At the airport, a new automatic photo booth shoots your memories!
Julie can't resist... and emerges, excited, to find that...
I dreamed I circumnavigated the entire Buddhist wheel of existence in a single night...
High-voltage traces of our lust and love flowed through our mattress nightly...
until one night when the power surged and overflowed. Then I felt you...
I dream I'm reading an amazing comic about a bright red geometric dog named Question,
floating through surreal landscapes. I'm envious--until I wake in relief that it's just a dream!
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!
All that spring I dreamed of climbing, cold, fatigue, risk, and fear.
But shamanic training involves toughening; ascent isn't always easy flight...
I'm an orphaned bat in an alley in a storm. I mistake a broken old umbrella's ribs & flaps
for... my Mom! I unfold Mom, and discover...
CAUTION: LIFE-THREATENING CHILD NEGLECT
I'm naked, flirting with two cute women. People can see us in our bay window, but I just don't care....
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
On the bridge between waking and dreaming, a jet plane duels a T. Rex. But
the jet strays into dream space, becoming a pterosaur--and soon, Rex lunch...
Rajiv keeps trying to convince me it's the best hotel in India: the orgy of biters, the
bowls of twitching fingers. But it's only the oracular spirits that really impress me...
CAUTION: CREEPY FINGERS
I'm a giant cartoon bird. I had to assassinate a friend--twelve times!
Eleven times I killed him, but I spared him the twelfth. He said...
I try to fly in my birdsuit before I have feathers! Can I? Starring the cast of Three's Company...
CAUTION: LAME SEXUAL INNUENDO TYPICAL OF THREE'S COMPANY
Inspired by Lynda Barry, I fill a black-paged book with 20 improv paintings.
They grow into a tour of my dreamwork led my anima Silky, a nightmare...
by Wayan; 2002/5/29 - 2004/5/11, a diagnostic, predictive dream-series; Bleeding Heart as comix
A tree-girl moves to Hollywood to make film deals, but jealousy stabs her...
CAUTION: BLOODY ASSAULT, GAY DRYADS, MUTANT NUDITY
The world's first all-bulemic band, Veronica and the Vomits, provokes a riot at our local punk club. So I go to
Anorexic Bootcamp where models learn self-defense under fire, as calories and fat jokes whiz by...
CAUTION: BARF, HORNY ANOREXIC, FOOD FIGHT
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
I keep dreaming of awkward but successful transitions into new life, and paint them all in one landscape...
A recurring childhood dream on how weird a boy-body is when you've been a girl too many lifetimes.
CAUTION: PUBLIC HUMILIATION, NUDE MONSTERS, SILLY GENITALIA
The Hunt of the Unicorn (yeah, guess who I am), as I fly through the worlds fighting Reaganism...
CAUTION: MOCKS THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR
I kept dreaming of a boy in striped pajamas. I had to save him every night.
Until one night I failed. I just couldn't. I knew who he was--my brother who...
CAUTION: DEATH
A champion swimmer tells me how she turned a sexual humiliation into excitement and liberating power...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, SHAME, PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY
Reporters interview my pet rabbit without my permission. Have I neglected her? She says
"Things have been pretty good." I'm relieved, but ask why she never spoke before...
Bart Simpson leads me down from the Cabin in the Sky back to being... grounded?
The cake horse resented my taking one slice out of him; but he let me.
No second slice, though! He just laughed at me--through his bad teeth...
News of a new national park and a science show on cleaner-fish spur a daydream of dolphins, cats and...
CAUTION: FISH ORGY; MOCKS THE ANGEL MORONI, TOO
I melted down all the vinyl records ever made in New Zealand to create one huge compendium.
I woke thinking "Could I do that for New Zealand comics?"
In the woods outside a modern art museum, I'm being stalked by Giacometti's huge skeletal cat...
I run away. A car nearly hits me and I fall into the lake. But
a kindly catfish drags me to an underwater phone booth...
I kept dreaming demon cats tortured me. At last a vicious dog joined them. He wanted to kill me, but
the chief cat wanted to keep playing with her prey. I realized they were my mum and dad, and said...
My writer-friend Cecy will do anything to get published. Anything? Oh, believe me, ANYTHING...
CAUTION: BONDAGE, not to mention POSTAGE
As a mob of Hollywood stars beats me up, I ask for autographs--and get them.
