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...
Edgar Allen Poe confronts his dead girlfriend, who wants to drag him into the grave with her...
CAUTION: HUNGRY GHOST, SEX TALK
Sure I've been through hell, but how the hell did that get me elected archangel? And why's my butt itch?
CAUTION: ITCHY BUTT
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
Hypnotherapy provokes nightmares of body-part shops, secret libelers, and madmen in space...
An old friend's awakening from anorexic asexuality. Puberty at 30? And wait a minute... is she me?
She dreamt Death attacked her but her youngest kids bravely fought back--and died. 3 months later...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I asked my dreams why my back hurt. They told me: pregnancy, marsupial pouches, snapping turtles...
A second me punches me in the breast. I fight back, yelling
"Bad Nancy! Bad Nancy!" Five months later I find a malignancy...
I'm in psychoanalysis. A diagnostic chart maps which areas of my psyche are bad:
nearly all of them. My therapist says "My God, how did your parents raise you?"
The panther in the Jungle Books was really female. I grew up with her cub...
My family has a hidden gene for incest--and griffins.
When I bring the family skeleton from the closet...
CAUTION: RAPE, INCEST
A bee-doctor in the city of Propolopolis diagnoses me as having a rare syndrome, Ambition Denied...
I hide a catgirl behind Japanese screens. We have hot sex now & then--but usually I ignore her...
CAUTION: SEX; NEGLECT
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
A sex-ghost appears in my bed, but when overstimulated,
she tends to fade out. Bad reception!...
CAUTION: SEX
Idiotically, I bet I can escape an atomic bomb on my bike. Maybe if I ignore stoplights...
CAUTION: IRRESPONSIBLE WEAPONS USE
I dream I have sixth and seventh senses--and wake to realize I do! Just denied them, explained them away...
CAUTION: SHAKESPEAREAN HEFT
Quiet Blondie seemed sane enough, especially compared to
her driven, talkative friend Crazy, until...
CAUTION: NUDITY, A LITTLE BLOOD
Flu. Ow, cramps! But that night I dream of a miner's rebellion against our fat-cat boss. Which side am I on?
J.H. dreamt both his mother and Queen Mary appeared in mourning. Within days, both were dying...
I'm analog myself, but in Tibet, I meet a digital shaman whose body's a sort of ...
An dreams a scary woman pulls his guts out and fills him up with brush! He wakes, gets gutted in a feud, and then...
CAUTION: BLOODY VIKINGS!
Caedmon can't sing. But he dreams an angel makes him try. Soon he's the first great English poet and singer...
A bee-doctor in the city of Propolopolis diagnoses me as having a rare syndrome, Ambition Denied...
I had a heart attack--but it faded in minutes! The phone rang. I knew at once my dying mother was gone...
A man learns to hop between time-branches, but like all transportation, this has epidemiological risks...
I'm in a hotel by the Great Salt Lake. Deer roam the halls and lap at the drinking fountain...
Body after body is peeled away revealing truth inside truth...
CAUTION: GROTESQUE
My sister & her new guru tests me psychologically--only it looks like a test to destruction...
CAUTION: EMOTIONAL CRUELTY
The dinner went badly. Power outages, alarming transformations, murderous
minions. Still, I'm here to tell you! So Death is weakening...
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...
I dream I have just six months to live. I go through a dozen phases and moods, preparing for death...
My doctor says (no exam, no tests) "hidden desires inflame you." I'm skeptical--suspect an infection.
Awake, I test both hints--repression and infection. Antibiotics work! I'm still weird--but not sick.
A spot on my elbow triggers a dream of being in a suicide clinic, getting the injection, starting to die. Yet
for two years, I put off having that spot checked! Only after a second warning dream do I go in to find...
An experimental helmet knocks me out. I'm groggy, miserable, till I learn what it did to others...
I learn weird sex positions from an abused elf, have calligraphic orgasms, and then I, uh, turn on my stereo...
CAUTION: SEX, ESP, ANORGASMIA, PAST LIVES, ABUSE ISSUES
I'm the Incredible Hulk, forced to do emergency brain surgery. For the patient's burning from within...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND UNLICENSED MEDICINE
At my mechanic's garage, a child prodigy rebuilds a car engine. Gawking, I nearly plow into the crowd...
