When I was a kid I was already a mystic and knew what Captain Ahab was REALLY after, but...
Writer Alice Miller tried painting her childhood monsters. I tried it and got surprise messages...
CAUTION: FRANK LANGUAGE
A witch & I duel with blades of spiral horn. But we both just want
to create an utterly truthful oracle. Can't we find a way not to fight?
Fleeing hunters, blocked by a cafe crowd, I fly up a long slope--but the cafe climbs on & on! At last
I perch exhausted on a peak, looking down on a now-alpine cafe above a sea of clouds. Next day...
I'm touring a gloomy, firelit Victorian mansion filled with icons and idols from every
faith in the world, while this funny theme song loops in my head. What is that song?
CAUTION: MUSLIM RANTER; EMBARRASSING SONG
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 dream of the legendary maiden chained to a rock, and the dragon coming
to abduct her--but neither one is as advertised. They look strangely akin...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I dream of Beren and Luthien happy and mortal in their forest, and wake to find...
I'm in a gypsy wagon that always creeps north; to break the spell, I need an arctic unicorn.
Four days later, at work at the library, a new book appears: Nancy Luenn's Arctic Unicorn...
DREAM: to stop an idiotic bout of war-fever, I have to take on the power of the Goddess herself...
NEXT DAY: I stumble on a fantasy book, Ariel, full of details straight out of the dream...
THAT NIGHT: I sign the Unicorn Commitment, but personalize the magical contract...
CAUTION: DISSES REAGAN & SOUTHERN MASCULINITY
There's a rare dream-type that can change reality itself. I study its EEG trace. Can I learn to do it?...
I'm arguing with musicians--what's better, music that serves your goals, or purely great music...
I'm bored in class. Draw sexy furries. The babydykes by me do too! Art'll summon the girls we want...
CAUTION: PHILOSOPHY! OH NO!
DREAM: I write a book involving spies and Lord Snow, but give him a cover name: Artie Shaw.
TWO WEEKS LATER: My wife & I go on the Tonight Show; unexpectedly, Artie Shaw shows up!
I tell him the dream. He turns pale, saying "No one knows this--I wrote a book under the name..."
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
I'm a parade route. A group of child artists walks all over me. But their soles are bare, so I don't mind...
I'm in a cafe in Narnia when the lion-god Aslan attacks a giraffe for the mortal sin of
dating a zebra. And why not? Oral Roberts University just banned interracial dating...
CAUTION: CRINGEWORTHY CHRISTIANS
Books, films, comics etc. of interest to autistics/aspies. Please help me expand it! What's helped YOU?
1: On a mid-Atlantic islet, a farm family plays music to summon the Greek god Pan. It works!
2: A mystical picturebook shows Pan & his mermaid lover. Again I'm told music summons Pan!
CAUTION: GOAT-GOD NUDITY
Drunk, I fight writer Peter Beagle. He falls. Out cold. I wake sure I'm a killer...
Next day I read Ellen Klages's Passing Strange. Its climactic scene is curiously familiar...
Beagle's fantasies, from The Last Unicorn to The Innkeeper's Song, closely resemble
my dreams. The ways we differ say more about our spiritual orientation than about our art...
Two rivals stand for reason & intuition. Why can't they
cooperate, see each others' virtues? Trained insecurity...
A publishing-house error made them reject Tolkien's mythical work, and demand a sequel to The Hobbit...
As humans settle infospace, will we cheat other species trying to evolve into people?
Are we already doing it? Admiring & documenting creatures we've written off as doomed?
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES; DISTURBING PREMISE
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...
I'm a shy wild cat locked in a zoo paddock with elephants and lions
till I remember how to fly! But just levitate, blown about by the wind?
Or can I steer my own course?...
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
DREAM: I'm in a restaurant offering just one dish: wild boar, for $12. Excessive. I say no.
NEXT DAY: I tackle a book review I must write. The book costs $12. Excessive. Oh! It's a...
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 look down on scrawny centaurs with cropped manes & tails: butch minimalism. Unsexy! Then I'm
down among them. Now they have big eyes, luxuriant manes and tails: femme excess. I find this sexy...
CAUTION: CENTAUR NUDITY
Bradbury's Mars was based on his life in Venice, California. What worlds grow out of my San Francisco?
I'm a middle-aged British writer in a triad with a sculptor and a dairy farmer
who seem happy sharing me. But it's a small town, so we must be discreet...
CAUTION: TRIAD THAT WORKS
Cleo the talking kitten denies being a cat, so I invent Wolf-N-Puma Chow!
