After I flew from New York to Hawaii, a surreal dream of a floating man reeled in like a kite...
My hometown floods. I swim after some strange fish and find
a scientific community where a scaled baby tells me who I am...
Weird paintings cover a hill town in Africa, demanding I paint them when I wake.
Paintings on courage, flight... and defying tradition.
My loud, spiky, tailed angel of change and potential, and
my calm, skeptical devil of gradualism--a star-nosed mole...
Allied submarines attack the giant Nazi toddler who's hunting us with sonar, occupying my playroom...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE AND GUILT
Parasites, Rambo, huge fetus-beets, an exhibitionist and a living statue advise me on my love life...
CAUTION: NUDITY
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
Someone is giving birth, and we're panicky. Fortunately, the Postal Service has
issued stamps with helpful advice like "Stay Calm" and "Boil Water"...
I looked into a narrow stream that was quite clear yet inky black. It made no sense at the time...
This was my first sculpture. I was around four. The rest of the preschool class made bunnies and snowmen.
But I'd been peeking at Isamu Noguchi and Henry Moore in my mom's art books, so...
Scuba diving, we find Atlantis. Beautiful Greek statues. But some kid painted a baseball in
Aphrodite's hand. And the bobcat diving with us has been holding its breath for an hour...
This picture does not actually contain any authentic boston beans, just Hieronymus Boschton b...
The moon invites me to go flying, but I get tired of magic and just want to go shopping...
I'm Bugs Bunny. I torment Daffy Duck till I learn that in many time-branches the New
Deal happened late... or never. I decide to prod a reluctant Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
CAUTION: FIRESIDE PETTING, DUCK TORTURE, BAD POLITICS
After seeing Picasso's massive cubist women running on a beach, I found myself drawing
a lighter version--except she (I) waved this bitter banner. But then I was ill at the time...
The cake horse resented my taking one slice out of him; but he let me.
No second slice, though! He just laughed at me--through his bad teeth...
Land is sea, sea is land: that's a lotta land!
Seas siphoned off by alien chefs. A lotta different land!
High is low, low is high, abysses are land. Surprisingly sparing land...
A mysterious old woman with cat-face and claws threatened me; she seemed
to be guarding a treasure. Sometimes she appeared as a praying mantis...
I was going to music camp, but I didn't know how to play my cello.
A teenager and her mother slept like vampires in her giant cello case...
To help the King of Italy, I become a baker in Baluchistan--
learning Norwegian, levitating, meeting quaggas, riding landslides...
My town transforms into a circus--trapeze artists, elephants, clowns. At first I loved it, but when I went home...
I meet King Louis-Philippe, but as I recall his symbol, the cockerel, he transforms to suit.
Now he cannot read the letter presented to him, so it becomes a basket of bird-seed...
A surreal statue of a naked body spilling out of the wall as if someone's caught between dimensions...
CAUTION: NUDITY
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.
Who sculpts landscape? So I tried a crag with a pool in a hollow on its knee, windows like red eyes...
My grandma came in from gathering eggs and showed me one was triple-sized and very long...
Dream: wild animals race across Paris, but in my hotel lobby, a small creature on my shoulder murmurs "Je t'aime."
Awake, I know those racers from the themepark where I work. But the creature takes me way back--to Paris, 1918...
CAUTION: ONE-NIGHT STAND
If you can't tell what it is from the thumbnail, cheer up. It's indescribable full-size, too.
I dreamed I saw what looked like an ink sketch by Dali of a horse--but I was dead wrong...
CAUTION: YUCK
My co-worker Daphne is snappish and stressed. She meditates, seeking the cause,
and becomes a half-newt-half-koi in a giant fishbowl. Up shambles a curious AI...
I was big as the world, so whole cars fit in my vagina. But men were selling women
to supermarkets, to be cooked & resold. So I crossed the Atlantic sea-floor on foot...
CAUTION: CAR SEX. NO, NOT SEX IN CARS...
Troutmet the moon-pigeon, Burtra the blackbird, a talking acacia,
my dead father and my dead gardener all give me afterlife-advice...
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?
A master criminal is tracked down by a hound in a monk's robe
who's introduced to me as... the President of the United States?
DREAM: On a farm, I meet two sexy shapeshifting sisters. But mushroom clouds rise on the horizon...
NEXT DAY: at SF-MOMA, Susan Marie Dopp's paintings: shapeshifting sisters, mushroom clouds...