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 was a 30ish woman discovering that my chronic pelvic inflammation was from childhood molestation...
CAUTION: MOLESTATION IN DREAM-PAST
I dreamed at least weekly I had to view a slide showing something wrong with my fetus.
I assumed the dreams expressed doubts about motherhood--until my miscarriage...
Coming down with a virus, I dream of a guy who INSISTS we must fight, it's just so FUN...
I'm a film actress, but the producer isn’t happy with my legs, so make-up takes them away to be redone...
I'm a cripple watching a sexy Greek Opera starring Whoopi Goldberg. Then I realize I'm in it...
I'm in the High Plains, at a huge powwow on climate change. This could become, not a new
dustbowl, but a firebowl. As I wake, I find I'm running a fever! And the dream hints what caused it...
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...
The terror of Navy breakfast, the joy of filterfeeding,
how to marry pudding, and a sniper lunch with kisses...
Comics character Doctor Blasphemy, on stilts, bares his secret identity:
poet Allen Ginsberg! But who chopped off his missing fingers?
CAUTION: BLOODY FINGERS
Night. Broken metal sculptures, a welder too horny to weld safely, and a steel panther longing to be whole and loved...
CAUTION: KINKY SCULPTUROPHILIA
A young woman and I swing one another into the air. I asked her to swing me more slowly and regularly...
A rabbit shaman makes his student drape dead hedgehogs round her neck til she bleeds. How to free her?
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, ABUSIVE MENTOR
Forced into a duel, I let my spirit fight for me using Boomerang Blades. But my
enemy becomes giant floating sticky lips! My spirit finds incarnation confusing...
In the park, long lines of worshipers wait to meet a guru. But I'm naked, so I hide in the reeds...
CAUTION: NUDE SUNBATHING
A poor planet with one city. Urban technocrats and hick ecologists have conflicting development models...
CAUTION: TOO REAL TO BE FUN
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
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 asked my dreams "should I return to school?" They replied with this bizarre tale of sabotage...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE TO DUMB INSTRUMENTS
In the hills above a polluted shore, I find hidden valleys with huge rare trees, and realize it's my choice...
I admire a baby, and talk the tired mother into washing it. I go get some
clean baby clothes and return to find she's roasting her baby in the oven...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, DENIAL
I interview my own metabolism. Trouble in Cellville! I've got strikers and usurpers. But at least no invaders...
Jill, pregnant, got a high fever. She dreamt her child's soul was locked out of the house. That fetus died.
Jill, pregnant again, got a high fever, but dreamt a chorus of children happily sang. That fetus lived...
DAY: I find old photos showing my dad ogled my sister, the Lee girls, and teens he met at the beach.
DREAM: Juana Lee wants to fire a rocket launcher--indoors. The house'll burn! But she won't relent...
CAUTION: INCESTUOUS & PEDOPHILIC DAD-VIBES
I know we will cross the water surrounding the heart of Jerusalem, but not yet...
My mom hires a therapist who really goes for my throat! Why is she so desperate to make me lose my...
CAUTION: OVER-THE-TOP CONFRONTATION
A volcano erupts in San Francisco! No human could survive the blast, but one researcher does--what IS he?
Jaguar Mask: a were-jaguar stuck in human form asks me to sew a new jaguar face on."But won't it hurt?...
Martian Airlock: I'm suitless on Mars. Freezing, choking, I dive into an airlock & slam the switch--but it's sabotaged...
I'm a kid imprisoned in an empty stone castle. Squeeze through a stone slit, and prepare to drop ten feet
down the face of a great stone gate. But I go lucid, and my dream and waking body-senses conflict...
I'm in a tribe of post-Crash kids with psychic powers, trying to keep nukes from rising again...
CAUTION: CHILD SOLDIERS
I was an avian Mr Niceguy with sore knees, till I got some advice from my supposedly extinct big brother...
My dad's new wife is a collie. Naturally, she wants a prosthetic arm. But she has no site to bind it to...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, LEERING BUSINESSMAN, DOG WIFE
Two moons rise. From one unpeels a sort of rind; on it I see the future
tracks of these moons' shadows and tidal sway on Earth, predicting ...
