An artificial intelligence acquires fans and has orgies with her groupies. Her creators
don't care as long as the advertisers get product placement. But she has this size fetish...
CAUTION: VIBRATORS
A late-night conversation with the proud developer
of a new concept in South Asian convenience dining...
While building the World Dream Bank, I dream a hacker says
"certain remarkable sites get free fast access; you should apply..."
We're orphans learning to fly by night, when others can't see and define us...
I'm in a cafe listening to a world-famous musician. He wanders the tables
begging for spare change as businessmen talk over his signature song...
CAUTION: TRUMP AND COVID, SIGH...
I find myself working in a bank that won't let us do our jobs. Only one guy can disburse cash!
Lines of angry customers. If management won't change the rules, I'll have to quit...
CAUTION: PREDICTIVE!
Lily & Wayan have simultaneous dreams of bizarre quarrels over seating bankers at picnic tables...
I had to negotiate a salary for hosting a radio show. I'd never done such a thing. I asked my dreams.
I was shown a land of ruthless warriors with a bushido code. So I went in tough, stayed tough, and...
Humanity's trapped in a Quad, overseen by the Guardians of Blackslime Tower.
Feather by feather, I grow wings, and plot to escape with the Flying Cat...
CAUTION: THE SLIME IS REAGANOMICS
Flu. Ow, cramps! But that night I dream of a miner's rebellion against our fat-cat boss. Which side am I on?
I dreamed this was in our civic museum: a painting of the central
dynamo of our world finally erupting: the Businessman in Anguish.
Why did I sign on as a crewman on the Cheapship, a freighter
that's falling apart? And yes, I do mean that literally...
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...
In my home town there were tales of coal-eaters. I dreamed of a miner who
transformed the mine-owner into a canary--at a price. He became coal himself...
CAUTION: GRIM MINE, HARSH SACRIFICE
After a day of medical mess-ups, I dream whites routinely cheat super-fast Native American pony couriers,
till the riders demand showy down payments called Contract Cloaks. Now cheats'll get publicly exposed...
The tale of a gray heart trying to heal leads to unicorn-hostage drama in the Transamerica Pyramid...
CAUTION: SEX, MAFIA THREATS, VIOLENCE
I dream an economist admits not only that eco-regs pay off, but that economic theory is faulty. Dream on!
I'm Coyote, keeping the Business Prophet from taking over Dante's Peak. But it turns too personal...
CAUTION: IDIOTIC VIOLENCE
A true tale proving the Trickster God really will provide. We're lilies of the field!
I’m an Asian kid in Pacifica, California. My parents annoy me, so I offer them for sale on Craigslist. A cop appears...
The crane toppled and fell onto the riverbank. I saw the number, but not if the operator got free...
The House of Comics has a shabby annex jammed with self-publishers.
We make a human ladder and climb out a high window, but I don't fit;
as the tenement collapses, I must smash the windowframe to free...
I did what I love. The money didn't follow. So now I have to guard a crimeboss at a theft convention...
CAUTION: INEVITABLE CHEKHOVIAN SHOOTOUT
On the Euphrates, a monstrous crocodile eats all his kin. But when a winged ship appears, he feigns remorse...
How my dad got onto the board of directors and made the organization his own...
I cross a hostile continent to a magic commune, fall in love with a flying girl who slaps a
soul-spark into my head, and follow an alien goddess leading the Dance of the Sun...
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
A Queen Bee devil kidnaps my grandniece; I kill her to free the child. Turns out even Hell's leaders are relieved.
She returns as a satanic housing developer. Slicker this time, but just as crooked. Must I kill her again?
CAUTION: DEVILS, VIOLENCE (NONGRAPHIC)
A serial killer stalks our office, but our bosses deny it and do nothing.
I kill him. He revives--over and over! A robot I have to disassemble...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I project I'll make a lot more money soon. Good, now I can support all my lazy friends! Wait...
After a hard day getting a "free" bed, I dream my milker comes to drain my dreams.
Wait...did I agree to this? Or does milking drain objections, too?
CAUTION: CREEPY
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
Mute, paired images, contrasting life with the death we're spreading. And then finally the dream speaks:
CAUTION: READ THE TITLE AND GO SABOTAGE SOMETHING!
I go to an investment counselor who asks ME for advice! I lay out
a plan, then wonder it'd work in nonfinancial affairs too...
Money, power, race and gender stifle my working friends less than hierarchical structures...
Night, downtown. A unicorn in tears, chained to her... barker? owner? pimp?
"Just $300" he yells. But for what? Magic? Sex? Healing?
CAUTION: PROSTITUTION? SLAVERY? GIG ECONOMY?