CAUTION: NUDITY; ESP
Looking in a mirror, Julie goes lucid. She changes herself into a man
and pulls her mirror-image through the glass...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
Girondé dreams she's floating through the oceanic abyss...
This dreamer is starting to notice certain subtle signs that all
is not normal and this may be a dream. Well, not that subtle...
The sparrow died in the ashes, but the dove in my hands became a blue cloud.
I drank it, thinking "This will benefit us all"...
Night. Heads shaved, in loose-fitting gray robes, the young men swing from eave to eave. Two lose their grips.
Hard fall. Blood. Assistants call ambulances. Others swing on, house to house, before dawn...
I was floating in the Ether, not far from this world, which seemed small as an apple.
An angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, 'This must thou eat'...
A monstrous empty eggshell, cracked open and roughly
propped up, makes an excellent skateboard park
I'm in an elevator with a giant guy with a hotel cart bearing a silver platter.
On it, an erect penis. The guy tries to enlist me in his program to... what?
CAUTION: CARTOON PENIS
A crowd watches from shore as a great glowing meteor descends into the sea. I fear a tsunami, but...
One pays for soaring high with solitude of the soul...
Slightly altered to remove the familiarity, but this is quite real...
I wander a weird palace full of books, seeking my father-in-law, but find
only a blindly-flailing whip anchored in the floor, creating a dome of pain...
I had a dream I was climbing up a bunch of tiny shanty buildings and I got stuck. There was a wall full of
giant Koi Betta fish I couldn't climb across, and when I looked down, I could only see the top of the sky...
Shasé liked absurd, impossible poses, and she held them heroically...
CAUTION: SILLY NUDITY
I'm a film actress, but the producer isn’t happy with my legs, so make-up takes them away to be redone...
A pod of whales in the sky and a circle of children dressed like seed-pods both beg me to interpret them...
DAY: I research a weird Salvador Dalí dream-painting mingling, flight, tigers and sex.
DREAM: I flirt with a talking cat. Want her to fly with me. But she wants something earthier...
Books are clothes, and always were. A potato makes me lie, and everyone gets it but me.
Sex in a crowd disarms the Mom Squad! And a Mystic Autistic's soul explores my room...
CAUTION: PUBLIC SEX? PROBABLY.
I felt like my heart was in my stomach. My friend Lyx opened me up & said "It is." She scolded me for eating it...
CAUTION: URP
I've always loved curves, color, dreams, sex, texture... and planning, too.
So one day I drew 100 black boxes in ink--no color, no curves, no erasure! And then I began to seek...
Two protesters, under the weight of full scuba gear and flippers, waddle toward City
Hall--the first steps of a transcontinental march. Or at least transcontinental waddle...
As they lower me into my grave, mourners don't throw dirt but--cottage cheese? I toss it
back, starting a huge foodfight. I climb out to join the fun. Only the poor pastor looks lost...
Three furry people show off their collected art & pets. But then they dissolve into their art & pets!
The room itself dissolves into a river-raft. A unicorn girl in a gauze ritual robe studies a map...
CAUTION: MILD FURRY NUDITY
At a beach, a man attacks the genitals, buttocks and thighs of a giant who sits half in the surf, ignoring him...
CAUTION: NUDITY, MUTILATION ATTEMPTS
Comics character Doctor Blasphemy, on stilts, bares his secret identity:
poet Allen Ginsberg! But who chopped off his missing fingers?
CAUTION: BLOODY FINGERS
In a California with no Gold Rush, wild deer carry a girl over the San Fernando hills to a secret dream-pool...
Then in a Japantown hotel lobby, that girl floats meditating in a huge aquarium, as local gossips lie about her...
I date a girl with a mysterious syndrome, but soon I become a monkeyfaced con-man. And SHE becomes...
I dreamed God was naked, selling cigarettes in a nightclub...
CAUTION: MONOTHEISTIC FALL
I was having dinner with friends when I saw on the wall a huge skullbone
spider. But I lost the word for spider, and my friends seemed not to see it...
So I looked out my window and saw this guy burying a tiny robed woman in a trench in the street...
Genteel gay guests first humiliate then torture their hosts--the rich but sick wife, then her weak, gay, parasitic husband...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE, MISOGYNY, CRUELTY, SHIT
I dreamt I gave birth to a white-hot stone shedding sparks. Most folk would find my son strange...
On a hunt, Guntram took a nap. His courtier saw a snake emerge from his mouth; it tried to cross a creek. The
courtier lay his sword out like a bridge, and the snake crossed, climbed a hill, and went in a hole. It returned
and crawled in Guntram's mouth. He woke and said "I was crossing a river on a great iron bridge..."
