“There’s no place like home”
–The Wizard of Oz (1939)
For a good chunk of my Winter quarter, and well into Spring, I was experiencing vivid recurring nightmares. They were utterly bizarre, and almost all of them involved some horde of vague and disturbing monster that would slowly kill the people I was with one by one. In one instance we were living in a duplex with a gigantic cathedral attached to it by a normal doorway and a staircase. Beneath the huge cathedral was a series of tunnels containing a race of strange beasts. For some reason, about 20 people were living in the duplex and every day someone would go and sleep in a bed in the middle of the gigantic cathedral. Inevitably, they would be snatched away in the night and eaten, but I found it exceedingly odd that every morning we would do a head count and there were still 20 people living in the duplex. I had this dream about 6 or 7 times.
That wasn’t my only recurring nightmare, but it was the most frequently occurring. I’m fairly certain my research about what to read and watch for this quarter’s work had something to do with amplifying these nightmares, but oddly enough they started before I had developed the plan for this quarter at all. Thankfully, I am free now, but the nightmares still haunt my memory. I was greatly looking forward to this week’s work because of these nightmares. Maybe my readings on strange dreamlands and blurring the line between reality and fantasy could help me get to the bottom of the strange things I’ve been experiencing. They really did! Let’s take a look:
The first thing I did this week was read a childhood favorite of mine: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll had a wild imagination, and his fantastic world of Wonderland is something I remember quite vividly from my younger years. The Jabberwocky is my favorite poem of all time, and I only hope that one day I can write anything half as crazy and wonderful as it. Basically everyone knows the story of Alice, so I don’t need to talk about plot details. The main take away is the meaning of the story. On the surface level, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a silly kids novel, but the story is actually quite sinister. There’s seemingly always a looming threat that could turn the light hearted colorful world into a terrifying nightmare. The world is crooked, exaggerated, and seemingly very far off from our own reality. But is it really though?
A lot of theories suggest that Alice’s story is purely a critique and satire of Victorian society and pop culture. I have always seen it in a different way. At the beginning of the story, Alice is feeling bored and tired while listening to her older sister read. She is a young girl, but at 7 years old she is old enough to begin to question the world around her. Wonderland may be sinister, strange, and full of pointless rules and falsehoods, but to a child that’s kind of what the real world seems like. Wonderland is simply the real world in the eyes of a child taken to an extreme. Alice is able to face reality in her dream of Wonderland, and she wakes up prepared to face the equally maddening real adult world. In this story, Alice learns from her dream and grows enough to be able to speak her mind.
I also watched the Disney adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it’s essentially the same story. There were a few minor differences. A few elements and scenes from Carroll’s sequel Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There were added, but the message was still the same.
Next, I read H.P. Lovecraft’s exceedingly long novella The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. I was shocked by what I found in this story. H.P. Lovecraft is an excellent horror writer that wrote amazingly descriptive tales about malevolent ambiguous horrors that want to destroy the human race. A bit later in his career though, he began to write about the Dreamlands. The Dreamlands are a gigantic alternate universe that can be entered through a person’s dreams. Sound familiar? Yes, the Dreamlands are essentially Wonderland. Not only are the worlds incredibly similar, the specific story The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is almost exactly like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the comparison is pretty commonly made among those that have read both stories. The story is about a man named Randolph Carter, who dreams of a beautiful golden city three times. He never gets to see it up close, and he eventually stops dreaming about it. He is determined to find his beautiful shining city, so he resolves to enter the Dreamlands to ask the dream gods where he can find the city. The ensuing quest makes up the tall tale.
Let me tell you some of the absurd things that I remember that happen in the story: Early on, Carter is captured from the harbor city of Dylath-Leen by a group of turbaned demon men called the Men of Leng. They take him to the moon where he learns that the Men of Leng are slaves to giant monsters called moon-beasts, and that he is to be taken to the scheming outer god Nyarlathotep. He is saved by a group of talking cats from the city of Ulthar. If that wasn’t enough for you, at one point Carter comes upon a gathering of oversized monstrous rats called zoogs who are planning to declare war on the cats of Ulthar. Since the cats saved Carter, he warns them of the coming attack. The cats launch a preemptive strike and defeat the zoogs. The two races write up a treaty to prevent further hostility.
Now I always knew that Lovecraft had an active imagination, but this was something extra. The horror elements were still there, but the storyline was so goofy that I was completely unafraid. I was laughing far more than I was feeling a sense of dread.
The cherry on top of this story is the ending. After a long quest of crazy adventures, Carter finally arrives at Kadath where he is greeted by a disguised Nyarlathotep. The outer god tells him that the golden city he had seen in his dreams was nothing more than his memory of his home city of Boston (where he still lives) as a child. The quote goes like this: “’It is not over unknown seas,’ he says, ‘but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes. For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth… These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love.’” This is when Nyarlathotep reveals himself and Carter is seemingly doomed. Just then, he escapes and wakes up, looking out over the city of Boston with newfound love. Does that also sound familiar to you? Yes, the message of this story is “there’s no place like home.” The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is what happens when Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets The Wizard of Oz. I was blown away after reading this story. Never in a million years would I have expected this from Lovecraft, and I’m in love with it. It’s not his best work by any means, but I think the surprise it gave me will always remain a fond memory.
The point here is, Randolph Carter learned something from his quest through the Dreamlands. He learned to appreciate what he had instead of chasing after some unobtainable ideal. He went through heaven, hell, and everything in between, but the answer he sought was staring him in the face all along. While he slept, his brain subconsciously was given what it was looking for.
Finally, I watched Jacob’s Ladder (1990). It’s by far the scariest story this week, and its significance was also slightly different. The film is about a Vietnam war veteran named Jacob Singer who is back in society as a mail carrier. He begins to have strange visions and sees demons with twitching heads. The reality/fantasy line is severely blurred in this film, making the plot fairly difficult to follow for most of the run time. Ultimately, the film is more about accepting death than anything. After several bizarre and traumatic experiences, Jacob is led up a staircase into a bright light by his dead son. It then cuts to Jacob heavily wounded on a bed still in the middle of the Vietnam war. Two army doctors are doing their best to save him, but he passes away. The last thing the doctor says as the movie ends is: “he put up one hell of a fight.”
So, it’s revealed that the events of the movie were a dream happening in Jacob’s brain as he was passing away in Vietnam. The real theme of letting go and accepting loss is really driven home here and in the last 15 minutes or so. At one point, Jacob is taken from the hospital by his chiropractor and friend who says this to him (quoting Christian mystic Meister Eckhart): “Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: ‘The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you’, he said. ‘They’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and … you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.’”
So, I learned one very important thing from my work this week: dreams mean something. They aren’t just distorted versions of reality that your brain comes up with to entertain itself while you sleep. Dreams can help you interpret the turbulent world around you, make you appreciate what you already have, and help you process trauma to allow you to let go. Dreams can teach you things about yourself that you didn’t know.
And now, I come back now to my dreams: strange cathedrals full of monsters that snatch and replace my roommates, orchestra field trips where I singlehandedly cause the death of all of my friends, and a meaningful relationship with a ruthless female pirate captain who rescues me from drowning after my boat capsizes. I’ve done a lot of thinking about each of these and what they can teach me about myself. It’s really open to my interpretation which parts are meaningful, but I have my guesses. My paranoia about monsters being closer to home than I think, my fear of losing those that I love, and my desire for a special and dramatic relationship immediately come to mind. If anything is for certain, I will be paying far closer attention to my dreams from here on out…