I sell the autographs to fund a statue of the beating--but with me smiling...
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 meet a dancer who plays a stick figure on stage. She smokes
a cigar. I ask her how many a day she smokes, and she answers...
At a polyspecies circus, I sketch three acrobat-dancers--one deerish, one human, one... a mannequin?
Fiendish to draw! I wake frustrated & sketchless. But my sketchwork in the dream helps me redraw it awake...
CAUTION: DEER NUDITY
A bee-doctor in the city of Propolopolis diagnoses me as having a rare syndrome, Ambition Denied...
I model with ten blonde clones. They want to be seen as individuals, so it's their last fashion show before...
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...
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
I'm trying to jam together my dream diary and my first comics. My grandmother's
skeptical. But at last, with an audible 'click', dreams and comics suddenly merge...
I'm a hippie girl in San Francisco, in hard times. To escape the Four Horsemen, I lie down with Death...
CAUTION: GANGS, CREEPY SEX
I've turned into my sister; and she's turned into me. We try sex. A wolf lopes by and joins us.
The energy from our orgy lifts us into space. Moons planets stars swim by as we float and fuck...
CAUTION: CARTOON ORGY IN SPACE
A graduation parade has a papier-maché cowboy (hollow ego?), a giant
rampaging stallion (unconscious), and a mama cat who calms him (anima)...
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...
Cartoonist Robert Crumb just turns off all taboos while drawing. A learnable technique...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, CARTOON SEX
We're Cubist cartoon characters, trapped in a strip gone mad. But my dad stays calm! Too calm...
CAUTION: SEAS OF BLOOD... OR IS IT RED INK?
I'm trapped in a cute cartoon universe! Worse, to judge this beauty contest,
I have to see past our style to our souls...
In the paper factory where my dad worked all his life, I find him on
his deathbed. Even as he fades, he's still trying to please his bosses...
Trump wackos bomb the World Trade Center. I flee New York. Morticia Addams puts us up. Inside the
dream, I fall asleep. When I wake I ask "was the attack a dream?" Morticia says it was smaller. I try to
write it all down on my bedsheet, but the ink spreads. I wake again, sure I need to wash the sheet...
I'm in a car with Walt Disney. A blonde comes in out of the rain.
He promises to make her a star, and puts his hands...
CAUTION: NOT GRAPHIC, JUST UGH
I'm actress Nicole Kidman, clinging to the dome of City Hall like King Kong, ripping it to shreds! Why?
CAUTION: VANDALISM, REVERSE SEXISM, EXHIBITIONISM
A mob chases me chanting "Lyin' Wayan!" I get dizzy, fall off a bridge, and wake. Then comes REAL trouble!
CAUTION: FATAL FALL
Tony works as a courier in Sarajevo till he inadvertently delivers a bomb. Held by
a warlord for months, he dreams within the dream, and draws those dreams...
CAUTION: GRIM
Looking in a mirror, Julie goes lucid. She changes herself into a man
and pulls her mirror-image through the glass...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
Two kids I grew up with are dead. We carry their still-smoking corpses by the home of George Bush...
CAUTION: BURNT BODIES
Fighting alcoholism, I dream I drink all the booze in a bar, then wake up shaken...
so shaken I reach for the bottles by my bed and drink THEM, then wake up shaken...
and clutch my cat, wondering if I'm still dreaming--will I wake up again?
CAUTION: ALCOHOLIC NIGHTMARE(S)
"I've always dreamed other lives. Other bodies. Other times. Other worlds. I draw my lives..."
I'm a small planet in an eccentric orbit: a one-day summer, a two-day winter. Rest and hibernate, or...
CAUTION: SLACKER ETHIC
I go to work at the factory, clock in, strip naked, and build my... self! Myself as art.
A long slow job, but when my workmates ask, I'm admit I'm happy with me at last...
I panic as statues come alive at the museum, but they're all about energizing a mystical pyramid...
DAY: I see Disney's new film, Encanto. Everything's about Family. You are your role. What is this, 1950?
DREAM: I'm trapped in Encanto's Family. We have powers--but what powers our powers is sibling incest...
CAUTION: DID I MENTION INCEST?
A series of family shadows, as I saw them then. These scenes are NOT literal,
is that clear? But the tensions they show were very real...
CAUTION: GRIM! SEXUAL VIOLENCE, INCEST, MUTILATION
I found myself in a cafe in Amsterdam--or was it Sevilla?--with Kevin, who I knew was dead...
