A nondream vision of an alternate Earth where continents are abysses, abysses continents...
A child dreamer and two different kinds of cyborg must cooperate
to free the hostages imprisoned under San Francisco Bay...
My hometown floods. I swim after some strange fish and find
a scientific community where a scaled baby tells me who I am...
A sexy comedian and her troubles down the drain.
A dream that turned out to be true six days later,
and again in a different way six YEARS later...
I dream cartoonist Al Capp switched late in life to painting horses in a weird expressive style;
I wake, write the dream, rush to work to find a painting of horses in a weird expressive style
CAUTION: CAUSTIC TO E.S.P. DENIERS
I'm one of a trio of swimmers in a pool, making out--under the surface only. Must we hide?
I'm near Shiprock with a flying-saucer girl who sees the nearby crags and far snowy peaks
as all the same size and distance... how to teach perspective?
CAUTION: SKINNYDIPPING, GROPING
by Jenny Badger Sultan; two dreams (2016/11/19, 2017/1/18) on dreamwork, memory & amnesia
1: Ruins in India. Fascinating but age-blurred; wish I could see the carvings better...
2: Giving presents at a party, I hand a girl a vertebra from the abyss, encrusted with jewel-like barnacles...
A great storm causes flooding. I'm knee deep in the surge. Women flee and flounder,
wearing different colors, forming a panicky rainbow. So much for God's promise...
Last night, as I slept, I dreamt--illusion blessed!--that I had a beehive, here inside my heart...
The far future. The moon falls to Earth. But then... the moon unfalls!
Golden light nurtures a rebirth of our dying ecology & civilization...
A boy leaps from a runaway balloon, falls 100' into a pond, and floats face-down.
I'm sure he's dead, but when a woman fishes him out...
Parasites, Rambo, huge fetus-beets, an exhibitionist and a living statue advise me on my love life...
CAUTION: NUDITY
I'm a fairy queen at the beach, chasing a girl who's a strong swimmer. Yep, she swims beyond the buoys...
CAUTION: BAD LESBIAN PUNS
Seems strange to have no hands. How do dolphins get things done? By not needing to get things done?
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
I swim far out in a lake to a business meeting on a dinghy; but that's trivial.
What matters is mapping the murky lakebottom, dive after dive...
I'm trying to bathe, but there are Boat People in the tub!
And my inner Grandma's spying on me, behind her fan...
My friends destroy all my old films and give me a 'new' one--but it's from 1900! Then I wake to find...
I run away. A car nearly hits me and I fall into the lake. But
a kindly catfish drags me to an underwater phone booth...
A visit to the Conches, a strange race of molluscs who are people only seasonally...
Night. Rain. A hansom cab. The horse slips on the wet pavement, toppling the cab with my husband inside.
I woke sure it happened. Next morning a postman tried to tell me of the crash, but I told him...
I did what I love. The money didn't follow. So now I have to guard a crimeboss at a theft convention...
CAUTION: INEVITABLE CHEKHOVIAN SHOOTOUT
I cross a hostile continent to a magic commune, fall in love with a flying girl who slaps a
soul-spark into my head, and follow an alien goddess leading the Dance of the Sun...
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...
An endless parade of drowned sailors sing a dirge. The dreamer woke in tears. Then the news arrived.
I was a small boy living on Oahu. Out my front door I saw a 20-mile-tall wall of flames stretching across the horizon...
CECY: In a desert, a thirsty dog jumps out of a tree--the first known dog suicide...
WAYAN: I'm a talking dog. Our owner denies us enough water, so we protest...
When I was 17, an older girl pushed booze at me and came on to me... in front of my parents and teachers!
For months, I had ambivalent sex dreams trying to process what Donna taught me--not all of it negative...
CAUTION: WEIRD SEX; ADULTS BEHAVE BADLY
A woman in Stockwith dreamt she'd drown going to market; but her friends talked her back into the trip.
When she fell in the water, they all stood by as she drowned; not one helping her till it was too late...
CAUTION: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE...
Dinner with Dracula goes well, considering, except for the mayonnaise. But suddenly I'm drowning!
No one sees or hears me. Am I a ghost, am I dead or alive? And how would anyone notice?
I go back 3000 years to the Judgment of Paris, then at Babylon's height see King Nebuchadnezzar,
then the doomed lovers Antony & Cleopatra, then Triton and the Nereids celebrating a divine birth...
CAUTION: DENSE CLASSICAL REFERENCES
There was this giant creature in the water along with a bunch of sharks.