Must I play similar games to nourish that other feral critter... me?
A fantasy bazaar full of wolf, cat and rabbit shoppers. But my human friend Mark has a booth
by the exit, and grabs a rabbit girl's tail! She glares daggers, but seems resigned to harassment...
CAUTION: SEXISM OR SPECISM?
Fighting an absolutist theocracy, my dragon-soul burns the
church's dragon-nursery. The cost is terrible: a black vortex...
CAUTION: ROMANTIC THREESOME GETS BURNED
As I wrote a poem on Caliban, I dreamt I was him: taken to Shakespeare's England,
shown as a freak, I must escape to save Miranda and Prospero from assassins...
Our Star Trek team explores alien ruins covered in cat scratches. Or are they writing? I uncover
Roman letters, Arabic numerals, I Ching trigrams, Chinese characters, Chumash pictographs.
Reading them turns us into cats! One cat lays eggs, but two more try to smash them...
CAUTION: CAT-EGG VANDALISM
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
People SAY they like realistic characters they can identify with, but they don't ACT like it...
G.K. Chesterton was a leopard, and he ambushed George Bernard Shaw... Oh, the blood! Why didn't I intervene?
I meet a half-angel half-mortal child, fruit of an illicit affair. Constantly growing pinfeathers,
but never mastering flight; ageless, but unable to grow up; at home neither in Heaven nor Earth...
CAUTION: 19TH-CENTURY VERBOSITY
Freud explains to me why writing's so hard. His explanation is as senseless as his other theories...
A girl I like invites me to her apartment. Her personal stormcloud hovers over her. Her housemates come home
and warn me "It's always there, it's her attitude," and I realize I like angsty intelligence, but I need a sunny...
Clowns have a point system like chess masters, & abuse their apprentices to get ahead,
just like capitalism--but I think this dream's about the suppression of magic...
CAUTION: CHILD-CLOWN ABUSE
I'm Coyote, keeping the Business Prophet from taking over Dante's Peak. But it turns too personal...
CAUTION: IDIOTIC VIOLENCE
A weird little forest god bred me from an ordinary deer into a creature who can
almost pass for human. But World War 2 killed my god, and now I'm growing into...
CAUTION: NUDITY, CROSSBREEDING
DAY: I admire Hannah Hinchman's watercolors of Montana and Vad Yakovlev's digital art of Equestria.
DREAM: I meet & sketch a coyote girl, a whack-a-mole mare, and a leering herder of shadowsheep...
Night. Rider and mount gallop in a ring, leaving a luminous spiral wake of glowing
flowers. Power builds, but when the spiral gate opens, where will it lead?
Alli/Tip could only imagine loving the strange, intense, and unavailable--and Bronte was all three..
DREAM: bisexual deer-people go on dates. Despite their fur, they seem shy about breasts.
WAKE: read Alison Bechdel's latest confessional comic. Bisexual phase, shy about breasts...
CAUTION: POSSIBLY PREDICTIVE; TOPLESS DEER
A strange book has woodblock prints telling how a princess turns to a deer-centaur
and meets animal-headed forest guardians. But the message is rather practical...
CAUTION: (FURRY) NUDITY
After a hard day in the recording studio, I dream of powerful yet obedient devil-angels;
quiet for now, but I fear they'll decide shamans like me are abominations...
CAUTION: ANGELS? GOLEMS? DEVILS?
After I die, I join with others to catch the Devil, who's a bag full of bitter, angry souls. But
he infects some kids. To free the world of evil, we'd have to kill them. Making us evil...
CAUTION: FRUSTRATING AFTERLIFE
A quiet, mysterious dream image that turned out to refer to the future, not the past...
A young dragon, raised as human, is finally setting out to see the world on dragon-terms...
A girl writes a whole movie to get a shy boy to hold her; I stupidly summon a monster dragonfly-bus;
a devil-suited jerk hogs a musical's stage TWICE; leeches crawl from the treasure-box I opened...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, SEXUAL FEAR/GUILT
A novel on a modern woman called to become a shaman
echoes my real life way too closely for comfort...
Granny's magic nipple helps me foil the yuppies dumping toxic
waste. But does it count if I did it just to save my own...
CAUTION: CRUDE TALK; STETHESCOPIC NIPPLE
After the Lord of the Rings falls, Elbereth herself is sent to heal the land. But she has a troubling neighbor...
We escape three trolls, but then our author Tolkien breaks in
to explain an Elvish word. Now we're really doomed...
Pa warns me to protect my paws. Then gilt wounds my sole. Then
a lioness eats a tasty drumstick. Then a bus crashes on our corner--for real!