CAUTION: GRIEF
I had an epic dream lasting subjective weeks--a true other life. It wasn't Earth and we weren't human.
I was a teenage lemur, sailing with two friends into unknown waters--a rite of passage. One night,
my friends curled round me, I saw I didn't WANT to pass the test, be declared a woman, marry, and have pups.
I loved my girl friends. In a world lacking the very word, I was groping toward queerdom.
Sailing into unknown waters! "Here be dragons," the old maps say. And they were right...
2600K loads slowly? Try it in parts: 1: HOME, 650K, 2: VOYAGE, 1200K, 3: BACK 750K.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, QUEER TEEN ANGST, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
I'm a nurse pulled through a glowing well to a world ruled by a five-hearted unicorn, who wants me to...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX FANTASIES, LONGING, MELANCHOLIA
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...
Sketches from a San Francisco street music festival where, after a long sleep, I woke up sexually at last...
CAUTION: NYMPHETS, QUEERS, AND OTHER REAL PEOPLE
In my ballet class, we were learning to leap. But I wanted to FLY. So I went outside alone...
I tell the angel teaching me to fly that I'm not ready to go solo yet--
I'm wobbly, the terrain's unknown. He lets go, and I...
On the Night Train out of my small-town life, I meet the town rebel. But she's misplaced her tongue...
CAUTION: PETTING; UNNERVING TONGUE
I was the first woman made High Commissioner of Baseball. One day a team of mutants begs a franchise...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, BAD TEAMWORK, HORNY BEES
I felt like my heart was in my stomach. My friend Lyx opened me up & said "It is." She scolded me for eating it...
CAUTION: URP
I've always loved curves, color, dreams, sex, texture... and planning, too.
So one day I drew 100 black boxes in ink--no color, no curves, no erasure! And then I began to seek...
I'm trying to hump the entire State of California. In public,
too. What brought THIS on? Well, actually, I know...
CAUTION: OBSCENE SITUATION--AND TITLE. OOPS, TOO LATE.
As they lower me into my grave, mourners don't throw dirt but--cottage cheese? I toss it
back, starting a huge foodfight. I climb out to join the fun. Only the poor pastor looks lost...
I meet a wolf who invites me to join Dr Who's pack of sexy Ghost Wolves.
Just one catch nobody mentioned. To be a ghost, you have to...
CAUTION: FLIRTATIOUS WOLVES
It was Christmas and we needed to buy gifts. But the shopping dragged on
and when at last we went to the register, the sales clerk laughed...
Comics character Doctor Blasphemy, on stilts, bares his secret identity:
poet Allen Ginsberg! But who chopped off his missing fingers?
CAUTION: BLOODY FINGERS
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)
I was so lonely the potheads on Haight looked good. I dreamed I had the Golden Key, but under a cheap
sodium streetlamp, ALL my keys looked gold! Then I met true gold: a woman meditating until she shone...
CAUTION: NUDITY, HAIGHT STREET STONERS
Green Day singer Billie Joe hocked a lugie on me in concert. I felt blessed...
CAUTION: EWWW
Two days before 9/11, I dream I'm a child at ground zero, mourning the devastation--and witnessing rebirth.
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...
I'm a digital superhero, rubbing red-orange oil into my fake skin. I have six more
colors of oil to rub in, six more chakras to heal. But first things first!...
A rabbit shaman makes his student drape dead hedgehogs round her neck til she bleeds. How to free her?
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, ABUSIVE MENTOR
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...
Whenever I run out of ballet class to Japanese without asking my classmate Wendy out, I change sex...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
I'm a slave, a scribe in the house of a Captain of the New Aztec Empire, when he brings home a wife...
CAUTION: SLAVE SOCIETY, SEX, SPOUSAL ABUSE/NEGLECT
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 in a restaurant at a round table. Waiters wrap me in hot towels. I laugh "If I were
chilled, I'd love this--but I'm NOT!" I wake to find I am too hot--too many blankets...
I'm in a jungle, making love with various well-endowed spirits...
CAUTION: JUNGLE STEREOTYPES, OVERSIZED ERECTIONS
A telepathic unicorn-lion says my true name is Wayan. And my true species? I'm like him!
I wake, change my name to fit the dream, move to a new city. Near my new house,
my dream-name is scratched into the concrete sidewalk...
