I lay on a beach with Nina. I stuck a shell on her body and designed a fabulous line of prosthetics...
I go to a lucid-dreaming party, meet the Child who Dreams the World, and find the Body under the Bed...
In one long night I hike out of Obligation Hell
all the way to Inner-Freedom Heaven...
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...
Jungian angels at a conference of dreams test my progress. But I'm all
backwards! Struggle with the easy stuff; zoom through the hard stuff...
Here in the marshes, tides drown the landscape, but it's hidden, not gone. Are we hidden or gone when we go under?
A plumber's daughter brings home a sick marsh bird and tries to save it...
A boy leaps from a runaway balloon, falls 100' into a pond, and floats face-down.
I'm sure he's dead, but when a woman fishes him out...
Birds enchant me, and they long have frequented my dreams.
Sometimes, as in The Beach, I am a bird/woman...
There are many astral planes--this world's just the cellar.
A cat and a bird in love, a literate bear and I guard the astral stair...
My neighborhood becomes a Huck Finn Eden after global warming turns it into a tropical island...
CAUTION: NUDITY, AMBITOPIA
I'm a fairy queen at the beach, chasing a girl who's a strong swimmer. Yep, she swims beyond the buoys...
CAUTION: BAD LESBIAN PUNS
DREAM: I see photos of smiling couples at the beach, but someone's scribbled on them: just black blots for eyes. Creepy.
DAY: Read a fantasy novel in which a prince has a cursed double, identical except: he has black blots for eyes. Creepier...
At first I was afraid of the blackbird, who asked me to come away with him--I wasn't ready to die--
but now I see him as a friend and guide. One day when I'm ready, we'll fly--and I won't be back.
At the beach, a deaf boy with a strong aura asks "Are you here for the coin?"
He buries horse skeletons in the sand; the bones are carved with symbols...
Boys still get portrayed as businesslike in sex, girl as floating orgasmic jellyfish. Time for a sex change...
CAUTION: SEX AND LIMP RUBBER ARMS
I was at the beach with my friends. It was fun. But gradually they were
laughing at me, not with me. Then they picked up burning sticks...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
After seeing Picasso's massive cubist women running on a beach, I found myself drawing
a lighter version--except she (I) waved this bitter banner. But then I was ill at the time...
On the beach, seated at The Piano, director Jane Campion warns
"Avoid Hollywood, they'll snip away at your vision..."
Me and my sisters at the beach. Strangers rarely think we're related, and you can see why...
Fear anorexia? Gain weight, yet stay slender--be a centaur, like model Paulina Porizkova...
CAUTION: NUDITY; BODY IMAGE/ANOREXIA ISSUES
A sea-centaur explains why some dreams don't LIKE to surface to so-called consciousness...
CAUTION: WET T-SHIRT, EXISTENTIALISTS, HARPOONS
Wise advice from a funny looking centauress at a nude beach...
CAUTION: CRUDE NUDE
A girl with a magic swimsuit flashes me, as her Iranian fundamentalist aunt glares from beyond the veil...
CAUTION: NUDITY? OR ILLUSION?
That moment when you tire of your old trauma and suddenly turn to the sun. Or fun.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
At a beach, a mob of kids stage an intricate practical joke full of coordinated “accidents.” How many of the jokers knew the end was death?
CAUTION: MALICE
I meet a giant psychic baby feared by 12-step people. So I go to the beach and find
I'm a shark-bit girl who can have her missing chunks sewn back in--if I still have room for them...
I fall for a circus girl. Her brother is jealous, so all the dwarves show up with guns...
CAUTION: INCEST ISSUES
I keep dreaming I'm in a multispecies family full of centaurs and satyrs, having a reunion at the beach...
CAUTION: NUDE BEACH, STRANGE RELATIVES
Being a hippie artist in San Francisco today feels like being an animal in an African game park...
I was camping by a creek. I went to get soap and returned to find my baby son face-down in the water...
It was on a beach. Inside, a black thing squirmed and boiled.
Despite all the tales of vengeful djinn, I pull the cork...
I'm in a hotel by the Great Salt Lake. Deer roam the halls and lap at the drinking fountain...
