"What about their dreams? What if they've all been partly dreaming us, and
lacking them, our world becomes as trivial and narrow as our dreams?"...
Tour bizarre worlds most exobiologists would dismiss as hopeless for life--and meet the natives...
CAUTION: SEXY ALIENS, WEIRD CUSTOMS, EVOLUTION
I was led into the future, where all the buffalo disappeared, to meet a frail old man by a ranch house...
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
A plague begins on terraformed Mars and spreads to Earth. Population biology made it inevitable...
CAUTION: POPULATION CRASH (OFFSTAGE)
Peering in a spacetime gate, I wonder if all the dinos went extinct. Would we spot an ancient Singularity?
I dream of a future where blondes are a too-cute endangered species. How can they survive? Like this...
CAUTION: NUDITY
Daily dream-poems in haiku style, nonstop for a month. A flood of animals, revenant ghosts, sex changes...
What Earth will look like 1000 years from now, with doubled CO2, flooded coasts and melted poles...
CAUTION: CALLS GEORGE W. BUSH A BIG FAT LIAR
Mute, paired images, contrasting life with the death we're spreading. And then finally the dream speaks:
CAUTION: READ THE TITLE AND GO SABOTAGE SOMETHING!
One patch of the night sky had a huge number of stars compared to the rest; there was no atmosphere in that portion of the sky...
A woman--Gaia?--leads me up Mt Diablo. Nature preserves--grass, oak, pine. But... all silent. The animals are gone...
CAUTION: ECO-RAGE
I dreamed that in four days a plague would hit our reservation and people would start dying.
Four days later it happened just as I was warned---the 1918 flu. And my dream caused it...
CAUTION: NOT JUST SURVIVOR'S GUILT, SEER'S GUILT
Three wind-gods are so revolted by humanity they want to kill us; the fourth says we'll kill ourselves soon enough...
DREAM: I hike up my Career Path into the hills. On a snowfield,
a bird and a fox create the eye of God, who banishes all evil!
NEXT DAY: I read a novel full of images out of the dream...
I'm in the Gulf of Mexico watching the Creator of North America place mountains, rivers
and ancestors just where they belong. I wake knowing this pious, static view is immoral...
CAUTION: CRITIQUES TRADITIONALISM
I find myself sketching the slope of progress up to the coming singularity, and notice a hidden stability...
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 saw a dark object like a cloud at a vast height, but coming swiftly down toward the earth.
It resolved itself into iron bars--tens of thousands, millions? I said: this is the end of everything...
I tilted the Earth to create a tropical supercontinent from Bali to Tierra
del Fuego. What will evolve there--and on the new tropical Antarctica?
I found myself defending humanity before an astral jury, begging them to delay the great die-back...
I'm a dog princess, on a world where kibble falls from heaven. When I meet our species' guardian angels...
CAUTION: DOG NUDITY, LAWYERS
I dreamt an epic poem on a sinister ruined city now home
only to reptiles. I woke with at least a hundred lines, but...
I challenge my teacher's claim human historical patterns are universal.
She challenges me by dragging us both back to the Ice Age and...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
I want to catch a crescent moon home--our transit system's been buying up
old moons and running them across town--but tourists reserved all the seats...
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)
Plato never did say what shed the light that cast those shadows on his cave wall. I find out.
CAUTION: CUT-RATE APOCALYPSE
A contest! Here's a wide, fertile world full of empty ecological niches for intelligent creatures. Design one!
The roots and reasons and back-stories for the nineteen virtual worlds making up Planetocopia...
A spell kills off nearly all humanity and mutates the rest of us. Now I'm a satyr living in a co-op home with
unicorns, dryads, cattaurs, and shy vampires. Thing is, I prefer the Apocalypse to what came before...
CAUTION: NUDE CREATURES
I meet two witch sisters. Little sister and I magically power a flying saucer. She gives me a tour
of this vast, ruined city. My life here is happy, but it doesn't look good for civilization as a whole...
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...
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
Silicon Valley goes enthusiastically fascist. I hide in a berry patch. They build a shining world, and then...
After my mother died, I dreamed I was a girl living after the Apocalypse. I rode my elk
past cars full of corpses, saw friends die, and never could find a single fertile mate...
I’m a drug-addicted amateur dramatist. A fat balding businessman and I bring humanity back from extinction, but...
CAUTION: TORTURE (brief), ADVOCACY OF WAR, HUMAN EXTINCTION (offstage)
Dreamworkers gawk at sexy unicorn drawings all over my bed. One friend's part unicorn. The other? I wonder...
Ten years later, having learned I have a rare mutation making me not too human, the dream feels half-predictive...
CAUTION: UNIPORN?
This symposium, airing a dispute between geologists & astronomers who just don't read each others' papers, had multiple revelations--big hazards, bigger holes in our knowledge, and bigger opportunities...
CAUTION: CHART! WITH NUMBERS!!
Exploring Indonesia's lesser isles, Wallace fell sick with fever. He dreamed that Malthusian hunger and
population pressure might explain the evolution of the species he found. He wrote to Darwin, and...
I dream I find a few 'extinct' watercats--in a slum! They talk. They say I'm one of them,
brainwashed to think I'm human. I wake, go to a dinner, and hear a tale of... watercats!
I'm a one-legged hopping hermit in the ruins of LA, and my only hope
for love is to conjure up a girl out of a trout and a puppy...
Attacked on the ground, in the air, even in space, I fight back effectively.
Not lucid, yet in my dreams I now have real power...
Is there really that much difference between the rootless yuppies flooding the West, and war refugees?
I dream of three colonies in the deep future. We outlived the universe itself, but can we survive each other?
CAUTION: WAR, GENOCIDE, POLITICAL ALLEGORY