A huge white ovoid like a tethered cloud hangs over a city street. We enter it and search for the crew...
A mind-control drug urges her to strangle her loved ones, but
to beat the curse she busies her fluttering hands with bluegrass banjo...
I wake in a hobbit-hole. My love looks worried. What's wrong with me? A badger
takes me to see wizard Sean Connery, who gives me feathers to eat, and I become...
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
I'm chased by spaghetti, snared, sprinkled with parmesan.
My hungry classmates loom, and my best friend says...
My friend Cory's sore back is healed by a dream. So I ask for the same, and get this dream of incest...
CAUTION: KARMA, SEX/NUDITY, INCEST ISSUES
I was an elephant trainer longing to be a star--to win the girl on the flying trapeze. Who's probably straight...
CAUTION: FLIRTING LESBIANS, OR POSSIBLY ELEPHANTS, OR MAYBE LIBRARIANS
Soil turns to air for me; I float in the dark between tree roots
and stones, thinking "If only I could remember my name"...
I’m so sick of irony I decide to get my sense of irony surgically removed and replace it with...
CAUTION: PLAYING WITH FIRE
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'm in World War II, asking a reporter to keep quiet about our secret weapon.
But it's already gone off, melting and distorting the whole cartoon world. It's...
Deep Duck's interview with Jasha the Krelkin goes rogue, as she urges tossing out human habits like... death?
CAUTION: REDWOOD-SPRITE SEX, PEEING ON TREES, DRUNK DUCK
The Mummy chases me, then unwraps his bandages to show the mutilated face of my boyfriend.
"I'm getting out of jail!" he says. Then the phone wakes me. My boyfriend. He says "I'm getting out of..."
CAUTION: CODEPENDENCE, MUTILATION, GUILT AND GRIEF
A library shows me surrealist Jean Arp's sketchbook. One Eschery sketch with repeated focal points is hypnotic.
But they also show me his lunch, and I try to eat it! I fail. Head & gut disagree. Stuck Arp-way...
CAUTION: NEVER EAT 12-YEAR-OLD SUSHI
The State tests my art. I worry they'll stereotype me as another Crumb.
So I tell an absurd lie about our governor. But my joke kinda makes sense...
As Joey's infant daughter Jesse died, her father-in-law woke up 500 miles away and announced, "The baby..."
I had a headache and couldn't sleep. I started drawing, and asked for a cure. And a cartoon angel said...
CAUTION: TANTRUMS, MASTURBATION, JUNKFOOD, ANGELIC SCOLDING
After a summer apart I dream my friend John and I fly hand in hand. Bliss! Strange, he has long hair and no beard...
CAUTION: OFFSTAGE MURDER
I'm a sexy singing beast, the Krelkin, trying to lure the Reading Man out of his Moral Kiosk...
CAUTION: NUDITY, INTERSPECIES FLIRTATION
I dream I go to my NY dentist, but the novocaine sends me into a dream of having dentistry in Tel Aviv!
I 'wake' and my NY dentist explains he can't do me today: sore hands from doing Henry Kissinger...
I was in Hell. My mom was in a cage suspended over lava. The devil
gave me a cruel choice: "Fry up these kittens or let your mom drop!"
CAUTION: CRUELTY
A courtroom hostage-drama where I'm forced to commit... tracheotomy! And then the Gulf War begins...
CAUTION: CARTOON VIOLENCE
I'm watching MTV. Laurie Anderson gets inside my remote control. I try to change channels
and she turns my head into an apple. I grope for a potato peeler, and carve a new mouth...
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
Windsor McCay's dream-comic Little Nemo is gorgeous but plotless & passive. Or is it? Dreamwork is gradual...
Little Nemo's bed gets restless and takes him for a wild ride through town and up onto roofs...
Getting rid of lice was easy. Harder was quelling the gossip and rumors from my co-workers and boss...
CAUTION: A LOUSE OF A BOSS
My lover's face is shadowed and we are never alone together. Things slip from film-noir to open nightmare when...
CAUTION: SEX, DEATH, GUILT
I dreamed I slowly climbed out of guilty longing to an exciting climax on the Escalator of Love...
CAUTION: CARTOON SEX, NUDITY, GENDER POLITICS
A volcano erupts in San Francisco! No human could survive the blast, but one researcher does--what IS he?
