Why'd I have to get my big inspiration deep in a lake
in the Land of the Lizard People high in the Andes?
I dream cartoonist Al Capp switched late in life to painting horses in a weird expressive style;
I wake, write the dream, rush to work to find a painting of horses in a weird expressive style
CAUTION: CAUSTIC TO E.S.P. DENIERS
I'm one of a trio of swimmers in a pool, making out--under the surface only. Must we hide?
I'm near Shiprock with a flying-saucer girl who sees the nearby crags and far snowy peaks
as all the same size and distance... how to teach perspective?
CAUTION: SKINNYDIPPING, GROPING
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!...
Four guys plot to enslave my girl and kill me; I have lucid powers, and kill them instead.
My girlfriend Attahuah gets poisoned, but...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, DECEIT
I keep dreaming of awkward but successful transitions into new life, and paint them all in one landscape...
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?
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'm a cheetah working as a baker in Coconino County, Arizona, haunted by Krazy Kat...
We desert-hobbits break through to a world of jungle giants who
see differently from us. Will they believe us about the UFOs?
A gang of slavers catch my family. I flee on a bike but it breaks down. Stranded. Replay! This time I have a gun...
CAUTION: GANG, SHOOTING
I'm in the bed of a pickup truck crossing Sonora, insisting to a farmworker "Deserts have spiritual value..."
I dreamed our physician said our son had diphtheria. When I woke, we found only a tiny
white spot in his throat. But by the time the doctor arrived...
CECY: In a desert, a thirsty dog jumps out of a tree--the first known dog suicide...
WAYAN: I'm a talking dog. Our owner denies us enough water, so we protest...
In the middle of Nowhere Desert, I meet a telepathic unicorn who's stuck with a false safety-tag...
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...
My bed floats high over southwest Morocco. Giant birds come fly lazily with me,
croaking "Faster, faster!" But I'm busy with anti-desert eco-planning...
I'm a guard on a train crossing the desert who falls in love with a refugee fox-girl,
despite heavy specist peer-pressure and the archaic Railway Code...
CAUTION: NUDE FOX
My anima sends me on peculiar journeys--smoke rings, islands, conversations with a stone--
but at last it's just us. She has something more she wants to teach me. On that bed...
CAUTION: ASTRAL COME-ON
I dreamed I returned to a childhood park and found mostly ruin. But one magical thing survived...
In a Hopi underworld, I find even lucid dreaming can't cure guilt and grief over losses yet to come...
People ride inside two levitating arms that shake hands
above a desert. Do the insiders know what the deal is?
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 cross the Mushroom Desert, meet a blue-tailed squirrel & a horse-size dog, then zombie-vampire suburbanites.
NEXT DAY: an artist sends me a flyer with a new dream painting--a huge dog whose fur-patterns depict a horse...
CAUTION: SYNCHRONICITY
My earliest memory's a recurring dream: I'm a wild horse near Shiprock, recurrently dreaming
that I'm a human child! The two lives alternated for years, each a dream to the other...
We search for exoplanets whose stats are Earthlike. But mass, chemistry, warmth and air do not a biosphere make!
Geography alone--the mere placement of lands and seas--can also make a world lush or barren...
CAUTION: CENTAUR BARBIE NUDITY
The children of some castaways refuse to go 'home': to them, this shore IS home. So what won't I leave?
In a general store on a High Plains rez, I find two surreal collaged postcards. If only
this were a dream they'd qualify for the World Dream Bank, but sadly, it isn't. Right?
CAUTION: STUPID, STUPID CONSCIOUS!
I dreamt an epic poem on a sinister ruined city now home
only to reptiles. I woke with at least a hundred lines, but...
Wayan: a mother mountain lion got quantum-entangled with farm animals, exhausting her...
Xanthe: my dogs hurt this lion and I had to tend and calm it all night, exhausting ME...
I stood in the desert preparing for a contest with a man and his snake. But he cheated! Then my cat Lulu intervened...
Mars as it will be 1000 years from now, terraformed. A guided tour with photos...
God offers gifts to pilgrims, so my sister enters his door. Fierce light shoots out...
From the punk clubs of Frisco to the Safeways of Si Valley to the vermilion sands of Mars,
Silky the were-nightmare fights for the Misfits against every cliche in science fiction...
