Some 200 Brits have dreams and premonitions of black landslides smothering children.
After heavy rain, half a million tons of coal slag sweeps over two Welsh schools, killing...
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'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
Fleeing hunters, blocked by a cafe crowd, I fly up a long slope--but the cafe climbs on & on! At last
I perch exhausted on a peak, looking down on a now-alpine cafe above a sea of clouds. Next day...
I'm a parade route. A group of child artists walks all over me. But their soles are bare, so I don't mind...
All that spring I dreamed of climbing, cold, fatigue, risk, and fear.
But shamanic training involves toughening; ascent isn't always easy flight...
On the bridge between waking and dreaming, a jet plane duels a T. Rex. But
the jet strays into dream space, becoming a pterosaur--and soon, Rex lunch...
How a centaur tames birds in the Sierra Nevada...
I keep dreaming of awkward but successful transitions into new life, and paint them all in one landscape...
A sexy encounter with two robotic girls hopping a night train outside Portland...
CAUTION: THREESOME
I'm gigantic, stretching from Ceylon to Tibet. Grass grows from my navel to heaven.
Worms crawl on me. Birds flock to me and change color. I climb a mountain of dung...
CAUTION: PIOUS MISINTERPRETATIONS
I DREAM: I'm at the scene of a fatal car crash. They thought it was Johnny Carson, but it's his brother Dick.
I WAKE: On the news: Johnny Carson's son Dick died in a car crash. The scene looks like my dream...
CAUTION: WILL TROUBLE E.S.P. SKEPTICS
Just a really cute guide to the centaur country around their holy mountain, Shasta...
CAUTION: BREAST
Two giants wrestle in the Chinese mountains. Who'll win, Red or Yellow? But when I wake...
I'm warily crossing an avalanche chute in winter, when my worst fear happens. Then the slide speaks up...
In the Sierra with geologists, I stick my arm down a drillhole and feel a living hand! Impossible, yet...
I was a wild mare in heat, torn between longing for sex, touch, love...and the fear of being tamed.
CAUTION: HORSE FRUSTRATION
Decision by decision, we made our way down immense rock crags. Below, I had to put out a deadly fire,
a fire as solid as wood or stone, with a white staff. What am I really trying to calm?
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has a challenge--draw an image upside
down. Better or worse? So I drew this with a mouse, then flipped it and found...
I climb down a cliff before night strands me; but in town, risky adolescent games cause a crash...
I'm the receptionist for a research group of small oracular animals
in an Icelandic rift, who can sniff out the answer to any question...
Happy beer drinkers from the Now invade the Tower of the Future.
Eggheads find idiots as lovable as kittens, and just can't eject them...
CAUTION: ELITIST; DISSES TRUMPISM
The Cultural Revolution denies me the Himalayas--the spiritual heights.
So I flutter around the base of the Stairway to Heaven...
In a parallel world, a gliding griflynx displays a brilliant
evolutionary strategy: joy! It's the strongest mate magnet...
The boy and I walk a spiral trail down the mountain to the caves of tears...
I ride a recumbent bike up an exhausting slope past browsing bears.
Oh. Not bears. Dinosaurs. No wonder I'm so tired! Timetravel's hard...
When I was 17, an older girl pushed booze at me and came on to me... in front of my parents and teachers!
For months, I had ambivalent sex dreams trying to process what Donna taught me--not all of it negative...
CAUTION: WEIRD SEX; ADULTS BEHAVE BADLY
Painting an abstract watercolor, I drifted into trance, and found myself climbing a
thorny slope. Deer in the brush. Great peaks around. Had I gone wrong?
Giant presences; rock, hill and crag are aspects worn. Shape-shifters they are; each in as many forms as eyes behold...
On a volcano's rim, watching the lava fountains, I interview a huge blue alien bird who never planned to be a monk...
I visited Europe while suffering from malaria. The local spirits helped me, cooling my fever. They prefer to live
high in the mountains where the air and water are still clean. White people ignore them, but they're still there...
A woman--Gaia?--leads me up Mt Diablo. Nature preserves--grass, oak, pine. But... all silent. The animals are gone...
CAUTION: ECO-RAGE
I'm in Mexico. The mountain of the gods looms over Coyacan. Around it, silhouetted
on the rising moon, wheel terrifying griffinlike winged horses wearing capes...
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
High in the Sierra during a thunderstorm, I dream aliens steal the gold, and the sun's
going nova. But Life wants us to conquer space, so we all grow wings...
In Europe, I enter a cave-shrine. Rock walls with... breasts! I suck one. It gives milk. A plaque says...
CAUTION: WEIRD
I dreamed I was a gull in Middle Earth fighting Sauron, though he
blurred my vision; but my hawk-eyed gullfriends helped me out...
