A child dreamer and two different kinds of cyborg must cooperate
to free the hostages imprisoned under San Francisco Bay...
DREAM: The future. A party. A woman spills her drink on my white pants. Off to Faerie, where fruit trees are mean...
NEXT DAY: I do not wear white pants to Sally's party. So? A woman spills her drink on Sally's white pants...
DAY AFTER: I open a book on musicals & see a shot from The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy baiting an angry fruit tree...
CAUTION: PREDICTIVE
I had a chronic illness doctors said was psychosomatic. So I called Alan, a therapist...
I dream I'm in his office. It's a nook in a basement. No windows, no door, no privacy.
I was so desperate I went to him for six months, while he ignored everything I said...
Canals and locks. American soldiers find an underground village and force everyone to evacuate to
a warship, "for safety". The villagers turn into birds so if it's a trap they can escape. Next morning...
CAUTION: ESP, GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY
DREAM: Ants invite me to a picnic. But one of the dishes they serve is--other ants!
NEXT DAY: I'm invited to a picnic. And my friend, munching, says...
CAUTION: BUG-EAT-BUG WORLD
My kidnappers were desperate: no jobs. I fled them down the berry chute, to the underground
strawberry factory where engineers in go-go boots did the berry dance--and the berries...
CAUTION: STRAWBERRY FETISH
I dream I have sixth and seventh senses--and wake to realize I do! Just denied them, explained them away...
CAUTION: SHAKESPEAREAN HEFT
It had been a weirdly mild winter day, but in my dream black storms loomed as I tried to build shelter...
I search for family skeletons, but then a talking plant on TV inspires me to seek the sun and fly free.
But certain velociraptors and barbarian swordswomen object...
CAUTION: DUELS, FISH ABUSE, THE F-WORD
By twisting strangely, humans can slip into a higher plane. Ten feet higher!
So unless you climb on the roof, you end up in the tunnels of the burrowcats...
No more token canaries--the all-canary workforce, that's us. Let's see if these products are toxic...
CAUTION: ANTI-CAPITALIST
I'm in the Mideast. No wonder it's a war zone--it's a vast pit BUILT for war!
But a spiral stair leads slowly out, to...
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
Twin dreams of ghoulish games backstage at a theater.
And they anticipated real long-term ghoulishness...
CAUTION: SLOW DEATH
That day I read Hilde Bruch's "Conversations with Anorexics" and face the fact I am one.
That night, in the land where anorexic horses heal, I enter the Kiva of Shamanic Pamphlets, and...
I'm Coyote, keeping the Business Prophet from taking over Dante's Peak. But it turns too personal...
CAUTION: IDIOTIC VIOLENCE
Saints and devils in a sunken statuary garden turn too real for comfort; so, creating my own wings, I fly...
Holding a luminous crystal sword, I enter a crypt where a king lies--ill, not dead.
An old woman wants to punish him, but as he stirs, I sheathe my sword...
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...
My friend Dawn dreamed she crawled into a dumpster to live, and at last felt at home, secure...
I met a deer-man in the woods. I go lucid, then wake up... to find I'm still dreaming. And wake again, and wake, and wake...
The boy and I walk a spiral trail down the mountain to the caves of tears...
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
I built a sex-maze to reprogram businesspeople, but I only grasp its meaning when I fuck City Hall...
CAUTION: SEX, LANGUAGE, RADICAL POLITICS
A master criminal is tracked down by a hound in a monk's robe
who's introduced to me as... the President of the United States?
Dream poems laid out like a calendar. Themes? Horses, camels, abused girls, vampires--all want their freedom...
In the cave, I chanted "Come Kama, Come Love..." and a procession of strange creatures came down the stone steps;
squirrels, peacocks, a blue birdlike being with golden headdress, and then the Goddess of Love. Her form shocked me...
It's not easy to get a California driver's license, ever since the Dept. of Motor Vehicles went Jungian...
The Emperor dreamt he was eating dirt. He feared it was a metaphor for
death. Wrong. No metaphor! Soon after, his enemies suffocated him in dirt...