I meet Envy, that pushy, ambitious rock singer from the Scott Pilgrim books.
She's kind of sabotaging herself--but then don't I go too far the other way?
I'm a delicate little ermine-chinchilla whose best friends are all sewer rats.
They push their food and drink on me, and I nibble to be polite...
DREAM: Landsmen betray their mermaid lovers in a harbor full of towers that seem tilted and broken from under the sea.
NEXT MORNING: My boss asks me to track down a new translation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.
AFTERNOON: I find a book on IQ tests that include spatial questions full of broken geometric shapes--familiar shapes...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
I had recurring dreams in which a talking horse’s head was nailed to a tree.
Strangely, this was before I read "The Goose Girl" in Grimm's fairytales...
CAUTION: GRIMM ALL AROUND
A time-traveling historian's caught in a moral dilemma: warn an ancient prince
that in her history books he died of a fall? Can you change fate? Should you??
In ancient Britain, as Christianity moves in, I'm a slave--sailing through centuries, but never free...
Coastal unicorns are slender; inlanders bloat. Genes, diet, both? Inland bosses enslave their gracile minority.
Performing pets! Jesters caged, chained & handicapped to heighten the wonder they can do their art at all...
CAUTION: TROUBLING SOCIAL ANALOGIES
I read The Best American Poetry, 2007, but it just isn't, and I find myself writing a Savage Poetic Response...
1: I visit Elrond and Bilbo in Elvenhome, but overthinking traps me in a timeloop;
2: Elrond says he renounces seriousness for joy, and plans a great, inclusive party;
3: I feel unworthy, but set out on a desert quest with Elrond's young apprentice;
4: I meet joyful, drunken, singing elves but hide in a tree, too shy to join in;
5: I meet a nervous elven singer and a dolphin trapped in a tiny pool in my bedroom...
Five agents hound me. Literal hounds--in trenchcoats. They stand for my five worst life-troubles. Luckily,
they can't cooperate--they're from rival agencies! And the dream spells out what works against each one...
Tibet, 1910. I find a cult whose ancestors manned a radar station that shot down
flying saucers. But were the aliens really hostile? I'm not so sure...
Books are clothes, and always were. A potato makes me lie, and everyone gets it but me.
Sex in a crowd disarms the Mom Squad! And a Mystic Autistic's soul explores my room...
CAUTION: PUBLIC SEX? PROBABLY.
I dream my Doors of Perception have four layered screens to keep out mosquitoes, when one is plenty...
DREAM: I hike up my Career Path into the hills. On a snowfield,
a bird and a fox create the eye of God, who banishes all evil!
NEXT DAY: I read a novel full of images out of the dream...
I meet a tall bipedal talking fox. He has a human house. And a pet vixen--on a leash. But
she talks too! Tells me he mounts her--yet treats her like a pet. She's never come yet.
But she stays! Still, I'm as dysfunctional as either of them--if not worse...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
The goddess of the Cult of Clutter catches a little thief, and tastes her to see if she’s worthy...
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...
A booklist (plus a few articles, films & comics) of interest to prodigies and geniuses. Just 100 so far; email suggestions!
Four thugs stalk a gawky girl through the Everglades. She treads on a black stone and...
becomes a blue heron! Her stalkers vanish--did they become birds too? Should I step up?
I'm in the Gulf of Mexico watching the Creator of North America place mountains, rivers
and ancestors just where they belong. I wake knowing this pious, static view is immoral...
CAUTION: CRITIQUES TRADITIONALISM
A reporter interviews the guardian angel of my dead sister Jill in front of a
green screen. He's dissolving in grief--luminous holes show through...
Two sisters want to lick me all over, but they lick everything; weird gut-fauna make them immune to toxins...
Fairy eggs infest my home--become worms, then tiny horses, then mothwinged hobbits, then adult fairies....
CAUTION: NUDE EQUINES & FAE; PARASITES (OR SYMBIOTES?)
James Hillman is the first psychologist on the moon! He sees a shadow and
panics like a groundhog--mistakes it for Death. Not his own shadow, but MINE...
You know angels feud over regional underfunding of Divine Grace. But you don't know how low they'll go...
I fall for a girl whose charm turns out to be partly her utter lack of worry and guilt--as she lies & cheats!
At last I face facts, and drop her. I end up with a quieter but honest girlfriend, though she too has quirks...
CAUTION: PUBLIC SEX, POLITICAL INTERPRETATION
People have asked me if I ever dream that I am 'in' Harry's world. The answer was 'no' until a few nights ago...
