
The ship carrying my mom to America sails on, as I drown in the sea;
They strap me down to pull out the pieces of my stillborn baby Obdale;
A family/gang called Thanotos invites me to join them...
CAUTION: MISCARRIAGE, DEATH
After a year of intense dreamwork, Berryman rejects Freud and accepts open-ended dreaming, and writes Dream Songs...
CAUTION: SIXTIES STONER REBELLING AGAINST SPELLING... and grammar... and punctuation...
Twin dreams of ghoulish games backstage at a theater.
And they anticipated real long-term ghoulishness...
CAUTION: SLOW DEATH
All the Asteroids were coming together at last to form something bigger. In church,
the dull-eyed preacher hadn't noticed. I led a blind man on toward the new...
Bess painted images that look like abstract symbols
but actually flashed in front of him when half asleep...
Beverly dreamt her party guests all wore masks. What were they hiding? Next she dreamt they passed around a
breadbasket. In it was her husband's penis! She woke, asked around, and found he'd had affairs with half their guests...
CAUTION: GENITAL SYMBOLISM
A mind-control drug urges her to strangle her loved ones, but
to beat the curse she busies her fluttering hands with bluegrass banjo...
I DREAM I'm helping my mom make a bed, but the light keeps going out. Each time, her hair changes color!
NEXT DAY I tell my dream to a co-worker. He says it means a romantic dilemma I fear to look at. He's right...
I find myself in armor, sheltering from a hard rain in an English undercroft.
As I climb out, I meet a second knight on the stair. But he won't step aside...
I walked into a 19th century home--and family quarrel. Decades passed in seconds; then
the house burned--with me in it. Two years later I learned the house and its history were real...
My grandma couldn't drive, but after she died, I dreamt she drove my brother Bill and me
around--speeding, in fact. When I told him the dream, he filled in details--he'd dreamt it too!
My son Billie, his Navy uniform soaking wet, cried "Oh, Mom--it's so terrible!"
and shrank into a baby again as I held him...
CAUTION: EXPLOSION
I volunteered to meet him underground. He held me underwater and slammed into me. I nearly drowned, yet...
CAUTION: ROUGH SEX
A mysterious old woman with cat-face and claws threatened me; she seemed
to be guarding a treasure. Sometimes she appeared as a praying mantis...
Peter draws painstaking realism til his tense hand turns into a horn!
An anima urges him to walk into a blue light.
He & Sybelle struggle against a crowd walking the wrong way...
Sybelle & I climbed the cathedral spire. Bravely she kissed the monstrous guardian, exhaling
blue light. My own challenge was to leap across an abyss, under the luminous eye of God...
In the dark, a dragonlike god of fire stretched out
one claw to courteously light my own small torch...
The Lynx, my dream-god,
comes for me at last...
This picture of a split man was in no sense a product of my conscious will. I simply
bowed to compulsion after four years of being haunted by that face in my dreams...
One night as I slept over a cheese shop, I dreamt I was trapped in a huge cheese, as a rat-horde gnawed...
CAUTION: YOU ARE LUNCH
Bishop is being driven mad by insomnia... until predawn birdsong wakes her,
and she discovers she's been dreaming of insomnia... maybe.
I was dead. A weed grew from my heart; then two streams poured out--not
water or blood but experiences. I asked the weed what it was doing, and it said...
An amicably divorcing man suddenly turns into an elephant to chase a little red demon! What's going on here?
Blake dreams he's a young queen with an uneasy relationship to her guardian angel...
A glowworm and nightwatch beetle help out a lost crying ant-woman. It's not always a bug-eat-bug world...
Blake was broke. Couldn't pay to typeset Songs of Innocence and Experience.
But in a dream, his brother advised him...
At the beach I dive into deep water to save my drowning friend Kathy, and find it's not so clear who's who...
Bo Ji, a minor concubine in the early Han court who'd never even met
the Emperor, dreamt a dragon slept in her lap. Next night the Emperor
summoned her; the child they conceived became one of China's best rulers...
A stallion reared to strike me. He was all the fear and rage I'd repressed for 35 years. I cowered til a woman said "offer him...
After 18 years of exile, Fariba in a lucid dream visits her old friend Yalda, in an unfamiliar home.
That night, Yalda has a lucid dream in which Fariba visits. On waking, each writes to the other...
Egbert decides to go convert the Germans. A brother monk dreams twice that God wants Egbert in Scotland, but he
sails--and nearly drowns. At last he gives in. Another monk sails to Germany. Two years later he returns defeated...
CAUTION: STUBBORN MONK, DEITY, AND GERMANS
I'll win a house if I can survive a night in the Haunted Pavilion! But I've been here before--before I was born...
CAUTION: GHOST ORGY
I dream of chickadees, bold and talkative; I fly with them. Below, a hurdy-gurdy man
celebrates our play. Notes rise up, take wing like little birds, and fly with us...
A large airship crashed onto a hilltop and burst into flame, silhouetting people who tried to escape, but...
This man comes into the chapel, makes a fascist salute, catches fire, and burns right down to his shoes...