CAUTION: BRUTAL
I'm an intellectual ballerina trying to stop zombies hatching from stone eggs, but I succeed
only when I become a dragon using touch, scent and visualization to persuade the eggs...
In the underworld, soldiers chase fundamentalists in underwear, as leopards stare. The
upside-down elephant plugs the exit. We can only escape if we
A logging war in the northern forests is confused by subjective realities. Am I sure what I see is real?
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...
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)
In the great race up Everest, I become an e-snake, cross 3 eco-bubbles, beg a
wary deer-taur to splice my spine, help Ariane my childhood crush, and solve
the Dream Equations. Climbing Everest takes not strength but... trust?
I turned off my conscious judgment and just drew. Two paths appeared--one led to
psychodrama, then parental prison; the other, into the underworld of dreamwork...
CAUTION: NUDE DREAM-SELVES
The boarding school needs to fill in the old Punishment Pit. Not just archaic,
but a threat to every student. So let every student dump clay in & dance on it...
The tunnel has pictures of a winged unicorn filly on a quest. But the editor
of the deluxe book version is intellectual, patriarchal and heavy-handed...
CAUTION: UNDERAGE ALICORN FLIRTING
In prison, the midnight bell chimed. I dreamt I saw a cavalry column of men and horses skinned, gory, still marching.
Wagons of the dead passed for hours. As the guard changed, the gate crashed, waking me--just minutes after midnight!
CAUTION: PROVES NOT ALL DREAMS ARE REALTIME
I had to prepare the house for a party, but the basement was flooded. I thought I could
decorate it with some floating flowers anyway, but they kept dissolving or sinking...
Our group's being hunted. We flee into a cave. A gulf ahead that we can't jump. We have to fly.
I know how, and I teach the kids among us quickly enough, but the adults are scared to try...
Climbing out of Childhood Abyss, I literally get a leg up from a girl seeking the Ledge of Teens.
A shy girl has to hide she's a were-creature. Gay men make out in the witch-registry to rattle its
homophobic guardians. My sister stripteases while scolding me for a mess I didn't make...
CAUTION: DUH, SEX TABOOS! KIDS, FURS, GAYS, SIBLINGS
DAY: I reread Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. His own dreams feel petty, devious, status-obsessed... dull.
DREAM: I find Freud's bought my childhood home! I spelunk the Freudian underworld--a dark complex of tunnels,
sewers and rats. Cross the rivers of muck on stepping stones. Emerge into sun at last, swearing "Never again..."
Parking structures with spiral ramps are, secretly, screws harvesting motion from parking cars, slowly drilling
into near-impenetrable rock. Thus are skyscraper-foundations made...
Previous dreamwork had made it clear my mother had betrayed me; I asked
my dreams how to protect myself from those who do not love me...
I'm in a cavern. A large green & brown dragon goes over to a machine
and gives me a green egg. A gift. It comes to me this is "dragon bane"...
In a Hopi underworld, I find even lucid dreaming can't cure guilt and grief over losses yet to come...
In Europe, I enter a cave-shrine. Rock walls with... breasts! I suck one. It gives milk. A plaque says...
CAUTION: WEIRD
On a hunt, Guntram took a nap. His courtier saw a snake emerge from his mouth; it tried to cross a creek. The
courtier lay his sword out like a bridge, and the snake crossed, climbed a hill, and went in a hole. It returned
and crawled in Guntram's mouth. He woke and said "I was crossing a river on a great iron bridge..."
I'm a Gyrlfalcon in a theater, fighting the Wolverine and his Morlocks with my lover the Green Lion...
A Buddhist scroll shows me Hell Cafe, where diners become entrees. But I read the scroll
backwards! You can escape Hell just by walking out, against the traffic flow...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL SOULS
I’m a homeless elf. We’re a persecuted minority group. I know I’m dreaming and try to change it but...
How's it feel to be an anima off the job? Is it lonely, when no one even believes you're a real person?
I'm a hobbit seeking Henry Fonda's haunted gold mine. And find it. Or is that chocolate?