I find my city has changed during Covid; a huge Chinese gate or folly near Fort Mason
and a monstrous tower in the central hills, made of Space Needles, umbrellas & balloons...
Next day I read Jan Morris's Hav... and there are my towers.
All the photos of hawk people I can find show them with bizarre genitalia: males
with hawk-heads for penises, and females with nothing. Blank! Then I go to work...
CAUTION: REVERSE SEXISM
I read Stephen Hawking, and dream I'm in the Quantum Desert, full of bridges, holes & loops--
like the microstructure of spacetime. But it's not counter-intuitive at all--it's HOME!
During our final exam, my second sight tells me our dance teacher's really
a Greek goddess in disguise. But she has her own final exam to face...
1: In a theater I meet weird big-eyed ballerinas, & realize I'll choreograph for them soon...
2: A sorcery student & her powerful future self flying back through time meet & fuse...
3: A squirrel-mage meets his future self too. He gives us a mild fever to protect us against a deadly plague...
CAUTION: NOT FOR TOTAL SKEPTICS ABOUT PREDICTIVE DREAMS
James Hillman and my own experience suggest we enter life with an agenda. But what if our goals are sick?
A book claims Hitler led not a political party but a cult out to apply mystical theories--like Manson! Then I dream...
CAUTION: BIG RANT, SMALL DREAM
I contemplate Bilbo taunting Smaug, then Frodo, Sam and Gollum triggering Mt Doom to erupt,
but next I "remember" other fiery catastrophes and "realize" hobbits are always causing...
I'm a Zen monk riddled with holes from a weird disease the government denies
is real. So as a protest, I stand naked atop a wall and let the air-sharks take me...
CAUTION: SURREAL SUICIDE
I'm back in the 19th century, learning that horse breeders cross-bred
more than the public thinks. One suggests I look hard in the mirror...
CAUTION: UNSEEMLY SENATORIAL DISCOURSE
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...
a writer's dream comically summing up her own fantasy series.
My characters are all dancing together. Roach is flanked by friends--but they turn into elves.
As dragons, elves, tengu & robot mice join in, Roach slowly freaks...
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 love a girl who wants to settle in a radioactive jungle, a scar from an ancient war. Stay or go?
I'm a lab animal who discovers voice software and creates a personal zine, testifying for our rights...
I dream my friend's amused that I date women to steal work-secrets; I get rich off
insider trading, while they get fired. Only... I don't! Where'd he get this idea?...
DREAM: in my car, the window crank turns on its own; my invisible girlfriend is crawling
out the window! She's turned so quiet & private. Have I seen the last of her? Well, not seen...
NEXT DAY: I stumble on a one-off manga about an invisible girl; but the artist writes "I
decided not to make her a regular--too quiet & private, & I can't draw her feelings"...
CAUTION: GLASSY NUDITY, E.S.P. SPECULATION
I'm in a dance class where we built not just muscle strength but strength of will, too: the idea's to
magically summon your soulmate through sheer longing! And my classmates succeed--intermittently...
CAUTION: QUEER THINKING
A car crashes & burns--but the driver bailed! No one to save...
A miner stabs a baby "because everyone not underground is evil"...
Radar O'Reilly from MASH, President Calvin Coolidge and I confuse who's who...
Lucid, I summon a sexy literary character. But he tries to take over my personality and make it his lucid dream...
CAUTION: VAMPIRE-SLAYING
A pig-man hybrid--huge mouth, tiny body--happily eats trash, smirking as I pass...
Then a woman bends over to flash me, smirking, as a censorious Judge glares...
CAUTION: SCENE 1 GROSS, SCENE 2 SEXUAL
At least fantasy and science fiction address my life-issues; "realism" just declares me nonexistent...
The true story of the very first tree-hugger. Not Kerouac! You'll never guess. In fact, you'll say it's impossible...
I dream I'm visiting a friend who's moved to a high equatorial peak. I'm shocked to find no trees. Next day,
I stumble on a book about Mt Kilimanjaro. Its treeline is below ours in California! A high-altitude desert...
One wizardry-classmate summons strange beings; another's learned how not to.
Because some things need to be dealt with alone, where they can't harm......
I met two strange sisters on a train who turn out to be half-cat. They open my eyes
so I realize that my neighbor Elaine must be a shapeshifter too...
CAUTION: FLIRTATIOUS UNDERAGE CAT
My psychology professor insists that nature spirits faded away as science rose.
But I still dream of krelkins! Jasha is the one I know best...