The creature turned out to be nice though, much nicer than the sharks...
Girondé dreams she's floating through the oceanic abyss...
After 20 years without a child, Maya dreams devas carry her to a holy lake, wash her...
and then an elephant carrying a lotus flower enters her right side. She knows it means...
CAUTION: DREAM OMITS TINY DETAIL--IMMINENT DEATH
1: I'm starving in a lush valley; a cult claims all the food, the water, even the air.
2: I'm drowning in a cage but find a corner with water I can breathe--just barely.
3: I'm a merman with a wise friend who hints I need to leave those who starve & drown me...
CAUTION: DOMESTIC BATTERING (OFFSTAGE)
Lucifer throws firebolts from a Montreal tower; monsters stalk us; next comes the flood...
The dreamer overflows from her egg, spills out to become a waterfall, a stampede of horses...
1: I visit Elrond and Bilbo in Elvenhome, but overthinking traps me in a timeloop;
2: Elrond says he renounces seriousness for joy, and plans a great, inclusive party;
3: I feel unworthy, but set out on a desert quest with Elrond's young apprentice;
4: I meet joyful, drunken, singing elves but hide in a tree, too shy to join in;
5: I meet a nervous elven singer and a dolphin trapped in a tiny pool in my bedroom...
I had to prepare the house for a party, but the basement was flooded. I thought I could
decorate it with some floating flowers anyway, but they kept dissolving or sinking...
Qu'lad, dying of flu in the pandemic, dreamt a wolf told him cold-water baths would save him. He staggered to the river. He lived. He told others.
They lived. The shaman Togumalis dreamt his spirit helper, a squirrel, prescribed the same. A century later, hospital records show why it worked...
CAUTION: ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE SHOWN AS SUPERIOR
On my quest I find magic portals, snarky flower-fairies, undersea redcoats,
reassembling bodyparts, living chess, and Nosferatu the Cheating Vampyre...
The terror of Navy breakfast, the joy of filterfeeding,
how to marry pudding, and a sniper lunch with kisses...
In the richest regions of the sea, dead stuff wells up to meet the light. Do we have similar zones?
With our ignorability spell, our team plans to free the angry Hick from the
Submerged Court. But the Coyote Girls can see us! Will this really work?
My horse and I dove into a lagoon and sought buried treasure on the sea-floor. What are we really after?
I was half-drowning, holding our son up in the pool, while my husband tried to take a
photo. I kept gasping "Did you get the picture yet?" but he kept saying "Not yet"...
I stalk a platoon of levitating surf-bunnies who may be out to bomb a Greenpeace submarine...
I meet a girl with a plant growing out of her head...
Someone prays to the spirit of a spring to heal me...
I watch people practice exercises with the ritual feel of voudun or candomble...
Landing in Hawaii, I dream of a magical twilit cove I must swim across. The eve of leaving, there it is...
A revival meeting goes bad--suicides, 'long pig', a hell-pit. If you sup with the devil, carry a long fork!
I dream I'm taking a hot shower, then realize our water heater died; this is a dream. "It means I want hot water!" I
blurt (in the dream) & wake. Next day, a plumber's error gets me drenched in hot water with no new heater...
Captain Ahab's part-whale students are better ice wranglers than I'll ever be--
wrestling icebergs of possibility round to their best outcomes, in this pea-soup sea...
In a flooded room, an indignant iguana scolds me, while
my wife Marnie checks her computer implant for water damage...
I live on Io. It's nicer than its photos. At least inside, where the oceans are--where I grow a second head...
At Sea-Dragon State Park, I climbed down to the sea serpent's dressing room after the show, and found...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
At a dream workshop for kids, James's trickster dream-figures provoked Jessica to dream one chased her;
fleeing, she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, became a mermaid, and married the trickster...
Wednesday night I dreamed I had to jump overboard... that night there was a wreck
off the Yorkshire coast in a storm and the captain ordered his men to jump into the sea...
Question authority? Nah. They always have such excuses! Kick authority entirely! Just say no.
Why'd a spirit-woman come to our reservation to mourn a drowned guy? Her mirrors & candles tell us...
I walk through worlds, fight a deadly lake demon, and work magic--but I mustn't go lucid...
"Freedom is a gift you give yourself." But it doesn't always involve seahorses or babycarriages covered in quills...
Bennet's daughter dreamt her husband drowned after wading too deep (he couldn't swim). He promised
he'd avoid deep water, but his best friend played a prank, treading water to make it seem shallow...