Manta Moths pick us off us explorers... or do they? An old scroll spoke of fear leading to transformation...
I'm cartoonist Marjane Satrapi. I passively tag along with friends (and a fiancé I tend to forget)
in the Mission District of San Francisco. But they blunder into real trouble...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
My friend Mark and I climb the Path of Righteousness to the summit where he finds a big red watermelon.
He rolls it down the Path of Righteousness, knocking businessmen aside like bowling pins! Why? Well...
The comics industry degenerates into civil war. We peddle all night to avoid the Marvel...
My "friends" pull me away from the girl of my dreams, push booze & pot at me,
and won't even try to climb the rope to success. But Marvin saves Evel Knievel
from a motorcycle crash. Sounds good--until, ten years later, I hear how Marvin died...
CAUTION: GRIM AFTERMATH
At around one year old, Al dreamed, while in hospital, that he was a merboy
leaping from the sea, trying to figure out how to swim in the air, too...
Four versions of an underwater meeting between lovers, one terrestrial, one marine...
CAUTION: ORAL SEX
I see a shop in Kyoto in the early 1900s. The old woman running it is calm,
with precise movements and sure hands. A voice says "That lady is Igort"...
I was an avian Mr Niceguy with sore knees, till I got some advice from my supposedly extinct big brother...
A shop sells coffee cups covered in tales & creatures begging to be drawn...
A horror film and Rick Veitch's dream-comix provoke a nightmare
warning me that guilt about my dad is wrecking my life...
I work in a witness protection program. We hide the Muppet on the bottom
of an empty swimming pool, hand him a long straw, and fill it with...
My friend Carol and I are carrots. We crawl out of our vegetable bed
through the kitchen window, and end up happily hot-tubbing in soup...
This woman shows me a book of my art. I'm not sure I want to see them--some pieces are from my future...
The full moon rises: I become Weregirl, do the Moondance, and gnaw open the lock on my heart...
CAUTION: MOONING
Aliens take me to meet my soul. It's on a pedestal in a quasi-Roman villa. I'm ashamed to
see my soul's just a tribble. But it sings soulfully, and when happy, it purrs...
I'm three women at once! We marry a unicorn, a goat philosopher,
and a magic talking cat. But cops raid our furry commune...
CAUTION: INTERSPECIES MARRIAGE, TEEN SEX, BAD COPS
I keep feeling I'm a reincarnated rainforest creature just passing for human. When all I want is...
CAUTION: TOBACCO
After Myrna’s husband died, one night she felt him behind her in bed, and he whispered...
Nazis call my simple architectural drawing a social protest, take it at gunpoint,
and toss it in the ovens. The commander mocks me with its ashes...
DREAM: on a Nevada ranch, I'm a were-horse into mares--when I'm human. And when I'm a stallion?
Why, cowgirls! Always date the wrong species--just to be sure of rejection.
NEXT DAY: I let a class of commercial artists critique my dream-comix. Just to be sure of rejection...
CAUTION: FURRYPHILIA, SELF-SABOTAGE
(plus a 2018/8/31 dream by Wayan provoked by Panter's dream art)
Rather than a dream narrative, this is a tour through Gary's common dreamscapes--
forgotten places, empty streets. Or ones you wish were empty...
Inspired by Shaun Tan, I fill a black-paged photo album with 36 improv paintings.
They become a tour of my dreamworld, led by my anima Silky, a literal nightmare...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, WEIRD DREAM IDEAS
My kid and I have mere nubbins where our fingers should be,
but I realize it's a dream--I can grow fingers or absorb them
Mom gave me cookies for my three-year solo spaceflight. Special cookies for both ends of me...
CAUTION: NUDITY, BAD SEX ADVICE
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
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...
Under the surface of my comics panels, a tiny horde is having an orgy. I can't
publish this, it's too embarrassing! Wait a minute. That one is me...
CAUTION: MICRO-ORGY
A doomed, orphaned ottercub meets the last Tasmanian Wolf, who makes a hard choice I couldn't. Or... did I?
CAUTION: BIRTH SCENE (MARSUPIAL/NON-GORY)
Dreams of translucent fairies, centaurs, robots & gnomes prompt me to cartoon
on transparent overlays to show how dreamworlds overlay ours...
I stumble into a bar where the TV stars from my childhood are
drunkenly arguing metaphysics--Howdy Doody, Beany & Cecil, Flipper...
