New Maps of Dream

By Cody Goodfellow, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., Kaaron Warren and 17 more

Once, the guardians of the Cavern of Flame admitted sleeping seekers to the Dreamlands, an endless realm of sublime horrors and unspeakable beauty. Some questers returned with wisdom and otherworldly inspiration to brighten the dreary waking world, while others remained forever where beggars could become emperors, mortals could cavort with gods, and ardent dreamers could cheat even death.
Once said to be more real than our own mundane reality, the Dreamlands now lie seemingly beyond our reach, the arcane art of dreaming all but forgotten. Were we exiled from it? Or has it simply changed as we have changed, since the old maps were mistaken for fantastic forgeries?
To reopen the Dreamlands for a new era, Cody Goodfellow and Shirley Jackson Award-Winning editor Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. dispatched nineteen modern oneironauts to survey the feral territories of the collective unconscious, and their report

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362964

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

CODY GOODFELLOW

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This project, at first, seemed as straightforward as any other expedition, as easy as falling asleep.

Our correspondents were seasoned oneiric voyagers and cartographers of countless liminal realms, but the legendary land we asked them to survey had become terra incognita, the old maps worse than useless. Many of our scouts begged off after reporting that the Gates of Horn and Ivory were closed to even the most intrepid dreamers, or wholly unrecognizable to those who could even find them.

To our grave dismay, the first monographs to reach us described no perfumed jungles, cat-haunted cities, or wine-dark seas. Even as many more reported that the Dreamlands of old were alive and well, we came to doubt not only the veracity of our travelers’ tales, but the project itself. If all previous maps of the universal Dream that dreams us were dead artifacts and sheer invention, even if we succeeded in assembling a new atlas, how could we ever be sure that we were not merely dreaming it?

In a time when escapist fantasy has thoroughly conquered our collective psyche, the Dreamlands remain as alien as we are alienated from them, and true dreaming almost unbearable, for any true map of the inward terrain is also a mirror. But were the deformations of that phantasmic landscape a symptom of our own collective madness, or its cause?

Even at the peak of Lovecraft’s popularity, the Dreamlands canon remains relevant only to HPL completists. Weaned on the whimsical romances of E. R. Eddison, James Branch Cabell, and above all Lord Dunsany, Lovecraft exceeded his influences in the deep pathos and melancholy that pervade his Dreamlands tales because they were less a diverting idyll, and more a desperate means of escape. Repurposing the archetypal shamanic journey to the underworld to renew the imperfect material realm, his lonely dreamers sought the status, adventure, and beauty missing from their waking lives. Contrasting dreary reality with the strange sensations and enchanting adventure of dreams was the central theme of Lovecraft’s early yarns, but it was already an anachronism for jaded audiences eager for less reflective escapism, who roundly condemned as a cheat the conceit of the protagonist awakening to discover it was all a dream.

Lovecraft famously abandoned hopeful fantasy for more objective nightmares in the Cthulhu Mythos, a bleakly nihilistic vision artfully interwoven with the rational trappings of mundane reality. When The Wizard of Oz debuted in theaters in 1939, only two years after Lovecraft died, it triumphantly perfected escapist fantasy as a mass-media phenomenon. The lonesome road to gnosis became a Potemkin sprawl of counterfeit dreamlands, the noble and solitary art of dreaming supplanted by the passive consumption of dream-products that hold the imagination hostage. Television, gaming, and social media promise the communal dream of wonder and fellowship we always craved, and yet we remain more isolated, unfulfilled, and dissociated from true communion than ever before.

With the psychoanalytical decoding of its imagery, dreaming itself has been falsely demystified, our collective psyche a ripe territory for corporate colonization; but the need for a shared spiritual universe ambiguously connected to this one persists. From Elm Street to cyberspace, we are still ignorant and uneasy about where we go when we sleep. Even as our relationship to dreaming is more commodified, we hunger to free ourselves and reconnect with the universal Dream more real than waking, to rediscover the unknown and reclaim wholeness.

As the trailblazing sleepwalkers herein have come together to report, the Dreamlands are indeed alive, but no more well than ourselves; and if we seek to return there, we must be wary of the very soul-sickness motivating our quest infecting and corrupting those exquisitely sensitive realms. No map can ever become the territory; the Dreamlands must remain a mephitic enigma, all maps as transient as portraits of water, ripped up with every awakening, even as we must reinvent the undiscovered country by seeking it.