CAUTION: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE...
Liu Bang's mom dreams a spirit is making love to her. Her husband sees the spirit is a dragon! Her baby grows up to found the Han...
Yi Yin's mom dreams a spirit warns "if water pours from your mortar, run!" She does, and survives a flood, to help found the Shang...
CAUTION: LIKELY JUST FOLKLORE
Creatures in the primal sea touch my third eye, dragons cry their eyes out, I fight the Sphinx, and arrive at last in...
DAY: I read an exposé on "Senoi dreamwork"--the Malaysian Senoi people disavow it. Some white guy just made it up!
DREAM: I'm a dream researcher in Malaysia. A manta-squid attacks! Now the "Senoi" focus on my needs makes sense...
CAUTION: TENTACLE-RAPE ATTEMPT
Mars as it will be 1000 years from now, terraformed. A guided tour with photos...
A mermaid friend invites me to see an underwater experiment in the Golden Gate...
CAUTION: MERMAID BREASTS
I was a mermaid summoning a great storm to carry my love to me--and my love was a red sea-mare...
I rescue some drowning kids by turning into a mermaid, but towing one girl has an unexpected effect...
Agents of Donald Trump with knives trap a mermaid. I jump one of them, and she
escapes, towing me with her. She assumed humans just hate merfolk, but I know...
CAUTION: HARSH WARNING ABOUT TRUMP
Four versions of an underwater meeting between lovers, one terrestrial, one marine...
CAUTION: ORAL SEX
DREAM: Gay boys, underage girls & my own sister all mock me, sure I want their forbidden sexual fruit
at a beach where grotesque trees make their own precipitation and salt-dunes spill into saturated, toxic brine...
NEXT DAY: I read Margaret Atwood's The Salt Garden--sex, guilt, and grotesque trees in saturated, toxic brine.
CAUTION: SEXUAL GUILT, EXHIBITIONIST TWEENS, APPARENT E.S.P.
The flood sickens my fuchsia bush. My mom says my fuchsia is hopeless,
but I make up a treatment. When it works, well... read the title.
CAUTION: PUNS, EXPLODING MOM
I dream my cousin and I ride out looking for his lost moccasins. Suddenly he's swallowed by mud
and drowns. It's so fast. I feel sorry for him but I'm helpless. Two months later, my cousin died...
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...
For a week the same dream-figures and settings have been recurring:
shapeshifters and sea monsters. What are they hiding? Or guarding...
The sea pours in the house, but Lynette swims and floats in the sun. When the flood ebbs, the
land blooms into paradise. An oracle says "Your mom will die, but you'll help her through it"...
CAUTION: SUBLIMINALLY SENSING ILLNESS, OR PSYCHIC?
A woman unreachable, in dream, drowning in the bed, fish-gasping, scissoring, while her man oblivious...
I'm biking over the English Channel. So mild & easy after the Greenland-to-New-York run...
A model of a moon, half-Europa, half-Mars, with (intelligent?) life in seas under a skin of ice...
Krishna, Orpheus, Kokopelli...why are the mythic musicians all guys? Where's Orphea's head?
I slept on an island in a scalding hot spring, praying for a dream. I got one--and woke up on the shore...
A man I loved goes into the Jungian depths, but when his anima appears in the mirror-pool, his nerve fails...
A naked angel came and perched on a rock, pointing at a vista that seemed both alpine and undersea...
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...
Four women with guns attack me at a public pool. Trapped in the water, can I survive? Only by being ruthless...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE
Night. A massive crash on the highway. Bodies strewn. Sickened, I descend a spiral stair to the Pool
of Truth. It gives no answers. Women spout platitudes. I go on, in pain, down past the polar bears...
CAUTION: THE DEAD
I botched President Clinton's taco. And on the way home, I fell in the river.
Luckily, Jesse Jackson happened by and pulled me out, restoring my faith in...
I'm swept off sea-rocks, as my scaly guardian watches calmly--letting me drown in the tears I shed...
CAUTION: DROWNING
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...
I tossed the crystal decanter of my self into the river, and watched it float away...
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 ship I was on going down in the Irish Sea. It was not till yesterday,
looking at an old paper, I saw about the sinking of the Rowan in the Irish sea...
I can fly and breathe water. So I fly into art-rich mansions, though
not to steal--I earn plenty from undersea massage...
I dreamed I was drowning in the Sea of Time, where dragons asked me questions.
