Beyond the world we know and the world we don't; beyond the desolate cities frozen in
time within the Antarctic wastes, where the Elder Things once prospered; beyond the sunken
city of R'lyeh in the abyssal depths, where dead Cthulhu lies dreaming; beyond the far
planet of Yuggoth in the black aether of space, where the intrepid Mi-Go pick away at the
boundaries of natural science; beyond even that unnamable, nuclear chaos at the universe's
core, where the blind idiot god Azathoth is held dormant under the cacophonous music of
eternity...
There is a place stranger still.
Though... not altogether unfamiliar.
Before his days of cosmic horror and pulp fiction, H.P.
Lovecraft spent years and years of his career idling within this realm.
The works he produced during his time there may not be his best, but they do provide us
with a really interesting approach to creativity, creative identity, and for some of us, maybe
even a path to new fiction of our own.
So, what is this elusive place, stranger than Lovecraft's strangest tentacle monster?
What we're talking about here... is the land... of Dreams.
A big thanks to Audible for making this video possible!
And for just being... an amazingly easy way to listen to fiction.
Well, here we are again.
It's been years, but I always knew we'd return to Lovecraft.
Although it's... hard to be a fan of the man himself, we always find ourselves drawn back
to his bizarre creations.
But this time, we're not focusing on the usual fare.
There's a whole other side to Lovecraft that we-and it seems many others-have kind of collectively
glossed over.
A side with notably fewer tentacles.
Lovecraft held within him a strange mixture of attributes.
Yes, he was horribly traumatized by the psychosis and death of both his parents.
Yes, he had a physical and mental constitution so weak he could do almost nothing except
for write for large swaths of his life.
Yes, he was a racist, xenophobic anglophile with rampant, untreated anxiety, and a social
life which consisted mostly of sending reams of letters back and forth with other amateur
writers...
But he was also... a romantic.
And I mean that in the traditional sense.
The obsession with nature's beauty, bygone golden ages of yore, deep emotions, movements
of the soul-this was the stuff of Lovecraft's youth, and the basis for the majority of his
early writings.
He even admits that at the age of eight, he was a practicing pagan, building shrines to
the Greco-Roman gods and looking for creatures of myth in the trees.
Pair all of that with his love for Gothic horror, and you have the makings of a very
interesting psyche indeed.
Lucky for us-and... maybe not so lucky for him-all of this manifested in the form of
terrible, haunting nightmares.
When his grandmother died, the five-year-old Lovecraft invented creatures called night
gaunts, based on the faceless, winged monsters who began to visit him in his sleep.
Later on, his first major publication, Dagon, was also inspired by a dream, of which Lovecraft
said long after that he could still "feel the ooze sucking [him] down!"
Over the next eighteen years he would continue to translate his night-time fancies into fiction,
building out the body of tenuously-connected works which we now know as H.P.
Lovecraft's Dream Cycle.
But there's more to this than an author who happens to be a little strange and writes
about his dreams.
We've seen plenty of that.
It's where Kafka's Metamorphosis, Shelley's Frankenstein, and countless other classics
came from.
What I want to pay attention to here is the setting of these stories: a place Lovecraft
called "The Dreamlands".
Dream as a setting is certainly nothing new.
In medieval fiction, before "speculative fiction" was commonplace and everything was pretty
much either a legend or historical, Dreams were often used as a way to lampshade fantasy.
If it was really weird it was either divine, or it had happened in a dream.
Since then writers like Lewis Carrol have stopped worrying about excusing their fiction,
and developed dreamlands for the sake of good, trippy, kaleidoscopic fun.
Lovecraft, oddity that he is, is of course precariously balanced between the two.
On the one hand, he continuously acknowledges the nature of the world he created as a dream.
A dreamer enters through The Stairs of Deeper Slumber, and their physical and mental prowess
within the world depends on their skill with the art of dreaming.
The world itself is supposedly part of a "general vision" that all dreamers see, but aspects
of it change depending on who's experiencing it, kind of like in the movie What Dreams
May come with Robin Williams.
So it's not at all surprising to find a lack of harmony in some places, and a lack of explanation.
It's okay for there to be cats who leap to the moon in the night and ships that can sail
the blackness of space.
It's a dream.
Who's to say what can and cannot happen there.
The full medieval excuse is in effect.
But at the same time, Lovecraft also suggests that the Dream Lands are an actual place within
his fiction.
Things which happen to you there can affect your sleeping body.
Creatures, like the Ghouls of Lovecraft's dream-underworld and the Zoogs of his Enchanted
Wood, have been known to emerge from the Dream Lands to carry victims from the waking world
away.
In Lovecraft's own words, "man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning
in another and [i]ncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know, and of which
only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking."
That isn't to say Lovecraft believed this about actual dreams-although... he was an
interesting person, he might have-but it certainly seems to be part of the mechanics of the setting.
So the setting is a dream.
It gets to be zany without the question of rationality... but... it's also technically
real, just outside of the waking world.
Which... makes it a fantasy?
A fantastical version of the real world, wherein dreams form a tangible alternate reality?
I told you this would get weird.
And where does all of this weirdness get us?