But then I'm caught in a shamanic showdown in a bar where they serve real spirits...
I fight to save a nest of 50,000 eggs that'll hatch... psychics!
But my friends want to exterminate them! Who's wrong here?
My first memory is of being a wild horse and waking up to find I was suddenly a human child...
I flee our love triangle when Abe turns mean. He's telepathic, but
I have my escape all planned: the goldfish, the snakepit, the caves...
CAUTION: THREESOME, SNAKES, MOTORCYCLE FATALITY
At an amusement park, big 3D letters appeared in the air, saying
"I WANT YOUR DREAMS". Terrified, I dived underground...
Soil turns to air for me; I float in the dark between tree roots
and stones, thinking "If only I could remember my name"...
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...
On Mars, a child-sacrificing cult of miners wants to kill me, but something strange happens....
I was a sheltered girl till I entered my family's secret ancestral vault. I didn't expect to meet...
My bedroom window is choked with dirt. I dig up to the surface
and find a man reading comics. He says 'It is the only way!'...
I get back from vacation to find the landlady's installed her daughter Jamie in our shared house...
Lucid, I summon a sexy literary character. But he tries to take over my personality and make it his lucid dream...
CAUTION: VAMPIRE-SLAYING
When the school district goes bankrupt, students flee creditors into a hell-cave.
But Joe Cool can skateboard even on lava in the Pit...
My home seemed antiquated but pleasant. I found a stair down to a darker, medieval floor.
A dark stair led down to a Roman cellar. A trapdoor led down to a cave with ancient skulls...
MIKE: A reckless friend races up a hazardous ladder. I follow slowly, reluctant, scared. Almost a nightmare...
WAYAN: Mike recklessly climbs an outdoor ladder as lightning strikes. Scary! Wait--this dream feels psychic...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
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
Deep in the caves, a Voice announces I've gone as far as the human mind can stand. But ahead, I see...
I'm in an alien empire dominated by big lizard-bugs. Humanoids are second-class, but
they're trusted with weapons--I witness a human squad executing a lizard for dissidence...
CAUTION: REPRESSION, OR IMMUNE SYSTEM?
I visit the underworld court of the Lizard King, but I can’t leave: he makes me Queen...
CAUTION: MARITAL RAPE (NON-GRAPHIC)
While spelunking, I blunder into the Lord of the Underworld's court where dragons swim--and
become one! My human friends stare at me, coiled with my two mates. Do they even know me now?
CAUTION: SCALY THREESOME
There's power in dark memories--creatures of the deep strata. But the flowers of now are just as real...
The Labyrinth of the Madonna's Tears provoked a dream of the Goddess telling me
"My forgotten sanctuaries are all around you now. You have only to see with your own eyes...
Jung (at age three and a half) sees a terrifying god deep underground, and is told “That is the man-eater!”...
The Mayan cave was a door between worlds. But also a model of the character you need to walk through that door...
At Sea-Dragon State Park, I climbed down to the sea serpent's dressing room after the show, and found...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
Deep in a secret diamond mine, I see stars. A door opening to the night sky!
But this shortcut's heavily guarded...
Our cowboy posse tracks a fugitive to a strange amethyst mine, where we're offered peculiar jobs...
I'm in the cellar, petting a tiger-cat. She speaks inside my head: "I'm tired of living on bread. I need meat."
I make excuses--it's pricy--then see big hanging quarters of meat. I hide them! She says "Call me Mistress
Touttmouss"--well, something like that--I know it's English, but can't make it out til I wake, when I see...
Inspired by a bird who weaves her nest of dollar bills, I become a sort of monk,
sweeping, renouncing wealth--but my monastery's a Silicon Valley BART station...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 14 dreams (mostly Jan-Mar 2011) painted on one canvas
A dream urged me to paint a big landscape with cutout movable (magnetic) dream figures
and liftable flaps revealing hidden dream scenes...
I hide a chip of secrets from thugs, fight a running light-gun battle, and hide in my workplace's
crawlways, amid live cables and pipes. As the factory burns, I run a gauntlet of goons. A girl
leads me into the underworld. Fires glow and mutants dance. I marry the leader of the pack.