Round the ring of twelve worlds and their twelve gods, seeking one god who's giving me grief...
The beach. Smoke? No, spray from hundreds of dolphins hunting. I thought
a giant wave was coming in, but it was just a trick of the light through fog...
by Gala Dalí 1943? painted by Salvador Dalí 1944; a supposedly instantaneous dream.
Dalí's wife Gala naps, but a bee wakes her--and her dream instantly magnifies
bee into tigers! After all, both have fur, sharp bits, black & gold stripes...
CAUTION: BREASTS; BAD DREAM THEORIES.
A month of dreams full of science fiction: galactic navigation, spacedragons, oppressed fairies, alien love...
A crowd watches from shore as a great glowing meteor descends into the sea. I fear a tsunami, but...
1: I'm starving in a lush valley; a cult claims all the food, the water, even the air.
2: I'm drowning in a cage but find a corner with water I can breathe--just barely.
3: I'm a merman with a wise friend who hints I need to leave those who starve & drown me...
CAUTION: DOMESTIC BATTERING (OFFSTAGE)
A girl from a low-gravity, dense-air world, where you strap on wings and fly, tours a
world of tropical atolls with me. I love sailing, but flight's spoiled her for it--too slow...
A pod of whales in the sky and a circle of children dressed like seed-pods both beg me to interpret them...
On my quest I find magic portals, snarky flower-fairies, undersea redcoats,
reassembling bodyparts, living chess, and Nosferatu the Cheating Vampyre...
I catch a magical fish and let it go. A friend and I consider higher learning--and we don't mean academia.
My friend lays a lotus in a chair on the beach. A man baptises in sunset water, shining like a certain fish...
In Surinam, a whole river falls 600 meters into the sea. I put on a birdsuit and fly into rainbows...
Leah, pregnant, finds herself at the beach, flying on a pogo stick,
just as all the seabirds do. Fun at first, but it gets out of control...
The terror of Navy breakfast, the joy of filterfeeding,
how to marry pudding, and a sniper lunch with kisses...
On hearing the election results, a girl at Esalen Hot Springs joyfully dances naked
around me. I heed the dream's prediction about the election, but not about...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I might have been less cowed by the storm-face, if I'd seen it was made of little foxes just like me...
The white horse, Earth, ambles on between the stars, and then unfolds into a swan...
My horse and I dove into a lagoon and sought buried treasure on the sea-floor. What are we really after?
I lose my temper. I don't just fly off the handle--I fly off a cliff and out to sea! Why'd I risk drowning?..
I'm Liza Doolittle on Mars. With Mr. Wells's Time Machine. Lost, in fact. Can I get home? Should I?
At a beach, a man attacks the genitals, buttocks and thighs of a giant who sits half in the surf, ignoring him...
CAUTION: NUDITY, MUTILATION ATTEMPTS
At 15 I misheard God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen and liked my version better. "Lit muffin, rude Esmé"...
I'm an orphan shapeshifter enslaved by a gold-eating monster. But I meet a cat-girl with a hammer...
CAUTION: BAD FOSTER-DAD; CAPITALIST MONSTER; VIOLENCE (TO VENDING MACHINES)
After 25 years I land on my native island of Wyre, to touch an ancient clay figurine, who grows young and wakes...
A friend tells me her sex fantasy. We try acting it out, but roleplaying has bizarre effects...
CAUTION: SEX GAMES
Very nearly a nightmare, till the guard on the beach relented in the face of people power...
Day: my dad's paralyzed, and my car's stolen.
Dream: a harpy made of steel, like a living Calder statue, holds three girls hostage...
I dreamed I was a gull in Middle Earth fighting Sauron, though he
blurred my vision; but my hawk-eyed gullfriends helped me out...
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
I climb a small-town water tower. The tank holds a reedy marsh where sentient herons live! They say
the Heartland below them is a nest reserved for greedy, screechy, flightless, half-grown souls like us...
CAUTION: DISSES SMALL-TOWN VALUES
A huge bridge spans the Pacific; my depth perception reaches miles instead of mere yards.
A crowd worships a guru hidden in a tent on a pier. I don't trust him! He has hidden in tent...