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...
A museum sketch of Navaho horses who got me hot--teaching
teenage me that my sexual orientation wasn't (only) human...
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
A poem linking the dawn of digital art to early, tinny phonographs, cranky film cameras...
CAUTION: IDEAS
I go lucid and drive my bed to the Nevada desert where I see my next million years. And so far, it’s been true...
A model of a moon, half-Europa, half-Mars, with (intelligent?) life in seas under a skin of ice...
I'm in a movie version of prehistoric Baja California, mining nuggets that howl,
when pterodactyl-worshiping pirates glide in trying to snatch our ore...
Age 7 to 11, I often dreamt I inhabited a consistent geography of mountains & deserts. I was an adult of dark
complexion in non-European clothes; I spoke a tongue (and read a script) that I didn't recognize when awake...
CAUTION: ADULT DRUG EXPERIMENT; PAST LIFE MEMORY?
Cultists must wear a burqa and confess their sins daily. So why's their beach such a pickup scene?
CAUTION: NUDITY UNDER FISHNETS
The child who runs with wild horses finds the secret spy-room of dreams! But no one's watching...
At a museum, a weird art project shows me how observing and documenting life
in art can improve that life--just from being taken seriously...
A giantess strides across the desert. The Great White Hunter fires his elephant gun,
but the books she's made of stop his bullets. I think I'll join the Queen Kong Library...
I'm a kid in Nevada around 1950, learning that both my folks are lone wolves who gave me a genetic double dose...
CAUTION: RACIAL THEORY ABOUT... LIBERTARIANS?
In a Scythian church, a painting says:
"Little St Bridget was bound so hard that when they released her she flew"...
My sister and I are runaways, developing psychic powers.
A cult of fish-selling witches wants to use us...
CAUTION: SIBLING INCEST, SPELL ABUSE
I meet a 140-year-old hermit in her black chadoor,
skateboarding down a hill near her sacred dream-spring...
An Arab shows me a stone he calls a book, and a prophetic shell that warns of a flood rushing toward us...
First, suck up 90% of Earth's seas. Now wait 90,000 years for life to adapt. The continents are now
Tibetan plateaus above steamy new Deeps, ruled by giant parrots, ravens and otters...
My sister's beautiful; I'm plain. When she's murdered, I ride into the Interface Desert, where worlds meet...
In a desert, I find a tree with red purselike pods. But they all seem empty,
and I know they should each contain a vivid yellow snake...
As I recalled what I'd dreamed the night before, a snake, I looked down and saw my foot was poised to come down on...
In a desert crawling with aliens who can absorb your mind, I propose a truce, and gain...
Drawn on a trip to the Southwest as a kid. Felt like I'd lived there in a past life. Or I would in a future life...
Thutmoses napped in the shade under the Great Sphinx--then buried to the neck in sand.
The resident sun-god complained of the sand; "the throne is yours if you'll clear it off..."
Navaho country felt like home--the land, the art, the animals, the language. Trapped in suburbia, I drew...
My friend Tanya tries hard to save her marriage, but in her dreams Isidora Duncan,
Carl Jung, even the gods themselves warn her to face their deep incompatibility...
I dreamed I was the Spirit of Mexico: a winged coyote flying around Sonora howling at the moon...
Tour a rugged, scenic moon with air and water in deep canyons sheltering a dozen intelligent species
CAUTION: ANARCHISM, NUDITY, SCIENCE
What the world looks like when you have environmental illness, like me...
A trail toward Freedom has extra markers, for it's three trails, superimposed! Not all the cues are for us...
We were inseparable: the tiger, the fox, and the wolf.
Together our magic lit up the darkness around us, until...
Changelings invade our orbital station, selling drugs, kidnapping teachers--but Constable
Odo can handle that. What's weird are the beans pouring out of that kid's tuba...
I dreamed of a unicorn rearing in the desert. I wanted to sculpt it and applied to Burning Man
but was rejected. So I sculpted the unicorn anyway, out of playa mud. It was a hit...
A road trip through New Mexico mutates into a tour of my relationship disasters...
Night. The Nile; the Pyramids on one bank; minarets and domes on the other.
But if the dream's comparing antiquity to modernity... which does it condemn?