The boy who turns onto a dog

I am coming down a steep flight of wooden stairs when I hear a commotion below me. Some boys run past me up the stairs, looking frightened, and I see they are being threatened by another boy their own age. He is a scary kid - he has that vibe of someone you can't trust. As I come up to this kid, he suddenly turns into a pitbull & bites my right hand. I can hear the bones crunching. People see me in trouble but keep their distance because of the dog. Some call for help.

The dog doesn't tear at my hand, but just holds it tight in its jaws so I can't move. I try to ignore the pain while I wait for help to come. In my mind I am thinking, how can this be resolved so that the dog doesn't have to die? As I think that, the whole world goes to sleep.

Everyone in the world hibernates for a long time. I wake up early, and my hand is healed. I think about the dog, but someone tells me it is still asleep, and if it wakes up early, then nothing will change. Some creatures have to sleep longer so they can change for the better. Later on, I see the dog, and it has changed back into the boy, and he has grown up into a man who works on fishing boats. We only see each other for a moment, and it is uncomfortable because of our past conflict, but he seems a nice enough man and I am relieved.

Black Powder

On a cruise ship one night, snow begins to fall out of the darkness, and some of the children on board go out onto the decks to play. The snow is so thin that it disappears under their feet, leaving dark little foot-shaped marks.

Then, as they stomp and jump in the snow, black things peel off the bottoms of their feet and float in the air like jellyfish. They are crisp little parachutes, crinkled at the edges and slightly stiff, like paper. They are alive.

More people come out to see the parachutes as they drift in a manner not at all random. They are drawn to people, bumping into legs and faces, and just as the people are becoming disturbed by their strange movement, the parachutes are joined by something else: swarms of black bats that come out of the dark, clinging with claws to whomever they touch.

Everyone the bats touch, changes. They turn into ghosts, and if you look a ghost in the eyes, you become one too. Panic ensues, and people run for the glass doors. Some get in with bats clinging to them. Once they have changed, the bats crumble to black powder on the floor, and the ghosts stroll dreamily around the ship, looking just like regular people until you look into their eyes.

A day goes by. People are hiding from ghosts and one another all over the ship. I walk around, staring at my shoes and calling, "Who's there?" whenever I see something moving. Anyone who answers is still a person.

The ship's pilot, thankfully, is still at his post and is taking us toward land, but night falls once more before we get there. Black winged gargoyles thump against windows wherever there is glass. In the morning, a small group of people pick their way carefully to a gangway, jump overboard, and swim the short distance to dock.

A tiny yellow lizard

Im my dream I am six years old and someone has given me a tiny yellow lizard to look after. He is so small that he lives under my fingernail. It feels good to be responsible for a such a friendly little creature, and I go about my six year old business, happy and confident that everything is as it should be.

Then one day, after some time has passed, I am in the midst of frolicking in a mud puddle with some other kids when I suddenly realize that the lizard has disappeared! I frantically look around on the ground and find him, cold and half-drowned, at the edge of the mud puddle. At that moment, I feel myself fill up with an awful grief. I pick up the tiny lizard in my fingers, lay him on my palm and try to warm him, to comfort him, but he's so very tiny that my efforts only hurt him more. Finally, the lizard leaves me and drags himself to a hole in the corner of a kitchen cabinet, and that's the last I see of him for years.

Years pass; I get somewhat taller and turn into a sullen teenager. The horrible grief has not left me even for a moment, but I hide my sadness from everyone. Still, it seems I have a friend or a sister who knows my secrets, because one day she tells me she has a surprise. She takes me to the kitchen of my house and introduces me to a young man in a blue uniform, and even before I see him I know he is the very same tiny lizard all grown up. I walk into his arms, and can't keep from crying.

To the Far North

In this dream, I took my younger sister Colleen to the far north on a visit to some friends who live in a shack on a cliff over an icy span of water. Once we arrive, my friends declare that we are all going on a trip to a far-off, mysterious place. First, though, we have to go into town for supplies, and that involves crossing the icy water. We don't bother with a boat; we simply spread ourselves on the icy wind and fly over. As we swoop low over the water, I look down and see a pod of whales. "Hey look, whales!" I yell to the others, and they go "Right on!"