I'm a schoolkid again, fleeing an eruption of sewage. We escape in a balloon.
Earth is beautiful, but I know this flood of shit will drown the whole world...
A startling deep-blue rabbit with scarlet eyes and red veined ears, floating in colorless air...
I'd been reading Watership Down, the chapter on the Black Rabbit of Inlé...
CAUTION: ART THEORY CRUSHES BUNNY
Kaleidoscopic constellations? No thanks! A nudist town in Italy? Ugh.
Ah, but singing vaudeville in a monk's robe & roller skates...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
I see a leopard chasing an Indian man who defends himself with a knife; then
I wake. To find I'm still witnessing the same scene, only now I'm the leopard...
I had fun playing fortuneteller, until David. My hands turned icy. I asked "Where are you going?"
I experienced a delicious tembling throughout my being, sweeping up
from my toes to my head. It shook me to the marrow of my bones...
I saw one man stalk another. Unprovoked, he cut his throat. I felt I knew him but couldn't see his face...
That night, my brother-in-law was brutally murdered in just this fashion, outside a wedding party...
CAUTION: GRIM. 19TH-CENTURY GRIM.
My partner and I were hunting for spirits with a camera designed to photograph them. Warned
away from the Niigata waterfront, we try to catch a bus out. But what comes isn't the bus...
This handmade globe of Mars, state-of-the-art for 1909, has Schiaparelli's
nomenclature and Lowell's canals--mostly illusory, though not quite all...
Bruno flew through space--not crystal spheres, not Heaven, not even the Copernican solar system, but
interstellar space. He saw the stars were suns, those suns had planets, and those planets bore life...
CAUTION: BURNED ALIVE BY THE INQUISITION
I DREAM I'm discussing art with a critic who's been hard on my paintings. But now he's friendly!
TWO HOURS LATER: he calls, interviews me about my new show, then publishes a nice review...
Drowsing on the bus, I see great holes open in the pavement. Our bus falls in. We climb out to find devastation...
I wake and get off the bus. A few days later, I see my nightmare on the news: that massive quake in Alaska...
I DREAM I buy a record I've wanted. But someone warns "You'll have trouble with it; you should have gone to another store."
I WAKE as my phone rings. "A clerical error in our records will delay the supplies you ordered." Wish I'd picked another store...
I DREAM I'm a kid again, in detention after school. The teacher eyeing me is familiar, but... what's her name?
I WAKE and go to art group. One member says "I visited my retired sister. She talked of you. She taught you!" It's...
In my dream I worry I'm going to wake up late, so I ask what time it is. Immediately, white digits
form in the air saying 10:00. I wake, but can't read my clock until I put on my glasses. It says...
Mary Queen of Scots' will (1556) was lost for centuries. In 1845, Major Buckley hypnotized
a fellow officer and had him 'read' a family heirloom. He said it was Mary's! Her lost will
was found in 1854 and published in 1863. Turned out the claim in the trance was right...
CAUTION: MARY'S LIFE WAS BRUTAL
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
When I'm stressed, I build a set of luna-moth wings and fly invisibly. Though once a blind man caught me by ear...
All day I've had a stupid song from 1948 in my head--"Bongo Bongo Bongo." Then I buy Metzger's Dogs.
Start reading. Page 16: "Gordon started singing "Bongo Bongo Bongo, I Don't Want to Leave the Congo"...
I dream of huge, weirdly marked & colored cats all over. They don't bother my cat Fletch as I expected. Next day,
I read the Audubon Book of Animals and recognize these patterns & colors.The flying fox even looks like Fletch...
CAUTION: WILL ANNOY ESP SKEPTICS
I'm in Lawrence, Kansas, watching a TV ad for hemorrhoid cream that won't solve your nuclear war problems...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE; ADVERTISING; HUMAN EXTINCTION
Genteel gay guests first humiliate then torture their hosts--the rich but sick wife, then her weak, gay, parasitic husband...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, MISOGYNY, CRUELTY, SHIT
A CIA man trying to infiltrate a revolutionary group flunks a lie-detector test, so the Headshrinker...
CAUTION: REAL HEADSHRINKER
I find a magical monkey's head. It grants wishes--too many, everyone's, they cancel, they clash, it's a wish-flood...
CAUTION: ASSUMES WISHES WORK
At the airport, I'm told I can't take my flight; I must finish my education first. Decades have passed,
and I still dream of borders and officials who won't let me go until they decide I've finished my...
A thousand feet above New York. I meet two naked angels who say it's their first flight, but I
got no fear of falling anymore; got no body to fall. Sit on a cloud. Just me and my shadow...
A certain intensity marks some dreams as predictive, whether they foresee a death or a crisis averted;
but I keep quiet about them, writing them only in a locked diary. Once I spoke up, and was shunned...
CAUTION: DISTURBING ANALOGY WITH SEX-ORIENTATION CLOSET
Glaciers feed a mountain lake; dust blows over a pass. Then I realize the ice is the robes
of a great choir; the dust, thousands of musicians filling the cirque, singing, playing...
An epic dream on the lifelong effects of unrequited love, compressed into seven stanzas...