A nightmare of a killer who I let torment me because it's better than being alone...
I'm kissed by the Holy Aardvark, but my bond with my dad is strained by ESP he can't accept...
I fear falling? The drop increases. Want a softer surface? The rocks turn to dirt, then water.
Want help? Here comes a flying dolphin. Oh, but I'm not dreaming...
I dreamed that as a kid I saw two girls making love in the bushes, awakening my own
sexual orientation. Later, I saw the bigger picture, which wasn't about sex at all...
CAUTION: SEX
All that spring I dreamed of climbing, cold, fatigue, risk, and fear.
But shamanic training involves toughening; ascent isn't always easy flight...
1: On a mid-Atlantic islet, a farm family plays music to summon the Greek god Pan. It works!
2: A mystical picturebook shows Pan & his mermaid lover. Again I'm told music summons Pan!
CAUTION: GOAT-GOD NUDITY
After a day of enduring reverse sexism, a silly dream of giant banana slugs turns out to be psychic...
CAUTION: ANTIMALE SEXISM
A black beetle insists I'm not needed or at home in the human world; my lifework is elsewhere...
How a centaur tames birds in the Sierra Nevada...
A dream-voyage round the world on the Black Current, only to wake up back in my animal village...
CAUTION: GORILLA MARRIAGE
Chapter 8 of UNICORN TAG, though it can stand alone.
A packet of magic soupmix sends me upstairs to a secret wizards' lab.
They've summoned a demon they can't handle: the furious Black Unicorn...
I was Eve's guardian angel the second time round, and I blew it again. But this time, it came out right....
CAUTION: BREASTS AND BEASTS
I dreamed of a bear playing a cello concert.
The next day at a concert I was surprised to see that the cellist...
I was led into the future, where all the buffalo disappeared, to meet a frail old man by a ranch house...
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
That moment when you tire of your old trauma and suddenly turn to the sun. Or fun.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
Ballooning over Middle Earth with a metamorphosing butterfly-girl, we drift into forbidden territory:
I'm warily crossing an avalanche chute in winter, when my worst fear happens. Then the slide speaks up...
I was hunting edible fungi in Foothill Park near Palo Alto when I saw this...
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
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...
That day I read Hilde Bruch's "Conversations with Anorexics" and face the fact I am one.
That night, in the land where anorexic horses heal, I enter the Kiva of Shamanic Pamphlets, and...
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...
Climbing a Mayan pyramid in Yosemite with Deanna Troy from the
Starship Enterprise, we meet a gunman who wants to sacrifice...
A magic lake where deer glide on water... so I try it. And start to realize I could build such a lake...
In a parallel world, a gliding griflynx displays a brilliant
evolutionary strategy: joy! It's the strongest mate magnet...
I dream of a future where blondes are a too-cute endangered species. How can they survive? Like this...
CAUTION: NUDITY
A dog man invites me to play in the park--and as long as
we play on soft turf, without teams or rules, I'm happy!
My hunting license won't let me legally shoot a giraffe or ibex, but I bag a prime Macy's salesman...
CAUTION: LICENSE TO KILL
A dragon's daughter seeking her inheritance defies a sneaky dragon-realtor out to own the world...
A logging war in the northern forests is confused by subjective realities. Am I sure what I see is real?
In the Rockies, in winter, I was freezing until I found the
hot springs. In the steam rising, I saw a vision of an elk...
Goaded by a green spirit of envy, an Ice Age sorceror kidnaps Adam's Eve, arresting human evolution...
The hero Gilgamesh troubles his city till he dreams the gods will send him a best friend & lover, Enkidu...
CAUTION: SEX
Bad puns link an ecological dream of a forest being murdered by inches, and a dental exam...
A woman--Gaia?--leads me up Mt Diablo. Nature preserves--grass, oak, pine. But... all silent. The animals are gone...
CAUTION: ECO-RAGE
Downtown San Francisco hides a magic wood full of crested
talking tigers. And I must enter it to live a while...
For mere disobedience, I EXECUTE a forest-fire-fighting cat! So next
I'm trapped in a security-obsessed job; how do I like it? I flee...
I have weird, bad luck around dating. Finally I go on a picnic with Page, and the Great Fire begins...
I had an epic dream lasting subjective weeks--a true other life. It wasn't Earth and we weren't human.
I was a teenage lemur, sailing with two friends into unknown waters--a rite of passage. One night,
my friends curled round me, I saw I didn't WANT to pass the test, be declared a woman, marry, and have pups.