My little brother catches and rides a fairy goose down steep mountain slopes, demanding it grant his wishes...
I'm a hisa, a primitive alien who solves a high-tech crime for the humans. Then I hike home,
step by step, down a great shield volcano. Because shuttles leave your soul behind...
I'm in the Rocky Mountains. Gold-hungry Mexican bandits capture me and put my feet to the fire,
demanding "How do you transmute copper into gold?" I scream "I don't know!", waking to find...
CAUTION: TORTURE PLAYED FOR LAUGHS
We're hiking in the Sangre de Cristos when a girl offers to show us how to be a wolf. We're
eager--until she turns wolf, bites us and leaps off a cliff! Furious, we stupidly follow her over...
CAUTION: NUDE FLYING WOLVES
From age six on, Simon nightly climbs mountains and faces roaring floods in a sort of naptime bootcamp...
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?
This place isn't out of my dreams, it just looks like it. It's real real real...
I tour the heart of a red supergiant, where dreaming souls explore
their fears and heart's desires, unconstrained by solid matter...
CAUTION: SWEDENBORGIAN VISION, UNICORN NUDITY
A Himalayan peak boils with warring creatures, but a guru says "They're just your conflicts. Sit, watch..."
They sneak off from a party to have a thresome, but monsters try to harvest their organs! Inept monsters...
CAUTION: SEX (OFFSTAGE)
Ko said "Now we have come to where we die." I thought it looked just like the land we'd been traveling,
and couldn't see why we should have to die. Ko grabbed me and pulled me over the cliff...
CAUTION: DYING IN DREAM
Jung's visions of dragons evolve from fiery destroyers
to thieves who can be forced to give up treasure
to peacful, luminous guardians of the sacred...
I dream I'm visiting a friend who's moved to a high equatorial peak. I'm shocked to find no trees. Next day,
I stumble on a book about Mt Kilimanjaro. Its treeline is below ours in California! A high-altitude desert...
DREAM: I run into a couple I know. I get gridlocked. R.D. Laing gives me a transpersonal message.
DAY: I bump into that couple, get gridlocked, and hear R.D. Laing speak on transpersonal messages...
We ride on a flying saucer made of stone. Atop the great cliffs, we meet a giant and
warn him not to slip. He doesn't appreciate advice from little alien tourist twerps...
As we climb down the steep mountainside, clutching bushes to keep from falling,
I ask Laura "Do you want another child?"
After fighting off an electrified Orson Welles, I meet the twelve
vulture-pine-politicians climbing Mt Sinai, looking for librium...
A waterfall leaps from a mountain so huge, steep and distant its base is lost in the haze...
Manta Moths pick us off us explorers... or do they? An old scroll spoke of fear leading to transformation...
A black anchor floats in the sky to the east. Impossible cities rise on mountaintops, only to erupt in flame.
The sea rises to drown them. On a plank, I ride the flood. In the ruins, I find angelic statues--who wake...
My friend Mark and I climb the Path of Righteousness to the summit where he finds a big red watermelon.
He rolls it down the Path of Righteousness, knocking businessmen aside like bowling pins! Why? Well...
Mars as it will be 1000 years from now, terraformed. A guided tour with photos...
On our roadtrip, I notice strange crags north of our highway, and deduce they form a ring: a caldera like
Crater Lake. But my friends can't see the pattern, just the pieces! I wake. The mail comes. With postcards of...
CAUTION: ANNOYING TO E.S.P. SKEPTICS
God offers gifts to pilgrims, so my sister enters his door. Fierce light shoots out...
I visit a beautiful artificial mountain with loved ones--but my demons overwhelm me one by one.
CAUTION: SUICIDAL FEELINGS, BODY HATE/FATPHOBIA, IMPLIED RAPE
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...
Sketching on North Dome, thinking only of the glorious Yosemite landscape, I was suddenly
possessed by the notion that my friend Professor J. D. Butler was below me in the valley...
A horror film and Rick Veitch's dream-comix provoke a nightmare
warning me that guilt about my dad is wrecking my life...
I climb a crumbling slope to a cliff with a Himalayan view; I slip, and no one lifts a hand to help as I...
Through wild jungles and over the Mattress Mountains, I lead a giant purple newt to love...
I'm a stratospheric bat who finds a flying swastika. Is it creeping fascism?
Or a Hindu blessing? Neither! It's an Octopian frisbee. I return it...
On terraformed Mars, we set out to climb Mt Olympus without
oxygen masks. The first miles are OK, but the air thins until...
CAUTION: ANTICIPATED DEATH?
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?
A naked angel came and perched on a rock, pointing at a vista that seemed both alpine and undersea...
At a strange gate between worlds with high and low sea levels,
a meddling spirit prods me to clear a path for a salt torrent...
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...
