A whole convention of adults abused as kids shows me how hard it is to hide the damage...
CAUTION: ABUSE ISSUES
As Red Emma said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution..."
My intuition led me to a panel discussion of women artists, just to hear one single sentence...
My loud, spiky, tailed angel of change and potential, and
my calm, skeptical devil of gradualism--a star-nosed mole...
I was anorexic for years; I only mastered it when I saw it was a hunger for the spirit world...
When I met someone attractive, my head flamed, burning my body like a wax candle...
The therapist my parents made me see as a kid got convicted of molesting his
child clients. But not all. I played an evasive waiting game for three awful years
under his leering scrutiny. So, can evading a molester still traumatize? Oh yes...
CAUTION: CHILD NEGLECT & ABUSE
My figure-painting class here in San Francisco has a diverse student body, but not THIS diverse...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I heard a noise out my window. I looked out, and saw something strange...
A publishing-house error made them reject Tolkien's mythical work, and demand a sequel to The Hobbit...
DAY: I bike across San Francisco writing down what I actually see.
DREAM: I'm an abused English heiress with a dangerous alien artifact...
CAUTION: HAUNTED BY CHILD ABUSE
Inspired by Lynda Barry, I fill a black-paged book with 20 improv paintings.
They grow into a tour of my dreamwork led my anima Silky, a nightmare...
Giving up a circle of friends is like the collapse of a sun--do you dry up like a raisin... or explode?
All day I've had a stupid song from 1948 in my head--"Bongo Bongo Bongo." Then I buy Metzger's Dogs.
Start reading. Page 16: "Gordon started singing "Bongo Bongo Bongo, I Don't Want to Leave the Congo"...
I was in the Stanford Bookstore and saw this strange visual pun across the room... or did I?
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
In drawing class I was supposed to be studying perspective, but I went beyond the box...
Bradbury's Mars was based on his life in Venice, California. What worlds grow out of my San Francisco?
A weird urge insists "Do laundry NOW!" I go. My housemate Liz is there! I open a machine and find
the buckles for the overalls I lent Liz for a Halloween costume. She swears "I looked everywhere..."
CAUTION: FLAMES E.S.P. DENIERS
A perfectionist gardener builds perfect planterboxes while his seedlings starve. And so I left the burbs...
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
A wild troupe of sexy, surreal, centaurlike dancers mostly built from Barbie dolls...
CAUTION: EXPLICIT NUDITY, FUR, BARBIE
I realize how strongly environmental illness sculpts my view of the world...
CAUTION: CHICKEN BONDAGE
That moment when you tire of your old trauma and suddenly turn to the sun. Or fun.
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
The jug of chocolate sauce smashed on the floor, forming a dark pattern. Then the scene melted and, like a film
loop, restarted. Horrified, I screamed "Don't touch it!" But the pitcher fell, the sauce made its predestined shape...
Our writing class meets in this Victorian home. I turn off my filters and describe what I really see around me...
I was hunting edible fungi in Foothill Park near Palo Alto when I saw this...
What my home town will become, if you fools keep burning gas and spewing CO2...
I had a heart attack--but it faded in minutes! The phone rang. I knew at once my dying mother was gone...
A spiral dream-instrument I'm building, that's easier to play than a piano or guitar, and a lot snakier...
I always wrote some letters strangely--my 'd' was nearly illegible. So I set out to retrain my deep motor skills...
Normal people want someone complementary. Weirdos want someone like them. Why? Economics!...
As a man on shore patrol in Manila is attacked, he and his mother simultaneously see and hear each other...
Gazing at the moon, Anna finds herself touring the Solar System, meeting all the planetary guardians...
CAUTION: MYSTICAL ECSTASY
I planned suicide. Then my friend 1000 miles away said in my ear "Don't do that, Marion." Next day an airmail...
SUICIDAL NARRATOR
A novel on a modern woman called to become a shaman
echoes my real life way too closely for comfort...
Sprague De Camp says religions seduce us with emotional comfort. But is dreamwork religion or science?
Artists have their own strange culture, and we can unintentionally mislead therapists unfamiliar with us...
CAUTION: THERAPESE
What are the psychological effects of growing up psychic, as others' thoughts
and feelings invade you? When other's bodies invade you, it's molestation...
A green monster guards the divine egg; with the right prayer, it
explodes in a fountain of mad color, half grenade, half freed jinni...