CAUTION: THE JONESTOWN MASSACRE
I'm wrapping my heavy-metal eggs too slowly, so the Judges sink my car! I set out to get revenge...
I look down by the dock and see the Navy vessels anchored in the bay and the crowds of sailors walking on the water towards the land...
I asked my dreams "should I return to school?" They replied with this bizarre tale of sabotage...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE TO DUMB INSTRUMENTS
Captain Ahab's part-whale students are better ice wranglers than I'll ever be--
wrestling icebergs of possibility round to their best outcomes, in this pea-soup sea...
To reach the Peak of Happiness on the Isle of Dreams, I must pass four Perils--but they're all backwards...
CAUTION: RELIGIOUS NUTS, KNIVES, NUDE ALIENS, BACKWARD PLOT...
I live on Io. It's nicer than its photos. At least inside, where the oceans are--where I grow a second head...
At Sea-Dragon State Park, I climbed down to the sea serpent's dressing room after the show, and found...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
I tour the heart of a red supergiant, where dreaming souls explore
their fears and heart's desires, unconstrained by solid matter...
CAUTION: SWEDENBORGIAN VISION, UNICORN NUDITY
The track gave way and many cars fell into the bay. People crawled out of the windows as waves broke on the wreckage...
At the beach, facing down a wave taller than you,
the only thing to do is levitate discreetly...
I ask my dreams about sex, and get... sex on a beach with a sea-serpent girl--a lamia. But she gets queasy--
landsick! Too hot for her up here. Help her back in the sea. What a contrast with Ruskin's lamia nightmare...
CAUTION: SCALY SEX
We ride on a flying saucer made of stone. Atop the great cliffs, we meet a giant and
warn him not to slip. He doesn't appreciate advice from little alien tourist twerps...
I was at the edge of a cliff and I had to jump to some pillar-like rocks.
I was very hesitant though because the ocean waves were so violent...
A marsh. One figure's wrapped in mummy bandages; another swims--or drowns.
A ruin's being rebuilt. Out in the bay, a faint water-road leads to the open sea...
Creatures in the primal sea touch my third eye, dragons cry their eyes out, I fight the Sphinx, and arrive at last in...
I dream over & over of the same place, time, & woman. We fall in love. Strangely, I'm the one who gets pregnant...
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...
DREAM: Gay boys, underage girls & my own sister all mock me, sure I want their forbidden sexual fruit
at a beach where grotesque trees make their own precipitation and salt-dunes spill into saturated, toxic brine...
NEXT DAY: I read Margaret Atwood's The Salt Garden--sex, guilt, and grotesque trees in saturated, toxic brine.
CAUTION: SEXUAL GUILT, EXHIBITIONIST TWEENS, APPARENT E.S.P.
The foul old fossil woman had carved and burnt her own flesh in the name of art;
we washed her till she was reborn young. It was my turn next to enter the water...
I climb a huge mushroom-shaped rock rising from a hotspring and prepare to dive in...
I'm at the beach, seeing it through English linguistic filters. Or do I? Is there a language under language?
For a week the same dream-figures and settings have been recurring:
shapeshifters and sea monsters. What are they hiding? Or guarding...
The sea pours in the house, but Lynette swims and floats in the sun. When the flood ebbs, the
land blooms into paradise. An oracle says "Your mom will die, but you'll help her through it"...
CAUTION: SUBLIMINALLY SENSING ILLNESS, OR PSYCHIC?
Down at the tideline, a man dressed in seaweed disproves John Donne's adage...
At the beach I dive into deep water to save my drowning friend Kathy, and find it’s not so clear who’s who...
I dream we canoe down a river. You say it's barren because this was once the ocean's floor. You're
protective but not longing. I wake on a beach, puzzled why I still feel for you a year later...
I'm biking over the English Channel. So mild & easy after the Greenland-to-New-York run...
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...
At the beach, wading with my fellow dreamworker Stephanie.
The waves are getting bigger--are they a hazard, or can we ride them?
My uncle mocks the racehorse he rides! Smears lipstick on this stallion, calls him a wimp... Why?
CAUTION: DREAM PUN, NUDE MARES
At a strange gate between worlds with high and low sea levels,
a meddling spirit prods me to clear a path for a salt torrent...