I swim with my daughter Naomi in a desert pool amid lemon trees. She may be able to help me...
I challenge my teacher's claim human historical patterns are universal.
She challenges me by dragging us both back to the Ice Age and...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I'm at a Neolithic art show. A Stone Age critic says "Viewers struggle to interpret signs as the signified."
I think they're just baffled how those animals can be stuck on a cave wall yet still be running around...
Two friends send energy through me, transforming me. Now that
my legs are detachable, I can sit comfortably on my eggs...
Touring an underground maze, I meet a woman I like. But her brother bristles.
Then, from a height, I see the ventilation pits of the labyrinth laid out like a map.
The Japanese invade! Hide in the jungle. Women in rags butcher centipedes & mice...
CAUTION: UNHAPPY MEALS; OVER-JUNGIANISM
On terraformed Mars, we set out to climb Mt Olympus without
oxygen masks. The first miles are OK, but the air thins until...
CAUTION: ANTICIPATED DEATH?
I'm car-buying. My friend has an Opel, but it's sluggish AND a gas hog. How can a car be both? Then...
I notice a jar of opals that my grandpa gave me has grown dull with algae! Sheesh, more opals gone bad...
I wake and head to work. But at a bottleneck, I'm blocked by this loud group talking on and on about...
Plato never did say what shed the light that cast those shadows on his cave wall. I find out.
CAUTION: CUT-RATE APOCALYPSE
Martial-arts student Parvati just won't fight the teacher she loves (too much!)--
not even for her final exam. Instead she gets a rotary saw and...
One tribe builds earth-magic pits that can teleport you or grant wishes.
But the other tribe's more powerful flow-state magic is harder to define...
CAUTION: SEX FANTASY GRANTED
I'm shown corn plants growing from skulls, and it seems like I must plant some skull-corn myself...
When I was little, two boys with strange laughs invited me to play. Their house was crowded and underground.
After I came back out, I realized their home was a grave and they were ghosts. They gave me a power...
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?
Night. A massive crash on the highway. Bodies strewn. Sickened, I descend a spiral stair to the Pool
of Truth. It gives no answers. Women spout platitudes. I go on, in pain, down past the polar bears...
CAUTION: THE DEAD
Led by a rebel demon into the heart of a Chinese mountain, should I wake the Sleepers in the Cave?
Quail, spelunking again, finds ancient cave paintings of the Cult of the Fossil TV...
by Jenny Badger Sultan, 1999/5/15, 6/12 & 7/14, a painting based on 3 dreams
I'm in the Hypogeum, an ancient Maltese dream-temple. I join some women
staging a ritual; a little girl draped in a web plays the role of an insect...
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...
20,000 years from now, a deer-harpist named Razi finds the Holy Wino's not quite the ruin he seems...
CAUTION: BAD PENGUINS, DEER NUDITY, RUDE DRUNK
Mt Everest is snowfree and red; in the next dream I redden a sandstone cave with ochre. I feel uneasy...
I was in the grave. Worse, a living skeleton was trying to crush my ribs. Though terrified, I fought back, and...
I'm not ambivalent--I'm confused! I live here by the Rift Zone and I don't. I'm single and not. Two lives!...
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'm dating a sexy salad. But I just gobble the good bits and leave: I have an appointment in Chinatown.
The salad understandably feels let down, but she's painfully familiar with guys who eat and run...
CAUTION: WEIRD EVEN BY MY STANDARDS
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...
The past. Burma. I'm shown a stupa covered in gold leaf, and given a key
to a tunnel where they say a tooth of Buddha is encased in glass...
For three weeks he wakened screaming in fright; he said he "fell in a hole." Then, one snowy day...
I'm lost in the underworld again. Happens a lot lately. But I run into my anima Silky,
in yellow boots and a safety vest, blasting clean the walls of the land of the dead...
1: Purple squid saboteurs flood our cliffhouse. 2: My oyster-ranching girlfriend has a snobby aunt.