I loved my girl friends. In a world lacking the very word, I was groping toward queerdom.
Sailing into unknown waters! "Here be dragons," the old maps say. And they were right...
2600K loads slowly? Try it in parts: 1: HOME, 650K, 2: VOYAGE, 1200K, 3: BACK 750K.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, QUEER TEEN ANGST, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
I try to pick a flower in Golden Gate Park. But it fights back--plucks an ear, an eye, my nose.
A half-gardener, half-cop hands me shears. But I turn from the flower at the last minute to cut...
CAUTION: SURREAL VIOLENCE
A man leads me to a cliff looking down on a canyon. Men dive into the river below, but
often hit the canyon walls. The two of us soar upwards though, across the canyon...
King Charles loses a new hawk. But a winged deer lands, bows to him,
and offers him a wild ride across France after his bird...
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...
The terror of Navy breakfast, the joy of filterfeeding,
how to marry pudding, and a sniper lunch with kisses...
I'm jogging in Yosemite. A man tells me I'm possessed. There IS something in my shoe...
In the Garden of the Gods, I sit through sun and rain. For gods aren't the gardeners, they're the crop...
I dreamed I returned to a childhood park and found mostly ruin. But one magical thing survived...
Four thugs stalk a gawky girl through the Everglades. She treads on a black stone and...
becomes a blue heron! Her stalkers vanish--did they become birds too? Should I step up?
I'm a fat guy hired as a temp by some unethical gods. Or are they trying to teach me something?
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
I get a crush on two mare-girls--sunny palomino Goldie is cute,
but it's dark-silver, lunar Grimoire that really stuns me...
CAUTION: EQUINE NUDITY, ESP REFERENCES
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
Landing in Hawaii, I dream of a magical twilit cove I must swim across. The eve of leaving, there it is...
I climb a small-town water tower. The tank holds a reedy marsh where sentient herons live! They say
the Heartland below them is a nest reserved for greedy, screechy, flightless, half-grown souls like us...
CAUTION: DISSES SMALL-TOWN VALUES
My little brother catches and rides a fairy goose down steep mountain slopes, demanding it grant his wishes...
A poor planet with one city. Urban technocrats and hick ecologists have conflicting development models...
CAUTION: TOO REAL TO BE FUN
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...
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...
The villagers warned me not to walk in the alien graveyard; for at night, the Id flowers wake...
To reach the Peak of Happiness on the Isle of Dreams, I must pass four Perils--but they're all backwards...
CAUTION: RELIGIOUS NUTS, KNIVES, NUDE ALIENS, BACKWARD PLOT...
I'm the animal guardian of a deep crater, but when a human girl rejects me, I set out to leave...
CAUTION: ORAL SEX, UNREQUITED LOVE, SPECISM
I live on Io. It's nicer than its photos. At least inside, where the oceans are--where I grow a second head...
I love a girl who wants to settle in a radioactive jungle, a scar from an ancient war. Stay or go?
I'm at a party in an air-lake. We fish for a girl who's gone invisible. But... what if we catch her?
I'm a Japanese werefox, longing to reach the Isle of the Blest; but dare I swim for it?
Deep Duck's interview with Jasha the Krelkin goes rogue, as she urges tossing out human habits like... death?
CAUTION: REDWOOD-SPRITE SEX, PEEING ON TREES, DRUNK DUCK
Shepherding a group of cityfolks through an alien wilderness, I need a werewolf's help. So why do I lie?
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
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...
In a general store on a High Plains rez, I find two surreal collaged postcards. If only
this were a dream they'd qualify for the World Dream Bank, but sadly, it isn't. Right?
CAUTION: STUPID, STUPID CONSCIOUS!
For years Martin's dreams were all set in a parallel world untouched by World War, until...
She didn't want to be there. She closed her eyes and went elsewhere. So I painted where she went...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I visit a friend's ramshackle cottage--trees grow through the walls. But glorious meadows! Spring at last...
In dark, grimy, rainy Liverpool, a friend shows me a park with an islet
in a pond, where a great magnolia tree shines--an oasis of light...
I was a bird-person in a post-nuclear future, touring North America on the wing. But ruins all look the same...
CAUTION: ALL YOU LOVE IS GONE
I'm a psychic circus animal who's just managed to teleport my humanoid girlfriend. It's for our act, but...
CAUTION: PETTING
An avian friend of mine researches a whirlpool. But it doesn't want to be studied, and it has friends too...
