The recent publication of Bietti allows us to investigate the role of the Dream as a portal to the Elsewhere in HPL's poetics… and even earlier in his biography.
di Marco Maculotti
In the history of literature of the twentieth century, the role of the dream experience on the imagination and genius of the greatest writers played a primary importance: we will remember, by way of example, the Book of Dreams by JL Borges, The dark shop by Georges Perec e Dreams by the Austrian Arthur Schnitzler — moreover author of traumanovelle (1925), one of the main modern novels focused on the mystery of the dream dimension —, he who once ruled that «No dream is ever just a dream». Otto Rahn, for his part, expressed the idea that for the individual the dream is equivalent to what the Myth is for the whole of our species.
Among the writers of the last century, one above all has been able to combine his literary inventions with visions and experiences lived in dreams, and this author we believe is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. In a letter of 1927 to D. Wandrei so he 'confessed' [1]:
« I live only to capture some fragments of that hidden and almost unattainable mystery; that beauty which is proper to dreams, and which nevertheless I feel I have known closely in very distant lost eras before my birth, before the birth of this or any other world. It exists somewhere - says my fantasy - a wonderful city, with ancient streets and hills and gardens and marble terraces, in which I once lived for whole eternities, and to which I will have to return to find the final satisfaction. I don't know his name or where he is - but from time to time a reflection of it shines on the paths man has walked. Of this enigmatic and glorious city - this archaic place of primeval splendor echoed in Atlantis or Cockaigne or the Hesperides - many cities on Earth still hold vague and elusive symbols, which manifest themselves for a brief moment and then disappear again ... Mine is such a perfect and complete dream life that it almost induces an oriental inaction, in which vision replaces action. "
'Putative son' of another great of horror and supernatural literature, that Edgar Allan Poe whom HPL always considered as a teacher and an 'initiator' [2], Lovecraft drew heavily from his own dream experience to write some of his most successful stories (eg. Nyarlathotep e The Statement of Randolph Carter), as well as willingly used the oneiric expedient in his other equally well-known works: in the famous The Call of Cthulhu the tentacular ancestral divinity manifests itself first of all in the dreams of the unfortunate, who in a feverish state dreamily visualize cities submerged by the abysses of time and unmentionable entities that trod the Earth even before humanity came into existence.
The dream experience, therefore, for HPL is to be considered as a portal that opens disconcerting visions onSomewhere else, on the unspeakable history of our planet and the whole cosmos. On the other hand, in the opinion of ours [3]:
“The dreams of men are older than the wisdom of Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx, and of Babylon surrounded by gardens. "
To date, however, there was no systematic anthology that would neatly collect the dreams and nightmares that stimulated HPL's imagination and which, as we shall see later in this article, influenced the genesis of the "Mythology of the Great Ancients" and other supernatural literary inventions of the "Providence solitaire". They thought about it Bietti Editions to fill the gap, with this first world edition entitled Oniricon. Dreams, nightmares & reveries, edited by Pietro Guarriello. This new release is based on the nowhere to be found The HP Lovecraft Dreambook, published by Necronomicon Press in 1994 by ST Joshi, Will Murray and David E. Schulz, never translated into Italian.
Except that in this Italian edition the material has almost doubled: the twenty-two dreams of the US edition have become forty-one here. In addition, the work is embellished - in addition to the original introduction by Joshi - by the preface by Gianfranco de Turris, as well as by an impressive array of explanatory notes, bibliographies, insights and the complete collection of those stories that were actually "lived" of the author in a dream. The edition is completed by an iconographic-photographic insert and an essay by the psychotherapist Giuseppe Magnarapa, who - as Andrea Scarabelli writes [4] - "he puts Lovecraft's dreams on the couch, interpreting them - in a very secular and convincing way, moreover, without forcing his hand or falling victim to that reductionism that many other Freudians run into who decide to improvise literary critics».