3: I wake in a stranger's bondage fantasy--ugh! 4: Shepherds on the sea-floor watch for gliderwolves...
CAUTION: EMBARRASSING BONDAGE DREAM
In psychodrama, my sister/lover did a happy childhood scene--till the actors took her
down a trap door into the underworld. And I knew I'd have to go down after her...
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
Lost in a dark maze of machine-shops, I follow Mr. Spock, who's drunk, and talks to tree-spirits...
CAUTION: ALCOHOL AS INSPIRATION?
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'm a teenage girl diving for treasure. In an eerie coral grotto reeking of sulfur,
I spot a diver in trouble... and wake to find the grotto is real..
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 1997, a collage on a dream-idea
A phrase from a dream, "the remains of men and women," led to this image
of a black sun in the underworld amid strata of time and the psyche...
A murderer was stalking Mt Tam. I dreamed I met the murderous spirit; only
by allying with small dancers from inside the mountain could we defeat it...
CAUTION: NEW AGE
Deep in the strata inside you, gems lie waiting in the dark for this child to dig them free...
Kaleidoscopic constellations? No thanks! A nudist town in Italy? Ugh.
Ah, but singing vaudeville in a monk's robe & roller skates...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
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 dreamed of this tree growing out of a cave-mouth. Years later, in Guatemala, I
was shocked to encounter my dream. That tree and that cave were all too surreal...
I'm walking down a tiger's throat, but it's not what you think. Diagnosis!
My friend suddenly couldn't roar. She's here too, exploring her own trachea....
Golfing in the basement with Giselle! But her ball goes through a Stargate
to land on a world where the water hazards are hazards...
It's Thanksgiving but my brother won't come in; he's digging up red earth. In our family he always digs up...
A lobe-by-lobe musical tour of your brain with Buddha as your tourguide...
DREAM: at a dreamgroup, I tell a predictive dream that my artist friend's front tooth will get infected. Then
we all chant "Loga-Shana!" THREE WEEKS LATER: my artist friend's front tooth gets a serious abcess...
CAUTION: WILL TROUBLE E.S.P. SKEPTICS
I led a blind man through a vast art museum underground. But guiding him, I too was blind to the beauty...
I wander a valley where unicorns love cyborgs but fear giant ants, who love unicorns but
fear cyborgs, who love ants but fear unicorns! And while the Three Tribes squabble, cave-monsters
sculpt them all. I set up peace talks between these four aspects of my tetrahedral soul...
CAUTION: SWEARING, DRUNK LIONS, CYBORG SURGERY, AND GOGGLE-BARFING
I volunteered to meet him underground. He held me underwater and slammed into me. I nearly drowned, yet...
CAUTION: ROUGH SEX
I was on a spiral stair. The walls had scrawled messages, not sprayed,
carved or painted but living tissue--and getting fresher as I descended. Whatever was growing them was still below me, and still writing...
I take a shortcut with the Warm Fuzzies, boating on lava through the earth's core,
and now when a volcano erupts, I know who it is that's quarreling beneath..
I'm the new manager of the watermelon mine. And to free the trapped minors--
oops, miners!--I have to plan. So I cover the floor with My Little Pony post-its...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
Maybe the web like a shining dove will lead me from my lonely cave
into the light. The glaring light... Wait! That can't be right!
CAUTION: SEPIA HALFTONE NUDITY
I'm a one-legged hopping hermit in the ruins of LA, and my only hope
for love is to conjure up a girl out of a trout and a puppy...
I'm nine years old again. But my mom acts like a child--crawls into a hole. I follow, scared,
and find my grandfather packing to leave the Old Country before the Nazis kill us all...
CAUTION: FEAR & PERSECUTION
In cave times, while the men were all out hunting, it was
the women who learned to paint the cave walls to summon...
A friend who's fought lymphoma invites me to sleep in a cave, but I fear a rattlesnake will bite me...
A burrowing owl invites her friend the wolf over for tea. It sounds very Beatrix Potter, but...
I wander a sunken maze, meet a playful woman, find a hidden treasure. Meanwhile, my friend Zooop...