A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane (1992)

Nothing is duller than listening to other people's dreams, except when Barry Yourgrau (Wearing Dad's Head) is doing the telling. A ''stand-up storyteller'' who has delivered his surrealistic fables on MTV, Ha!, and National Public Radio, Yourgrau uses dream logic as a scaffold for his imagination in. In his second collection, A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, a man climbs inside a cow and falls asleep, a skater on a frozen pond sees his ancestors staring up at him through the ice, a fertility rite causes a girl to cough up miniature fruit and flowers, and a racy female shrinks herself to 12 inches to impress her date, gets drunk at dinner, and rolls around naked in his spaghetti, sneering, ''I thought you could take it!'' Despite occasional concessions to cuteness, Yourgrau writes like a modern-day Morpheus with a rapier wit. A-