American horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft is most well known today for his invention of the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’—a collection of stories about a group of horrendous elder gods from outside the known universe intent on destroying mankind, which has spawned an endless cultural fascination with tentacle-faced monstrosities. Lovecraft, though, was also an avid dreamer—often drawing directly on his dreams when writing horror stories—to the extent that he crafted an entire Dreamland in which a number of his weird tales are set. Called the ‘Dream Cycle,’ this series centers around the character Randolph Carter (often seen as Lovecraft’s dreaming alter-ego), and his quest to find the key to the gate of dreams and the legendary sunset city of his childhood dreams.

“The longest tale set in the Dreamlands—Lovecraft’s only novel-length work—”The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath—could equally rival the Cthulhu Mythos for its invention of a unique frame of weird story-telling (while many readers find it simply too strange or incoherent, others compare it favorably to the dreamworld of “Alice in Wonderland”). The concept of a ‘dream-quest’ is woefully under-explored, but resonates with shamanic vision-quests and the hero’s journey structure as much as with the a-logical, continually thwarted, reoccurring scenarios of the dreaming mind. Throughout the story, Randolph Carter seeks out his sunset city, is kidnapped by moon-beasts, befriends zombies and an army of kittens, rides the rubbery squeaking night-gaunts, and ultimately confronts the elder gods themselves as no other adventurer in Lovecraft’s tales dares do.

Beyond the tantalizing idea of the dream-quest, Lovecraft’s novel also explores the representation of dreaming in a unique manner that can teach a lot about how dreams might be used creatively—that is, though the protagonist is ‘only dreaming,’ his dreams are not mere psychological symbols but a persistent imaginal reality. The cities and wastelands of Carter’s Dreamlands—Celephaïs, Ulther, the hideous Plateau of Leng—exist even when no one is dreaming them, and other dreamers can access these locations. As Carter explains, when strong dreamers die, they become permanent residents of the Dreamlands. The other characters whom Carter meets are similarly persistent, autonomous entities rather than projections of the dreamer’s unconscious—even existing across a number of Lovecraft’s other stories.

While at first glance it seems possible to take Lovecraft’s use of a dreamworld as a gimmick or plot device, the act of dreaming seems to have been of great importance to the writer. Lovecraft even goes so far as to invent a technique for dream incubation for his dreamer, hidden within the first handful of paragraphs of the book, which might be called the Descent of the 70 and 700 steps, through which Randolph Carter enters the Dreamlands:

“In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and talked of this design to the bearded priests…So asking a formal blessing of the priests and thinking shrewdly on his course, he boldly descended the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.”

This is a fascinating moment, as it resonates with techniques of dream incubation and intention across a number of cultures, from ancient Taoist techniques of entering a dreamstate with one’s intentional consciousness intact, or modern lucid dreaming techniques of maintaining awareness on a stable element of the dreamworld. One imagines that as Randolph Carter falls asleep, which each slow breath he takes a step down into the intermediary caverns of the subconscious, and then continues to breathe and step deeper into the full depth of his dreams. Sadly, though Lovecraft wrote a voluminous amount of theory on writing weird and horror fiction, he does not seem to have written an explication of his Dream Cycle or dream incubation techniques, and so, as with a dream, it must be inferred from the creative works he left behind.

Anyone not yet convinced that dreams can be a form of art, much less a marketable one, should have told that to Melville House Publishing before they published the dream journals of Georges Perec (“la boutique obscure” translated by Daniel Levin Becker, 2012). Most famous for his novels “Life A Users Manuel” and “A Void” (written entirely without the letter ‘e’), Perec was a highly inventive and linguistically challenging writer who was not above the challenge of trying to record his dreams with the same style of language and plot consistency in which they were dreamed. According to Perec’s introduction to his dream journals, which he called the world’s first “nocturnal autobiography”:

“Everyone has dreams. Some remember theirs, far fewer recount them, and very few write them down. Why write them down, anyway, knowing you will only sell them out (and no doubt sell yourself out in the process)? I thought I was recording the dreams I was having; I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them. These dreams—overdreamed, overworked, overwritten—what could I then expect of them, if not to make them into texts, a bundle of texts left as an offering at the gates of that “royal road” I still must travel with my eyes open?

