A child dreamer and two different kinds of cyborg must cooperate
to free the hostages imprisoned under San Francisco Bay...
I go to a lucid-dreaming party, meet the Child who Dreams the World, and find the Body under the Bed...
After the death of her 5-year-old, Adela dreams Alexandrina says "Don't be sad, I'll come back." Eight
months later Adela bears a child identical to the dead girl--and she recalls things Alexandrina saw...
Are dreams really so ephemeral? Lewis Carroll, who built the Alice books from dream-shards, wasn't so sure...
I was always the weakest magic-worker I knew. But when demons threatened my grandchild...
At an anarchist fair in San Francisco, a 13-year-old punkette genius sings some shocking advice to me...
A child prodigy stands out in a chorus line of waterdancers. Her body is a patchwork of young & old...
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
I'm a parade route. A group of child artists walks all over me. But their soles are bare, so I don't mind...
A plumber's daughter brings home a sick marsh bird and tries to save it...
She dreamt Death attacked her but her youngest kids bravely fought back--and died. 3 months later...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
An old actor tells me "I met Hitler when we were both babies.
I knew what was coming so I wanted to kill him, but then I'd BE him..."
Allied submarines attack the giant Nazi toddler who's hunting us with sonar, occupying my playroom...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND GUILT
I'm a schoolkid again, fleeing an eruption of sewage. We escape in a balloon.
Earth is beautiful, but I know this flood of shit will drown the whole world...
I meet a sex-kitten in the Underground Cartoonists' Bar, but her body language makes no sense to me...
CAUTION: UNDERAGE FLIRTATION... OR IS IT?
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
A black beetle insists I'm not needed or at home in the human world; my lifework is elsewhere...
Two DC-6s catch burn over New York. Me? I'm a naked child in a Babylonian temple in Jersey...
My son Billie, his Navy uniform soaking wet, cried "Oh, Mom--it's so terrible!"
and shrank into a baby again as I held him...
CAUTION: EXPLOSION
A bizarre marathon, and the Princess is the prize. But she doesn't WANT to be, so she sets out...
CAUTION: BLOODY BIRD
A young Tibetan boy approached me with his arms full of the shapes I had been working on for
the past week. To my delight I found the material, textures and colors I had been searching for...
My friend F. saw a child whose every move was controlled by a weird figure behind her...
A man obsessed with blood and death disturbs me, but I have to admit I share his interests...
Next the blood comes home; a surgeon wants to flay my tongue...
Next, witch-children rebel against a bloody flossing ritual and fly away on broomsticks...
Spies kidnap a girl and move her soul into a madwoman's body.
Can she survive? Recover? Thrive? The TV dance show helps...
At the beach, a deaf boy with a strong aura asks "Are you here for the coin?"
He buries horse skeletons in the sand; the bones are carved with symbols...
A woman urged her friend to give her daughter a musical education. Without hearing this, the child went hunting for...
I keep dreaming of awkward but successful transitions into new life, and paint them all in one landscape...
Reaching into her coat pockets, my sister pulls out fistfuls of bottlecaps.
Silly dream! Then my sister visits. Reaching into her coat pockets...
A little bowling prodigy bothers an adult team. So one sits in his lane, daring him to bowl at
her crotch. He's used to kids taunting him, but what do you do when grownups gang up?
CAUTION: SEXUAL SHAMING OF CHILD
I was at school, walking through the gate to the playing fields, when a boy crashed into me...
I dreamed my toddler son followed two Boy Scouts down to the creek, and drowned. That morning, on my curb, two...
Women who run with the wolves? Ha! In Mongolia, the only ones who can beat lightning-demons are...
I found myself in childhood again, in a village where my dad was building a bridge. A man in a guard's
uniform introduced himself as C--. Awake I could recall no such person, but research revealed...
Dreams warning of mania and paralyzing shame alternate with calm dreams of life and growth...
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
I was led into the future, where all the buffalo disappeared, to meet a frail old man by a ranch house...
Cleo the talking kitten denies being a cat, so I invent Wolf-N-Puma Chow!
Must I play similar games to nourish that other feral critter... me?
I was at the beach with my friends. It was fun. But gradually they were
laughing at me, not with me. Then they picked up burning sticks...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
Malevolent artwork terrorizes my baby and me! What's to be done?...
A glowing sentient autistic button falls in love with a small boy; then I try
to make two friends change orientation and fall in love by singing 'Molly Malone'...
