What do you get when you take a sleepwalker, download the complete works of HP Lovecraft into her Kindle, then have her train for the Grand Canyon and hike until she falls asleep the second she gets home?
Interesting dreams to say the least.
I recently found that the Australian Project Gutenberg* has, in one file, everything that HP Lovecraft wrote. All of his short stories, all of his longer works, all of the pieces that don’t seem to be quite finished but were published in one spot or another. This clearly met my requirements for a free download (the author is long dead yet I own several of his works in hard form so I have supported his estate) and so I downloaded the file without thinking much about it and have begun reading through.
First off though, let me just say that Lovecraft was a prolific writer. Kindles don’t really show page count, but by my count it takes about 31 pages for the percentage meter at the bottom to go up on percent. So that’s something like 3,100 pages, most of which is short stories. I’m a fast reader, but I’ve been reading this thing for a week now and I still have some to go.
With the sheer number of pages there are of course a couple of stories that I don’t really enjoy. Some are short, others are predictable, and some -like Medusa’s Coil- are just kind of racist (the twist at the end of the story is that -gasp- the wife actually had African heritage!). But there are other stories here that I’ve not seen before and that I really really enjoy.
In particular, it’s the books and stories of the Dreamlands Cycle that are new to me. I’ve read Celephaïs before, but the novella The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is amazing. It unites a lot of the mythos of his previous stories (the dread plateau of Leng, Richard Pickman and the ghouls, the cats of Ulthar, and Nyarlathotep all make appearances), pulling together disparate realities into one cohesive whole and providing a partial explanation for the weirdness that occurs in his other stories- for sometimes strange things happen where the real world touches that of dreams.
I love the idea that dreamers who have proven their worth can descend to the Dreamlands from their own, individual dream worlds, and that those lands have outlets in our own, but that just might be that- as I mentioned before- I’m a prolific dreamer myself. I have my own worlds of dream that I’ve created since I was little, places that I revisit and characters that I spend time with, and the Dreamlands Cycle provides a kind of framework with which I can draw my own dreams into my stories.
They also provide a glimpse into a side of Lovecraft that is very different from the creeping horror of Cthulu and the elder ones out of space that make up the bulk of his popular fiction. There is a dark mystery to cold Kadath and Carter, the main character, spends some time in some very dark places as a result of his journey, but most of Dreamland is painted in a wide sweeping brush of color and beauty that reflects the world of dreams better than I have ever seen before. It’s a world with more magic than horror even in its oddities, and it’s an excellent break from the darker stories in the collection.
But at the same time I’m not sure what reading all this Lovecraft is doing to my dreams. I have this strange feeling that I walked last night in my sleep. I’m not sure, but despite sleeping more than usual I was still exhausted upon waking. I’m also sure my socks weren’t that dirty when I went to bed. Stranger still, the lock upon my front door was open and my roommate is usually very conscientious about dead bolting it… but my memory of sleep is blurred and I can’t remember the places of which I dreamed.
*If you have an electronic reader you need to check out Project Gutenberg. It’s a compendium of books that are no longer under copyright- and thus are in the public domain- that have been transcribed into electronic files. It’s a great resource for free classic books.