Elegant, ancient, the tower rose into the clouds. Inside? Smoke & darkness. Workers roast meat...
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
On Christmas eve, I ask my dreams what they think of our annual orgy, and...
CAUTION: THE F WORD AND THE C WORD (CAPITALISM)
After a trip to a failing mall, an old Grateful Dead song haunts my dreams. Mall, song; opposite political poles...
CAUTION: HIPPIE/JEFFERSONIAN DEISM
old Frisco gone, high-rise condos obscure the view: hives for techie...
I win a prize on a gameshow, but collecting is another story, since the show is run from Hell...
Parking structures with spiral ramps are, secretly, screws harvesting motion from parking cars, slowly drilling
into near-impenetrable rock. Thus are skyscraper-foundations made...
I dream my sister has an epiphany--we should relax, blur our boundaries, and just be
sloppy old Geysers of Good. Surprisingly, my financier mentor agrees...
CAUTION: DECLARES CAPITALISM OBSOLETE
I was a giant carefully & guiltlessly flattening San Francisco--just following orders
to recycle it! Killing how many? While my mind inside the giant's mind was appalled...
A lecturer tries to help the homeless founder of Hamm's Beer, robbed by bankers. But the talk may harm more than help...
A mail-order warehouse in Kansas sends ghost-infected software out, causing mayhem.
But less than when Kansas exported the killer flu 100 years ago...
CAUTION: DISSES KANSAS & CAPITALISM, FOR GOOD HISTORICAL REASONS
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.
A con artist fools me and a waiter. But if my dreamfolk are all me, who's fooling whom?
Two teens crack a bank with a homemade rocket--but forgot a crowbar! Caught, but
the bank can't press charges; the kids have proof the bank uses slave labor...
CAUTION: DISSES CAPITALISM
I'm an organic almond grower who's solved the Luminous Snail problem. But my neighbor has an agenda...
MIKE'S DREAM: A volcano erupts. The lava pours into my hotel...
WAYAN'S DREAM: Our hill erupts in flame from a gas explosion...
I'm my friend Dawn, at a convention for my job. But I get insulted. I walk
out. Lost in endless parking lots, by a dumpster, I make a bizarre wish...
CAUTION: APPARENT TELEPATHY
This place isn't out of my dreams, it just looks like it. It's real real real...
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
In the hills above a polluted shore, I find hidden valleys with huge rare trees, and realize it's my choice...
My friend put an ad on her gown, so I try one on our house. I have big ideas for more, but a pickpocket...
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?...
My dream characters aged and tamed until they sit in a genteel Victorian flat. Then a wolf rappels in...
I'm a California Indian wandering through time, keeping
our secret of time-travel from reckless white guys...
I tilted the Earth to create a tropical supercontinent from Bali to Tierra
del Fuego. What will evolve there--and on the new tropical Antarctica?
The tale of a fawn named Fawn and her mom, a bank-robbing hippopotamus...
CAUTION: GLAMORIZES THIS ALARMING TREND
What really built Silicon Valley? Oh, sugar, coffee, speed and cocaine, mostly...
CAUTION: DRUGS ON THE JOB
I have to kiss a mess of cats. Fishy, but I'm not chicken. My real beef is with the humans watching...
The rich block reform. So let's offer the rich what they really want: ranking and attention...
CAUTION: CHIMPONOMICS
The Dating Fairy, built on lonely evenings waiting for her to call me back--whoever "her" was that week...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
Phyllis Schlafly, killer of the Equal Rights Amendment, provokes a dream of being Captain Kirk
trapped in a magic school with no way out but the graduate exam. Can I learn the lesson of the tree?
CAUTION: POLITICAL JOURNALISM BEFORE THE DREAM. OH NO!
Dream: tourists in our town use brainware to navigate & translate, but it's infected. Turns you fascist. Whaaaat?...
Next day: the FBI knocks! Our web provider fingered us as a nest of internet criminals. Thanks, Comcast!
Talk about malware...
Martian robots pester me. I flee through the Asteroids, leaving chaos, cratering Earth.
Years later on my farm, a bot shows up disguised as Freud. I start mudslinging...
The comics industry degenerates into civil war. We peddle all night to avoid the Marvel...
I was a young dream-artist out of place in the Silicon Valley...
I argue to a friend that Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Capitalism are more alike than they admit...
I'm John Muir reborn on Mars, supporting Mars First against tree-cutters, who poison their enemies...
In a world of wizards, many have gone silent. They seem to forget speech exists. A toxin, a disease? But what explains
people's calm as more go mute? No, it's an insidious spell--with a penumbra making us take its spread for granted...
CAUTION: IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR WORLD
A woman with two teenagers breaks in and says she's my ex-wife and they're my kids.