Joe and I envisioned this project as a modest thought experiment in 2015, but its arduous journey to print has given it the flavor of a quixotic ordeal, not least because of the very real decline of Joe’s health. As I write this, I have only just learned of his removal from life support in an intensive care ward in Berlin. As we grieve and as he sleeps, awaiting admission to whatever comes next, I cannot help but wonder what—and where—he is dreaming. If there is a Carcosa or Celephais, he needs no map to get him there.

As I await the announcement of his passing amid a worldwide pandemic that has shut us up in our homes and heads, all the lofty conceits of this project suddenly recede into petty lies we tell ourselves about where we come from, where we go, or the biggest one, that dreams will save us; and yet I’m reminded with mortal urgency that it is precisely in times like these that dreams are most important. Joe and I, and all of the contributors to the book you’re holding, have pledged our lives and made terrible sacrifices to the Dream, to bring them to you. Even if there is no Dreamland waiting for us in sleep or death, even if imagination and memory are the only other realms that will admit us when we’re done here...maybe they’re all we need.

—Cody Goodfellow

Saint John’s, Portland, Oregon, April 21, 2020

SIREN SONG

MICHAEL CISCO

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When the wind blows, the scintillation on the lake water forms tiger stripes, bright bands evenly divided by dark troughs. Traveling parentheses. Each wave-edge of fluttering sequins releases piercing, distinct glints. When the wind dies down, the lake water wrinkles in long brush strokes of green-whiteness. When the wind draws closer, the surface shivers into a lacerated, ruffling green static. It’s all just water, laddered and ruckled by wind, and with the sun. The leaves of the park scintillate when the wind tosses them. They roll and nod. Their flow in the direction of the wind incessantly arrested by the stiffness of their stems, so they flow and pull back, flow and pull back. Their waxy gleams ripple like pennants caught in the sharply crooked hands of the trees and bushes. The branches coax rustling tresses, lift and air them. Mingled with transparent leaf shadows, pale spots of daylight spin cautiously on the ground. Like compound eyes, skyscrapers of confronting mirrors reflect the sun, each other, and the warped action of the city. Angry firebrands of sunlight relay along moving cars, blaze and leap and drop and leap. The turbulent dapples on the lake, above the trunks, and below, on the ground, answer back to the cloudless sky and motionless sun. Skyscrapers and cars, and the wide snow meadows of concrete fill up with light rebounding crazily from everything. Traffic and business make sighing sounds, and there are garish outbursts of city gaiety too. In the park, leaves rustle, air hums, water frisks and clinks. Statues and their shadows are still there. The hollow cement bell with the slot cut out to allow a more vertical visual impression of the lake is covered in graffiti and long willow fronds stroke it. Mobbing shoals of light and shadow steal and mantle over the park benches and stone causeways. Dark and light lobed shapes swaying back and forth over a white French cuff, out of a sleeve of black wool minutely picked at by daylight, with three ornamental black buttons. Light and shade buff the crisp new toes of parallel leather shoes, and fondle dress-slack knees. Fingernails glisten like glass. Hair is lustrous like varnished wood. The body in the clothes is talcumed, fragrant, magnetically welded to the park bench.

My eyes are dry, I think.

The body shifts its weight returning from sleep. The eyes are seeing without looking. There’s a second row of benches, closer to the water. Someone is sitting in one of them, to my left. An indistinct, round shape, largely hidden by the trunk of a tree. I can only see a little of the body, and the armrest at the end of the bench. The body moves a little, and the seatbelt flaps over the armrest and dangles. Why does the forlorn tinking sound it makes cause mournful feelings? There aren’t any associations. I feel as though I’d just been informed of the death of a friend, actually myself. I know that neither of us will ever get up and leave the park. The sun is moving through the sky without changing position. By passing, time is keeping us in the same places.

My eyes feel sandy, I think. As if they’d been open while I was asleep, filling up with city grit.

