From as far back as I can remember, I've always had "the dreams"...
Nightmares, more precisely, on an epic scale that I never thought I'd be able to describe in any rational mode of communication, nor did I think anyone else would understand. They were too bizarre, too alien, too unexplainably horrific... Most of them had me standing alone on a vast, colorless plane, littered with scattered, nonsensical shapes; or at times, balancing on the top of an impossibly tall labyrinth (thanks, "Time Bandits," for lodging
that image in my childhood brain), while...
SOMETHING positively enormous, shapeless, and, well... totally
cosmic leaked into my universe from a tear in the sky, and pressed down on me with impossible weight from all angles ... Suffocating me, offering me no escape and no possible comprehension of What was trying to absorb me as I stood alone in the emptiness...
I had dreams like this a lot when I was a child, back when my subconscious self still held better sway over the more rational mind. Back when I still kind of believed in magic, and had a better ear for the things that don't ever show their face to adults, only whispering and winking to children.
My wife had dreams like this, as well, and it blew my mind when she told me of similarly terrifying and unknowingly hostile dreamtime experiences. I think Howard Phillips Lovecraft had dreams like this, too. In fact, I know he did, and did so almost a century before me. His stories were like a third person dream diary, documenting snatches of nightmares I held onto fiercely, as I had no way of forgetting them. It was a revelation, and I've been hooked to the marrow every since I cracked my first Lovecraft anthology in my teens.
So, it's only natural that I relate - and, in many ways - emulate, and thereby honor, H.P. Lovecraft through this blog, and through my short stories, screenplays, and middling poetry. So much has been written, but there is still so much to explore in the infinite folds of outer space and the inner mind, from the center of the roiling universe to the hidden Dreamlands down the 700 steps. It's an exciting time in the horror and speculative fiction game, with new media bringing unprecedented access to content, readers, and like-minded fellowship. Hopefully, as things speed up, they also slow down, and we find clues to our future (in)sanity while looking to the past, all the while forging ahead with a darkly squinted eye.
Another legendary writer and dream walker, Hunter S. Thompson, wrote, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." With as weird as things have turned, I think I went pro long ago...
Join me, and let's see down what dimly lit hallways this moldering, electronic tome takes us, our quills and brushes and awakened minds leading the way into the chaotic abyss swirling at the Beginning of Everything.
You see, I don't dream like I dreamed as a child anymore. Now, I have to create those weird and wondrous visions while awake, in "real" time, like so many have done before me.
It ain't as easy, but it sure as hell is a living.