CAUTION: JUST... WRONG
I don't even notice the car until it's hit me and I'm dead. Now I have to lie here
forever, even though I know it's a dream. But if you die in a dream, you die...
DAY: I thorn-puncture my hands while gardening, and write stupid poetry about it...
EVE: I watch Little Darlings, a teen sex farce that turns weirdly serious...
DREAM: a Mysterious Pussy guards us librarians from stinky alien dinosaurs...
CAUTION: SEXUAL INNUENDO???
I'm an alien exchange student in Palo Alto High School. I get stared at--they wear clothes, they don't fly...
CAUTION: FELINE NUDITY
I was the new girl among rich students, then an adult among snobs, then a girl again--always craving freedom...
A girl with a magic swimsuit flashes me, as her Iranian fundamentalist aunt glares from beyond the veil...
CAUTION: NUDITY? OR ILLUSION?
A mass breakout of baby chicks. They say "Now we know how, so we'll
go where we choose." And maybe it's about more than chickens...
I meet a half-angel half-mortal child, fruit of an illicit affair. Constantly growing pinfeathers,
but never mastering flight; ageless, but unable to grow up; at home neither in Heaven nor Earth...
CAUTION: 19TH-CENTURY VERBOSITY
At a beach, a mob of kids stage an intricate practical joke full of coordinated “accidents.” How many of the jokers knew the end was death?
CAUTION: MALICE
I tour a middle school paralyzed by delinquents, and learn this is normal now...
a 2015 painting weaving seven dreams (2014/5/4, 6/9, 7/1 & 9/4; 2015/5/23, 6/26 & 8/25)
A portrait of Clotho, the Greek Fate who spins our life-threads, by a pool woven of my dreams from this time...
Clowns have a point system like chess masters, & abuse their apprentices to get ahead,
just like capitalism--but I think this dream's about the suppression of magic...
CAUTION: CHILD-CLOWN ABUSE
A castle with horse statues in the moat. Only... one of them is alive! He's my lover...
CAUTION: EVERY SEX TABOO YOU CAN THINK OF
In the dream-corridor of the many doors, I meet
my husband, my lover, and my daughter...
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
I find myself in a church-like setting. Above me, couples in 18th century dress dance joyfully.
It provides a wonderful, ‘curious’ moment to pause and reflect... before my journey must continue.
I’m an Asian kid in Pacifica, California. My parents annoy me, so I offer them for sale on Craigslist. A cop appears...
A crane came and spoke to me, reassuring me "I'll be back" even as a great fire burned it. It returned
as a white butterfly. Next morning, as we played hide and go seek, I shut my eyes and counted to...
CAUTION: CIVILIANS MASSACRED
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?
My little sisters tell the detectives, "Daddy's ghost has
a message for you" but at first they don't listen...
Croesus dreamt his heir Atys was slain by an iron blade; he locked them all in the armory. But Atys went
hunting; his guard Adrastus's spear went astray. Did Fate kill Atys, or superstition rattling poor Adrastus?
After a nature show on bears and a horror-parody film, I dream of a man and a demon toddler
in a sick relationship. At least it sickens all of us...
CAUTION: DEVIL AND PEDOPHILE: WHO'S CORRUPTING WHO?
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
I was a small boy living on Oahu. Out my front door I saw a 20-mile-tall wall of flames stretching across the horizon...
I lead my daughter up a thorny path; she’s getting scratched. She'd rather stay in that fishing village below...
I struggle to write down a bizarre dream clearly and simply, but both pens and paper have mutated. Then a child prodigy explains “dreams don’t always want to be linear”...
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...
A bomb's planted on our ship! But when a teen finds it, rather than fetch a responsible adult...
A mob chases me chanting "Lyin' Wayan!" I get dizzy, fall off a bridge, and wake. Then comes REAL trouble!
CAUTION: FATAL FALL
Mother & daughter both dream Mum runs over a little girl. Next morning she
spots the girl in the road--warned, she swerves. But bystanders see no child...
Two kids I grew up with are dead. We carry their still-smoking corpses by the home of George Bush...
CAUTION: BURNT BODIES
In a castle, a white bird lands on the table and becomes a little girl who plays with Jung's kids, hugs him,
then turns back into a bird, explaining "I can become human only for a few hours of the night, when...