I wondered where a friend was, and felt as if I were walking at night near the Sphinx. Months later...
Money, power, race and gender stifle my working friends less than hierarchical structures...
Escaping the tiny red plush room inside a star, I dive back to earth. Oops. A beast eats my broken body. My soul waits...
A series of family shadows, as I saw them then. These scenes are NOT literal,
is that clear? But the tensions they show were very real...
CAUTION: GRIM! SEXUAL VIOLENCE, INCEST, MUTILATION
Examples of inexplicable moods that appear (after the fact) to be reactions to future events...
A book's example of a mathematical savant made me stop and try to do what he did. I can! Can anyone?
I have weird, bad luck around dating. Finally I go on a picnic with Page, and the Great Fire begins...
Sketches from a San Francisco street music festival where, after a long sleep, I woke up sexually at last...
CAUTION: NYMPHETS, QUEERS, AND OTHER REAL PEOPLE
My dreams urge me to build furry dream creatures with joints,
muscles & bones, then to heal myself by mating with them...
CAUTION: FETISHISM, FURRY NUDITY & SEX
The first thing any beginner does with a paint program is behead someone. Why?
CAUTION: PAINFUL SPLINTERS
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...
old Frisco gone, high-rise condos obscure the view: hives for techie...
I was single and tired of kissing frogs. Then I realized--I AM one. Or worse: a pretentious polliwog...
A mural on how I became a dancer--the day I lost my old
body-image, failed to recognize myself in the mirror...
I was on a London train. An ad had an image from "Jack and the Beanstalk" and I pondered
the tale--the meaning of the golden eggs. A man got on, held out a golden egg, and opened it...
So I looked out my window and saw this guy burying a tiny robed woman in a trench in the street...
My mother's face took on a sudden expression of astonishment--possibly agony. She said "Your father
is remarrying." I laughed. 'Impossible. He'd have told me. I had a letter from him only a few days ago..."
All my life I've had sudden visions showing violent deaths accompanied by headlines naming the victims...
Surely the dinosaurs were as vocal as their little cousins, the birds.
But bass to the birds' soprano! So when dinos sang to the moon...
From age six on, Simon nightly climbs mountains and faces roaring floods in a sort of naptime bootcamp...
I lost two rings. Searched hours; nothing. I hadn't touched the freezer all day, yet I peered into the icecubes...
Dream researcher Stephanie Van Zandt Nelson questions me on the roots of the art of dreaming...
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
Montgomery's film about her teenage affair with a pedophile
is troubling enough before the FBI tries to blackmail her...
CAUTION: MOLESTATION/ABUSE ISSUES
At least fantasy and science fiction address my life-issues; "realism" just declares me nonexistent...
The rich block reform. So let's offer the rich what they really want: ranking and attention...
CAUTION: CHIMPONOMICS
She didn't want to be there. She closed her eyes and went elsewhere. So I painted where she went...
CAUTION: NUDITY
The Dating Fairy, built on lonely evenings waiting for her to call me back--whoever "her" was that week...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
Creatures in the primal sea touch my third eye, dragons cry their eyes out, I fight the Sphinx, and arrive at last in...
Getting rid of lice was easy. Harder was quelling the gossip and rumors from my co-workers and boss...
CAUTION: A LOUSE OF A BOSS
I was officer of the watch in the Southampton. I knew that as we passed an islet a mile ahead, a man would fall overboard...
Jung, in crisis, drew a complex mandala, and then wrote about its
symbols & archetypes, always claiming a patient had drawn it...
An older woman I know nags me about food. Suddenly my mind flips our genders and weights...
Donne, in Paris, was alarmed by a vision of his wife holding a dead baby. At that hour, in England, his wife...
If you sense auras, every singles event feels like a scene from Halloween Hell...
CAUTION: HORNY MONSTERS
I have all the signs of multiple personality but memory gaps. Here are the ones I've met and been in dreams.
But you all forget your dreams. Don't be too sure you're so unitary...
CAUTION: BACKGROUND SEX
Advice from a successful writer of worstsellers to all you aspiring failures: unfame has its price...
It takes time to build yourself out of found objects and trash...
Sally Morgan, in her famous autobiography, details racism and family silence, but also her
family's matter-of-fact acceptance of premonitions and dreams. I feel acceptance envy!