Above me, a singing, tiny comet pinwheel perches on one of the branches. It’s like a burning snowflake of dripping gold that shakes. Its frayed comet tail hangs almost to the ground. I look up in time to see a flare drop in the empty sky. The white flare turns the sky black. It throws clear shadows nearly underneath the objects. The shadows shrink and stutter. The flare burns its vertical fuse down toward the ground. The comet pinwheel sings siren song. I stand up and re-enter the city. I’m going home. I’ve finished my day. Gigantically bowing and rising, everything prays to the blue-white sky. The sky is a deep, even blue. It sounds like a bowed, purring note. The chiming of the wind is partially tickling and partially soft, like geometric gobs of dry jelly. I wade into the crowd of people streaming along the sidewalks, already aware of animal eyes seeing me without watching me. Ribbons of mixed eyes, leopard, eagle, fish, insect, frog, I guess, undulate through middle zones in the city, like the dark troughs between the small waves, between whatever stands out in relief. Ribbons of polished human anuses travel alongside them, ribbons like slack, elastic timing belts. The ribbons bulge up and settle down with pedestrian motion like buoys on a line. I walk with the crowd like I’m waist-deep in surf. The crowd is a patchwork of luminous skin, cloth, and plastic. It consists of panels and outlines. The thinking is all tidal. I pull up my feet and the ground is shearing sideways. There are prolonged, steady, caressing pulls, and insistent, surging pushes. My head and chest totter; I have to keep them stacked.

I turn aside, into the brown funnel that leads to the glass doors. They part to admit me to air conditioning.

The man at the desk is wearing a white shirt with a cloth badge. He recognizes me and gives me a perfunctory smile. A smile creases my face.

I get dizzy in the elevator. Perhaps I have sunstroke. My head feels externally heavy so that I want to dive forward like a slinky, land on my head, my body piling up on top of my inverted head, just a heap of empty clothes. A pair of empty shoes welded to the floor. The door to my apartment is at the end of the hall, facing the elevator. Every door I pass makes a different sound. There is the noiselessness of my feet crushing the carpeting. The lighting almost has a neutral sound too. I stop before my door and listen. No sound from inside. I realize I’ve been listening intently since I woke up. I don’t normally take naps on park benches. I wonder if I will look the same for having taken a nap on a park bench. The key to the apartment is the only thing in my front right pocket.

The heavy black door falls away. I can see all the way to the glass wall at the far end of the apartment. My wife is standing in the kitchen doorway with the light behind her, her arms at her sides, smiling at me through a haze of shadow.

You look different today, she says.

I sit at the black table prepared for me. The hanging lamp makes a cone of light that isolates the table. In front of me, all ready to go, is a wreath of noodles caked in gold, served on a black plate. I have a golden napkin that sheds gold dust, and a gold fork with an ebony handle.

I’ll get you your water.

A glass of water is set before me. When the glass base touches the table, the water becomes a black eye, all pupil. The top of the water, the meniscus—I know that word—is a silver line, and there’s a white daub of reflected light palpitating. My wife sits on a chair in the kitchen doorway, between the light from the lamp above the table and the light in the kitchen behind her. She leans back in the chair, legs apart, arms folded, chin down on her chest, studying me. Outside the glass wall, a comet pinwheel the size of a small car streaks by, slithering through the air with a musical sound. Its dripping body is all angular petals of flame around a sort of asterisk in front. Its tail is diaphanous orange and red scarves that dissolve in trails of golden pollen.

Finish your dinner, my wife says.

She breathes slowly and deeply. I am an ordinary person. My plate and utensils are placed in front of me. Later on, my wife will go to her home, her husband.

Years go by and we don’t change in different ways. I’ve already changed into someone with a horrible shadow, like a raggedy lunatic, stinking, grimy, out of its mind with terrifying grief. My wife is always near me, always pale and smeared. She’s like a lifebuoy in still water, tethered to me by her breathing. I don’t think she changes.

I lie down on my back to sleep, without removing my suit. Even though I couldn’t stay awake on a park bench, now I can’t sleep. I’m not dressed for sleep. Matter around me is transparent. I am aware of the universe. An infinite crystal uterus whose skin is too far away to be touched, ever, containing me and all things. I lie face-up in the universe. Ghosts impermeably enveloped each in their own times collect around me. Clear red flame memories form a mane around a lion. Specters of pastoral landscapes stand solemnly around my bed. They have lion eyes. They see me but they don’t watch me, or look at me.

Ever since I last woke up I’ve had the feeling I’d had a dream, but I can’t remember a thing about it. It was a powerful dream. Something really happened to me in it. What was it like? No impression. Maybe one: a repeated sound. Like a klaxon drum. In total darkness. Each beat carries to infinity like overlapped waves that dissolve. The prism doesn’t see the light hitting it or feel the division of the light. I didn’t see anything, but the dream made a prism out of me. The sound is a way of menacing all the dream’s perceptible things. Its beat was like the drum that sets the tempo for the rowers. The rowers who turn the universe on its silent axle, groaning inaudible thermals some of whom we know as ghosts. The ghosts around me are like lions. Now they’re like golden pulled fangs stuck individually in space.