Well, usually when we see a dreamworld of this precise nature in fiction, the characters
are entering someone else's mind in some kind of bid to explore or repair it, something
like that.
TVTropes.com has a whole page about this called "Journey to the Center of the Mind", which
is a really great name for this trope.
But in Lovecraft's case, it's kind of a journey to the center of his own mind.
By far the best representation of the entire Dream Lands setting can be found in the story
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
It's basically Lovecraft's Odyssey, chronicling an episodic journey through the many locales
of his dreamscape, and the encounters with its denizens.
Over the course of the tale, the protagonist creeps through a city of sleeping giants with
a troupe of friendly ghouls, is saved from evil moon beasts by an army of space-faring
cats, is borne down into a dreamy approximation of the underworld by the winged Night Gaunts...
and that's only a sliver of the adventure.
The Call of Cthulhu might be one of Lovecraft's best works, but Dream-Quest is easily more
bizarre.
What else should we expect, wandering around inside a mind like his?
If you read the story, you'll find the manifestations of his psyche everywhere.
The Night Gaunts, beasts of his childhood trauma; the Other Gods in their onyx castle
atop Kadath, a clear parallel to the Greco-Roman pantheon he so adored; subhuman monstrosities
and human slaves, echoes of his xenophobia and racism; the golden city the protagonist
hopes to find at the end of his journey, which, we discover, is basically just Lovecraft's
beloved hometown; even his love for cats.
It's all there, contained within the conjoined fragments of his dreams.
In fewer words: Lovecraft made his own mind the fantasy world.
He is his Dream Lands.
This is a really interesting worldbuilding template, and I feel like, if anyone had the
inclination, it would be absurdly easy to make use of.
A break from all the research and logical gymnastics involved in regular worldbuilding.
Every mind is so full of unique, identifying material, it could rapidly become a world
worth exploring... if you let it.
You don't actually have to do it the way Lovecraft did.
No need to translate all your dreams into fiction for years and years, slowly consolidating
them into a setting.
Instead, see this as an exercise in self-discovery.
Write out your hopes, fears, and inspirations-or any other part of your psyche you want to
explore-then see what you can do about manifesting them into a setting.
Maybe you're afraid of body horror?
The "underworld" of your dreamland could be a fleshy, peristaltic vault which builds itself
out of the conjoined bodies of its prisoners.
Maybe you're motivated by the validation of others?
The denizens of your dreamland could acquire physical strength and well-being from one
another's opinions, and by the same token, take it away.
Maybe you just really, really love manatees?
They could be a sentient race which hold domain over the sea, sought after for their wisdom....
or something.
And you could put all of this... into the same setting.
Not a dream, but a dreamland.
Somewhere which gets to be an actual, tangible place.
It doesn't wink out of existence when the dreamer wakes, or when the girl crawls back
out of the rabbit hole, or when the matrix simulator is unplugged.
A place that makes about as much sense as the inside of your mind... but which you can
actually move through and experience.
With all of this, Lovecraft shows us a way to travel the landscape of our own minds.
And I think that is at least worth trying out.
I know I will at some point.
But if you're feeling like you still need to nurture your weirdness a little first-give
your psyche more material to coalesce around-good news, you don't have to be traumatized the
way Lovecraft was to get there.
Exposing yourself to the weirdness of other creatives is absolutely contagious, so all
you really need to do is consume a whole bunch of fiction, and you'll be there in no time.
And there are few easier ways to do that... than with Audible.
Audible is... amazing.
We use it constantly for our research, and honestly... just to relax.
It's hard to overstate how useful it is for anyone who loves stories.
You cannot always make the time to stop your life and get absorbed in a book, and audiobooks
are outrageously expensive.
Audible has been an incredible solution for us, allowing us to handle all the things involved
in running a channel like this, while listening to our favorite stories-and plenty of new
stuff we'd never hear anywhere else.
This is actually how we've consumed the majority of our Lovecraft.
And now, with audible plus, you can choose to pay half as much as usual and get access
to a massive collection of select audiobooks, audible originals, podcasts, and more!
Visit audible.com/talefoundry, or text the code talefoundry to 500-500.
And, if you sign up now, you'll only be paying $4.95 a month for audible plus for your first
six months.
It only costs $7.95 during a normal month, but you could get half a year of it for less
than $5 if you sign up now.
Again, that's audible.com/talefoundry, or text the code talefoundry to 500-500.
Go sign up and nurture your weirdness... with good stories.
Before we wrap up, I'd like to give a quick thanks to all the helpful humans who support
the show on Patreon.
All those words you see scrolling in the background of these videos?
Those are actually the names of our Patreon maintenance crew, without whom this show would
be impossible.
And a special word to all of our top patrons: Excelsius, Lord_Gatte, RPGgrenade, Puzzling
Shutterbug, and TheAutumnWriter - thank you so much!
There's always a few weeks between uploads, so it might be a minute before you see us
again here... but that doesn't mean the Foundry will be quiet.
We actually hold a writing group every Friday over on the Tale Foundry Twitch channel, where
we read fiction submissions from the community live, and give critiques!
If you're craving more Tale Foundry, there's no better way to get your fill.
I hope we'll see you there!
Until then, thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
I'll see you...
next time!
Bye!