The Dream Cycle is a series of short stories and novellas by author H. P. Lovecraft[1] (1890–1937). Written between 1918 and 1932, they are about the "Dreamlands", a vast alternate dimension that can only be entered via dreams. The Dreamlands are described as lying deeper than space, matter and time, and are a "limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity".[2]
A map of Lovecraft's "Dreamworld" by Jack Gaughan (1967).
Description
The Dreamlands are divided into four regions:
The West contains the Steps of Deeper Slumber (descended via the "Cavern of Flame") and the Enchanted Woods, by which many enter the Dreamlands. Other points of interest include the port of Dylath-Leen, one of the Dreamlands' largest cities; the town of Ulthar, "where no man may kill a cat";[3] the coastal jungle city of Hlanith; and the desert trading capital Illarnek. Here lies the fabled Land of Mnar, whose gray stones are etched with signs and where rise the ruins of the great Sarnath.
The South, home of the isle of Oriab and the areas known as the Fantastic Realms (described in "The White Ship").
The East, home of Celephaïs, a city dreamt into being by its monarch Kuranes, greatest of all recorded dreamers, and the dangerous Forbidden Lands.
The North, location of the feared Plateau of Leng, home of man-eating spiders and the satyr-like "Men of Leng".[4]
Other locales include the Underworld, a subterranean region underneath the Dreamlands inhabited by various monsters; the Moon, accessible via a ship and inhabited by toad-like "moon-beasts" allied with Nyarlathotep; and Kadath, a huge castle atop a mountain and the domain of the "Great Ones", the gods of Earth's Dreamland.
Evidently all dreamers see the Dreamlands slightly differently, as Atal, High Priest of Ulthar, mentions that everyone has their own dreamland. In the same sentence he says the Dreamlands that many know is a "general land of vision".[5]
The Dreamlands are described in Hypnos as beyond anything conceivable to humans, and in which only imaginative men can dream of:[2]
Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connexion with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep—those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men.
Continuing on, the Dreamlands are described as limitless and beyond all thought and entity:
There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known.
Bibliography
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death. Del Rey, 1985.[6][7]
