You all know my fandom of HP Lovecraft, and how I have argued that his mythos of madness and decay represents the closest thing America has to an authentic mythological cycle. And I stand by that. You also know that I have discussed the red pill wisdom of the pulp fiction medium on the whole—and I stand by *that* as well.
So with all that being said, let us combine these two topics to discuss HP Lovecraft’s Dreamland stories, a series of stories loosely connected by a few common themes and characters that are highly relevant to both American culture and masculine men on the whole. Rather than jaw-jacking about it some more, let’s dive right in, starting in no particular order:
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If the Dreamland stories can be said to have any one “moral” (when looked at in context of Lovecraft’s other work), it seems to me that it is: “dreams and fantasies are certainly good to have, but not to excess. Keep one foot grounded in reality”. Lovecraft’s Polaris illustrates this immediately—it is a highly autobiographical work, all talk of Pnakotic Manuscripts aside. The narrator is “feeble and denied a warrior’s part, given to strange faintings under hardship”, much like how Lovecraft was rejected (4F) when he tried to join the army during the Great War.
In dreams, the Pole Star is portrayed as “hideously winking, seeking to convey some message but recalling nothing other than that it had a message to convey…”
Our narrator wakes up from this dream “but I am still dreaming”. He has a tenuous grasp on reality, but what’s clear to him is his failure to fight the “Inutos”. He refers to real people as the shadwos of dreams, who deride him. “There is no land of Lomar, and where the Aldebaran meets the horizon, there is naught but ice and Esquimaux”.
In other words, of those two realms, the narrator asks which is the “true” realm? He is still a feeble weakling in both, pointing out the limitations of the dreamscape, and how the real world and the world of dreams are intertwined.
Even the happier stories in the Dreamlands can still have majorly down endings—take Celephais for example, depicting a man who (with the aid of hashish) sojourns into the eponymous golden city at night, until to reveal:
” And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighboring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephaïs and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.”
Despite the air of tragedy this contains Lovecraft does, however, show some sympathy to these dreamers, since the dead tramp (a noble gentryman, who retreats into dreams and drug abuse as his money declines.) is portrayed more nobly than the “Fat and offensive millionare” with his “purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility”.
Even more tragically than Celephais is “The Quest of Iranon” which is a long, extended story about a youthful and idealistic dreamer, sustained entirely by his dreams:
“Long have I missed thee, Aira, for I was but young when we went into exile; but my father was thy King and I shall come again to thee, for it is so decreed of Fate. All through seven lands have I sought thee, and some day shall I reign over thy groves and gardens, thy streets and palaces, and sing to men who shall know whereof I sing, and laugh not nor turn away. For I am Iranon, who was a Prince in Aira.”
Slowly and repeatedly being slapped in the face by reality as he somehow remains youtful and spry:
“O stranger, I have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other names thou hast spoken, but they come to me from afar down the waste of long years. I heard them in my youth from the lips of a playmate, a beggar’s boy given to strange dreams, who would weave long tales about the moon and the flowers and the west wind. We used to laugh at him, for we knew him from his birth though he thought himself a King’s son. He was comely, even as thou, but full of folly and strangeness; and he ran away when small to find those who would listen gladly to his songs and dreams. How often hath he sung to me of lands that never were, and things that never can be! Of Aira did he speak much; of Aira and the river Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra. There would he ever say he once dwelt as a Prince, though here we knew him from his birth. Nor was there ever a marble city of Aira, or those who could delight in strange songs, save in the dreams of mine old playmate Iranon who is gone.”
Until he realizes his dreams are just that:
“And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon cast on the marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, there walked into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned with whithered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.”
It is in my opinion that the three “core” dreamland stories are The Silver Key, Through the Gates of the Silvery Key, and the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. And despite the fact that putting the stories in this order makes perfect sense narratively, Wikipedia tells me it’s actually reversed. Fittingly for a series of stories about noble, doomed dreamers, I’m going to choose to interpret it in this way:
Silver Key is about Randolph Carter, a man who is slowly losing his dream ability: he used to dream of fantastic places and beings, as an antidote for the “prosiness of life”.
He believes his dreams to reveal truths missing from man’s waking ideas, regarding the purpose of humans and the universe, primary among these being the truth of beauty as perceived and invented by humans in times past. But as he gets older, he becomes more prosy. He debates whether dreams are better than reality. as he gradually becomes “dreamier”.
During one of these dreams, his long-dead grandfather tells him of a silver key in his attic, inscribed with mysterious symbols, in the attic of his old childhood home. He finds the key somehow enables him to return to his childhood as a ten-year-old boy, and his adult self disappears from his normal time.
The story then relates how Randolph’s relatives had noted, beginning at the age of ten, that he had somehow gained the ability to glimpse events in his future. The narrator of the story then states that he expects to meet Randolph soon, in one of his own dreams, “in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt”, reigning there as a new king, where the narrator may look at Randolph’s key, whose symbols he hopes will tell him the mysteries of the cosmos—an ending that is ostensibly a man submitting to his childhood dream state, but not presented as a tragedy per se.
Through the gates of the silver key involves an estate meeting about Randy’s estate (it’s apparently the last story, but I always thought it was DURING the dream quest, and then the dreamquest’s end is the very end of the randy saga (if you’ve read the three stories, perhaps you can see where I’m coming from).
He meets Yog-Sothoth who tells him that all beings are part o fmuch greater beings or essence, and tells Randy that he is part of that Supreme Entity (Yog), which is made of all the great thinkers. Carter ends up trapped in the body of Zkauba the Wizard who is of the Nug-Soth of Yaddith. THe entity actually did this because Carter wanted to learn about the planet, and even warned him “you better have a way to get out of this”.
After much time on Yaddith Carter returns to Earth. still in the Nug-Soth body. He shows up at the estate meeting dressed as a swami, and the accountants think he’s some con artist, and they rip off his turban and stuff and SURPRISE ALIEN. The alien mind “Reasserts itself”, and he just disappears, back into the dreamscape.
“Dream Quest combines fantasy and horror to illustrate the scope and wonder of mankind’s ability to fantasize”.
Randolph Carter wants to go to the city he sees in dreams, but is torn from each time. He goes to beseech the gods of Kadath, the priests that border the dreamlands tell him it’s dangetous and suggest the gods took his dreams away for a reason.
He meets Dick Pickman, who has himself abandone the world of humanity, and Kuranes, the dead homeless guy from Celephais
Eventually he makes it to the abode of the gods, a strange Pharaoh tells Carter that the gods of Earth have seen the city of your dreams and decided to take it. THey hae abandoned Kadath. Theya re mere denizens of that dream city. The Pharaoh (Nyarlathotep) tells him that the shining city he sees “…is not over unknown seas,” he says, “but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes. For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth…. ”
Nyarlathotep tells him he will send him to the city, but he in fact sends him to Azathoth. Realizing this, Carter wakes himself up and emerges in Boston , looking out upon its architectural graces, suffused in a splendid sunrise. And, if you choose to read the stories as I do, Randolph Carter has learned to hold reality and dreams in a balanced accord.
Stories of mad dreamers seeking to create a better reality, only to ultimately learn to face the actual reality without completely abandoning their dreams—said it before, and I’ll say it again: what could be more American than that?
Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,
A dozen more of ours they sweep away!