I'm in my twenties; I CAN'T have teenage kids. And I have no ex-wife! Just my girlfriend Cassandra.
Forty years later it all makes sense. It's not about me then, but John now...
CAUTION: ADULT THEMES--TRULY STUPID ADULT THEMES. E.S.P., TOO.
Advice from a successful writer of worstsellers to all you aspiring failures: unfame has its price...
At the library, my boss says we're restructuring, modernizing. My new job is to...
Mythic creatures round a woodland pool want to heal a businessman. Do too many cooks spoil the soup?
At a family picnic, my sisters and I fish for scholarships and grants. They put down my art, my website...
I want to catch a crescent moon home--our transit system's been buying up
old moons and running them across town--but tourists reserved all the seats...
It's hard being even mildly multiple. Here three of my least compatible personalities line up and...
Softly snows the spam upon my lonely brain, quilting me in flounderdrifts. Shovel it again...
I see two Ohlone women around 1900, starving, naked, despised, their land stolen--and still way happier than...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I'm a spy tracking down coinlike bombs. Fighting a double agent, I fall in love!
So I suggest her gang rob golden-parachute bankers...
CAUTION: POOLSIDE SEX
Humans and elves like me can get along, but not oni (Japanese demons)--they'll hurt anyone for gain...
CAUTION: POLITICAL BITTERNESS
Kate Wolf sings that ads are way dirtier than porn. But my memory slowly twists her message...
Thomas Piketty argues we obsess on income, ignore capital. My experience suggests he's right. Track wealth, tax wealth...
CAUTION: NON-DREAM RANT, ECONOMICS, HOW TO GET RICH SLOW
A living camera edits us all: the dappled hawk-man, the slutty candidate, the blue businessmen
who give such bad advice when you pull the thorns from their feet. And my sweet sad hell-hound...
A literary agent proposes a novelization offer from a writer I've barely heard of. Twelve weeks later...
My friend Chris gets tied up at the office--that’s his job, looking martyred! But when the boss is away...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Now and then I model. I'm offered a gig doing ads for Trump--at $1000 a session! Tempting, but no.
As I go home, my cabbie is shocked--"I'd take that gig!" "But would you really?"...
CAUTION: HARSH TO COMPROMISERS
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
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'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...
The unemployed angel with her resume is the Goddess of Freedom...
A Buddhist student, troubled by a corporation marketing a product called
"Satori", summons the ghost of her beloved mentor for advice...
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...
I had a horrible realization that computers are useless, and I tried to make it beautiful...
A street poet preaches a gospel of smallness, until he pokes at capitalism in a slightly too personal way...
I'm slow to catch on that this skunk's slidetalk isn't a business pitch; it's about seduction...
CAUTION: ABSURD LOVE TRIANGLE, KINKY SKUNK
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
They call it the information highway because we're all supposed to march in formation...
I dreamed a tornado loosened our showroom sign; it swung down to smash the window. I told my husband, and...
Silicon Valley goes enthusiastically fascist. I hide in a berry patch. They build a shining world, and then...
Yesterday, Hitler marched into town. I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about 200 years old...
I'm a girl living alone in a forest. I go patrolling after a storm and find a red cable
strangling a tree. Though scared, I climb up and tear it off. But there are more...
CAUTION: POLITICAL INTERPRETATION
In my nightmare, TV ads push new, supposedly eco-friendly uses for pigs, until this alarming ad...
I murder my wife. I try to sell her body as meat to a firm that'll turn her into wine.
But the transubstantiation has already happened, and the paperwork's undone...
CAUTION: GRISLY
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...
My friend's ignorant of our local Congressional race. I loathe Pombo
and like his rival McNerney, but can't pronounce his name right...
I feel horrified--how publishers will batten on the sufferings of junkey musicians... unbearable...
I'm a part-owner of Eden, harvesting windfalls.
But a renter says his Landlord promised him all the apples...
Is there really that much difference between the rootless yuppies flooding the West, and war refugees?
I'm an elephant working in a diner. In the bathroom, I inadvertently summon the Genie of the Urinal...
CAUTION: PISSED PACHYDERM
I'm in a college class studying a bizarre alternate Earth where
anarchist co-ops never evolved and (of all things) money rules all...
CAUTION: SCORNS CAPITALISM
DREAM: I'm in Yellowstone, in a monstrous resort. Local tribes fight white exploitation of sacred land.
NEXT MORNING: I read a Native American critique of racist land-theft in a TV show: Yellowstone...
My mild yuppie friend Lou climbs a bank tower to reach his rich mentor,
and wins an internship. But as he swears his oath to Get Rich Quick...
CAUTION: DISSES CUTTHROAT CAPITALISM