Glaciers feed a mountain lake; dust blows over a pass. Then I realize the ice is the robes
of a great choir; the dust, thousands of musicians filling the cirque, singing, playing...
People ride inside two levitating arms that shake hands
above a desert. Do the insiders know what the deal is?
DREAM: I'm in the Arctic facing a hostile mob. I insist "I'm dreaming; you can't hurt me." They try!
I look down at my body, stuck full of hatchets, and say "See?" They slink off, looking sheepish...
TWO DAYS LATER: I'm in northern England. A reporter snaps "Dreams won't help the miners..."
I find my city has changed during Covid; a huge Chinese gate or folly near Fort Mason
and a monstrous tower in the central hills, made of Space Needles, umbrellas & balloons...
Next day I read Jan Morris's Hav... and there are my towers.
I, sleeping me, watch dream-me find a third me who saw too much
in the kitchen. Unconscious or dead? I just don't know...
Every good party leaves a corpse or two. Cleaning up, I behead this one and drag it across the street to the
empty lot where we leave them. But its throat forms a toothless mouth and starts biting--well, gumming me...
A CIA man trying to infiltrate a revolutionary group flunks a lie-detector test, so the Headshrinker...
CAUTION: REAL HEADSHRINKER
Saint-Denys pushes a strange theory of dream-incompetence, using as an example
a woman's dream of grief over her brother, killed in a war. But her case suggests
a second explanation a 19th-century scholar isn't equipped to see ...
Forced into a duel, I let my spirit fight for me using Boomerang Blades. But my
enemy becomes giant floating sticky lips! My spirit finds incarnation confusing...
Greenwood dreams he finds a severed hand on a mantelpiece. The next day
it happens! But he sees no moral, so he dismisses it...
I paddle through the grim streets of Karachi on my belly, on a skateboard,
with my flipper-hands, until at last I reach the border to a Higher Realm...
I contemplate Bilbo taunting Smaug, then Frodo, Sam and Gollum triggering Mt Doom to erupt,
but next I "remember" other fiery catastrophes and "realize" hobbits are always causing...
I'm a hockey player. A woman strips to a bikini, wondering if she's attractive. My erection says she is...
CAUTION: BRRR!
I'm a Zen monk riddled with holes from a weird disease the government denies
is real. So as a protest, I stand naked atop a wall and let the air-sharks take me...
CAUTION: SURREAL SUICIDE
A student of Elsie Sechrist reports a dream in which Bob Hope came jumping
down the street on a pogo stick, expressing the dreamer's feeling that...
A huge white ovoid like a tethered cloud hangs over a city street. We enter it and search for the crew...
My nonexistent brother is a bank robber about to be arrested; he says
"I never saw Jung die." Meaning not that Jung's alive, but just...
Drops fall outside. But it's not rain! It's dripping from a
gray-purple block of ice floating fifty feet above me...
Soil turns to air for me; I float in the dark between tree roots
and stones, thinking "If only I could remember my name"...
In a flooded room, an indignant iguana scolds me, while
my wife Marnie checks her computer implant for water damage...
Is that a madwoman riding a horse, or a cougar pouncing on a deer,
or are these dream-creatures wildly making love?
I'm the first tuna to get a scholarship to Stanford.
Naturally I sign up for a course in Inuit Meditation...
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...
Bearded professors call through an iron-barred window shaped like
a woman's torso, hoping to lure a nude model to fill it so they can grope...
CAUTION: CREEPY
I'm in World War II, asking a reporter to keep quiet about our secret weapon.
But it's already gone off, melting and distorting the whole cartoon world. It's...
My Japanese friend Kotaro looks at me sternly and shoves his phone inside my chest. In my dreams, a phone
can mean ESP, so when I wake I check the news. A huge quake and tsunami have devastated Japan...
A library shows me surrealist Jean Arp's sketchbook. One Eschery sketch with repeated focal points is hypnotic.
But they also show me his lunch, and I try to eat it! I fail. Head & gut disagree. Stuck Arp-way...
CAUTION: NEVER EAT 12-YEAR-OLD SUSHI
I interview my own metabolism. Trouble in Cellville! I've got strikers and usurpers. But at least no invaders...
In a museum I see huge Jesus heads with inset saints and figures in pain;
then, in our old back yard, huge coffee cups half-sunk in the grass...
Joseph as a teen dreams sheaves of his brothers' grain bow to his; then the sun, moon & stars bow to him.