I hear siren song. It’s always impossibly familiar. Hearing it is like hearing my own breathing, something that is always there. I hear my own breathing and I have to fight the impulse to hold my breath. Now its familiarity is smothering me. Its vibrato is oppressively heavy. I can feel it troubling my breathing, like a counter-current in my throat, driving the air back into my lungs, inhibiting its escape. I am lying on my back in infinity being strangled by siren song. I am a memory of something. What I am is of something. I am something’s something. A pulsing thin shadow crams my throat. The song arches through me again, falling away to nothing not a foot away from me in any direction.

Years of happy marriage go by. My wife is golden. It’s our golden anniversary. We celebrate by going to a fancy restaurant. Pinwheel sunflowers stretch their rooted stalks into the sky and nuzzle the clouds, joyously sobbing. Night is over. We are seated together, surrounded by other patrons eating. Rolls of dense shadow flow toward me from my wife. Each one washes over me with a heavy Doppler shift. Our children sit faintly beside her, facing me, their little mouths working away in faces that are weak aerosol plumes of photons. We have a conversation. My hand reaches for the cloth napkin lying to my right. I move the napkin. There is a golden injury beneath it. The lips tremble and vibrate. The bruised crater is thickly streaked with coppery sanies. I hear siren song. Its rapture is choking me. I know I am an ordinary person. I turn to them to tell them. The red-gold glare of sunset wells up out of me and floods the restaurant in siren song. I stand, struggling to say, I am an ordinary person! Everyone sees me and screams. They jump from their seats overturning tables and chairs in paroxysms of horror. Their faces, red-gold in the furnace sunset light, are contorted with horror. Now at last the blurred features of my wife and children are distinct. I struggle to say, I am an ordinary person! My voice says: I am you! I am you!

The red-gold light perishes. We all sit back down. We are all exactly where we were, tables and chairs placed back where they were, dishes swept away, new dishes replace them. Our children complacently eat their sweets, one by one. Our wife emits the same reassuring shadows. Inside us, though, the song is still climaxing, the most shattering it’s ever been. Our chest is bursting with welcome. Our heart is torn open within our calm outline. We dab at our mouth with the napkin. The gold injury is a hole in our heart draining life. Dinner is over. Everyone gets up to go. Our suit with something inside goes with them. The gold injury heart is a lion eye burning hidden in the dark. It remembers siren song, and its burning says, I am you. I am you.

RUST RED IN MOONLIGHT

KAARON WARREN

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Kyle liked to see the blood well up in a neat line and set in small globules. He’d cut and watch, cut and watch, never in a hurry, taking his time.

When his left arm was fully lined (and this took a matter of weeks; he didn’t want to rush) he began on the right. Clumsily, at first because he wasn’t used to his left hand. He always shaved with his right, and diced vegetables, and cut meat.

His right arm bled as beautifully as his left.

He wore long sleeves to college, shirts with jokes on them that no one noticed, and he pressed on the wounds every now and then. If he pressed hard enough he could draw blood, otherwise he could scratch the scabs off if no one was looking. He didn’t do this often, though, because he didn’t want anyone to know.

His economics lecturer Amanda noticed. All the boys liked her class. She wore short skirts, and loosely buttoned shirts, and she had been known—she was known—to fuck the students every now and then if they were interesting enough.

Are you feeling all right, Kyle? she asked him. On track to hand in your essay?

He nodded, but there was no way he would.

Listen, she said. Listen, Kyle. I know you’re struggling. It’s not about your ability. I have no doubt you can do it. You’re just not getting to it. Distractions, perhaps, and allowing your anxieties to get the better of you.

I’m not anxious, he said, but he glanced at his sleeves and saw blood seeping through.

Meditation might help. Very deep, subconscious-level meditation. She smiled at him then, the sidelong smile all the boys talked about. Craved. Mindfulness is important, she said.

He thought, Why me? because he wasn’t the handsomest, or the smartest, or the funniest. He was none of those things.

Come to my office after school tomorrow and we’ll see if you’re a good candidate. Oh, and Kyle, she smiled again. Have a shower in the morning. My office isn’t big and can smell quite close.