Richard Russo writes that Westerners cannot dream like tribal people.
So I dream Russo's the Cubist Dictator of Dreams! I prefer the part-equine
Lady Demicorn, and the Fat Meditating Dog, and the Birdiesattva...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
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
I'm Emily Dickinson reborn in 2100 as a breeder of hydroponic lilies, till my dad drafts me as
an Arctic energy-prospector, where I meet a ghost, a fiery Beast, a new me, and the girl of my dreams...
CAUTION: QUEER-POSITIVE, NUDE PROSPECTORS, GNOMIC DICKINSON QUOTES
I'm a betrothed teenager having to choose between mates, in an alternate Africa where
lions are another tribe of people--and occasionally adopt humans...
CAUTION: NUDITY
An idiot wizard lures car-sized spiders into town. I find a spellbook that repels them, but have to hide it
so my community college professors, Gandalf & Saruman, don't take it. For I'm no wizard, just a lizard...
CAUTION: HUGE SPIDERS, HUGE SELLOUTS
I fell asleep reading a book I'd read years before. I finished it in my dreams. Every word in place. How?
Dream: up on Floor 4.4 of a strange library, I'm shown Os Lusiadas, apparently the Portuguese national epic.
Next day at work, I'm handed a new purchase to input--Os Lusiadas. And yes, it's Portugal's national epic...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
A book that kept me up late. Ariel and Robin get abused as subtly & deniably as me and my sisters...
CAUTION: RELIGIOUS/PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE
What I write in my books and think I have made up has a creepy way of coming true. I noticed it first...
CAUTION: DISTURBING INVOLUNTARY MANIFESTATIONS
DAY: I read an exposé on "Senoi dreamwork"--the Malaysian Senoi people disavow it. Some white guy just made it up!
DREAM: I'm a dream researcher in Malaysia. A manta-squid attacks! Now the "Senoi" focus on my needs makes sense...
CAUTION: TENTACLE-RAPE ATTEMPT
My friend Lily misuses the word 'Mareotic'; I know, because I once saw it in a Yeats poem, thought
the footnote explaining it was fishy, checked it myself, and found the editors hadn't even bothered to...
I'm inside a magical novel by Patricia McKillip, amid tricksters, cosplayers, spooks, sex changes, levitation and (sigh) cops...
CAUTION: COYOTE SEX
As a kid I was haunted by the parallels between Menolly of Pern and me...
I'm in a tribe of post-Crash kids with psychic powers, trying to keep nukes from rising again...
CAUTION: CHILD SOLDIERS
Deep in a secret diamond mine, I see stars. A door opening to the night sky!
But this shortcut's heavily guarded...
I'm in a loading dock with the door pulled halfway down, so I have to look between my legs
to see the mythical dancers outside--upside down. Wait, why am I hiding in here? Go join...
CAUTION: MOCKS PLATO; NUDE CENTAUR, TOO
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.
Should I subscribe to Sundance Community Dream Journal? I dream I find a letter--yellowish paper, cryptic blue
lettering, a red margin. I eat it! Best thing I ever tasted. I wake and order that journal. It arrives--and the cover is...
I'm a giant wolf with a human girlfriend. A formula says I must shrink until my paws are 128 times
the volume of her feet. But I'll still be way too big for sex! Eight seems more like the right volume...
CAUTION: HORNY WOLF, MATH, CLIMACTIC PUN
a dream-poem provoking a 2008/9/16 dream by Chris Wayan
I was in my mother's closet, trying on her outfits, and trapped in Hamlet, too...
Sally Morgan, in her famous autobiography, details racism and family silence, but also her
family's matter-of-fact acceptance of premonitions and dreams. I feel acceptance envy!
I'm in a basement, forced to enact a ritual where I must mate with, then FEED on, a flayed creature...
I wake shaken, open a random book--and it describes the ancient Celtic rites of Epona...
CAUTION: BESTIALITY, MATE-DEVOURING
DREAM: a man tries to break into my house. I call for help; the operator says "Oh, that's Nisrock."
DAYS LATER: I open a book on the unconscious. It says Nisrock was a Babylonian god of dreams...
CAUTION: BAD MYTHOGRAPHY
My first memory is of being a wild horse, and waking up to find I was now a human child.
Franz Marc's "Blue Rider" paintings felt like my dreams; but as I learned of his life...
I'm in San Francisco trying to throw Sauron's Ring into the Cracks of San Andreas.
But a sexy sorcerer steals my sense of I! How can you act without a self?
I met two transparent spooks who insist "We're not ghosts! We were never human."