A girl writes a whole movie to get a shy boy to hold her; I stupidly summon a monster dragonfly-bus;
a devil-suited jerk hogs a musical's stage TWICE; leeches crawl from the treasure-box I opened...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, SEXUAL FEAR/GUILT
My children ask me to tell our family history, up to the death of their mother. I wake to find
myself single, my late wife alive but married to another, and my beloved children, phantoms...
CAUTION: 19TH-CENTURY LOGORRHEA
Daily dream-poems in haiku style, nonstop for a month. A flood of animals, revenant ghosts, sex changes...
One dream-poem in haiku style each day for a month!
Ghosts, snow, penguins, yoga babies, elves who leave their tree...
This dream's not about a man whose dream lovers keep materializing till the bed overflows.
This dream's about who those lovers are and what the neighbors will think...
CAUTION: SEX
I've been drawing a personification of the World Dream Bank.
Nerdy, but most of your readers are nerds...
I'm a migratory girl who's lost my tribe. I find eleven coins, cross the world, and pay the Oracle...
I lose myself, but I get some startling advice from a convent-school kid with empty eyes...
I dream my autistic son, miraculously high-functioning, recites a math-poem to a crowd...
Then I become cartoon cat Madam Purr-Say and chant my own defiant poem at the dream gods...
CAUTION: FIRST POEM AUTISTIC, SECOND PISSY
I was a child again, sitting on a bench, watching young maidens dance.
But as I grew older, they faded away in the light of adulthood...
I knew I was on my bed, yet I felt myself falling into a tesseract--huge, crystalline, colorful.
Inside I met an energy being who explained I'm not meant to die yet; this was just training...
CAUTION: UNCONVENTIONAL GOD
In school, I'm seen as a freak--lied to, set up for little pranks. Not just by my classmates--my teachers...
The flock of cranes called to the boy but he could not hear what they were telling him...
A great director alternates hits and bombs, because in half his films he sets out to trouble his viewers. Here's one...
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
My little son accidentally tears the tail off our goldfish. The wound
looks vaginal. The fish, moaning in pain, turns into my daughter...
My Cambodian village was burned, my family murdered. At 12,
I was the oldest survivor; I led a band of kids to the border...
My eighth grade class is a flock of birds migrating south for the winter, but we don’t migrate the easy way...
A pod of whales in the sky and a circle of children dressed like seed-pods both beg me to interpret them...
In our mutant future, a lovely horse-tailed four-armed girl sings her heart out--as clubgoers ignore her...
CAUTION: NUDE CABARET
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
A boy offends his uncle the King, who transforms him into a fox. Grounded! But Fox-Boy runs away...
The goddess of the Cult of Clutter catches a little thief, and tastes her to see if she’s worthy...
"Oh no" she moaned. "I don't want Frankie to go to that camp. He must not go there." She began to cry...
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..."
I'm a child in a Latin American city who's murdered on the street. Then I'm my brother,
seeking my own murderers. I find the General behind it! Unfortunately...
CAUTION: DYING. DYING TWICE. AND THEN NEARLY AGAIN, AWAKE...
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
A child from another universe materializes--part way. Too bad we called in that expert from Stanford...
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...
A snotty shopkeeper won't let a kid have a balloon, so she teleports one through the display
window! Blind to the magic, he just scolds her and takes it away. So her mind reaches
through the window to liberate every balloon in his store! And then, 26 years later...
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)
We're children seeking gold in a fairy wood. We meet some elf-kids,
chase them off, and dig where they played. Then their parents show up...
CAUTION: INTERSPECIES BULLYING
Dream-skeptic Cicero dreamed a youth descended from heaven on a golden chain.
The next day he first met Octavius, and exclaimed "but there is the actual boy I dreamed of!"
The boy became Augustus Caesar, presiding over Rome's golden age...
Two sisters want to lick me all over, but they lick everything; weird gut-fauna make them immune to toxins...
Fairy eggs infest my home--become worms, then tiny horses, then mothwinged hobbits, then adult fairies....
CAUTION: NUDE EQUINES & FAE; PARASITES (OR SYMBIOTES?)
Two days before 9/11, I dream I'm a child at ground zero, mourning the devastation--and witnessing rebirth.
My part in the revolution in Guinea-Bissau: substantial, but not exactly planned. I just wanted out...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I dreamt I hit & killed a small boy in the road. Weeks later in Manchester I swerved & just missed that boy...