I froze to death trying to climb an icy peak. But I try again, and this time,
no holds barred. Wow, am I selfish! But alive...
Hypnotized in therapy, I saw AT LEAST five competing goals tugging at me like gravity fields.
Naturally I drew them. Come tour the Inner Solar System of our desires...
CAUTION: NUDITY (BODY, HEART, BRAIN, SOUL)
When Perissa, an exhibitionistic centaur, bares her body in a crowded Coliseum,
she also bares a human-supremacist plot...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM
After whining all day that I lost my anima, I dream I'm petting a cat.
Who purrs, and grows, and grows, and purrs "Pet..."
CAUTION: PUSSY TROUBLE
Bums tap on the diner window. I tell them to buzz off, until I really look at
the latest--a shaman dressed as a huge pigeon. He's no panhandler!...
Janet's obsessed with a creepy guy till her pixy friend Kay decides to "knock some sense into her cunt"--literally...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, NASTY LOVE SPELL, PIXIE NUDITY
What if comics panels and layouts weren't so square? I try triangles,
pentagons, hexagons, circles, spirals--and some serious stuff pops out...
CAUTION: IDEAS, OCCASIONAL NUDITY, MENTIONS ABUSE
At thirteen, I dreamed a van crashed right at the spot where my best friend always met me after school.
The next day we went to see what'd happen. I suggested we stand across the road just to be safe...
I botched President Clinton's taco. And on the way home, I fell in the river.
Luckily, Jesse Jackson happened by and pulled me out, restoring my faith in...
A huge spiral nautilus needs healing; its coils are coming undone, and if it dies, all on earth may die with it...
Our neighbors keep dropping by with gifts and favors for our cat.
Why? He'd gained magical powers by amassing 10,000 dead mice...
I'm a Confederate officer. The only way to save my men is to end the war by
pulling the plug at the bottom of the lake! I dive in, fighting a Yankee, who...
A library book with a brutal attack & rape scene has pages stuck together. Why?
Some trollish reader masturbated all over it! Oh. Not an orgasm, a wargasm...
CAUTION: HARSH TOWARD PUTIN (AND HIS AMERICAN BRO)
I'm a telepathic rabbit defending our world from space-laser attack. We do, but do we modernize too much?
CAUTION: IDEAS
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)
A Borges story of a were-tigress provokes a dream of a ranch
crawling with weird were-women. Weird, but I LIKE them...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
The wildcat Rare Bit Fiends slinks out of the hills to stalk and maul
dreamers--until one day she rears up to teach a dream workshop...
I was trapped in a Handmaid's Tale dystopia; I was a mannequin, naked &
helpless. I couldn't even walk. But I hid one rebellious act: I kept a diary...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, CARTOON DYSTOPIA
Is our brain trying to tell us something that, evidently, we haven't heard the last 70 times? Or is the
dream-manufacturing area feeling a little lazy? I have no idea, but here are some of my "classics"...
Julie keeps dreaming that she gives birth to a cat, or a part-cat baby...
CAUTION: NUDITY, BIRTH, UNBIRTH, REBIRTH...
Trapped in elementary school, Julie is forced to study the alphabet
until she declares "I'm a professional cartoonist, goddammit!"...
Night. A mirror-maze of contradictory preachings. But in the secret mermaid pool, I find love.
Then... sphinx-angels war in the air! A war of riddles. Can I, a batwinged devil, make peace?
CAUTION: SEX, NUDITY, MEAN ANGELS, AND ONE HAPPY DEVIL
Turns out you can float in deep space without a helmet.
But there's this weird disturbing smell, like an electrical fire...
All I usually hide, I strip bare, & vice versa. Like that Playboy cartoon with the stockings & gloves--the Femlin!
Behaviorally, too, I reverse all my habits and judgments. Perverse, self-destructive! But my life still works...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY. ALSO, A LOSER SUCCEEDS.
I'm single and feeling shy. So I asked my dreams for an image of my true love, and got...
CAUTION: SEX
I'm a raft guide on a circular river that may just be reincarnation. A girl in my
tour group jumps ship: she dreads the white water of rocky relationships ahead...
CAUTION: METAPHYSICS, SEX, WEAK SOULS...
The posse lost their enemy; reluctantly they asked a tracking detective--me.
They found him where I knew he'd be--from eating my Rolodex cards...