Eleven years later, in prison, Joseph interprets two cellmates' dreams as premonitory, and gets both right.
Two years later, he interprets two bizarre dreams troubling the Pharaoh, thus saving Egypt from famine...
CAUTION: BRONZE AGE FUN! NEAR-FRATRICIDE, SLAVERY, EXECUTION, FORCED MARRIAGE...
At the beach, facing down a wave taller than you,
the only thing to do is levitate discreetly...
I win a free game of Kick the President. But what if everyone can see your kick-ass Prez but you?
CAUTION: THIS DREAM IS MONITORED BY THE SECRET SERVICE
Kitty, exhausted, stops fighting what's inside her, and lets herself die.
Crystalline alien worms burst out, growing till they loom over the spaceport...
CAUTION: ADDICTION ROOTED IN AVOIDANCE
I'm in the kitchen making a mess--kneading pasta dough on the bookcase. If my mom comes in and sees...
Huge gold construction cranes loom over medieval castles. Not rebuilding, but
hoisting knights to the heights. I get a ride up, and see a wide timescape...
Tiny people ride a herd of levitating ladders--badly.
One seems to have gotten bucked loose...
I'm caught in a surreal traffic jam--balky horses, teeny cop cars. Get so stressed that I split
into a big creature guarding a small human sleeper. But even sleep is now a crime...
CAUTION: PREDICTIVE?
As a child, Paul Nash dreamt he flew over rural southern England.
As an adult surrealist painter...
I was one of just three to survive a roller coaster crash. I dreamed of a playful, laughing girl who drove off a cliff.
Dead, she lay on a bier in a surreal cemetery. But she woke and looked at photos of her old self with curiosity...
I'm watching MTV. Laurie Anderson gets inside my remote control. I try to change channels
and she turns my head into an apple. I grope for a potato peeler, and carve a new mouth...
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...
Leather boys flap down from the sky, feeding from giant mustard pots. We fight them with honey & boomerangs.
"Freedom is a gift you give yourself." But it doesn't always involve seahorses or babycarriages covered in quills...
Out of a Campbell's soup can poured life force: someone's last breath...
Embodying that upsetting feeling
when you're crawling on the ceiling...
After fighting off an electrified Orson Welles, I meet the twelve
vulture-pine-politicians climbing Mt Sinai, looking for librium...
The dancers, in a frenzy, stripped themselves. Not just their clothes; themselves...
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...
After finding marine geologists in my chocolate pudding, I'd rather be a Frenchman and insult my wife...
CAUTION: DECADENCE
Suddenly, out of the clouds, a man came shooting down, head first, at a terrific pace. He landed on his head with a sickening...
CAUTION: GRISLY
I dream squatters build surreal towers in a city of junk. I wake, go to a movie, and see...
I see a shop in Kyoto in the early 1900s. The old woman running it is calm,
with precise movements and sure hands. A voice says "That lady is Igort"...
You say you're leaving me. I go to grab an ice pick to stab you, but my hand
freezes to the ice block on the stair--I dare not even dream of murder. Since...
CAUTION: RESPONSE TO SPOUSAL SUICIDE
Dinner with the Lightbulb Heads. When we leave, the Mood Elevators welcome us...
but won't let us out! And in the struggle to escape, heads will roll--and shatter...
CAUTION: HARSH WORDS ON WESTERN MEDICINE
I work in a witness protection program. We hide the Muppet on the bottom
of an empty swimming pool, hand him a long straw, and fill it with...
I'm hiking through the Catskills when a gigantic amoeba comes slipping over the hills...
Ow! My body parts grow & shrink... A mad orchestra leader pulverizes me for nonconformity...
The Brady Bunch crams siblings into a waterpipe one by one. I'm next! My bones crunch...
I'm blindfolded, perched on a miles-high needle piercing my big toe. Blood drips down...
CAUTION: GLEEFULLY GROSS
1: I sketch two deer-girls making videos. 2: I pull a man's nose off, and milk the scene for drama before...
3: My old boss is convicted of murder! 4: I wake and two friends interpret #3 as "Overwork is killing you..."
I wake again. My dream-notebook's blank. No friends here; their interpretation was a dream too....
CAUTION: NUDE DEER
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...
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...
I dream my theatre friends are particles dancing inside an atomic nucleus--
particles that reveal their character, motivations and power. And I'm one too...
The Goddess gave birth in my workplace. Her fever-dreams become real around us...