A farm girl seems to be sexually exploiting her dog and horse, but their auras tell another tale...
CAUTION: SEX SYMBOLISM
A single dad loves his daughter, but is so pathologically cheap he's teaching her an unintended lesson...
CAUTION: CHILD NEGLECT
1: In a theater I meet weird big-eyed ballerinas, & realize I'll choreograph for them soon...
2: A sorcery student & her powerful future self flying back through time meet & fuse...
3: A squirrel-mage meets his future self too. He gives us a mild fever to protect us against a deadly plague...
CAUTION: NOT FOR TOTAL SKEPTICS ABOUT PREDICTIVE DREAMS
I'm stuck on a jet full of cartoons. We get hijacked by a kid who just wants
pilot practice, and then a talking cactus counter-hijacks us...
CAUTION: THE F-WORD
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...
In a club, a new genderbending band. One singer gets me hot, but completely confused--for good reason...
CAUTION: SEXUAL SITUATIONS, GENDERBENDING
As my grandmother is dying, I have a dream about what really went on in her house...
CAUTION: CHILD SLAVERY
I wanted to be human, but Mom said "You'll always be just a lousy caterpillar." So I slipped inside
a human girl. After some arguments with her boyfriend, I got born as a human-faced butterfly...
CAUTION: UNDERAGE SEX AND MOM
From age six on, Simon nightly climbs mountains and faces roaring floods in a sort of naptime bootcamp...
My first memory is of being a wild horse and waking up to find I was suddenly a human child...
I dreamt I was an adult, and male. I was hiking in the snow with my girlfriend or wife. I felt protective--and
utterly at home in this quite different body. If dreams process our daily experience, what did this dream draw on?
Wounded, bandaged, chased by cops, I end up heading a huge children's parade,
marching to Mongolia. No secret what it's about--On The Road was just published...
On Mars, a child-sacrificing cult of miners wants to kill me, but something strange happens....
An ink sketch in a magazine shows a new Ghost Dance invading city clubs.
But the (biased?) artist uglifies the Indians, horses and giraffes dancing...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY; JAUNDICED ART/REPORTING
I dreamt I met my friend Karen, looking like she did years ago... except she was
towing around a son about seven years old! And she'd been childless. I called her, and...
A children's recital of "Where the Wild Things Are" turns into a riot-orgy. And it feels... political?
CAUTION: WILD THING ORGY
That day Frederic, craving irises, fell in the water three times. At night he swam through an iris paradise...
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 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
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...
The tale of a fawn named Fawn and her mom, a bank-robbing hippopotamus...
CAUTION: GLAMORIZES THIS ALARMING TREND
At the beach, facing down a wave taller than you,
the only thing to do is levitate discreetly...
Half elvish, rejected, I wander the worlds, and find a limbo built by Zeus--but do the inmates deserve it?
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
A bewildering dream of a boy's borrowed bath, absconding renters' furniture and fly-eating turns real a few weeks later...
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...
One boring lonely day, I meet a cute teenage bunny who wants to play with me! But half an hour later…
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, INTERSPECIES FLIRTING, AND LOSS
I'm a cartoon flamingo; with my sisters, the frog and the rabbit-squirrel, I meet our Maker--the cartoonist...
The children of some castaways refuse to go 'home': to them, this shore IS home. So what won't I leave?
My dad has a time machine, so he generously invites the King of Persia over. And offers him MY room...
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
I met two strange sisters on a train who turn out to be half-cat. They open my eyes
so I realize that my neighbor Elaine must be a shapeshifter too...
CAUTION: FLIRTATIOUS UNDERAGE CAT
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...
I find myself in a vault with tables where half-dissected animals writhe. Hidden in each was a human shape...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
I fled a snake by flying. I felt guilty, I knew it was cheating. Years passed. I made tiny clay figurines.
Years passed. I drew a chicken lady with a halo. Years passed. I sculpted a flock of BIG...
CAUTION: NUDE CHICKEN LADIES
For years Martin's dreams were all set in a parallel world untouched by World War, until...
I found myself in a cage, with only a bench and piles of old books. A mirror showed
I was old and twisted with speckled skin. In horror I said "I must get away"...
As a boy I dreamt I was trapped in a wooden chair, paralyzed, as a stampede
rushed toward me, just as my grandmother was paralyzed and chair-bound...