A horror film and Rick Veitch's dream-comix provoke a nightmare
warning me that guilt about my dad is wrecking my life...
DAY: I write, exploring my jealousy toward my wife, though I know she's not cheating on me.
DREAM: Doctors remove my spleen and wake it up! Now my spleen is out to do me in...
Mythic creatures round a woodland pool want to heal a businessman. Do too many cooks spoil the soup?
My best friend and I qualify for new bodies. The new me is taller, but poor Ken may take years adjusting to his new...
At a party, Nietzsche told a young woman "my hand was transparent as glass;
and a fat toad sat on my hand. I felt compelled to swallow it, and did..."
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM, CREEPY FOLLOW-UP
My sister Miriel asks me to ask my dreams if it's safe for her to get cataracts removed.
I find myself in her body, biking at night--near-blind. Surgery has risks, but this is riskier!
1: I sketch two deer-girls making videos. 2: I pull a man's nose off, and milk the scene for drama before...
3: My old boss is convicted of murder! 4: I wake and two friends interpret #3 as "Overwork is killing you..."
I wake again. My dream-notebook's blank. No friends here; their interpretation was a dream too....
CAUTION: NUDE DEER
I always thought learning no one's out to get me would be a
good thing. But No One turns out to be a deadly opponent...
My sister & I swim round a weirdly shrunken Pacific. Near Fiji, we blunder too close to the drain...
In a grassy depression, a small animal is thrashing. Death-throes? No. Calisthenics!
But not under the animal's control. Someone's testing...
I dream my theatre friends are particles dancing inside an atomic nucleus--
particles that reveal their character, motivations and power. And I'm one too...
Malaria nearly kills a talented young artist; he must retrain from scratch. Why? Well, he's not exactly himself...
Ann had inflamed ovaries and faced surgery. She asked her dreams for a second opinion. She dreamt of voices and images saying
"there's plenty of time for all this." She bathed peacefully in a river, meditated, gave easy birth to an infant, climbed a ladder to
her law degree. She woke cured. Her next doctor said "you must've been misdiagnosed; you just thought you were in pain."
CAUTION: SEXIST GASLIGHTING
A hypnotist elicits a personality inside me who says he obliges my paranoia by giving me weird luck...
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...
A dream that'd explain why I quit taking Western medicines--
(and why haven't you?) Only I didn't dream it. Just lived it.
A timetraveler shows me a hotspring shrunk to a quarter of its old flow.
Valves? Pipes? Or drought, from climate change? This IS the future.
A day later, a local main breaks, and our water flow shrinks to a quarter of normal...
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
After weeks of headaches I dream of a fatal, mosquito-borne plague.
Humanity looks doomed till my friends devise a folk remedy...
An itchy patient of mine insists he's turning into a four-
headed, man-eating plesiosaur. He left one thing out...
Poison takes many forms, from attitudes to environmental by-products to actions done deliberately...
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
DREAM: our car's been acting funny. Turns out it's a severe electrical drain.
NEXT DAY: my housemate discovers what's been making our car act funny...
Captain Kirk (Starfleet, retired) saves us all from terrorists at a powerplant, but he forgot something...
We were looking at our three-pound premature baby girl. Though tiny she was bright-eyed, active, perfect...
DAY: In yoga class, a sexist teacher and angry student don't question assumptions I know are false...
DREAMS: I flee sexy but underage Easter bunnies, fox-girl marathoners, a witch and a wolf in love...
and a horde of single girls of all ages & species! I run away, because MY problematic assumption is...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, REVERSE SEXISM
M. Teste, 1830-1848, and Maurice Macario, early 1850s? four dreams predicting illness
Dog bites doctor's leg. Snake bites scholar's chest. Apoplexy kills a
government minister. Tonsillitis flattens a sleep and dream researcher...
I'm shown a crystal egg with a model of my mind in it. The mapping is unmistakable. How embarrassing!:
I asked my dreams why I had no more sexual desire for my rage-prone boyfriend. I dream
a nature show says "Rabid dogs can't be cured" and shows the horrible wounds they inflict...