Beauty's link to status and privilege bothers me. The pretty get perks (or parks), while we uglies...
CAUTION: BREASTS, BEASTS, AND A BLOOD FLOWER
I met a woman whose art (and her love for the Earth) inspired me to start a series of paintings with creatures hidden in landscapes...
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
A park in San Francisco has melted into a bizarre mutation-zone. Its guardian is a lonely elf-woman...
CAUTION: ELF NUDITY
At Sea-Dragon State Park, I climbed down to the sea serpent's dressing room after the show, and found...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
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...
I climb a huge mushroom-shaped rock rising from a hotspring and prepare to dive in...
I'm hiking through the Catskills when a gigantic amoeba comes slipping over the hills...
I always thought I saw differently than others, but when someone builds the Goggles...
I'm a wildcat in a cat/fox team led by a woman who wants us to merge with a man/wolf team...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
I love a Naiad who's lost her God. Tragedy strikes us. I'm devastated till I meet the aliens who explain...
A museum sketch of Navaho horses who got me hot--teaching
teenage me that my sexual orientation wasn't (only) human...
Through wild jungles and over the Mattress Mountains, I lead a giant purple newt to love...
While conducting a census of fairies in Golden Gate Park, I fall in love
with an abused oriole-girl, and we try to heal one another...
CAUTION: AWKWARD SEX
Mom's vanished, and our writer/bohemian dad's caring for us
alone now. But he's barely coping. And he's me...
I'm pulling a cart in the woods. At a bridge over a canyon, owls urge me to climb down into the misty abyss, but...
West of Seattle, near Lake Ozette, a mudslide buried a whole Makah Indian village centuries ago...
My last two businesses went bust. So I let a giant parrot talk me into interviewing
her people, who've been settling all those alien ruins in Amazonia. Great career move...
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...
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
A misty day in San Francisco's Presidio, where migrant pegasii graze on pine-tips and shadow witches nest...
The roots and reasons and back-stories for the nineteen virtual worlds making up Planetocopia...
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?
I'm a telepathic rabbit defending our world from space-laser attack. We do, but do we modernize too much?
CAUTION: IDEAS
Strange beings from the realm of Platonic Ideals rain down like meteors on San Francisco.
I work as a tour guide, teaching the newbies not to step in front of a bus...
CAUTION: CRUSHED IDEALS
A Borges story of a were-tigress provokes a dream of a ranch
crawling with weird were-women. Weird, but I LIKE them...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
My sister hoists us up to the Goddess's country too early, or too late: the ice is thawing, treacherous...
The wildcat Rare Bit Fiends slinks out of the hills to stalk and maul
dreamers--until one day she rears up to teach a dream workshop...
As a boy I dreamt my uncle (a calm man) glared at me in red rage; I was terrified. A decade later, in a bar...
I dreamt I saw, over a balcony rail, bright-colored, spectacular scenery. Years after in Arizona, I took a detour...
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...
Night. A jungle full of prowling lions and leopards. So naturally, I get up on a rock and roar back...
Sunbathing on Saturn's rings with a girl who's preparing for reincarnation--like me.
She's cute, but she chucks litter in the Bay of Rebirth. Maybe not Ms. Right, then...
by SAO (Shawn Allen O'Neal); March 2001, a painting of a dream-scene.
In the golden light of a primal Eden, my friends and I flock naked
through emerald glades like wild deer, until the tower approaches...
Camping in strange mountains (Australia?), I can't sleep. So I nightwalk, and find I'm changing...
I take my friend Neil Gaiman to a park where we sculpt a giant horned head. Months later
we collaborate on a graphic novel. The course of the project's full of echoes from the dream...
I dreamed a sea eagle I saw as a boy led me back to my native Australia, to a Dreaming place.
Later a 'spirit man' of the Mununajali in Queensland led me to the exact place I'd seen in my dream...
An Arab shows me a stone he calls a book, and a prophetic shell that warns of a flood rushing toward us...
Our family of Japanese pearldivers is cast away on an atoll. One day, lonely, scared, I cast away fear...
My sister's beautiful; I'm plain. When she's murdered, I ride into the Interface Desert, where worlds meet...
Infected glass-cuts scar the vegan alligators in the park. As part of a cleanup, I'm told to EAT one...
Lost in the rainforest of Olympic National Park, I stumble into the wrong cabin:
the hut of Time herself. Or is she? She asks me to clean up, but spare her web...
