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...
Rajiv keeps trying to convince me it's the best hotel in India: the orgy of biters, the
bowls of twitching fingers. But it's only the oracular spirits that really impress me...
CAUTION: CREEPY FINGERS
I'm trying to jam together my dream diary and my first comics. My grandmother's
skeptical. But at last, with an audible 'click', dreams and comics suddenly merge...
A graduation parade has a papier-maché cowboy (hollow ego?), a giant
rampaging stallion (unconscious), and a mama cat who calms him (anima)...
The House of Comics has a shabby annex jammed with self-publishers.
We make a human ladder and climb out a high window, but I don't fit;
as the tenement collapses, I must smash the windowframe to free...
In the paper factory where my dad worked all his life, I find him on
his deathbed. Even as he fades, he's still trying to please his bosses...
Tony works as a courier in Sarajevo till he inadvertently delivers a bomb. Held by
a warlord for months, he dreams within the dream, and draws those dreams...
CAUTION: GRIM
Two kids I grew up with are dead. We carry their still-smoking corpses by the home of George Bush...
CAUTION: BURNT BODIES
I go to work at the factory, clock in, strip naked, and build my... self! Myself as art.
A long slow job, but when my workmates ask, I'm admit I'm happy with me at last...
I panic as statues come alive at the museum, but they're all about energizing a mystical pyramid...
I tell the angel teaching me to fly that I'm not ready to go solo yet--
I'm wobbly, the terrain's unknown. He lets go, and I...
Comics character Doctor Blasphemy, on stilts, bares his secret identity:
poet Allen Ginsberg! But who chopped off his missing fingers?
CAUTION: BLOODY FINGERS
I'm gloomy about the state of the world, but my alter ego cheerfully explains we're dead and in
Hell--as a demon train rolls up with Elvis Costello on the roof singing "This is Hell I suppose"...
Soil turns to air for me; I float in the dark between tree roots
and stones, thinking "If only I could remember my name"...
My bedroom window is choked with dirt. I dig up to the surface
and find a man reading comics. He says 'It is the only way!'...
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...
The comics industry degenerates into civil war. We peddle all night to avoid the Marvel...
My "friends" pull me away from the girl of my dreams, push booze & pot at me,
and won't even try to climb the rope to success. But Marvin saves Evel Knievel
from a motorcycle crash. Sounds good--until, ten years later, I hear how Marvin died...
CAUTION: GRIM AFTERMATH
Nazis call my simple architectural drawing a social protest, take it at gunpoint,
and toss it in the ovens. The commander mocks me with its ashes...
Under the surface of my comics panels, a tiny horde is having an orgy. I can't
publish this, it's too embarrassing! Wait a minute. That one is me...
CAUTION: MICRO-ORGY
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 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...
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...
The posse lost their enemy; reluctantly they asked a tracking detective--me.
They found him where I knew he'd be--from eating my Rolodex cards...
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...
We need to get down to the sea, but Disney Corporation blocks the way. Wait--we're
dreamworkers! We ooze through the walls, and cheer the parade marching in on the tide...
Repeated attempts to move a gigantic, sacred, saucerlike stone all failed; but now,
with the world's biggest cranes, we get it on a truck. It crawls past adoring crowds...
I'm a bike courier. I take a packet of fifty potent dreams
up Dream Street and deliver them to the year 1980...
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
We escape tornadoes by fading out and rematerializing in a future dream...
But one of the tornadoes manages to follow us from the old dream to new...
I grope through fog to the Vague House. Fog inside, too. Find a stone carved with an Eye of
Horus, and know it's my anger. Find a bigger stone scarab, and know it's my REAL anger...
God speaks in surreal images from the sky, and I hurry to write down
what God says. But I find I wrote mere squiggles on the page...