A museum sketch of Navaho horses who got me hot--teaching
teenage me that my sexual orientation wasn't (only) human...
ESP is like having neutrino detectors for eyes: what radiates from people's cores blinds you to their surfaces...
A poem linking the dawn of digital art to early, tinny phonographs, cranky film cameras...
CAUTION: IDEAS
My friend Catherine dreamed she was a flying mare with golden hooves. But in real life, she lost them...
No Man is Island. So Men say. I am not a Man...
Inspired by Shaun Tan, I fill a black-paged photo album with 36 improv paintings.
They become a tour of my dreamworld, led by my anima Silky, a literal nightmare...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY, WEIRD DREAM IDEAS
All day I expected a terrible scream, but had no idea why until I heard it. A woman in flames came out of her house...
CAUTION: GRUESOME DEATH
An open microphone in a San Francisco cafe. Others tell stories, sing songs, chant poems. But I
want to tell a shamanic dream! To an audience sure that dreams are dull, incoherent, meaningless...
Why don't I push for more art shows? I asked how I feel at shows of my own work, and this came out...
When I was battered, I briefly lived on the streets. What struck me was how fragile most of us were...
CAUTION: BRIEF BUT GRIM
I held the strangest and most entrancing object I have ever seen: the very citadel of life itself!...
Talk about mixed messages! Or... is it really?
CAUTION: NUDITY, SLIGHT FIRE HAZARD
In occupied Germany, Pat flags down two friends just before a truck crash. Except...
Pat was in England at the time. She sensed they were in danger, but...
Hypnotized in therapy, I saw AT LEAST five competing goals tugging at me like gravity fields.
Naturally I drew them. Come tour the Inner Solar System of our desires...
CAUTION: NUDITY (BODY, HEART, BRAIN, SOUL)
Sexual beauty scares me--how I'm affected--how vulnerable I am. An irresistable pheromone...
CAUTION: SEXUAL THEME
Pete told me to skip the shortcut. Only after I'd turned the truck around did I realize Pete had died weeks ago...
I worked at Stanford too long. I got tired of observing the mating displays of the purple-prose patriarch..
CAUTION: NUDE ACADEMIC GROUPIE
Thomas Piketty argues we obsess on income, ignore capital. My experience suggests he's right. Track wealth, tax wealth...
CAUTION: NON-DREAM RANT, ECONOMICS, HOW TO GET RICH SLOW
A dream that'd explain why I quit taking Western medicines--
(and why haven't you?) Only I didn't dream it. Just lived it.
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
Smallpox is extinct. No need to worry. But the pocked face of the rising moon reminds me
malice, madness, incompetence and black-market greed, our four horsemen, aren't extinct...
CAUTION: ODE TO SMALLPOX, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT?
I don't know what this scene is about--but it's not a dream. A stage, I think. Something from childhood.
CAUTION: BARE BEAR
I suspect we child prodigies and geniuses are as unlike the gifted as normal people. So here's a checklist...
CAUTION: BRAIN REQUIRED
My sister's avoiding our nosy parents, but I sense they'll run into her soon. I just didn't know HOW soon...
Why wait for the Rapture when you can use a chinup machine and raise yourself off that cross?...
CAUTION: NUDE PSEUDO-CRUCIFIXION, SACRILEGIOUS SELF-HELP
Jung Chang’s exposé of Mao's brutal deeds and legacy
provoke dreams of leaders who don't listen--till I scream...
These days I'm doubtful about both an afterlife AND utter extinction.
Was Shakespeare wrong about what gets buried, what lives on?
Biking, I find myself chanting a dinosaur name--Rhamphorhynchus. I don't even know what kind it is.
At home I open a novel, and a Rhamphorhynchus appears, politely defined for me by our obliging universe...
CAUTION: E.S.P.?
My sister and I played games based on the Rhine Institute's ESP studies. Our scores were not random...
Leading a party out of slavery, I got off the road when God warned me to. He insisted I must ford a cold river.
Turned out the slaveowner had posted a reward at the station ahead; we were saved by divine guidance...
The white road is my life history, told in women: friends, lovers, relatives, ancestors--and one past life...
Gloom clung to me & I skipped the dance. I begged Frances to ride in a safe car, but coming home...
I wrote my dreams each morning no matter what--even if I it made me late for work.
They assumed I was sloppy, lazy, spacy. No; disciplined about priorities!