When Perissa, an exhibitionistic centaur, bares her body in a crowded Coliseum,
she also bares a human-supremacist plot...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM
A wizard into spots and dots invites me into his beach house, hungry for advice on his peculiar fears...
My detective lover warned me, "Stay away!" Now I'm trapped. Dare I follow the lion over the edge?
A timetraveler shows me a hotspring shrunk to a quarter of its old flow.
Valves? Pipes? Or drought, from climate change? This IS the future.
A day later, a local main breaks, and our water flow shrinks to a quarter of normal...
I often dream I'm lost in a strange city, wandering the unfamiliar streets
in search of something unknown, and possibly unknowable...
Cultists must wear a burqa and confess their sins daily. So why's their beach such a pickup scene?
CAUTION: NUDITY UNDER FISHNETS
Four women with guns attack me at a public pool. Trapped in the water, can I survive? Only by being ruthless...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
A huge spiral nautilus needs healing; its coils are coming undone, and if it dies, all on earth may die with it...
I'm swept off sea-rocks, as my scaly guardian watches calmly--letting me drown in the tears I shed...
CAUTION: DROWNING
Predawn. The beach. A gypsy goddess rises from the waves. She says
"Begin to ride the gods of the Hand, in London." I say "What?"...
CAUTION: CRYPTIC BUT FIRM
I sit on a half-flooded pier and read a dream-journal--the first ever written by a dog. But
I can't interview the dreamer; the dog followed a fad diet and just died of excess salt...
At the beach, I meet some gregarious desert-world aliens who think loners are insane...
Sunbathing on Saturn's rings with a girl who's preparing for reincarnation--like me.
She's cute, but she chucks litter in the Bay of Rebirth. Maybe not Ms. Right, then...
A spell kills off nearly all humanity and mutates the rest of us. Now I'm a satyr living in a co-op home with
unicorns, dryads, cattaurs, and shy vampires. Thing is, I prefer the Apocalypse to what came before...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
Stranded on an island where a marching band drowned, I escape
by paddling across the Pacific using a rusty, er, cymbal...
I can fly and breathe water. So I fly into art-rich mansions, though
not to steal--I earn plenty from undersea massage...
We need to get down to the sea, but Disney Corporation blocks the way. Wait--we're
dreamworkers! We ooze through the walls, and cheer the parade marching in on the tide...
Three successive attacks! I escape the Roadrage Nut, I withstand the mob of Angry
Ghosts, but the Tsunami floods all. Strange--that angry, glowing, blue Sea-Sphinx
who summoned the flood is really sexy. Why is she mad at me?...
A summer love affair with a shapeshifting alien turns awkward when she gets a high fever, and...
CAUTION: UGH!
At the beach, I see a swim team wading in. One girl teases a laggard wader,
not seeing her huge scar. She says "I won't swim till the shark-risk is mapped"...
Our family of Japanese pearldivers is cast away on an atoll. One day, lonely, scared, I cast away fear...
Atop a sea-cliff, I meet a young couple in love. One look at me and they
push me off! When I see I can't save myself, I try to take them with me...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARE BARING UGLY TRUTHS
I play the lovers in a teen romance: shy abused boy, insecure girl. But I get tired of the script, and...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
WAYAN: I'm a cat climbing on sea-cliffs. Fear I'll fall. Run into Silky, an archer firing
a line across to an islet. Now the Deer People can build their gossamer bridge...
LIZ: I was hiking along a trail atop sea-cliffs. But I feared I'd fall...
A love poem to the black mare I keep meeting in my dreams, who finally married me...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
As my friends & I walk in a marsh, we argue. They know humans can't fly--
so I levitate on the spot! But, oddly, they convince me I can't--while I am...
My girlfriend and I can fly, but detectives shadow us. How to lose them? By sticking to the beach and...
CAUTION: BIZARRE CREATURES, FRANK LANGUAGE
The pier jutting into the sea of dreams has an 8th chakra at the end, where a lonely woman fishes for, um, sole...
I'm being hunted in Reincarnation Swamp, as I worry--the human population boom
means experienced souls are scarce. Are most folks you meet really dogs, cats... rats?