What emerges from the reading of these correspondence is that, despite the fact that during his life Lovecraft had repeatedly declared himself an agnostic, closer to a rationalistic-scientific mentality rather than to a so-called 'mystical' one, he is himself to illustrate, in letters to his closest acquaintances, the importance that some kind of dreams had on his work, to the point that the latter often follows slavishly — in the 'visions' as in the atmospheres — the dream experience he experienced [5]:
“I have had such dreams since I am old enough to remember them, and I will probably continue to have them until I descend into Avernus. The visions are vivid […] prospects of fearful cliffs — peaks and abysses of repulsive black rock, in the midst of repulsive darkness — above which I was carried in the clutches of black winged demons to whom I had given the name of thin nocturnes. [...] I have traveled to strange places that are not of this Earth, nor of any other known planet. I have ridden comets, I have been the brother of nebulae ... »
If of the cd. "Skinny nights" we have spoken elsewhere [6], it will suffice here to underline how Lovecraftian dreams, far from being able to be analyzed by "Freud with his childish symbolism" [7], sometimes result in real 'mystical' or 'cosmic' experiences, such as interstellar travel — as we have just seen. As Scarabelli rightly notes [8], who are "for Lovecraft, dreams do not go to scrape the bottom of the unconscious, of the id, but are authentic windows wide open on the Elsewhere". Sometimes his dream travels are in fact indisputably comparable to the shamanic 'flights' and to the so-called. Out-Of-Body Experiences [9]:
“I was suddenly seized with dizziness, as if the room were spinning into an unknown dimension. Then, although the outlines of the walls remained perfectly clear, my field of vision began to extend over ever larger spaces — filled with clusters of gigantic cubes scattered over an abyss of violet radiation — and my mind became aware, in an intolerable way, of the unfolding of the aeons ... as if the whole eternity was about to pour all its weight on me. »
It's still [10]:
“There was not a soul in this vast region of stone-paved streets, marble walls and columns, and the numerous statues in the deserted squares depicted strange bearded men in robes I had never seen before. I was […] visually aware of this city. I was in it and, at the same time, around it. But I didn't have a bodily existence. It seemed to me that I saw everything at the same time, with no limits of direction. I didn't move, but I moved my consciousness from one point to another, as I pleased. I didn't take up any space, nor did I have any shape. I was just a sentient and perceptive presence. "
We have already advanced the hypothesis elsewhere that HPL, although not in possession of any 'sacred technique' — such as those of the shamanic type — to reach ecstasy and make 'journeys' in spirit, still managed to live such peculiar experiences by virtue of a natural predisposition — what we normally call genius — completely disconnected from the rationalism that contradicted the conscious thought. On the other hand, it is Lovecraft himself who wrote to R. Kleiner how 'cosmic' and 'supernatural' dream experiences occurred to him from an early age [11]:
« Space, strange cities and bizarre landscapes, unknown monsters, horrifying ceremonies, Egyptian and oriental opulence, indefinable mysteries of life, death or torment they were commonplace for me every day — or, better, every night [...] "
And then [12]:
«[…] It is in dreams that I have known the real grip of a raw, hideous, exasperating and terrifying fear. The nightmares of my childhood were typically horrifying, there is no gulf of agonizing cosmic horror that I haven't explored. […] It is undoubtedly from them that the most macabre and dark side of my imagination arose. "
Not infrequently the 'mystical' dreams of Lovecraft present, in addition to the pregnant sense of supernatural horror — il Ganz Andere, "Totally Other" which according to the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto best expresses the most intimate and profound meaning of the Sacred [13] —, the awareness of the existence in a forgotten past of ancestral civilizations, whose mystery and esoteric knowledge have the particularity of combining Beauty or Horror, as well as that of sending, after millennia, "secret messages" in the dreams of people predisposed to receive them [14]:
« I dream of the evenings when spheres and planets gravitated to the cryptic and seething Alexandria ... and, even before that, Carthage, and before that Thebes and Memphis and Babylon and Ur of the Chaldeans. I dream of secret messages that arrive after eons from those distant and half-forgotten places, and from others even more obscure, gloomy and old, of which only whispering voices dare to speak. When I look at them, I feel that they in turn look at me, and the beauty they project on the thickening night and on the waxy and twilight city is a symbol of primordial glories older than man, older than Earth, older than Nature , older even than the gods, reserved only for my mystical soul. »
Of all the civilizations of the past, particularly strong was the bond that Lovecraft felt firsthand with ancient Rome: already at the age of eight the very young Howard Phillips left his family astonished by declaring himself a "pagan of the Roman period" and declaring his extraneousness to the contents of the Holy Scriptures [15]. In a missive published in this Dreamicon, HPL speaks of Rome as a "second homeland to which I turn all my sense of loyalty, expectation, affection, pride and personal identity, whenever I imagine myself in the ancient world» [16].
Dreams set in the Roman domains, in which Lovecraft found himself in the role of an officer or a equals in some centuries, they often reappeared in the dreamlike unconscious of the writer, for the entire duration of his life. Particularly interesting in this respect is The horror in the hills, the famous "Roman dream" from 1927 ("the most vivid dream I've ever had, drawing on intact and forgotten wells of the subconscious» [17]), which in this new issue is reported in three versions, delivered to as many correspondents [18]. It is one of the Lovecraftian dream experiences that would best have lent itself to being translated into a story. Although this unfortunately did not happen, it must nevertheless be recognized that the transcription of the "Roman dream" in these letters is invaluable material for its readers who especially appreciate the typically Lovecraftian connection between the ancient world and supernatural horror.