I trained myself to associate one scent with the mountains, one with an art studio. On a random
night my servant applied both secretly, and I dreamt artist & model burst into a mountain scene...
I'm peeking at Pike's Peak with Gregory Peck, as we seek my dream-journals in the Hawaiian jungles...
CAUTION: STUPID PSYCHIC PUNS
I'm building a planetary model a kilometer across, inset in Bernal Hill like an eye in a socket.
My intern Silky kicks the globe, scuffing a caravan trail in a desert. Needs to be crookeder...
CAUTION: FATSHAMING? OR CALLING OUT SKINNYSHAMING?
My sister hoists us up to the Goddess's country too early, or too late: the ice is thawing, treacherous...
20,000 years from now, a deer-harpist named Razi finds the Holy Wino's not quite the ruin he seems...
CAUTION: BAD PENGUINS, DEER NUDITY, RUDE DRUNK
Mt Everest is snowfree and red; in the next dream I redden a sandstone cave with ochre. I feel uneasy...
I'm a raft guide on a circular river that may just be reincarnation. A girl in my
tour group jumps ship: she dreads the white water of rocky relationships ahead...
CAUTION: METAPHYSICS, SEX, WEAK SOULS...
I'm a Brazilian in the Olympic waterfall-jumping finals. The Russian & American cheat--threaten my family.
I snap! Fight recklessly, knocking them off their ropes. We all tumble down the cliff...
CAUTION: BULLYING, VIOLENT REVENGE
A dry little world with many small seas, Serrana has at least six intelligent species
and an anarchist culture. It's a tribute to Ursula Le Guin's anarchist utopia,
"The Dispossessed", and Kropotkin's theories of biological cooperation...
CAUTION: ANARCHIST POLITICS, ALIEN NUDITY
I visit Shangri-La, the ancient Tibetan valley of refuge. Unicorns graze. We
drive around on car-sheep. Robin Hood rebels against the Priestess of Gloom.
Pilgrims in silly gauze robes arrive. Or are they just tourists? Oh, well. Toga party!
CAUTION: GAUZE ROBES, NUDE UNICORNS
WAYAN: I'm a cat climbing on sea-cliffs. Fear I'll fall. Run into Silky, an archer firing
a line across to an islet. Now the Deer People can build their gossamer bridge...
LIZ: I was hiking along a trail atop sea-cliffs. But I feared I'd fall...
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...
I meet the Red God of Running and Holly Golightly; we're in the triathlon up the world's greatest peak...
A murderer was stalking Mt Tam. I dreamed I met the murderous spirit; only
by allying with small dancers from inside the mountain could we defeat it...
CAUTION: NEW AGE
Tour a rugged, scenic moon with air and water in deep canyons sheltering a dozen intelligent species
CAUTION: ANARCHISM, NUDITY, SCIENCE
I dreamt again of that mountain east of Concord where no hill exists. I ascended that long
rocky ridge where wild beasts haunted, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity...
In a world where speech is in Mayan glyphs, comedian Tina Fey (dressed for prom night)
climbs a Tibetan peak to learn levitation. But the flying monks are scared of women...
CAUTION: COOTIES; ROWDY JESUS; MAY FLUNK THE BECHDEL TEST
Climbing a mountain on Mars, I reach a hall where I'm transformed into a cryophilic being.
Then I feast on methane soup with the heroic Martian dead...
In the border-mountains, there is a Trumpeter. His clear, triadic melodies break out through the frosty air,
or through the swirling mists. No one knows whether the Trumpeter is theirs or ours...
Jealous of newlyweds, I grind my teeth. But the Ice Age ground the Sierra's granite teeth, and they're lovelier for it...
Vesta are animal guardians of the land. This isn't a portrait of a vesta, but how I see when I AM one...
I ask to see my past lives, and dream of a viewpoint where I can--but this Mormon ranger...
I'm on a mesa, looking down in terror. I try to pull back but a compulsion
overrides my will--I crawl helplessly forward until I go over. As I fall...
CAUTION: PRE-FREUDIAN DISMISSAL OF WARNING
The vulture people are fucking in the city dump. I end up their guest, given putrid food
in their cold stinking house of rancid grease. I'll become a vulture too...
CAUTION: UGH!
In my sister's house I saw a magazine cover showing that famous
national monument in the Black Hills: Mt Walrushmore...
1940s reporters almost trap me in a mob shootout. I shelter in a gender-segregated hotel.
The owner of Wharton Tower shakes the hotel so it swings between its butch & femme halves.
I fall off the Hudson Palisades, but I land safely on the Glass Ceiling...
A writer I meet is either flirting with me obscenely, or
advising me about eyecare, or... are those the same?
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM
Who were they? I don't know. But they were doing something powerful on top of that mountain.