When I was a kid I was already a mystic and knew what Captain Ahab was REALLY after, but...
I dreamed I circumnavigated the entire Buddhist wheel of existence in a single night...
I'm Annie Oakley, sharpshooter, facing something scarier than gunmen: a formal ball
introducing me to my new husband's family--Austrian aristocracy! What's an American gal to do?
DREAM: I write a book involving spies and Lord Snow, but give him a cover name: Artie Shaw.
TWO WEEKS LATER: My wife & I go on the Tonight Show; unexpectedly, Artie Shaw shows up!
I tell him the dream. He turns pale, saying "No one knows this--I wrote a book under the name..."
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
Alien robots kidnap me... and make me the mascot for a college football team.
But my Channel Changer slowly infuses us all with nerdy trust...
Bear lady, bare lady,
in (or out of) a bear suit...
Parasites, Rambo, huge fetus-beets, an exhibitionist and a living statue advise me on my love life...
CAUTION: NUDITY
DAY: I bike across San Francisco writing down what I actually see.
DREAM: I'm an abused English heiress with a dangerous alien artifact...
CAUTION: HAUNTED BY CHILD ABUSE
My friend F. saw a child whose every move was controlled by a weird figure behind her...
A bubble of spacetime distortion lands in an awkward place,
making people mistrust the unlucky recipient...
In a world where respectable men wear masks, an old, old man rebels in the crudest way he can...
I'm trying to bathe, but there are Boat People in the tub!
And my inner Grandma's spying on me, behind her fan...
I'm in a huge colonnade. An army of blood-painted men sacrifice the dove of peace. Their masked leader drinks its blood.
But then I'm carried upstairs to meet... the prophet Daniel! I'm amid the angels, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel...
CAUTION: BLOOD-DRINKING THUGS
All her life, Cartwright dreamed of a figure disguised in a harlequin costume; she never saw his face.
He always drove her to self-sabotage. But near her death, she dreamt she gave a lecture, and he...
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...
2021: I dream I'm confessing to friends how I'm over-compliant. I wake, and start transcribing my
1984 journal. Turn the page and find a dream of a horny stallion who's disturbingly over-compliant...
CAUTION: KINKY STALLION
Suddenly I see the notion of "cool" as just another Euro theft. Being cool shouts "I'm insecure"...
A surreal statue of a naked body spilling out of the wall as if someone's caught between dimensions...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Alli/Tip could only imagine loving the strange, intense, and unavailable--and Bronte was all three..
My dad saw a mob killing; our family enters witness protection. But why's my new role female? Well, my parents...
CAUTION: WILLING OR UNWILLING DRAG?
Four teens dream their moms are monsters: Patricia sees hers as a demonic doll, Fiona finds
her mom's a wolf, Lenore's is a grinning vampire, and Helen's is a bossy, punitive octopus...
I used to dream of this violent anthropomorphic being. At times I'd put on his deer-skull head
and become him, inflicting and inciting violence. Naming him gave me some control...
A demon invades our police station, takes over our captain and lieutenant, and pushes them to fight.
But I know demonic possession can't last long. Our copshow's special effects budget is too limited...
Dr Who, that lovable BBC alien, grows a sappy flower-face and
allies with Death. An alarming turn-around! What's he up to?
CAUTION: GOOD DOCTOR GOES BAD?
After our trip to Turkey, I dreamed I was dancing in
a heavy black robe like those the Turkish women wore...
I sneak into a dance rehearsal. Huge colorful cloth goddesses dance,
while four fat women wearing only scarves weave round them...
CAUTION: NUDITY
A month of dreams full of science fiction: galactic navigation, spacedragons, oppressed fairies, alien love...
I dreamt an eagle slaughtered my twenty geese. I wept until he spoke to me: "Take heart! I am thy husband..."
Elegant, ancient, the tower rose into the clouds. Inside? Smoke & darkness. Workers roast meat...
I fondle the noses of two masked girls in red leotards--parodying part of a Clockwork Orange...
I'm excited to see Last Year at Marienbad, but either the actors mumble or the sound is bad...
Night. I fly, as in Fellini's 8½, but out of control. The wind takes me, I'm terrified...
My grandmother attacks me with her crab-claw, then retreats, chanting the film title Shoeshine!
I'm a cripple watching a sexy Greek Opera starring Whoopi Goldberg. Then I realize I'm in it...
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...
Decades ago, I was too shy to talk to Frances. Now I'm going upstairs with a girl who looks like her but...
Comics character Doctor Blasphemy, on stilts, bares his secret identity:
poet Allen Ginsberg! But who chopped off his missing fingers?
CAUTION: BLOODY FINGERS
I read Stephen Hawking, and dream I'm in the Quantum Desert, full of bridges, holes & loops--
like the microstructure of spacetime. But it's not counter-intuitive at all--it's HOME!
I toured the factory where they make the spare heads you put on and
take off to change your mind. Nothing creepy about it, nothing at all...
I change sex to infiltrate a sinister castle, unaware its Lord can spot a shapeshifter--being one himself...
CAUTION: A DISTURBING BEDSIDE MANOR. I MEAN, MANNER.
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...
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 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...
A surgeon persuaded me to swap my face with another man's. But I found I felt compelled
to carry on his life, not mine--to pass for him. And when I demanded my face back...
An archeological dig inscribed in the Roman alphabet, Chinese characters, Ethiopian
syllabics and unknown scripts. A carved egg bears news from the future, not the past...
CAUTION: CALLS PROPHECY A LEARNABLE SKILL
God watches over me--to slap me down. If God is even God. So I set out to learn about this jerk-God...
A marsh. One figure's wrapped in mummy bandages; another swims--or drowns.