I'm a kid again, waltzing with my dad, though he's long dead. He hands me the trumpet inside his chest. When
I wake, I feel it still. My mom just died; I've reclaimed a playful part of him she condemned all her long life...
The black bird hovered above my cradle, and several times struck me with its tailfeathers between my opened lips...
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
I visit the underworld court of the Lizard King, but I can’t leave: he makes me Queen...
CAUTION: MARITAL RAPE (NON-GRAPHIC)
Embodying that upsetting feeling
when you're crawling on the ceiling...
I walked along a hilly road with ropes and boxes. My wife vanished in a hollow. But
my path went on until the hills were blue in the distance. An old man interpreted...
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
I fell asleep reading a book I'd read years before. I finished it in my dreams. Every word in place. How?
A book that kept me up late. Ariel and Robin get abused as subtly & deniably as me and my sisters...
CAUTION: RELIGIOUS/PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE
Morocco. Horseback mercenaries attack a town. A boy says "Take their lifestyle, and you must remove their brains."
A protective Hand of Fatima dissolves, leaving a finger, a feather, a... vagina. "What a slit!" We burst into laughter...
DREAM 1: On green grass, a red & blue boat with a net draped atop. Predictive.
DREAM 2: Climbing a ladder with square rungs in a space w/o walls. Predictive.
DREAM 3: A small boy with a toy boat. A sail's laid out flat for washing. Predictive...
by Jenny Badger Sultan; Jan-Feb 2003, painting of a dream-series
My dreams were troubled by war. So I painted them in concentric rings--lotus, fire, children, animals, and nightmares...
I'm a small boy in a ship docking in Mars Orbital Station. I meet a strange man: myself as an adult! Uh-oh...
Beverly Cleary's Ramona is a popular teen, but she's having a nervous breakdown. And her best friend...
CAUTION: STUDENT-TEACHER AFFAIR
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 meet a girl who's a Mendelian hybrid of human, animal and peavine! But I'm no more human than she is...
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...
I rescue some drowning kids by turning into a mermaid, but towing one girl has an unexpected effect...
I'm in a tribe of post-Crash kids with psychic powers, trying to keep nukes from rising again...
CAUTION: CHILD SOLDIERS
I'm in what seems to be a village of very conservative Muslims. But they're really alien castaways...
All my life, from age three or four, I've dreamed of being a young monk named Stefan
somewhere in southern Europe. And aspects of his short life have shaped my own...
CAUTION: SEXUAL EXPLOITATION
I help a mutant boy find others like him, and learn why some prayers are ungrantable...
At our family reunion's parade, a tropical float goes by with a drag queen
who turns out to be physically female--but still drag! The next day...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, DRAG OF COURSE
I commute to my dreamjob on a four-story bus; then my baby brother
(who I wouldn't let eat any chocolate pudding) utters a new poem by William Blake...
An animal-girl I know lives like a sine-wave, first forward in time, then backwards, dying at every zero...
I was downtown when I knew I had to hurry home. I found it full of gas.
As my husband napped, our two-year-old had turned on all the stove jets...
I wished I could kiss my son farewell. That week, Ethel called. "I dreamed Ned kissed you, not me!
I was hurt. He laughed like anything and kissed me too..."
Through wild jungles and over the Mattress Mountains, I lead a giant purple newt to love...
I wander New York City, a homeless ageless child, unnoticed--unless I climb stairs. Then people panic--see a huge cat!
But today I meet a crew lugging big paintings, who seem blind to cat or child. I think they're art thieves, mid-heist...
CAUTION: SHAMANIC INTERPRETATION
At the beach I dive into deep water to save my drowning friend Kathy, and find it’s not so clear who’s who...
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...
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
The night after my 29th birthday, I dream my youth is literally leaving me. I'm at a party
full of kids and teens; I can't get anyone's name, and they slip away leaving me alone...
A child of radicals goes wild in Rio. When we bail her out, we find she's had a strange enlightenment...
CAUTION: UNSAFE SEX
You'd think his Christmas wish would be "a new eye"; well it was, in a way...
My day life as an artist and explorer of the San Francisco underground scene
gets regularly commented on by my dreamlife...
CAUTION: SEX, BONDAGE
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...
Two child artists mail themselves to me in their paint kit, and
start a painting orgy that gets messy in more ways than one...
CAUTION: PEDOPHILIA, OR MAYBE PEDOPHOBIA
After a rainy hike I'm cold and muddy. In the camp's hot tub, six girls splash and play.
