An illustration from an 1873 issue of Punch magazine.  The caption reads: "Currant Jelly."

"Last night she dreamed she was wandering through a labyrinth of teeth."
—Cai Emmons, His Mother's Son (2002)

This section of a labyrinthodon tooth appears in Cosmopolitan Magazine, 1892.

I woke up with various TV specials swimming in my head, on the theme of Being John Malkovich.  These are the ones I can remember:

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Malkovich!
Wicked mentalist Derren Brown hypnotizes three bedraggled homeless people into believing they're legendary actor John Malkovich.  First one to be asked for a celebrity autograph wins three days and two nights in The Address hotel at Dubai Marina, a haven for the discerning traveller.

To Be John Malkovich
Legendary actor John Malkovich and three "nobodies" who genuinely share his name vie to accept a lifetime achievement award in Hollywood, Florida.  Trouble is, the thespian is the only one without identification.

Stars in Their Id's
Prescription for disaster: an unwitting psychiatrist accepts five patients who all "believe they're John Malkovich," including the legendary actor.  By the end of group therapy, will the real John Malkovich get carried away?

Finding John
Deepak Chopra, Mick Fleetwood, Akiva Goldsman, Catherine Hardwicke and Joseph Campbell (archival footage) are just a few of the people who offer their insight into how we are all John Malkovich.  "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. Follow your Malkovich!"

Ken shares a dream that we're honored to figure into:

I woke up and looked at the clock. It was 8:50 AM. My daily class started at 8:30, so I wondered why the alarm hadn't gone off. I looked at another clock, but the hands were all scrunched up in one corner of the clock face. Then I realized that I could float in the air, and was excited because I was fully conscious and would be able to remember it to tell Craig Conley.

I floated around from room to room, looking for something to"test". But everything was normal, other than the fact I was floating in the air.

I floated down to my other bedroom in the opposite corner of that floor of the house. The bed there was a single mattress on the floor, with a burgundy bedspread. I noticed how it matched the burgundy carpet on the floor. I floated over to the desk and looked for some object to take back to my other bedroom, to prove I'd actually physically transported something via floating. I had two black clay Incan figures, and so took one of them. When I picked it up, the head fell off, and I remembered that it had previously been cracked. I tried to remember if I had any glue in my other bedroom, to fix it.

I then floated back towards my other bedroom, and was still trying to come up with some "test" to try out, to tell Craig about. I floated over to a wall to see if I could float thru it, but it was completely solid. So I just floated back to the bed where I'd woken up.

I dreamed I was a grim reaper — not the Grim Reaper, but a grim reaper, as there was a different Death for every possible way to die.  Ironically, I stood accused of a person's demise, but I didn't fear capital punishment as I knew I was the personification of death and, besides, I could slip away from the rigmarole at any moment.  Exactly which sort of death I personified as I can't recall.

In the wee hours of January 17, 2013, I dreamed of writing to Larry Hass.  He had requested the template from a printing company that I use (full of cut lines and bleeding, come to think of it!).  I noticed on my laptop screen that the file of Larry's request had surprisingly disappeared once I'd printed out the template.  (Behest and fruition adding up to one, not two?)  As I began to handwrite a cover letter for the printout, I noticed that the paper was unusually fibrous (papyrus?), the back being somewhat smoother than the front.  Within mid-sentence (asking "Did you request this?" since I had no evidence of a request), I noticed that I'd inexplicably switched to the back of the page.  (When front and back merge, aren't we in Möbius territory?)  This happened twice, and I crumpled up the very crisp pages with divided sentences.  On my third try, I decided to begin on the smoother side to see if my pen would stay there.  (Apparently it worked.)  As I wrote, I was aware of three mismatched clocks.  (A fullness of time?  A three-in-one mystery?)  When I set off to mail the letter, my feet ran in place like Fred Flintstone.  (Motion/stillness? Point B indistinguishable from point A? "Modern stone age"?)  After I dreamed this, as I remained asleep, I lucidly recalled the details and dream-typed this transcript to Larry three different times, as if the message were so important that I mustn't forget anything upon waking!

Our friend KC shared this dream from 1999:

I was with Craig C. and a few other people on an exploratory voyage.  It seemed like we were on a spaceship, but there wasn't much sense of it being that physical.  We were exploring different levels of reality, and discovered that to go from one level to the next higher, we had to place our attention on the sun of the nearest solar system, and once we focused on it, we would awaken in the next higher reality.  But each level was different enough that the technique had to be altered for each level.

We so often assume that our waking life influences our dreams, but Jeff Hawkins knows it's the other way around.  He notes: "Funny that my dreams can so powerfully influence my waking life, while my waking life has so little influence over my dreams."  We couldn't resist a diagram.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

An illustration from a 1902 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "At night it fashioned strange dreams for him."

Our friend Ken shares a nesting box of a dream:

In the dream, you told me that you really liked a word I had coined. I responded that I wasn't surprised, because you'd actually coined the word yourself, in a dream I had (which was a dream within the dream I was in).

Here's a list of the levels:

1) Ken writing this e-mail to Craig describing
2) A dream I had, where you were impressed with the word I'd coined, where I said that
3) I'd had a dream where you had coined the word, and told it to me.

Make sense?

Unfortunately, I don't remember what the word was...

If I find a faint shadow of hands on a wall and the memory of a rabbit in white chalk, I may recall that all dreaming is a kind of living where you cannot die no matter how many times you fall from the building.
—Geof Huth (see his entire piece here.)

Chalk rabbit underfoot by tech wizard Gordon Meyer.

For Geof Huth, whose poems sometimes go backwards.

Inspired by and for Gary Barwin.

Here's a fun dream anecdote over at Futility Closet.

Do you remember,
when you were a child,
the animals used to call your name?
And you knew in the dark
when the others were dreaming
and you could never get to sleep.
—Cat People (1982)

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"Behind the dark masonry of the forehead there must be enigmas sleeping such as Amsterdam had never imagined in its wildest dreams.”
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

For George Parker.

To resist nightmares of the Spanish Inquisition, evoke the Danube at midday.  (This tip comes to us from The Stone Door by the great surrealist painter and author Leonora Carrington.)

We're so often mesmerized by rows of asterisks twinkling on pages of old books.  Here's an especially dreamy example from Wilfred Montressor: or, The Secret Order of the Seven (1865).

Friedrich Nietzsche suggests:


However, Vladimir Nabokov notes:

I dreamed I was being tested on Shakespeare's "Withdrawn," but I couldn't remember if it was a comedy, tragedy, or history.

Myrlin Hermes writes: Strangely enough, you turned up in my dream last night, emerging from a TARDIS. Perhaps a subconscious reaction to your habit of blogging from the future? At any rate, I'm tickled by the image, which seems somehow fitting, given the way you have quite suddenly and wonderfully dropped into my consciousness.