Perec goes on to give some notes on transcribing and composing dream records on the level of typography and page formatting (paragraph breaks indicate changes of style, place, mood as felt within the dream), before presenting the dreams themselves.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a dream journal titled (though not translated as) ‘the obscure shop’ carries with it a certain everyday or quotidian banality—dreams abound of conferences, house-calls, writing crossword puzzles, chasing cats, and buying clothing. One is strongly reminded of the dream journals of French critic Hélène Cixous (published in translation as “Dream I Tell You” in 2006), where the most untoward and dream-like situation is that her daughter keeps transforming into a kitten. While both dreamers are often haunted by scenarios of the World Wars, they also struggle with the mechanisms of dresser drawers and interpersonal relationships (though Perec’s journals do not avoid dreams of sex). Perec’s dreams, though, also indicate a fascinating shift toward a post-modern worldview and literary style.

Born in 1936, Perec’s dreams included in this book were not dreamed until the 1970s-80s, and amongst the quotidian, early-century concerns of his formative subconscious, one finds fascinating moments when Perec finds himself living out the plots of modern movies or demonstrating as a “hippy.” In one dream (no. 52 in the collection), after making dinner reservations Perec, “returned to Paris in a magnificent machine, ultramodern and very sci-fi. I remember panoramic portholes. Dizzying speed.”

While it is tempting with a collection of dreams like this to quote from the whole selection—as it is through the repetition of symbols that dreams texts take on their full aesthetic fascination—the first dream, called “The Height Gauge” gives a powerful feel for the dreaming imagination of Georges Perec:

“A scene with several people. There is a height gauge in the corner. I know I am at risk of having to spend several hours under it; it’s an act of bullying rather than real torture, but extremely uncomfortable, because there is nothing holding the top of the gauge and, after a while under it, one might shrink.

“Naturally, I am dreaming and know that I am dreaming, naturally, that I am in a prison camp. It’s not really a prison camp, of course, but an image of a prison camp, a dream of a prison camp, a prison-camp metaphor, a prison camp I know only as a familiar image, as though I were ceaselessly dreaming the same dream, as though I never dreamed of anything else, as though I never did anything but dream of this prison camp.

“It’s clear that the threat of the gauge is enough, at first, to concentrate in itself all the terror of the camp. And then it seems it’s not so bad. In any case, I escape the threat; it doesn’t come to pass. But it is precisely my avoidance of this threat that most clearly proves the essence of the camp: the only thing that saves me is the indifference of the torturer, his liberty to do or not to do; I am entirely at the mercy of his arbitrary power (in exactly the same way as I am at the mercy of this dream: I know it is only a dream, but I cannot escape it).

“The second sequence modifies these themes slightly. Two characters (one is without a doubt myself) open an armoire in which two hiding spots have been forged, crammed with deportees’ valuables. By “valuables” I mean any objects that could increase the safety and chances of survival of their owner, be they bare necessities or objects with some exchange value. The first hiding spot contains woolens, countless woolens, old and moth-eaten and drab. The second hole, which contains money, is made of a rocker device: one of the armoire’s shelves is hollow inside and its cover lifts up like that of a school desk. But this little stash seems unsound, and I am just activating the mechanism that opens it to take the money out when someone enters. An officer. In an instant we understand that all of this is useless anyway. It also becomes clear that dying and leaving this room are one and the same.

“The third sequence could surely, had I not forgotten it completely, have supplied a name for the camp: Treblinka, or Terezienbourg, or Katowice. The performance might have been the Terezienbourg Requim… The moral of this faded episode seems to invoke old dreams: we can save ourselves (sometimes) by playing…”

With recent rumors about a potential return of the cult TV series, and in honor of Kyle MacLachlan’s 54th birthday today, it seems a portentous day to talk about the use of dreams in David Lynch’s surreal detective show, Twin Peaks.

First airing almost thirteen years ago, Twin Peaks was canceled after two seasons only to become a lasting fan favorite, due in part to the stunning emotional tenor of the story of a small town in which a murder serves to unravel and reveal the darkest secrets of the town’s inhabitants. It was, however, the use of a bizarre, spirit-world plot-line filtered through the uncanny dreams of FBI Agent Dale Cooper (played by MacLachlan) that truly grabbed audiences and left them wondering just what was happening in the woods behind Twin Peaks.

The third episode of the series, titled “Zen, or the Skill to Catch a Killer,” features two dream sequences that became lynchpins for understanding the whole series. In the first, Agent Cooper recounts a dream he once had about the plight of the Tibetan people, which ended in Cooper learning the intuitive investigative technique of throwing rocks at a bottle to determine connections between the various suspects of the murder. Unlike classic detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s Auguste Dupin, who used logical ratiocination to solve crimes, Cooper turns instead to the associative logic of the subconscious—which may in fact be a more realistic example of criminal problem solving: “It sounds weird, but there really were people who thought about cases in their sleep,” says former special agent Herb Clough, a 30-year FBI veteran. “The facts in your subconscious really would all fit together.”