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 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...
A feral mare will only let me ride her if I quit being
a Japanese diplomat and become... a Samurai!
Night. Two moons. I go lucid! Find a knob adjusting the dream's color saturation.
Dial it up--and meet ghosts of pure color, invisible til I luridified...
Alone in my blue room, I heard sax music. Two sunbathers were jamming outside my window...
CAUTION: SEX AND SAX
I take my friend Neil Gaiman to a park where we sculpt a giant horned head. Months later
we collaborate on a graphic novel. The course of the project's full of echoes from the dream...
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 meet my anima downtown. She looks great, but admits she's still healing sexually--
"I over-romanticize." "Oh? Who or what?" "National Geographic!" An odd fixation.
Then I wake & go to work; in a staff-room magazine I find a strange cartoon...
I tried to cartoon a joyful dream but nightmares kept intruding. Finally, aching, I half-slept...
My spirit guide Silky came, and said the obvious, and stretched my sore neck and back...
CAUTION: NUDE ANIMAL DANCE TROUPE
I dreamed I'd made a set of woodblock prints showing a scene from varied times & angles:
my anima Silky, part girl part mare, contemplates another set of prints--famous Zen ones...
Stolen by the Fairy Queen, I'm forced to nurse her great project: creating life! But her synthetic baby is...
The lights go out, the world's ending. Roz tries to make party snacks and keep folks calm. At last
she notices lights out the window. Other buildings seem fine. Is it really the Apocalypse? Or...
Africa. My horse trusted me as we faced lions and fire, but to face the Soul-Board, he must trust himself...
I'm a kid again, gawking at the Space Needle. But a woman stands before it, who no one else can see:
CAUTION: NUDITY, A SEXUAL PERSPECTIVE
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
First a lone image on waking, of a woman cradling a skeleton; ten days later,
a nightmare of spiders swarming out of my toilet, covering me...
Laying my timeline in a Fibonacci spiral, it's clear great changes come in a pattern--
as soon as I've digested the last couple, a new revelation/revolution appears...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, HEAVY ISSUES
I'm on stage. I have to sing. They just stare. I try dancing. Stony silence. At last,
a second me leads me offstage, saying "You can only fail so many times"...
Repeated attempts to move a gigantic, sacred, saucerlike stone all failed; but now,
with the world's biggest cranes, we get it on a truck. It crawls past adoring crowds...
Thirsty deer invade the hall. Children play in the dunes encroaching on the city.
Will those ominous red clouds drop rain? Or sand?
I'm a bike courier. I take a packet of fifty potent dreams
up Dream Street and deliver them to the year 1980...
DREAM: I was a cheetah seeking a book of cheetah rolemodels, but this specist librarian harassed me...
PAINTING: months later, dream forgotten, I painted myself without knowing why as a cheetah stretching...
Two nude women (drawn Wally Wood style) dance ritually in a
forest, summoning a worm-snake-dragon with a ring of fangs...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I'm a married couple--the cook and laundress for an English observatory in 1948.
Why are we testifying to a Labor Party committee that we WANT to be servants? Well...
To avoid being stabbed, I flee the Psychodrama Circus. Wisely--the place explodes!
But it's the filling of the sushi roll that really upsets me...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL MAKI
I wake amnesic in a cabin in Alaska, in a dress printed with self-putdowns.
I track down the wizard who cursed me. He turns me into a swan! Worse?
No! His first curse was on a human being, and now I'm a bird. My mind is free!...
Solve a pictographic riddle and you can fly, shapeshift, work magic!
But someone doesn't want us solving dream-riddles...
Ted died of CO2 poisoning in Hong Kong. His mom dreamed he came to tell her
it was painless. To prove he was real, he told her...
I dreamed a sphinx artist visited humanity and drew the crazy natives. I copied her sketchbook...
CAUTION: NUDITY, PAGANISM, SLACKERISM, ACTUAL IDEAS
I dreamed I had to take a bewildering test on who is allowed in the military. I flunked. So will you...
CAUTION: MOCKS HOMOPHOBES
Kaleidoscopic constellations? No thanks! A nudist town in Italy? Ugh.
Ah, but singing vaudeville in a monk's robe & roller skates...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
My dog and I are abducted by aliens who turn us into cats. We escape & go feral to survive.