Worthy of mention for his otherness is also the 1935 letter to RH Barlow [19] in which Lovecraft tells of a dream in which he experienced the attack by "a swarm of swirling insects descended from the sky", which pierced his skull and entered his brain, "as if their substance was not quite solid" . Following this 'intrusion' alien, HPL lives a supernatural experience that closely resembles those nefarious that the protagonists of his stories need:
"I remembered alien and incredible scenes: spiers and pinnacles illuminated by purple stars, fantastic buildings with cyclopean walls, mushroom and multicolored vegetation, shapeless figures crowded into boundless plains, bizarre spiers and waterfalls, monoliths whose top you could not see crossed by stairs of rope as large as ship ramps, labyrinthine corridors and frescoed rooms with incredible geometry, curious gardens of unknown plants, amorphous beings with strange clothes that spoke with non-vocal organs ... and countless other events of a vague nature and with indefinite consequences. I couldn't determine where I was, but I had the distinct feeling of a infinite distance, a complete alienation from the Earth and the human species »
In conclusion, this excellent new issue by Edizioni Bietti edited by Pietro Guarriello gave us the opportunity to demonstrate how the dream dimension was for Howard Phillips Lovecraft a real well of 'visions', which were then wisely merged into his literary work. . The dream experiences that he experienced and the supernatural situations in which the unfortunate protagonists of his stories find themselves catapulted are often almost indistinguishable from each other.
Through the dream dimension — which as we have seen HPL considered as a portal to the Elsewhere — he created even before in a dream than on paper the terrifying cosmos which constitutes the most abysmal substratum of his literary work. And yet, the more carefully you read the missives contained in this Dreamicon, the more we suspect that the more that create HPL limited itself to borrow images from another world or from another dimension, visualized in dreamlike glimpses in which scenarios and atmospheres opened up in his mind totally others, in time as in space. In this regard, in conclusion, read carefully what de Turris was able to write elsewhere, namely that [20]:
"Lovecraft in his narrative myths has managed to bring to light and represent with unparalleled effectiveness the collective nightmares of man, putting all of us in front of our repressed instinctualities, fears not recognized or accepted, unconfessable desires, the horrors that humanity has pushed to the bottom of its conscience and that go back to its ancestral origins »
Note:
[1] HP Lovecraft, The horror of reality. The worldview of the fantastic narrative renovator. Curated by G. de Turris and S. Fusco. Mediterranee, Rome, 2007, pp. 84-85.
[2] Poe's influence on Lovecraft's work, which does not need too much study here, is particularly evident from the quotations from the Gordon Pym featured in one of the best known stories of HPL, At the mountains of madness.
[3] HP Lovecraft, Oniricon. Dreams, nightmares & reveries. Curated by P. Guarriello. Bietti, Milan, 2017, p. 65.
[4] A. Scarabelli, Howard Phillips Lovecraft's Cosmic Dreams, IlGiornale, 30 November 2017.
[5] Dreamicon, p. 72.
[6] See M. Maculotti, The phenomenon of sleep paralysis: folkloric interpretations and recent hypotheses.
[7] Dreamicon, p. 148.
[8] Scarabelli, op. cit.
[9] Dreamicon, P. 166.
[10] Ibidem, p. 43.
[11] Ibid, p. 75.
[12] Ibidem, p. 220.
[13] "[...] assumed in its universal and faded value means only secret, in the sense of stranger to us, of misunderstood, of unexplained, and as mysterium it constitutes what is considered by us to be a pure analogical notion, drawn from the realm of the natural, without actually drawing on reality. In himself, however, the mysterious religious, the authentic mirum, is, if we want to grasp it in its most typical essence, the 'Totally other', the tháteron,anyad,alienum,aliud valde, the stranger, and what fills with amazement, what is beyond the usual sphere, the understandable, the familiar, and for this reason "hidden", absolutely out of the ordinary, and therefore filling the spirit with stunned amazement " . Broken, The Sacred. SE, Milan, 2009, p. 41.
[14] Dreamicon, p. 139.
[15] The Horror of reality, P. 24.
[16] Dreamicon, p. 111. In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith in 1933, HPL writes: "A real Roman coin, a statue, a stele, a sarcophagus, a household utensil or a weapon of the Romans can evoke a sort of pseudo-memory; while paintings of Roman scenes induce in me a feeling of affinity mixed with certain inexplicable resistances, which for anachronism I cannot consciously recognize. It is absolutely impossible for me to contemplate Rome in such a way detached. As soon as I leave the age of the Saxons in England behind me, the feeling of personal connection with my ancestors of Nordic blood fades completely, giving way to the natural and unshakable feeling of to be a Roman»(Ibidem, p. 123, note 3).
[17] Ibidem, p. 109.
[18] Ibid, pp. 89-117.
[19] Ibid, p. 195. Note that in this case the HPL dream experience has many points in common also with psychedelic experiences, for example those with DMT told by the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna; cf. T. McKenna, DMT. Shake, Milan, 2015.
[20] The Horror of reality, introduction, p. 11.
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