They welcome me, but I feel shy. They slowly become winged ponies! Were-Pegasi...
CAUTION: HOT-TUB NUDITY
Dad's human, Mom's a weird owl-lynx, the kid's a baby Pegasus... and I,
W.C. Fields, that fat cynical drunken old actor, am the babysitter...
I'm to be martyred. I ask if the man I love can strangle me. Yes! I say farewell to our hermaphroditic genius baby...
When I try to play the piano in public I get sabotaged. At last I see a child who says she can't play while she's in pain...
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...
Poison takes many forms, from attitudes to environmental by-products to actions done deliberately...
I sat thinking "Now that boy will jump the fence"--and he did; "that boy will chase the dog"--and he did...
EMRICH: I'm in a conference center in "Pondecherry", even though it feels nothing like India...
THOMAS: A woman picks fruit off a tree by a pond and calls them "pondicherries--with an 'i'"...
CAUTION: WILL ANNOY E.S.P. DENIERS
The child who runs with wild horses finds the secret spy-room of dreams! But no one's watching...
I had a dream I was exploring ruins in a forest, where
I encountered this feral girl with a porcupine head....
I sneak into a mansion where a mom & daughter bond by interrogating willing victims who
get off on the bondage. Later, Inquisitor Girl and I are waiting to use a teleportation gate
and discover we have something in common: not just weird moms, but even weirder dads...
CAUTION: KINKY FAMILY VALUES
The time-caves under Golden Gate Park lead to supervillains, magical girls, miniphants,
bamboo thugs, adorable dinosaurs, and... pandemics. But is there a way back home?
We were looking at our three-pound premature baby girl. Though tiny she was bright-eyed, active, perfect...
I suspect we child prodigies and geniuses are as unlike the gifted as normal people. So here's a checklist...
CAUTION: BRAIN REQUIRED
Child prodigies may develop allergies due to immunosystem damage from too much testosterone in utero...
News of a child prodigy who was given the support I wasn't, triggers a flood of envy and bitterness...
I tried to have sex with a puppy in heat, but she was just too small for me.
An image that freaks out even my friends! But its crudity hid an unexpectedly subtle message...
CAUTION: SEX, BESTIALITY
I saw a boy beating a qilin [Chinese unicorn] with a willow branch, hurting its left leg. I scolded
him and wrapped the leg in grass. In gratitude it spat up three books! I studied them diligently...
Suddenly I hate and fear black kids in school! The counselor says I'm clinically paranoid: I need drugs!
My dad says "How strange, how sad." And goes home to light a candle at his shrine to the Confederacy...
CAUTION: INDUCED RACISM
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...
Trapped in elementary school, Julie is forced to study the alphabet
until she declares "I'm a professional cartoonist, goddammit!"...
I'm in my home town, but at two times at once! Murderous boys explain why: I died here in 1861...
DREAM: I climb a stair to a surreal space where kids dance in tights spattered with wet red paint.
NEXT DAY: I watch Wednesday--Wednesday Addams dances & gets spattered with wet red paint...
CAUTION: NUDITY, ESP SPECULATION
I dream of a therapist who allows kids to regress to crying babies; they take weeks
to re-mature to face the present. Will it work for me? Can't see why not...
I dream I’m telling a tall tale about a cat-funeral with hung-over mice pulling the hearse. But it all turns a bit too real...
A refugee girl crawls into my bed. We become lovers. I protect her. But over time... am I holding her back?
CAUTION: ABUSE? OR NOT?
Lounging in the sun, I do a magical make-over--molding my bones to give myself more room for
intuition, judgment, nerve--all the while feeling shallow & indulgent for self-improving!...
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 small child in Finland writing out the meaning of three ancient runes
about trees, ships and elbow room. They seem to hold serious advice...
A Japanese high school athlete has no friends, till she starts meeting animal spirits on her long solo runs...
I meet a female Bigfoot, who, to my surprise, quietly speaks my tongue.
She's mourning the death of her infant son...
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...
I search rivers and lakes around the world for someone dead. But the living I meet act as strange as ghosts...
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...
I'm in an art class drawing a dream image--a dog-taur or wolf-taur girl.
But I hesitate to draw her flashing me as she did in the dream. Should
I risk offending half my class, or make her modest and innocuous?
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
A creature that's half kitten and half baby wants me to masturbate it... I'm reluctant, but when I do...