How we got back, and what happened along the way, even my own shrink refuses to believe...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUID AND KLEPTOMANIAC BUGS
I was a mermaid trying to find Count Coyote's stolen dreams, so I could marry my human girlfriend...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, LESBIAN MARRIAGE, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
As a kid, my nightmares were of Sesame Street characters. In my teens I graduated to
slasher nightmares and recurring lucid dreams. Alcohol trashed my dreams for years, but
now they're not nightmares--just surreal. Hitler wrecks my sex life! What a spoilsport...
CAUTION: (MOSTLY FRUSTRATED) SEX
I dreamed I checked my neighbor's flat for prowlers; I got shot and fell out a window. The same night
my neighbor dreamt she asked me to check her flat, I got shot and fell out a window; the same night
her best friend dreamt she came by and saw from street level the gunmen and my fall out the window...
CAUTION: VIOLENT ATTACK FROM THREE VIEWPOINTS
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
A 'toon liberation dream. I cartooned a new self and slowly she grew realer, until she ran Disney...
CAUTION: FRANK SINATRA SWEARS
Worldwide drought. I have a mutation making me produce lots of saliva, so to keep
people alive, I drool into their open mouths. Gross, but it's take my drool or die...
CAUTION: UGH
I dreamed that huge nouveau-riche polar bears invaded San Francisco, evicting us locals...
CAUTION: CORRUPTION, URSACIDE, MATH!
We escape tornadoes by fading out and rematerializing in a future dream...
But one of the tornadoes manages to follow us from the old dream to new...
Evicted. Lawsuit. I dream a lawyer sends me a letter full of fox-girls! In East Asia, foxes
mean trouble, but these are friendly--good news is coming! I wake to find we've won a home...
Twenty-four panels of improvised comics in unerasable ink,
letting the shapes and themes in each panel suggest the next...
In Castle Frankenstein, will Mary Shelley wed Elmer Fudd? His two-headed monster has marital advice...
Two witches, maiden and crone, ride a flying monster made of two magically fused trolls.
But I know somehow that the two are really just aspects of a single powerful sorceress...
Night. A London suburb. A UFO big as a city block looms over us. It's seen all over South England. Yet we go blank--
forget! Though not quite--for years after, Steve has recurring dreams. When he tells me one, I recall the same event...
CAUTION: INTENSE UFO EXPERIENCE
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...
A strange creature slunk into our yard, carrying a skunk lunch.
But she dropped her fur coat, and I recognized a kindred spirit...
Masked champions of Good and Evil fight, peeling off layers till they're
elven-thin--what's left to hide? They can't keep stripping forever...
An improvised painting-series exploring my obsession for Utopia--and your deafening silence...
CAUTION: IDEAS, FURRY NUDITY, THAT GOSH-DARN MODERN ABSTRACT ART
I grope through fog to the Vague House. Fog inside, too. Find a stone carved with an Eye of
Horus, and know it's my anger. Find a bigger stone scarab, and know it's my REAL anger...
I'm a flying fox in England. I see a poisoning and call for help. Ugly knockoffs of
Peanuts characters attack me! The real Peanuts gang defeats them; Snoopy drives
the victim to the hospital, saving her. It really is vital to be... authentic.
CAUTION: PUNS
Ever since I was battered I feel like a virgin again: longing, but wary--scared where sex may lead...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
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
God speaks in surreal images from the sky, and I hurry to write down
what God says. But I find I wrote mere squiggles on the page...
After fasting for six days, I dreamed of three spirit helpers who aided my village,
guiding hunters toward game and healing others. But I lost so many loved ones...
CAUTION: SPOUSE MURDERED; CAREER BURNOUT
I must outrun the rising moon so I don't turn into a wolf and
kill my friends, but only a werewolf is swift enough to...
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
At age 90, the first female high-rise steelworker tells me
why she did it--and why she regrets it now...
An art experiment--the only rule is DRAW without preconceptions--
no models, no ideas, no plans, not even dreams. Drawing from the void!
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...
Drew all night in a trance and only learned at dawn what this flirting otter and wolf were trying to tell me...
CAUTION: NUDITY AND SEXUAL THEME
Each spring my mom took us up to Yellow Crane Tower.
One night I dreamed I rode the crane over the city of Wuhan...
My Zen master keeps asking me koans. But every riddle is about insurance
forms. I always reply "I am thirsty." He asks another. It goes on forever...