I'm sure they're wrong; they've just forgotten. But I phone a witch, who confirms...
After reading a manga and gorging on sushi, I dream a mob of little ninjas
dressed as catgirls pile on me, begging to be petted. Excitement, guilt...
CAUTION: PEDOPHILIA, NON-FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION
Sexy dreams of Chinese archeology, authorized by the fairies, make me face that my family abused me...
Mom's vanished, and our writer/bohemian dad's caring for us
alone now. But he's barely coping. And he's me...
An alien woman makes a mess of our economy, ecology, world--but insists she wants to be my friend...
A giant luminous guardian owl baffles and intimidates me
but after seeing a play next evening, it makes more sense...
One night I meet a robot and an alien staring in a shop window at a photo of a Gothic chapel.
They're shocked--it's a Galactic legend, the Palace of Good Policy. Pure myth! Or is it?
I bike deep into Time Hall, barging through security gates of amnesia, to climb the midden of the past...
After a rainy hike I'm cold and muddy. In the camp's hot tub, six girls splash and play.
They welcome me, but I feel shy. They slowly become winged ponies! Were-Pegasi...
CAUTION: HOT-TUB NUDITY
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
I'm peeking at Pike's Peak with Gregory Peck, as we seek my dream-journals in the Hawaiian jungles...
CAUTION: STUPID PSYCHIC PUNS
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...
I'm building a planetary model a kilometer across, inset in Bernal Hill like an eye in a socket.
My intern Silky kicks the globe, scuffing a caravan trail in a desert. Needs to be crookeder...
CAUTION: FATSHAMING? OR CALLING OUT SKINNYSHAMING?
Looks like this underground nuclear test will leak. Minutes from detonation,
we flee up the spiral stair and out across the sand. Can we run far enough in time?
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
The time-caves under Golden Gate Park lead to supervillains, magical girls, miniphants,
bamboo thugs, adorable dinosaurs, and... pandemics. But is there a way back home?
I get stuck with a one-year mandatory gig as President of the
World, just as Saudi Arabia collapses, and fools rush in...
Two shapeshifters meet, fight and love over the centuries--
and I live out scenes from both their long lives...
We drive into a zone of perpetual night to see Sweet Melinda, but veins of light burst
across the landscape, and our time-path splits! I'm living two lives at once...
A hunter catches a Rabbit-Eared Doe by her yard-long ears, pulls on them like reins, and mates with her!
She doesn't object; maybe ear-pulling's normal for her. Should I intervene? I can't tell if this is love or rape!
CAUTION: STRANGE FURRY SEX
I'm a telepathic rabbit defending our world from space-laser attack. We do, but do we modernize too much?
CAUTION: IDEAS
In the Cave of the Ant Ambassador, I meet his mate, a beautiful translucent fox named
Raethe. Way happier with her mate (& body!) than in that dream just two months ago...
I'm in an alt-world Berkeley where mythic creatures shop on College Avenue. Marigold
the unicorn flirts with me. Rainbow Dash the pegasus has turned male. Very very male...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY (AND CRUDITY)
1: My dad can't see my world. Literally can't see my world...
2: The House of Busyness is unlivable--busy, crowded, noisy...
3: Achievement takes twelve factors; any one can block you...
Jung Chang’s exposé of Mao's brutal deeds and legacy
provoke dreams of leaders who don't listen--till I scream...
A middle-class girl rejects me, and a newsman declares my politics irrelevant. "Liberal media" my ass...
CAUTION: POLITICS
I dream I'm telling a tall tale about a cat-funeral with hung-over mice pulling the hearse. But it turns a bit too real...
DREAMS: 1: I can't afford language classes. 2: A beautyqueen rigs a stargate; I kill monsters & sell their bones...
NEXT DAY: I'm asked "Why don't you get a language degree?" I can't afford it! I go home & watch Dr Who...
A stunning girl fixes a spacetime portal. Smugglers kill alien monsters & sell their ashes as a drug...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND CREEPY DISPOSAL OF BODIES
DAY: Sidarta Ribeiro theorizes dreams are brilliant at extrapolation, which we mistake for a sixth sense.
DREAM: I tell Ribeiro "Your theory explains the occasional prediction. But after your first thousand..."
A dream of innocent incest turns guilty, growing to a war of ghosts versus a cult of sexy but dishonest psychics...
CAUTION: INCEST ISSUES, NIGHTMARE
Jeffers, that harsh, visionary, ecological poet, seems drunk on Darwinism,
blind to kindness--or is he just reporting Big Sur's true, mean spirit(s)?