CAUTION: SEX
After moving in with Gemina, Matt suddenly had erectile dysfunction. He asked
his dreams why. He dreamt he was a kid being bullied by his big sister Cindy...
A Goddess-worshiping general gets a visit from her twin daughters who bring a puzzling message...
Dinosaur people demand to take our Ship's Boy with them. But he knows them! They RAISED him?
A fictional niece acting sexy in a shirt, plus... water balloons? I woke, and a friend told me HER dream...
CAUTION: DREAM INCEST, KIDS WITH GUNS, GENERAL WEIRDNESS
A man adopts two orphaned, talented musical griffins. But their previous guardians were
so traditionalist & stifling that the cubs want to BURN all their instruments...
I'm a kid in a classroom someone's trashed. Our teacher goes ballistic. But was the gypsy girl framed?
My anima the singing horse was encouraging a shy werewolf boy to give it a try...
CAUTION: UNCLAD HORSE CHANTEUSE
Samuel Pepys dreamt of kidneystones, pee, come, & snot--or did he? Thomas Macauley dreams his niece confesses...
I'm a peace terrorist trapped in Squaw Valley, herded like a mare by a huge stallion made of snow...
And then the dream shifts. I blurt out the truth behind our idiotic waking world! And wake believing it...
CAUTION: MERMAID AND HORSE NUDITY
The red string tying that creepy puppet to
the child sitting on the moon has broken...
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
I dreamed of speckled eggs, Caribbean drug traffickers and of
almost drowning near a sinking boat...
A preteen sphinx pleased with herself and her treebranch world...
I'm a Lapp boy in northern Finland, studying shamanism. So why do I pour coffee down a driveway?
The world is a whirlpool, a black and white spiral pulling me down toward a black hole, and it’s laughing...
While I study how humans went extinct, my
daughter happily splashes in the sea...
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 mom & daughter caught a squirrel robbing their guaranteed rodent-proof birdfeeder. He
speaks English so they demand to know how he did it. But he knows they won't hurt him...
My daughter got a tattoo that spread and became blue feathers growing from her arms. Wings start to bud...
I found myself on a stone pillar in a valley. Invisible people sat on other stalagmites, but my voice didn’t reach...
A sacred starfish piloting a Cessna plane survives a crash. But can it survive a boy's clumsy rescue efforts?
Weird blue snow covers a dump of unwanted historical statues, but they seem
less political than... strange. Is that a griffin? What's really getting covered here?
Two child prodigies fail to stop the killers stalking President Obama, but a geek with a homemade laser...
The Crocodile King & the Geisha Queen, the couple who guard
the bridge over the River Styx, seem to quarrel a lot...
I dreamed a short story--even its title. Not that I read it. No, I lived it, through the eyes of a 5-year-old...
I find the cure for an alien plague, then visit its homeworld, to find it has a curious variant...
CAUTION: SEX CUSTOMS OF THE NEWT PEOPLE! MY COUSIN'S GAY WEDDING!
During Tiananmen, I was in Beijing for a conference. I heard chaotic noise outside, and the muffled sounds of gunfire.
I dreamed a star painted the sky an eerie purple-green. Children sang, marching over snow, rifles fitted with bayonets...
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...
A lonely little girl plays on a swing in her yard. A shy young faun or satyr
who has a crush on her conjures up a strange gift: a translucent wall of candy...
An alien is taking over our world, and I feel so helpless that even when I wake I want to just forget the dream...
I'm a boy from a Southwestern tribe whose rite of passage is a bike race.
I wear a jasper pendant with mysterious powers...
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...
Deep in the strata inside you, gems lie waiting in the dark for this child to dig them free...
A black separatist commune hides two little girls who are psychokinetic.
They fear I'll expose them. But I've spent my whole life passing too...
CAUTION: PARAPSYCHOLOGY, RACIAL SEPARATISTS
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
Dreams of my childhood--bootlegger dad, critical mom, gun-
happy uncles, slaughtered squirrels, slaughtered Jews...
Dead fish in a poisoned stream, dead kittens in a pit...
and advice from the woman who revives them with a touch.
I'm shown pictures of three different magical ways to fly. But the third
shows no actual flight--just someone giving away the magical means...
Intimidated by stylish friends, I split in three--myself, and a small child
nursing at the breast of an earth-mother priestess--or Earth herself...
As a toddler I repeatedly dreamed I was a married adult with a daughter
of my own, but the dreams always ended with my husband shooting me...