Painful questions...
Compulsively honest spirit-women with waterjugs invade my friend's house.
I wake to find my girlfriend's obsessing on hair loss. To calm her, I babble about limb loss...
and wake again to find she was a dream too.
Our family of Japanese pearldivers is cast away on an atoll. One day, lonely, scared, I cast away fear...
I had a dream that everyone was sinking, drowning, but still alive. No one
could move, and it was just getting darker and darker with bodies. Lovely...
First, suck up 90% of Earth's seas. Now wait 90,000 years for life to adapt. The continents are now
Tibetan plateaus above steamy new Deeps, ruled by giant parrots, ravens and otters...
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...
The pier jutting into the sea of dreams has an 8th chakra at the end, where a lonely woman fishes for, um, sole...
Giant squid start surfacing at popular beaches and eating people. Not the form of first contact we'd hoped...
CAUTION: YOU ARE LUNCH
I love curves, not the chunky forms of this machine-ruled world...
The first drop struck about four miles away, with terrific force and thunder, breaking and drowning the land...
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...
The ruins of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco were the setting for an otherworldly dream...
Swimming down among the tentacles didn't bother me. I wanted that ball. But I didn't see the BIG eye...
I have recurring dreams of figures broken up by hair the color of the background...
CAUTION: MILD NUDITY
Tracking two cats at night, I watch amazed as they dive in and swim gracefully across a swimming pool...
I was a mermaid trying to find Count Coyote's stolen dreams, so I could marry my human girlfriend...
CAUTION: NUDITY, SEX, LESBIAN MARRIAGE, ANTI-FUNDAMENTALISM
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
One image has remained with me for more than sixty years:
a man in oilskins bent double under the blow of a great wave...
Worldwide drought. I have a mutation making me produce lots of saliva, so to keep
people alive, I drool into their open mouths. Gross, but it's take my drool or die...
CAUTION: UGH
Psychics give me an incomprehensible reading. A book from the tree-library gives only Victorian dating advice.
At last a madman gives me a treasure-box holding a tooth that unfolds into slices carved in unreadable symbols...
I climbed a tree with a beautiful view, but climbing down I fell, and woke. I visited the people under the
river. A beautiful ayocora bird danced for me. But so did the moon spirit, baring its fangs. Terrifying!
Only up close do I see that the map of these mysterious continents is made of moths. I wake
in Polynesia. By the bed, in a jar, floats one of my hands. For no reason, I begin to cry...
We flee a tsunami. Inland. Up a hill. Onto a roof. One by one, the flood plucks us away.
Long past hope, I climb a flagpole. As I cling to the very top and the mud rises to my lips...
CAUTION: GRIM PREDICTION
She tells me there's a stream under the floor, upstairs. Peel back the carpet, pry up the boards. An icy creek.
Trout. She brings me a fishing rod. But the fish say they're too young to die. I feel such guilt and grief...
I volunteered to meet him underground. He held me underwater and slammed into me. I nearly drowned, yet...
CAUTION: ROUGH SEX
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...
War, monsters, plague and bombs are just thrills spicing up
this city rising from a tropical sea on an alien world...
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...
A murder case. But the suspect had gone to an interpreter and told of an ominous dream.
The investigator saw its strange images might be puns, naming the real killer--and they did...
I'm a demon girl out to sabotage a pirate radio station by climbing a tall
wall of glowing wax, carrying a comatose mountain lioness on my back!
I was dead. A weed grew from my heart; then two streams poured out--not
water or blood but experiences. I asked the weed what it was doing, and it said...
I meet my own muse--the muse of all of us, perhaps--scooping water from a sacred well...
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
My girlfriend and I ride out the Great Flood in the White Submarine,
but there are romantic complications. Some things never change...
I flew joyfully over Sun Valley. But when I landed, I wore a uniform. As I slept in our barracks,
I dreamed--within my dream--of finding two friends in the lake, tangled in a net, long dead. I
"woke" and told a friend my dream. She said in tears "I know someone has to die, but why me?
A man dreamed he was the River Xanthus at Troy. I interpreted it to mean he'd bleed for years, but not die of it...
Wading a river at night, I fall in. I'm drowning! But my friend Edward pulls
me out. "But Eddie, you're dead!" "No" he says. "You'll grow out of that!"...
Zebra emerge from the lake. They glide as if swimming, and the air has an odd shimmer; did they bring the depths
along? They seem to be having great fun ducking branches and vaulting brambles. Such agility and grace!