My hometown floods. I swim after some strange fish and find
a scientific community where a scaled baby tells me who I am...
Agassiz, faced with a fossil he had to crack open, was unsure where to strike.
But for three nights he dreamed...
The jeweled fish over San Francisco grew and grew
until it landed and the crew told me the secret code...
Aristotle keeps marrying my friends and fucking them up. So I challenge Mr. Logic to a shamanic duel...
CAUTION: THE F-WORD. OOPS, TOO LATE! LESBIAN FISH, TOO.
My abstract sculpture just got fishier and fishier, til it grew these big red lips...
This picture does not actually contain any authentic boston beans, just Hieronymus Boschton b...
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
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
Not a dream image, as far as I can recall. Just looked like it should be...
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 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...
My friend Zooop taught me to crayon onto heated paper--it's vivid, dreamlike...
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 co-worker Daphne is snappish and stressed. She meditates, seeking the cause,
and becomes a half-newt-half-koi in a giant fishbowl. Up shambles a curious AI...
1941. My dad and I are denounced to the SS. We're put in with monsters; I'm a snake or fish myself.
But the Nazis become a photo album, I go to a memorial, I cry, it's 1947, peace...
CAUTION: HOLOCAUST MEMORIES
A self-portrait, or it was going to be, till the songbird and fish upstaged me...
by Gala Dalí 1943? painted by Salvador Dalí 1944; a supposedly instantaneous dream.
Dalí's wife Gala naps, but a bee wakes her--and her dream instantly magnifies
bee into tigers! After all, both have fur, sharp bits, black & gold stripes...
CAUTION: BREASTS; BAD DREAM THEORIES.
I'm in a small pond. A monster goldfish stalks me. I seem trapped in place, and
wake in panic, sheets drenched--to find my pet goldfish gasping on the floor...
I learn to fly, but keep it quiet. Yet aliens still find out, and tell me a truth I didn't want to know...
I dreamed living in a body of flesh is like being trapped on a sinking cruise ship...
CAUTION: NUDITY (but she's just crying, not giving that guy a blowjob, okay?)
DREAM: Landsmen betray their mermaid lovers in a harbor full of towers that seem tilted and broken from under the sea.
NEXT MORNING: My boss asks me to track down a new translation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.
AFTERNOON: I find a book on IQ tests that include spatial questions full of broken geometric shapes--familiar shapes...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
A mysterious "Führer" hypnotized all my companions. So I become a human-sized falcon and hunt him...
I had a dream I was climbing up a bunch of tiny shanty buildings and I got stuck. There was a wall full of
giant Koi Betta fish I couldn't climb across, and when I looked down, I could only see the top of the sky...
My little son accidentally tears the tail off our goldfish. The wound
looks vaginal. The fish, moaning in pain, turns into my daughter...
I'm talking to a friend while waiting in line, when a huge fish appears. It turns into an equally huge snake...
On my 45th birthday, at the end of my eight-year dream-art project, I dream of a women's rite
turning scraps of chewed flesh into a whole fish I offer to the fishbowl in the heart of the Vatican...
I catch a magical fish and let it go. A friend and I consider higher learning--and we don't mean academia.
My friend lays a lotus in a chair on the beach. A man baptises in sunset water, shining like a certain fish...
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 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
A cranky nun wants fish. Ilarya, the monastery's cook, sets out to buy one--a long walk, and unsafe after dark.
So Ilarya asks the sun to halt! She buys her fish, cooks, feeds her patient, and forgets to tell it to set...
CAUTION: PETTY, GOOFY, COMMUNITY-BAFFLING MIRACLE
Sybelle & I climbed the cathedral spire. Bravely she kissed the monstrous guardian, exhaling
blue light. My own challenge was to leap across an abyss, under the luminous eye of God...
I'm the first tuna to get a scholarship to Stanford.
Naturally I sign up for a course in Inuit Meditation...