CAUTION: RECURRENT MURDER
Psychics give me an incomprehensible reading. A book from the tree-library gives only Victorian dating advice.
At last a madman gives me a treasure-box holding a tooth that unfolds into slices carved in unreadable symbols...
Hecuba dreams she gives birth, not to a child but a flaming torch! But she lets Paris live...
CAUTION: MORAL NO-WIN SITUATION
Asparagus, wings, an unhinged hand, a boxed ghost, butter, sister incest, tomato-pincushions,
secret volcanoes, one-eyed integers, chickenleg dresses, mirrors and bananapeel beds...
I dreamt of the Du Pont lab where I'd work, and my neighbor's future coffin,
and the hospital where my sister-in-law would get a transfusion...
I try to protect the kitten from being strangled and girl geniuses from the depth charges; ...
I'm on an alien world inside the minds of two women and a child struggling with moral choices in a civil war...
CAUTION: DEATH, LOSS
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...
My mind and my soul both apply for a job in Stanford Cathedral. Their rivalry grows to a shamanic duel...
As a child sick in bed, Max had a fever dream that the shapes in the knots and grain in a
wooden panel were children terrorized by a bird. Adult, he assembled a sort-of-painting...
With no sense of incongruity, I planned to take the child Polly
with me to the theatre, to see the grown-up Polly act...
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
The All-American Family visits the fabulous Un-American Fantasy Store, where Mom is in for a shock...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY, LANGUAGE
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...
A strange creature slunk into our yard, carrying a skunk lunch.
But she dropped her fur coat, and I recognized a kindred spirit...
I'm a girl living alone in a forest. I go patrolling after a storm and find a red cable
strangling a tree. Though scared, I climb up and tear it off. But there are more...
CAUTION: POLITICAL INTERPRETATION
Jealous of newlyweds, I grind my teeth. But the Ice Age ground the Sierra's granite teeth, and they're lovelier for it...
I found myself in a whole pride of cat-people like me, each one representing some side of me...
Kingsford meets a girl who burns herself as a protest. K flips out! Rants instead of helps...
CAUTION: RANT MIDWAY YOU'RE BETTER OFF SKIPPING
After a class where students are forced to vivisect anesthetized dogs
I dreamed I'd made a mistake; I was sawing open my daughter...
CAUTION: CREEPY DREAM, CREEPY DISMISSAL
DAY: our ex-cat comes back, needing surgery. Dad doesn't want to pay. Big quarrel.
DREAM: Cats, birds, elf-girls; in their asteroid library, a tale of oath-breaking...
Now I'm the one who stole a tooth of jade from the volcano hall. Greed... erupts!
CAUTION: NUDE BIRD-ELF, DEATH BY LAVA
VAUGHAN'S DREAM: I visit Kurt Vonnegut. Kids all over. He's going on a trip soon. Mentions of 'Jerome' and an island...
VONNEGUT REPLIES: "That night, childrens' author Jerome B visited; we discussed my upcoming trip to England..."
I dreamt my son Walter drowned in the creek by a certain tree. I woke in tears, and resolved...
A giant insect chases me around our gym. A girl tells me it's harmless but I'm sure it's a...
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
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
My face was leprous white like parchment; my eyes shone with
a cold blue eerie light. I shrieked "Papa, don't you know me?"...
1: Dad picks up Bigfoot; he bites off my ear. 2: Dad abandons me in a canyon full of wolves. 3: The man who
killed my family hands me his ax. 4: Bees move into my pillow. 5: A marionette with razor-nails lures me close...
CAUTION: OUCH
I meet a ghost girl and ask her about death. I figure she knows first-hand. And she tells me...
After teaching a class on color, I had a series of vivid dreams
about color, and tried fusing them into one painting...
First I dream the neighbors are powerful witches offering dog-collared children
to the local men. Later, on a train, I meet two kids who managed to escape...
CAUTION: CHILD ABUSE, NUDITY
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
This man comes into the chapel, makes a fascist salute, catches fire, and burns right down to his shoes...
We go swimming in a sea full of wrecked tankers. We explore one derelict, but ebb tide pries it off the bank,
out to sea. Do we swim for shore, or wait, hoping high tide will wash it in again? Guess wrong and we die...
Each spring my mom took us up to Yellow Crane Tower.
One night I dreamed I rode the crane over the city of Wuhan...