CAUTION: LITERARY AND MYSTICAL
After too much TV, I dream I'm plotting against a regime of suave, treacherous magical beings. But
a unicorn sorceress suggests I enlist the robots. She's right--they find plutocratic thaumocracy ugly...
CAUTION: ANTI-CAPITALIST
I was a robot who had a soul--till the Reagans stole it! I track them down, and
demand it back. Simply confronting them works--the hole inside me is filled...
CAUTION: CAUSTIC POLITICS
I'm in a vast cavern full of skyscrapers--sucked into the underworld. Rusty steel plates cover
their now-useless windows. In the shadows, horned, fanged businessdevils scurry by...
I wake up dreamnesic but singing a nonsense line about "samphires"--whatever
they are. Half an hour later, I encounter the word for the first time in 45 years...
I find little cards all over town, each with a check for $512. A fragmented treasure!
I wake and see the 512 implies a digital treasure-trove, and search my computer...
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 friend nags me to be lookout as he steals a cult's papers. I know it'll end in murder, but foresight paralyzes me!
In a videogame that keeps freezing unplayably, I find a button calling up a secret screen of second chances...
I'm lost in a grim basement, but two kids show me a cobwebbed glass door you can walk through like air...
Animal poets at an open mic. My turn! And I find... I'm one. A creature without grammar...
My work as a federal shaman inspector involves judging a rainbow of traditions by a few basic principles:
Shevek invents time-travel and discreetly alters the past. But the future alters
Shevek's present, to undo his changes! Who's sabotaging him? Or... WHAT?
As a child I read Jules Verne's Clipper of the Clouds--a metal craft with many propellers on spars, not wings.
Soon I dreamt I designed & flew quite a different craft, like a small boat of canvas on a wood frame.
20 years later, I was test-flying a new aeroplane with a boatlike cockpit of white canvas on a wood...
Samuel Pepys dreamt of kidneystones, pee, come, & snot--or did he? Thomas Macauley dreams his niece confesses...
I discover a Sorting Hat, as in Harry Potter--and it moves in with us. Our cat crawls in and plays peekaboo.
She becomes a teenager eager to get drunk at Thanksgiving--like every adult in her life. But she's not
puking drunk like them, so she must be OK! Just as I think I am--I only overwork to exhaustion.
CAUTION: DRUNK TEEN CAT, SEVERELY ALCOHOLIC ADULTS
I'm a half-sphinx--human dad, sphinx mom--stuck in human form so far.
Will I ever learn to shift? I practice--sculpt my elegant feline future self...
CAUTION: SPHINX NUDITY
I find the sketch-journal of a beautiful winged sphinx who left her mythic isle
to explore a great city of crazy bipeds, called San Francisco...
CAUTION: SPHINX SEX, SPHINX ATTITUDE
Lost in the rainforest of Olympic National Park, I stumble into the wrong cabin:
the hut of Time herself. Or is she? She asks me to clean up, but spare her web...
Weird blue snow covers a dump of unwanted historical statues, but they seem
less political than... strange. Is that a griffin? What's really getting covered here?
As we cross a scary ledge, my tough survival-guide, always no-nonsense before,
finally willing to consider... intellectualism, dating, ethics... fun?
I'm Sybil Sue, a hard-boiled shapeshifting shamus, on the track
of the most wanted bankrobbers in LA: the Bad Girls...
CAUTION: IN BETWEEN GUNSHOTS, THE BAD GIRLS SWEAR
Chased by purple squid from Jupiter, I seek refuge with a guru the Goddess recommends for me...
I'm on the border of human territory. Beyond is the land of the unnerving
Telepaths, each one different but every one creepy...
After reading 170 capsule biographies of famous people I conclude life-plans are
a joke. But I do deduce ten negative rules--ten universal don'ts--that may be of use...
CAUTION: CYNICAL, BUT 170 OBITUARIES WILL DO THAT
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
Three dreams set on Abenaki holy ground, of weird shamans--one ashen, one pumpkin-headed, the
third goofy-faced--lead me to visit the site. Where I find the river's washed up that third shaman's face...
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
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...
That day: I read of a young healer in rural Indonesia harassed by the local mullah.
That night: I dream she leads a revolution on a starship against her elders...
1: Crystal-skulled wizards, dino & lionfolk parade by. 2: I curl up with three skittish beasts. Patience!
3: My friend Mark tries to rape me. I tie him up, seek a restraining order. Will the cops believe me?
CAUTION: RAPE ATTEMPT
A black dog leads me into the fairy wood. I'm curious what happens
to those who walk under the tree where the Lightning Tiger lurks....