CAUTION: THERAPIST TRIVIALIZES URGENT DREAM-WARNING
Calmly, I watch a girl trapped in a lab try to escape, and die; and watch a man lose his head to a hungry thing...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
The Rem Road I climb every night, from flesh to spirit, earth to sky. Though tonight, all these
wounded skateboarders worry me! And my own bruises say I overdid it in contact improv today...
I'm a circus tiger, then a performing shark. One day, I block my human partner's high dive... Why?
I ask my dreams how to find love. I dream of a 1920s bohemian girl
teasing stuffy folk. But her pranks turn dangerous, then deadly...
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...
Infected glass-cuts scar the vegan alligators in the park. As part of a cleanup, I'm told to EAT one...
I am given a dehydrated package of dried snake to insert in my vagina. Inside it will unfold and come to life...
CAUTION: KIDS, DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
I bike round the ring of women on the stage. Oracles! Whoever speaks, levitates.
One advises me, but I can't act on it--too ill. "Gotta heal!" I blurt. My own oracle..
I spy on a girl learning magic in a quilted ditch. She lets me join her telekinesis lesson! Can my mind move a balloon?
Then I tour a witch-world where normality's shameful. One kid's not witch or normal--he keeps turning into Donald Duck!
CAUTION: DISNEY = DISABILITY?
A sacred starfish piloting a Cessna plane survives a crash. But can it survive a boy's clumsy rescue efforts?
Thirsty deer invade the hall. Children play in the dunes encroaching on the city.
Will those ominous red clouds drop rain? Or sand?
A friend stockpiling for Armageddon shows me what I thought
was lust is really a need to learn... pelvic anatomy? Why?
CAUTION: NUDITY; LANGUAGE; WE FIND OUT WHY
An alien is taking over our world, and I feel so helpless that even when I wake I want to just forget the dream...
My wound's taped up, but hurts bad. I peel off the bandage. Nothing! Gone. So I check my other body...
High up a scaffold, I was beating the chaff off a huge seed, unable to stop. I was beating my own heart...
In 1985 I was flooded with nightmares about heads and necks. They had an unparalleled intensity...
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....
Three men follow me. But they're not men; they fly. They shapeshift into teenage archeologists...
then into pure energy-beings! "We don't care about you; we're watching another entity
you let into your dreams." Wait--I've got FOUR foreign entities stalking through my psyche?
CAUTION: ALARMING, IF TRUE
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...
I cling alone to the cliffs of Lands End, so when the tsunami hits,
I survive. Had I been in the low, crowded Sunset district I'd be dead...
A "friend" gives me her TV. No wonder! Turns out it's haunted
by a small-minded devil who cheats on all his deals...
I'm climbing a tower, as my dad, Apollo, drunk, throws bottles at me from the top, breaking bones...
CAUTION: DENIAL ABOUT ALCOHOLISM
I dream we're on a miserable camping trip. So why, when I wake,
do I think it's a diagnostic dream? It's that triple pun...
My family home's invaded by ancient Egyptian architects. So
I put on my unicorn mask and eavesdrop on their plans...
My art mentors turn on me! My mom the painter says I'm genetically inferior,
and then my art teacher Verity sits on my head (ow!) and chants...
My friend Verity's given a beautiful set of wings. I'm envious until I consider what angel wings imply...
In a camp, women wove mats. I was tempted to try. But it was
months before I learned what they'd really been weaving..
On a gene-engineered world, the Prime Minister tries to assassinate
the Bug Princess by tricking a well-meaning smartlawn...
Dry noodles shatter when bent. Wait, not noodles--they have auras! Feel like me--parts of me? Oh!
These aren't noodles or strands of my being. I'm not this brittle. They're relatives!
A friend who's fought lymphoma invites me to sleep in a cave, but I fear a rattlesnake will bite me...
I have a tummy ache. Our local wizard says "no wonder, with fascists occupying your colon"...
CAUTION: TREATMENT NOT A.M.A.-APPROVED
I'm a wizard's horse, trying to warn him about a toxic spell on a roadside corpse...
Wake into a second dream, but try to return to being a dream-mare and warn my rider...
And then wake to realize my Nightmare was warning about a home-renovation project!
A man dreamed he was the River Xanthus at Troy. I interpreted it to mean he'd bleed for years, but not die of it...
I dream I meet my headaches! An ascetic yogi who punishes jokers, flirts and cynics for worldliness...