CAUTION: BIRTH SCENE, LIBRARIANS' ORGY
As I bike home at night, strange doings--a rat is sacrificed; gemstones delivered;
an astronaut shows glowing alien objects; a second rat becomes a... firefighter?
A coy, giggling giant orange bounces onto a man's bed, trying to seduce him, and...
Now the Evil Empire's dead. We're all safe, safe at last. And all the bombs are gone... right?
My dreams mix sex with warmth, grief, even silliness, but what's with the owls? Bewildering...
CAUTION: WEIRD ORGY
God issued me a paper bag to go over my head & protect my eyes
when facing him--at first. But as I advanced spiritually, I tore...
We're stuck in an empty town whose streetnames are all emotions. And they change.
Rage becomes Giggle. Tedium, Terror! Devious town...
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...
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
Love that hair, girl. A very seventies bar-monster...
A timetraveler shows me a hotspring shrunk to a quarter of its old flow.
Valves? Pipes? Or drought, from climate change? This IS the future.
A day later, a local main breaks, and our water flow shrinks to a quarter of normal...
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?
I often dream I'm lost in a strange city, wandering the unfamiliar streets
in search of something unknown, and possibly unknowable...
I'm in a play. Fear, then joyful sex, then ranching, then silly hats, as a man drones on about
class struggle. Weird chairs, pingpong, coffee, impossible double utterances. At last
I tell friends my dream--backwards. Then I write the dream down on slices of cheese...
CAUTION: SEX ONSTAGE
Plums float through the autumn air, sending us airmail kisses. If we'll accept delivery...
A living camera edits us all: the dappled hawk-man, the slutty candidate, the blue businessmen
who give such bad advice when you pull the thorns from their feet. And my sweet sad hell-hound...
What if comics panels and layouts weren't so square? I try triangles,
pentagons, hexagons, circles, spirals--and some serious stuff pops out...
CAUTION: IDEAS, OCCASIONAL NUDITY, MENTIONS ABUSE
I'm a Confederate officer. The only way to save my men is to end the war by
pulling the plug at the bottom of the lake! I dive in, fighting a Yankee, who...
A giantess strides across the desert. The Great White Hunter fires his elephant gun,
but the books she's made of stop his bullets. I think I'll join the Queen Kong Library...
In Rainbow Food Co-op, a huge statue of a sleeping woman emerged from the floor, shedding shoppers...
A raven summons a levitating mirror that shows her face as a human, and
tries out moods & expressions based on Tarot cards plucked from a tree...
A movie version of heaven. Souls line up for rejuvenation from a great
fountain. But fat old rich guys crash the line, demanding to be first...
CAUTION: UGLY NUDITY, UGLY BEHAVIOR, POLITICALLY PREDICTIVE
New moons appear. I try to mash them into a spare Earth, but botch the orbits.
So now, runaway moons rumble down a steep San Francisco hill...
CAUTION: ALWAYS SET PARKING BRAKE
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...
Robe or petals? Head or lilybud? Face or tongue or clit or slit? An eerie hybrid of person and flower...
CAUTION: SOMETHIN' HAPPENIN' HERE, BUT WHAT IT IS AIN'T EXACTLY CLEAR
I’m the only one who can stop the plot to kill the Pope--but if he keeps shrinking like that, will it matter?
CAUTION: RECOVERING CATHOLIC
My anima, a black mare, is upside down, hanging on the ceiling! Rears downward.
And she's changed sex! Not a mare today, a stallion! A gay, humanophilic stallion...
CAUTION: VERY QUEER FLIRTATION
1: A flooded bathroom becomes 2: a glass water-piano; 3: my friend strips in a restaurant, so
4: they serve me gutted dog. 5: Dolls teach prostitution, as 6: a rhino rubs up to an elephant-bear...
One night I meet a giant talking skunk and its pup, who asks how to walk to Thailand...
While watching two rooftop actors (one a chicken) I noticed the icebergs in the sky were melting at last...
I cross San Francisco on public transit--a network of children's slides. One leads into...
A wormhole full of aliens, where a goofy-haired reporter interviews a hacker...
The red string tying that creepy puppet to
the child sitting on the moon has broken...
DAY: a stranger screams "BITCH! Plant a TREE!" Thinks I'm female and wants to fight over an old bumper sticker?
DREAM: I'm a horse detective. In shades, lipstick, & high heels I try to pass as a mare. Absurd! A stallion in drag...
CAUTION: HORSE NUDITY. OH WAIT, THAT'S NORMAL.
As the steamroller flattened me I became quite a lovely stained-glass window...