CAUTION: MYSTIC ELITISM
I'm at the beach, collecting stones to make a gigantic face viewable only from the air...
My job is to set up portals to other realities, and
create secret routes through our world between them...
On the freeway, my car and I split into quantum possibilities. I steer both entangled cars
till I split again--now I have to steer three cars with just one pair of hands and eyes...
Giant squid start surfacing at popular beaches and eating people. Not the form of first contact we'd hoped...
CAUTION: YOU ARE LUNCH
An underage girl comes on to me, and begs me to... throw her down a stairwell?!
CAUTION: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
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...
My sister and I are on a ship abandoned by its crew, heading full-steam for the rocks, when...
(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...
Through twin gates of dream--not ivory and horn any more, but fear and trust...
Three castles on the sea: a Mock Kremlin, a Ship of Toiletpaper, and a Ship of Brick and Beer...
A mad old surfer of the San Andreas Fault, impossibly riding earth-change...
The tale of the most truly sincerely religious revelation I've ever witnessed...
CAUTION: REAL WITCHES
The ruins of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco were the setting for an otherworldly dream...
Not easy to fly without a plane, but I practice over a lonely lagoon.
Even if I panic some nesting swans. They'll get used to me...
Time, tide, cycles. In the full phase, life brims over. Time for passion & action...
Time, tide, cycles... At ebb, the hourglass drains, the tide recedes, life hides in the cracks...
Dream-inspired landscape with herons and wild horses in a vaguely Japanese style...
At the beach, a biology teacher shows me how bottles smashed on the rocks by jerks lead to
slow death for the tidepool creatures. I'm afraid the warning is both personal AND planetary...
CAUTION: CAUSTIC TOWARD RECKLESS G.O.P. CUTS
I'm a tiger from Planet Cat, visiting Earth to run in San Francisco's "Bay to Breakers" race.
I knew racial tensions were high, but why is William S. Burroughs out to kill me? Oh. Because...
I ride a magical self-guiding canoe, seeking the right beach and cove for me.
Even when the boat climbs hills so I can explore inland, I expect it to fail...
I cling alone to the cliffs of Lands End, so when the tsunami hits,
I survive. Had I been in the low, crowded Sunset district I'd be dead...
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...
My uncle Mac has a secret scheme to free us all from the Rat Race, but
his dancing mouse-headed robots (and climate change) get out of hand...
Exploring a sunken sub, my buddies salvage a something ticking. Toss it back, but it won't stay sunk...
A unicorn wades in the shallows to meet a mermaid.
Are they lovers now, or just headed that way?...
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
Half-mad with fear, I massacre a cult, till my gun manifests stigmata: a gory miracle.
Then I'm a cultist, resisting the Voice of God pushing all us mortals to murder in His name.
I woke up haunted, and wondered for weeks what this was about... until the Waco Massacre.
CAUTION: CREEPY VIOLENCE, CREEPY GOD, CREEPY PREDICTION
War, monsters, plague and bombs are just thrills spicing up
this city rising from a tropical sea on an alien world...
I dream I find a few 'extinct' watercats--in a slum! They talk. They say I'm one of them,
brainwashed to think I'm human. I wake, go to a dinner, and hear a tale of... watercats!
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
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 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 get so mad at some gaybashing cops and gangsters
that I become the sea itself and chase them...
CAUTION: UNCHARITABLE REPRESENTATION OF OUR SAINTS IN BLUE
My sister's fiancé Billy died a year ago. I didn't realize how deep the grief ran till I dreamed...
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...
We go swimming in a sea full of wrecked tankers. We explore one derelict, but ebb tide pries it off the bank,
out to sea. Do we swim for shore, or wait, hoping high tide will wash it in again? Guess wrong and we die...
Zebra emerge from the lake. They glide as if swimming, and the air has an odd shimmer; did they bring the depths
along? They seem to be having great fun ducking branches and vaulting brambles. Such agility and grace!
I careen from a sacrificial marriage-altar to the Oracle Harper's secret pool,
into the jaws of Leviathan and the joys of lucid flight, shifting from male to female
and gay to straight--till I meet the Dragonfly People themselves...
CAUTION: STUPID, STUPID SEX CULT!