A ruin's being rebuilt. Out in the bay, a faint water-road leads to the open sea...
DREAM: A series of old films with Erroll Flynn looking shy in his glasses, and his... lion suit?
NEXT DAY: Hunting pumas is legalized; the paper shows a sit-in full of people in lion suits...
I'm a shaman in Nunavut who has to teach a guy in a lizard
suit (and his foxy niece) that reparations have limits...
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
The dancers, in a frenzy, stripped themselves. Not just their clothes; themselves...
Wayan makes love to Martha's double, then sees her soul watching from the shadows...
Barbara can't reach Wayan to say farewell...
Martha falls off a mountain and decides to let herself die, just to see what happens...
CAUTION: SEX, ABUSE ISSUES
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...
Martian robots pester me. I flee through the Asteroids, leaving chaos, cratering Earth.
Years later on my farm, a bot shows up disguised as Freud. I start mudslinging...
I'm a unicorn in a life-drawing class, feeling more naked than the model...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
My home's a huge maze. Find a clinic and a cafe. Cops appear, & claim I'm a woman named Mem Loi
& confiscate weird masks off our walls. Ugly masks, so who cares? Wait, one looks like a covid virus...
CAUTION: DREAMER'S A DOORMAT
At Sea-Dragon State Park, I climbed down to the sea serpent's dressing room after the show, and found...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
In Palo Alto I meet strange musicians in the rain, and realize kitsune aren't born but made...
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
My glass heart survived the rocket's blast, but I'm stranded on this barren world.
Wrapped in glamor, we climb a steep forbidding stair into a rosy, fake tomorrow...
My mom and I road-duel an alien beetle, then investigate a deepspace Marie Celeste;
then I spy for the Angevin Empire to protect the Crown Jewels...
An orange tiger with wolf ears jumped on me. I was surprised but not scared, as if it were just a big dog.
The next day, shopping, my daughter thrust an orange wolf-eared hand-puppet in my face, jaws open...
Softly snows the spam upon my lonely brain, quilting me in flounderdrifts. Shovel it again...
You'd think his Christmas wish would be "a new eye"; well it was, in a way...
A spacy friend rolls on the floor with me. Seduction, or play, or what?
She peels off patches of clothes and skin, exposing a new realer self...
CAUTION: TRUMP FANS WILL HATE IT
Beverly dreamt her party guests all wore masks. What were they hiding? Next she dreamt they passed around a
breadbasket. In it was her husband's penis! She woke, asked around, and found he'd had affairs with half their guests...
CAUTION: GENITAL SYMBOLISM
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!...
I'm shown corn plants growing from skulls, and it seems like I must plant some skull-corn myself...
I'm detective Hercule Poirot, but I'm losing my case and my brain--
because my story isn't by Agatha Christie, it's a knockoff...
CAUTION: PINK DILDO HATS
I don't know what this scene is about--but it's not a dream. A stage, I think. Something from childhood.
CAUTION: BARE BEAR
Bob is at the window asking to be let into my house. He is dressed as Santa Claus; but I think he's really...
CAUTION: MURDER ATTEMPT
Dreams and other revelations shouldn't be dissected--they need to be reveiled, not revealed...
CAUTION: INTENSE MYSTICISM
I find myself sitting on toy trains and fake snow as I'm told a fable:
how a herd of department-store Santas got tragically lost in a blizzard...
I'm in Santa Cruz with my friend, a shocking-pink stuffed toy cow
with sewed-on accessories: big red lips, a floral wig, and a third eye. I wake,
draw the dreamcow--and my sister calls from Santa Cruz to sing me a song about...
I play the lovers in a teen romance: shy abused boy, insecure girl. But I get tired of the script, and...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
A woman up a tree has white flaky stuff camouflaging her.
It cracks and peels like snakeskin. What tree is this, exactly?
MY SOUL RESTORED: To hide me as I grew up, someone transplanted a shard of redwood-soul
into me, and part of my soul into the tree! But now I'm grown...
RED ROBE OF INITIATION: I came to play music, but I'm dragged to the magic-school portal & draped in...
CAUTION: MYSTICISM
by Jenny Badger Sultan; 2002/1/19, a dream-painting of a dream about dream-painting!
I'm teaching an art class full of strange masklike beings. We debate art
as spontaneous process, versus art as planned product...
Divers made of ice win the Traffic-Leaping Olympics. But
I think they cheated! I seek my friend the Sphinx...
Seeking my lost teacher-bird, I dabble with the time machine in the basement.
Oops! I summon Bigfoot. But the monster rips out her fur...
A ship-captain insisted some castoff clothes were mine. They fit. As I put on an elegant coat,
I recalled it was made in a past life to disguise me so I could enter a temple excluding women...
(A comic frustration dream hiding a warning)
Our tennis game's spoiled by rubber rackets, fierce grandmas,
Good and Evil (those identical twins) and a bully on stilts...
That day: I read of a young healer in rural Indonesia harassed by the local mullah.
That night: I dream she leads a revolution on a starship against her elders...
I'm a tiger from Planet Cat, visiting Earth to run in San Francisco's "Bay to Breakers" race.
I knew racial tensions were high, but why is William S. Burroughs out to kill me? Oh. Because...
Golfing in the basement with Giselle! But her ball goes through a Stargate
to land on a world where the water hazards are hazards...
In a prison cell, two robed figures with horned hoods like the heads of
black owls question a limp figure who looks far beyond answers...
CAUTION: IMPLIED TORTURE
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
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...
My family home's invaded by ancient Egyptian architects. So
I put on my unicorn mask and eavesdrop on their plans...
My face was leprous white like parchment; my eyes shone with
a cold blue eerie light. I shrieked "Papa, don't you know me?"...