DAY: I hear Angela Duckworth (writer of Grit) talk on positive thinking. She thinks we're our own worst enemies.
DREAM: I test my grit an African savanna--and outbluff lions! Unfortunately, that Siberian tiger won't be bluffed...
CAUTION: TROUBLING ASSESSMENT OF... PUTIN? BULLIES IN GENERAL?
In the steampunk world of the Parasol Protectorate, I'm on a swing, fondling four friends
who I'm in love with--all four! I won't give any up. Yet it's time to quit swinging...
CAUTION: SEX ED CLASS, POLYFIDELITY
In a world where speech is in Mayan glyphs, comedian Tina Fey (dressed for prom night)
climbs a Tibetan peak to learn levitation. But the flying monks are scared of women...
CAUTION: COOTIES; ROWDY JESUS; MAY FLUNK THE BECHDEL TEST
14 years before the Titanic sailed, Robertson wrote of a great liner, the Titan,
with 3000 people aboard, that strikes an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic...
In an oneirophobic society, it's easy to forget that when you do dreamwork, you're doing basic science.
No funding, no team, no lab coat? Can't be science! Unless they mistaught us what science is...
I wake up in a weird sexual situation. But I'm still dreaming--I wake again
to find I'm in an even weirder sexual situation. But I'm still...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, (ANTI?)ROMANTICISM
Twenty-four panels of improvised comics in unerasable ink,
letting the shapes and themes in each panel suggest the next...
I'm named the Undersecretary for the Arts. I sift through all the grant applications. But
I'm a webtroll; I hang furry pastel pinups in my office. The humans see postmodern irony...
CAUTION: FURRY PINUPS; UTTER LACK OF IRONY
In a future society, I'm deliberately, permanently paralyzed. Yet my home-grown cure slowly works...
I find myself on the bridge of a starship. But the décor is Arabian Nights--and half the crew are unicorns,
grazing built-in flowerbeds. Some humans on board treat them as mere pets. But one's piloting the ship...
CAUTION: PREDICTIVE
Ballerina Joan Brady quit, but ten years later, returned. Her body rejuvenated! So what can MINE do?
In my dreams, a co-worker tells me HER dreams. Their
focus is so unlike mine! Dream goals really differ...
All I know about humans, I learned in psychodrama. I gawked as caterpillars grew wings. Except me...
Trapped in a blend of Joan of Arcadia and The Tempest Tales, I'm tired of being the pratfall sidekick...
I ask to see my past lives, and dream of a viewpoint where I can--but this Mormon ranger...
We lose control of our new time machine, which seems to have its own agenda...
CAUTION: CONTEMPLATION OF SUICIDE, CHRONOLOGICALLY IMPAIRED DREAMER
This symposium, airing a dispute between geologists & astronomers who just don't read each others' papers, had multiple revelations--big hazards, bigger holes in our knowledge, and bigger opportunities...
CAUTION: CHART! WITH NUMBERS!!
Werecat Syndrome runs in my family. Academics assume I'm a savage predator.
Why? All I want to do is rub up against girls and find one who purrs back...
After seeing Julia Wertz's cartoon history of her entire dreamlife (on one big page!) I dream
Wertz style all night! I don't mind the nightmares--what gets me down is comics' black & white...
CAUTION: NIGHTMARES, SEX
1940s reporters almost trap me in a mob shootout. I shelter in a gender-segregated hotel.
The owner of Wharton Tower shakes the hotel so it swings between its butch & femme halves.
I fall off the Hudson Palisades, but I land safely on the Glass Ceiling...
I dream ESP isn't just for oneself.
A romance between a wolf singer & a deer guitarist.
I'm furry too, and better accept it!
Time-hopping through centuries, I learn how slow
deep social change is. How we cling to the old horrors!
Trapped in segregation-era Florida, I force a racist waitress to go bother someone else.
Disastrously, she does. Someone more vulnerable. Self-assertion's not always wise...
CAUTION: KLAN THREAT
I live in four consecutive bodies: I'm a Bose-Einstein condensate, a cloud of particles moving as one--
unless overheated. No, I'm Witch's Butter, a mob of amoeboid cells who unify into a quasi-slug--temporarily.
No, I'm a person, but soft and yellow as Witch's Butter. No, I'm firming up, but still entangled...
The life experiences, writers, artists and scientists that inspired the building of Planetocopia...
Mark Twain dreams we're cells inside God, and writes of Huck Finn among the microbes.
A century later, unaware of Twain's dreams, Robert Moss...