Mistress Abbot dreams if she eats a jackfish her child will be great. Next morning one swims into her waterbucket...
My guide to the archeological site was veiled, but soon she revealed her scales
and gills. A little girl led a procession in, to reconsecrate the Temple of Isis...
"Freedom is a gift you give yourself." But it doesn't always involve seahorses or babycarriages covered in quills...
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
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
DAY: I read an exposé on "Senoi dreamwork"--the Malaysian Senoi people disavow it. Some white guy just made it up!
DREAM: I'm a dream researcher in Malaysia. A manta-squid attacks! Now the "Senoi" focus on my needs makes sense...
CAUTION: TENTACLE-RAPE ATTEMPT
DREAM: Gay boys, underage girls & my own sister all mock me, sure I want their forbidden sexual fruit
at a beach where grotesque trees make their own precipitation and salt-dunes spill into saturated, toxic brine...
NEXT DAY: I read Margaret Atwood's The Salt Garden--sex, guilt, and grotesque trees in saturated, toxic brine.
CAUTION: SEXUAL GUILT, EXHIBITIONIST TWEENS, APPARENT E.S.P.
Erica dreams that during a protest she's caught in a radioactive flood...
Michael dreams a nuclear forcefield makes his fingertips explode and congeal into weird knobs...
Joanne dreams she meets nuclear mutants with curling black nails great for peeling potatoes...
Scott dreams the world goes silent and white, bleaching out. His hands dissolve...
Patches the kitten, my alter ego, paws at flying fish who are also toast-slices...
I'm a circus tiger, then a performing shark. One day, I block my human partner's high dive... Why?
I'm in a crowd as a man lectures about sharks. He points at me and asks "Shall I throw him in with...?"
At the beach, I see a swim team wading in. One girl teases a laggard wader,
not seeing her huge scar. She says "I won't swim till the shark-risk is mapped"...
An version of the Egyptian Ship of the Sun with a mutant Osiris at the helm,
in a monster-infested sea: image of the spark of consciousness in a sea of...
The pier jutting into the sea of dreams has an 8th chakra at the end, where a lonely woman fishes for, um, sole...
Skimming over the lake on surface tension as two sharks prowl beneath, I'm not sure who's fishing for whom...
Dead fish in a poisoned stream, dead kittens in a pit...
and advice from the woman who revives them with a touch.
I'm in Houston, gawking at giant starfishy towers looming through the smog. Their shapes are familiar...
I'm carried off by a crane to meet birdfish, singing sheep, fell-spirits, mad shopkeepers and devil-bulls...
She tells me there's a stream under the floor, upstairs. Peel back the carpet, pry up the boards. An icy creek.
Trout. She brings me a fishing rod. But the fish say they're too young to die. I feel such guilt and grief...
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
The home we were to stay in was on fire. The next had a living room
that was shallow water, wall to wall, where turquoise fish swam...
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...
A cowgirl is driving us in circles round the dusty parking lot, fleeing the air-sharks... or is she?
In a jungle river, I fish for giant kite-bass, then relax and have a drink. A lot of very drunk
porpoises dance on the bar. I worry their skin will dry out. Alcohol is so dehydrating!
After his dad's death, a boy dreams he's an orphan facing cannibal witches--every night! Therapy helps;
his recurring dreams shift to a manhunt for a criminal who hides on the ceiling. The dreams shift again, to
a tiger hunt. That is, the tiger hunts you. The boy jumps in the sea. Swimming with sharks...
CAUTION: INTENSE NIGHTMARES, PARENTAL LOSS
My job's to feed the wolves downtown with the heads of tuna-human hybrids; I mystify the pack
with a blend of skating, ballet and rope tricks. Wait, could this work on scary humans, too?
Zebra emerge from the lake. They glide as if swimming, and the air has an odd shimmer; did they bring the depths
along? They seem to be having great fun ducking branches and vaulting brambles. Such agility and grace!