At the store, my friend starts to tell me about all the hardships we are going to face on our journey, walking for days over the snow and suchlike. My sister starts to freak out and ask me why I brought her along, but my friend gets impatient with her and keeps belabouring the point of how difficult and dangerous it's going to be. Finally I roll my eyes and say, "Can we just leave?" and so we start out. Step one of our adventure is to turn ourselves into a lynx, a wolf, a caribou and a bird, and we set off across the countryside.

Cassandra

In this dream, which I had when I was in highschool, I felt like Cassandra, the prophet whom no-one would believe. I dreamed that I woke up one morning convinced that the Earth would be invaded by aliens that day and that we would no longer be masters of our own destinies.

I go to my mother, my friends, my teachers etc, but they all think I am playing a joke even though I am in a rising panic. I keep having visions that I don't understand, but it looks like terrible things happening to people I care about. Finally the fear and frustration get too much for me, so I go to my sister and ask her to give me the huge cardboard box that her refrigerator came in (not that she had a fridge in real life at the time!) I tuck the box into a corner of the basement and hide in it. Not long after, there is a wave of scary booming noises and gusts of wind, as alien spacecraft come down from the sky by the hundreds. Strange creatures pour out of the ships in every city on Earth and go from door to door like commandos, herding everyone out onto the streets at gunpoint. The streets are full of screaming, panicking people. They find my hiding place and throw me out into the road where I stand with my mom, my sister and a friend, wondering what will be done with us.

After some time, something seems to be happening: the aliens are circulating through the crowd, doing something to people one at a time. As they get closer, I see they are using something like a Star Trek hypospray, a little gun they fire into the skin from a few inches away. They reload the gun with little capsules full of compressed gas or powder. I feel very frightened when I see the people already injected start to look sick and scratch themselves frantically, as if they had fleas.

The aliens shoot my mother, my friend and my sister. Then, finally, my turn comes and I get shot at close range with one of the capsules. My skin starts to tingle right away. In a few minutes all my hair falls out (so does everyone else's) and tiny green vines grow in its place. Soon I am standing in a crowd of mossy, vine-trailing people. Once we are all growing foliage instead of hair, the aliens set up an arrangement of fences like what's used to control livestock, pass us through one by one, and harvest the plants we have grown. Some of them eat right off of our skin. Then they send us all home, telling us we'll be rounded up again tomorrow and every day to have our foliage harvested.

A childhood dream

I had this dream and wrote it down when I was about 14, so the main players are family members: my mom, stepmom and siblings. There's also an old man who looks like Wilford Brimley. We are all in the midst of climbing a treacherous mountain with a fortresslike monastery on top. Falling rocks and dirt roll past us, and we look up and see that evil-looking monks are throwing themselves off the monastery walls. (Maybe I was prophesying my future Umberto Eco fascination!) The Wlford Brimley man tells us that we'd better hurry and get to the top, because when all the monks are dead, the mountain and everything on it will disappear right out from under us. Luckily, one of the monks lusts for power, so he stays behind after all the others have killed themselves and names himself King of the Mountain.

When my group and I get to the top of the mountain, we sneak into the monastery through the storeroom, then follow WB through the building, climbing stairs and ladders until we reach a large room. In this room is a giant cat the size of a bison sitting next to a table and holding a bowl of soup in its paw. Old WB takes a piece of bread from the table and dips it in the soup, and suddenly, strange words appear on the bread. Apparently it's a magic map of the monastery, and WB follows it until we come to the throne room, where the King of the Mountain is sitting looking paranoid. He does some kind of magic when he sees us, and presto, we are magically expelled from the building and find ourselves looking up at the walls from outside. We sneak in through the storeroom again, climb to the cat room, go through the bread-dipping routine again, and wait for a message to appear. This time all it says is "A1 - 1" WB reacts to this as if it were a bomb timer showing 2 minutes: he yells "Run!" and we take off as a group trying to get out of the building. We can hear the King of the Mountain chasing us and shrieking terribly, but we manage to stay ahead of him. At the end we all have to jump from a broken staircase and run out of the storeroom, but the giant cat appears suddenly and cuts us off.

Old WB comes forward and explains that the monks and priests of the mountaintop monastery have been tormenting his family for generations and he wants it to stop. The giant cat agrees, as long as the old man agrees to be the last victim. He agrees, and we all make it home safely. A week later, the old man starts acting strangely, getting up in the middle of the night and pulling people out of their beds, or moving his own bed into another room. Then one night he just disappears, and so does the mountain and the monastery on top of it.