That night he scored between the lines, letting the blood pool onto his desk where it shimmered like a flattened ruby. He found it hard to sleep, and that sleep was hard, the dreaming was hard; at first he walked ankle-deep through water, in the very dark, moving forward without knowing where he was going, only knowing that behind him loomed something monstrous. In his dream he could smell it: a dark piscean stench that made him want to duck his head under water and swim, but the water was too shallow.

The dream ended, as it always did, with the stream dividing into two, and him undecided. One path would lead to a stagnant pond and no escape from the monster. The other led to the sea and he didn’t know which was which.

And as he stood he felt the monstrous tendrils tickling his ankles.

When he woke up his bedside lamp was on and he saw his sheets were covered with blood. He’d sneak them into the washing machine and his mother would assume that he’d had a wet dream. Better she thought that. As the sheets were already stained, he cut soft, beautiful lines into his thighs.

It was only after he’d set the washing machine running that he realised she, Amanda, might see his thighs that day.

The thought was so ridiculous he dismissed it.

He made it to college that morning just before twelve. This meant skipping Amanda’s class, but he didn’t think he wanted to face her, any-way. He’d had a half-daydream, half-sleep about her that made him uncomfortable but that he knew he would summon up again.

He’d googled deep-state meditation and thought it sounded okay. He didn’t think he’d be very good at it, though.

Amanda found him anyway. You weren’t in class, she said. You can have till midnight for the essay.

He hunched his shoulders. I might not make it.

Well, look. I’m keen for you to try the meditation. I think it’ll help. She touched a lock of his hair, still damp from the shower.

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Even at eighteen he would let his mother know if he’d be late. It stopped her worrying (and she did worry, texting him a dozen times if she didn’t know where he was).

I’m going to hang out with some friends, he said, and he heard his mother gasp.

That’s good, she said. Good. Look after yourself.

He wanted to boast, to let the group know it was his turn, that he was going to fuck Amanda that afternoon, but he didn’t know how. In the end, he asked one of them if he had any condoms, and that was enough to set them off. He enjoyed the teasing they gave him, laughing at their tips but at the same time drawing in every word.

He’d tried not to cut that morning but the sight of the lines on his arms and thighs and the image of blood mingling with water in the shower got him. It was only two. He didn’t want fresh scabs, he didn’t want to bleed on her sheets.

He drove himself to Amanda’s house. He liked to drive. It was one of the few times he felt completely in control.

She’d set up an armchair for him, with cushions and a blanket.

You could work on your essay first if you like, she said, then laughed. Don’t worry. We’re not here for that.

She went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of wine. I’m going to have a glass. You better not until we’ve had a go at this meditation thing.

She got him to dress in what looked like tracksuit pants, but felt like silk against his skin. He wasn’t sure whether to leave his underwear on but the guys had told him to take them off if in doubt so he did, but now his cock rubbed against the soft material and there was no way he wasn’t going to react.

Look at you, Amanda said. She threw down a glass of wine and poured another.

He stood, unsure what to do. She’d given him a long-sleeved top, soft like the pants, and he felt the sound, a faint scritch scritch, as it rubbed against his scabs.

I’m very, very good at this, she said. She had him sit in the armchair. Take off your shoes if you want. She led him through a process of relaxation.

I wish you could do this for me every night, he murmured. It’s really hard to get to sleep.

Relax now, he heard, but already he was walking ankle-deep in water. He could feel it, ice cold, his feet bare. His soles hurt from the sharp river pebbles. He hadn’t felt them before. It was dark, so dark he could barely see his own hand when he held it up in front of his face.

Behind he heard the sound of deep breathing and smelt a hint of fish in the air, so he walked as quickly as he could, forward in the darkness. He felt objects banging against his shins and, when his eyes adjusted to the near-dark, he saw lumpish things that could be flesh, could be softened wood. He ignored them for a while but he could use a lump of wood as a weapon if he needed it, so he bent over and grabbed at the next object.

It was a bone, a long bone, but he kept hold of it because that could be a weapon too.

Something caught around his toe and he bent again to untangle himself. Lakeweed, he thought, but it was hair, long, thick and it clung to his fingers, his arms, and he had to flick to get it off, rush his hand through the water.

His arms stung, a sense which made him feel alive and made him wish he had a blade.

He heard a groaning behind him and it was the monster, catching up, so he paddled on, shivering in the cold. He could barely breathe with it—his mouth was full, as if he’d taken a large bite of hamburger—but he walked on until he came to the