Wang dreamt a man cut his belly open and implanted a big mirror inscribed with stars. It hurt,
even when he woke. For a month! But his belly now had a hunger to learn about astronomy...
DREAM: a weird footbridge of twisting tree-branches; with steps made of wood-cased stereo equipment!
NEXT EVE: a birthday potluck with a twisting papier-maché trees. Steps lead up to a treehouse full of...
Swedenborg cuddles a talking dog who asks after its old master, Swab, and then kisses
Swedenborg, grossing him out. But he wakes knowing just what his doggy pest represents...
I was late for something, so I opened my pocket watch and swallowed a bunch of numbers...
Dusk. A plain. A troop of swordsmen approach me, draw their weapons...
and toss their spinning, shining swords up to the stars...
No, not a guy with a tan. Yves Tanguy was a sailor who became a Surrealist.
When I was nine or ten, his work inspired me to try my first landscape drawings...
I get speared by Irish warriors, slipped an LSD dose, chased by giant spiders, torpedoed--hey, I'm not bored!
Hand-puppets, a devil and a witch, have sex, and implant a lunar ghost embryo
into Lois Lane; now Lois & Clarkes, ten clones each, pretend to be puppets...
CAUTION: PUPPET SEX; EVERYONE A FAKE
A workmate said "They feed they lion"; two dreams later, the poem emerged as you see it...
CAUTION: POLITICAL RAGE, SURREALISM
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
Three dreams set on Abenaki holy ground, of weird shamans--one ashen, one pumpkin-headed, the
third goofy-faced--lead me to visit the site. Where I find the river's washed up that third shaman's face...
CAUTION: WILL BOTHER E.S.P. SKEPTICS
I dream I play 7 and win three times at Monte Carlo. I wake and head for the casino with witnesses...
THROATS: Men put babies into giant throats inset in a funhouse wall;
SLOT MACHINE: I see a slot machine generating random art-speak phrases...
A gentleman clad but in a sheet notified me that an old friend had died of a terrible disease. What disease? Well...
Asparagus, wings, an unhinged hand, a boxed ghost, butter, sister incest, tomato-pincushions,
secret volcanoes, one-eyed integers, chickenleg dresses, mirrors and bananapeel beds...
Arboreal marsupials with megaphones narrate a Polynesian documentary, while
the rare translucent lobster sings its death song, sacrificing itself for lunch
CAUTION: WILL CAUSE VEGETARIANISM
Nearly abstract but not quite. The snake, the quill pen, the secretary bird, and the rose.
I'm carried off by a crane to meet birdfish, singing sheep, fell-spirits, mad shopkeepers and devil-bulls...
I get painful menstrual cramps, and with them come nightmares of birth. Not always child birth;
once it was five kittens. Most recently the baby was human but encased in a Butterball turkey...
I possessed ubiquity: twenty of me, and each possessed by my same soul, so I could not say who I inhabited...
I twirled pinups into surreal not-quite-abstracts, to see just how twisted sex could get...
CAUTION: NAKED PRETZELS
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...
You're in a subway station. You put coins in a coffee machine.
Down drops the Holy Grail. And begins to fill with blood...
Make silhouettes of your beloved vegetables; then listen to the spaces between...
CAUTION: LEWD SQUASH
Here's an incantation to induce flying dreams. "Bring me wings NOW, or forever hold your peace..."
The home we were to stay in was on fire. The next had a living room
that was shallow water, wall to wall, where turquoise fish swam...
In a Tibetan monastery on an ancient lakebed, I swim through a vast sunken library.
Books open like sea anemones, letters float to the surface like kelp...
I'm the new manager of the watermelon mine. And to free the trapped minors--
oops, miners!--I have to plan. So I cover the floor with My Little Pony post-its...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY
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
A male real estate agent knocked on the door. The house was full of sleeping crocodiles.
She fled through the house, trying not to rouse the attention of either sort of predator...
In a jungle river, I fish for giant kite-bass, then relax and have a drink. A lot of very drunk
porpoises dance on the bar. I worry their skin will dry out. Alcohol is so dehydrating!
I dreamt the world itself hired me, at a generous salary, to report its great affairs exactly as they happen...
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...
Sharks unicorns and moonbeams / Lost loves and karma chocolate I-beams
Raw telepathic bundles of beans / Write a little dream with me...
You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river
with darkness coming over / and salt has lost its savor...
I was nineteen again, riding my horse down a bad road in Virginia. After three hours, my horse spoke up...