Night. I'm scared of the men in the park--till I see they're all gay. I dance,
and as darkness flares to dawn, remember how to fly--regain my falcon-wings...
My job is to set up portals to other realities, and
create secret routes through our world between them...
DREAM: I meet a woman with a bun hairdo, black skirt, black & white striped blouse. I think she's a spy!
TWO DAYS LATER: I meet that woman--bun, skirt, blouse. And all the hotel guests here say she's a spy...
A slightly surrealized San Francisco landscape--not that it needed much help...
CAUTION: PINK PAGAN TOES
As a kid, my Ecotopian fantasy city was hollowed out of living rock, with hanging gardens and terraces...
The first drop struck about four miles away, with terrific force and thunder, breaking and drowning the land...
DREAM: I was a cheetah seeking a book of cheetah rolemodels, but this specist librarian harassed me...
PAINTING: months later, dream forgotten, I painted myself as an intellectual cheetah stretching...
I'm a teenage girl diving for treasure. In an eerie coral grotto reeking of sulfur,
I spot a diver in trouble... and wake to find the grotto is real..
Through twin gates of dream--not ivory and horn any more, but fear and trust...
Three castles on the sea: a Mock Kremlin, a Ship of Toiletpaper, and a Ship of Brick and Beer...
A mad old surfer of the San Andreas Fault, impossibly riding earth-change...
A gigantic herd of buffalo stampede toward me. I panic, then surrender in peace to what is surely my death...
The tale of the most truly sincerely religious revelation I've ever witnessed...
CAUTION: REAL WITCHES
The ruins of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco were the setting for an otherworldly dream...
On a cruise to Catalina Island, I find friends, a boyfriend and a magical sea of color...
A dragon killed a friend, and threatened worse. I had to fight.
We dueled mid-air, over Lake Tahoe...
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
I dream Edward Abbey shows me a secret grove of telepath trees.
That night, in my dreams inside my dream, they meet me...
My cold-sensitive dinosaur friend makes a find at our archeological dig by thinking like the Old Ones...
Did sex turn creepy because I sensed the madman stalking us? Or did our sin (casual sex) summon him?
CAUTION: CREEPY SEX, CREEPIER PREMONITIONS
At the beach, a biology teacher shows me how bottles smashed on the rocks by jerks lead to
slow death for the tidepool creatures. I'm afraid the warning is both personal AND planetary...
CAUTION: CAUSTIC TOWARD RECKLESS G.O.P. CUTS
A black dog leads me into the fairy wood. I'm curious what happens
to those who walk under the tree where the Lightning Tiger lurks....
I dreamed of this tree growing out of a cave-mouth. Years later, in Guatemala, I
was shocked to encounter my dream. That tree and that cave were all too surreal...
A trail toward Freedom has extra markers, for it's three trails, superimposed! Not all the cues are for us...
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...
I dreamed of a unicorn rearing in the desert. I wanted to sculpt it and applied to Burning Man
but was rejected. So I sculpted the unicorn anyway, out of playa mud. It was a hit...
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 ask to see my past lives, and dream of a viewpoint where I can--but this Mormon ranger...
In my sister's house I saw a magazine cover showing that famous
national monument in the Black Hills: Mt Walrushmore...
I'm a Wapato Bird: part crane, part elk, part tree-bud. Despite my
shyness, I must lead our people's migration to the Grand Teton lakes...
A stylized waterfall--a distillation of all those childhood summers camping in Yosemite...
A road trip with no road--levitating over the Arctic Sea to meet the Whale Philosopher.
Then it's time for us all to bike to the stars, leave this world behind...
I'm living in an England rendered in chalk. We wander the woods with butterfly nets,
ritually hunting the White Deer--if that's what they really are...
I'm a part-owner of Eden, harvesting windfalls.
But a renter says his Landlord promised him all the apples...
After seeing 'Rear Window', Grace Kelly and I are wolf children in a pack that's quickly evolving into...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, CHILD SEXUALITY, WOLF-SLANDER
I'm a dyke playing baseball in Golden Gate Park. Some guys harass us and run into a tunnel. I follow, but...
DREAM: I'm in Yellowstone, in a monstrous resort. Local tribes fight white exploitation of sacred land.
NEXT MORNING: I read a Native American critique of racist land-theft in a TV show: Yellowstone...
I walked into a 19th century home--and family quarrel. Decades passed in seconds; then
the house burned--with me in it. Two years later I learned the house and its history were real...