Alone in my blue room, I heard sax music. Two sunbathers were jamming outside my window...
CAUTION: SEX AND SAX
A newsreel showed a flier for the Schneider Trophy Air Race. I felt a violent shock and said "He's going to die..."
An version of the Egyptian Ship of the Sun with a mutant Osiris at the helm,
in a monster-infested sea: image of the spark of consciousness in a sea of...
Closing my eyes I saw an old man and a red-haired girl in a shop. My workmate was writing home...
(a poem answering Wallace Stevens's 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)
As the beast in question (and recalling the fable Six Blind Men and the Elephant)
I don't mind letting six half-blind humans have their say--as long as I get my own...
CAUTION: UNICORNS
A man who wants to love and respect all life has unwanted kitchen guests: a wave of slugs...
In my drawing class it was antlers and bones and skulls, death death death till I was tired of MY bones...
A street poet preaches a gospel of smallness, until he pokes at capitalism in a slightly too personal way...
I froze in dance class when I followed anyone else's script. Was it fear? A dragon inside said no...
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...
On a poster of a model who's around my weight, someone's scrawled STARVATION IMAGERY...
CAUTION: DEFENSE OF SKINNY PEOPLE
My unconscious sabotages a lunch date with my friend Stephanie. The tricks get weirder, till...
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 without knowing why as a cheetah stretching...
I was anorexic for years before I found I was allergic to many foods--I had good reason not to eat!...
I had to sell my horse Shadow, but I missed him so much I painted him. As I finished, a strange impulse led me...
The tale of the most truly sincerely religious revelation I've ever witnessed...
CAUTION: REAL WITCHES
I like bad taste. Taste always tasted like another Anglo conspiracy to keep me from having fun...
I've been meeting, talking with, and turning into unicorns in my dreams these last few years...
CAUTION: ANTI-FUNDAMENTALIST
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...
A weird identity-confusion at a dance hints I'm simultaneously psychic, autistic, and... really stupid.
After reading 170 capsule biographies of famous people I conclude life-plans are
a joke. But I do deduce ten negative rules--ten universal don'ts--that may be of use...
CAUTION: CYNICAL, BUT 170 OBITUARIES WILL DO THAT
Nightmares can warn. But when awake, what warning can you get from nonstop ill-luck?
An artist I know dismisses her (gorgeous) art as just therapy... while the museums are full of trash. Why?
I drilled new poles in my globe and tilted the Earth. Ice Age or Carboniferous? Flood or drought?
Come visit tropical Antarctica, the Thai Desert, the Hawaiian glaciers, the jungles of France!
A trail toward Freedom has extra markers, for it's three trails, superimposed! Not all the cues are for us...
In an oneirophobic society, it's easy to forget that when you do dreamwork, you're doing basic science.
No funding, no team, no lab coat? Can't be science! Unless they mistaught us what science is...
In an idle moment I held a pencil and asked the air who'd win the Derby.
'Trigo' meant nothing to me, but was listed at 32 to 1, so...
I twirled pinups into surreal not-quite-abstracts, to see just how twisted sex could get...
CAUTION: NAKED PRETZELS
Yesterday, Hitler marched into town. I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about 200 years old...
Night. A London suburb. A UFO big as a city block looms over us. It's seen all over South England. Yet we go blank--
forget! Though not quite--for years after, Steve has recurring dreams. When he tells me one, I recall the same event...
CAUTION: INTENSE UFO EXPERIENCE
Okay, say evolution is driven by things (I don't care what) besides natural selection. How could you tell?
Ballerina Joan Brady quit, but ten years later, returned. Her body rejuvenated! So what can MINE do?
All I know about humans, I learned in psychodrama. I gawked as caterpillars grew wings. Except me...
Ever since I was battered I feel like a virgin again: longing, but wary--scared where sex may lead...
CAUTION: CARTOON NUDITY, SEXUAL THEMES
A road trip through New Mexico mutates into a tour of my relationship disasters...
After a peace march in San Francisco, I saw us as deer, and Americans as dogs. Yet WE frighten THEM...
Maybe the web like a shining dove will lead me from my lonely cave
into the light. The glaring light... Wait! That can't be right!
CAUTION: SEPIA HALFTONE NUDITY
An art experiment--the only rule is DRAW without preconceptions--
no models, no ideas, no plans, not even dreams. Drawing from the void!