While the first dream is only discussed, audiences were treated to a direct glimpse into Cooper’s dream world at the end of the episode, in a strange series of images that provided the primary clues for the rest of Cooper’s investigation. This article gives a fairly clear description of the sequence, or one could simply watch it in all the dream’s strange glory:

David Lynch here presents a fairly straightforward example of dream interpretive techniques: Cooper is inclined to see the images of his dream as a code; “break the code, solve the crime.” What works to make such a symbolic code dream-like for the viewer is the complete obscurity of the clues provided in the dream. Bubble gum, singing birds, arms that bend backwards, each of these seems completely illogical at the time, but is woven into the narrative that follows, adding a sense of prophetic certitude to the resolution of the murder investigation (even if there was no certitude to the resolution of the show).

But what truly makes Cooper’s dream feel like a dream is the absolutely inexplicable black shadow that slowly hovers across the room (seen in the top image at the far right). Over the last thirteen years this shadow has led to much wild speculation as well as parody. This inexplicable shadow seals the dream-like quality of the scene, though, precisely because it is inexplicable—falling in line with theories of dreaming (such as those of James Hillman in The Dream and the Underworld) in which dreams will always contain a chaotic and un-interpretable core, even when all other symbols or images of the dream can be placed in a logical framework.

Illogical, powerful, surreal, one wonders what other striking dreams lie behind the red curtains of Cooper’s subconscious, and if, were the show to return, we might be treated to more of David Lynch’s filmic use of dreams.

Sometimes called the last symbolist poet, Rainer Maria Rilke is perhaps best known for his stirring poems “The Duino Elegies” and “The Sonnets to Orpheus,” as well as his inspiring “Letters to a Young Poet.” In the “Letters,” Rilke gives the creative advice that an artist must go deep into themselves in order to find the lasting themes of their work, whether in childhood memories and longings, but also in “the images from your dreams.”

While Rilke’s prose work is less well appreciated, and much of it has either been lost or left untranslated, Rilke did leave behind a selection of short dream fictions from “The Dream-Book,” first published in 1902 before the bulk of his poetic oeuvre, which may show the original gestation of some of his most powerful images and themes. Here is one of them (excerpted from Rodin and Other Prose Pieces translated by G. Craig Houston):

The Seventh Dream

I looked for the girl. I found her in a long, narrow room, in which the morning-light was just breaking. She was sitting on a chair and was smiling almost imperceptibly. Beside her, not more than a pace distant, was another chair, on which a young man was sitting,leaning back stiffly. It seemed as if the two had passed the night in this way.

The girl moved and held out her hand to me, raising it high to do so. The hand felt warm and somehow rough, as if one were holding a little animal that lived in the open and had to fend for itself.

And now the young man moved too. He was obviously making an effort to wake up; his face grimaced in an unpleasing and impatient manner. The girl had turned a little sideways and was watching him. His face was quite red with the effort; it contracted towards the centre and now and then one eyelid lifted with a twitch. But the eye beneath it seemed empty.

“That’s no god,” said the girl, her transparent voice scintillating with dissolved laughter, “you can’t wake up, if your eyes are not back again.”

I was about to ask, what did she mean by that? But all at once I understood. Of course. I recalled a young Russian worker from the country who still held the belief, when he came to Moscow, that the stars were the eyes of God and the eyes of the angels. They talked him out of it. They could not contradict it at all, but they could talk him out of it. And rightly so. For the stars are the eyes of human beings, which rise out of their closed lids and become bright and regain their strength. And that is why all the stars are above the country-side, where everyone is sleeping, and over the town there are only a few, because there are so many restless people there, weeping and reading, laughing and watching, who keep their eyes.

This girl ought to have told the Russian that. But she had been thinking of other things for some time. She was telling about someone, about a girl, as I understood it, who was now married in Meran. Now she’s called —, and she mentioned a name, with much amusement. I nodded, nodded perhaps too much. “Now, of course, you know something,” she said mockingly. “The way you always ask names and want to know names and behave as if that meant something.” “My dear,” I said seriously, “that does mean something amongst men. Roses are called Marie Baumann or Madame Testout or the Countess of Camondo or Emotion, but that’s almost superfluous. They don’t know their names. We hang a little wooden label on them, and they don’t remove it. That is all. But human beings know their names; they are interested in what they are called, they learn them be heart and tell them to anyone who asks. They nourish them, so to say, all their lives, and in the end grow very like them, indistinguishable from them, except in some small detail—”

But I was talking uselessly. The girl was not listening. She had risen, was standing at the window, where it was already day, smiling and calling someone. A bird, I think.