Welcome back everyone, to the seventh meeting of our Dream Cycle Book Club. This week we will be discussing Hypnos and Azathoth.
Our reading for this week is two more short stories: What the Moon Brings and The Hound.
What the Moon Brings was written in June 1922. It is available in PDF format via the Arkham Archivist here. An audiobook version is available via LibriVox here
The Hound was written in September 1922 and is the last dream related story written by Lovecraft in 1922. It is available in PDF format via the same link given above. I cannot find a LibriVox recording so I once again link to a reading by the talented HorrorBabble here.
Image credit Carole Raddato
It's hard for me to draw much out of Azathoth, as in my tome of Lovecraft stories it measures in at about a page. What interests me most about this story is that Lovecraft had intended to write a dream novel, 5 years before his novella The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. It's interesting to me, to see these early experiments with the germ of a story which eventually develops into my favourite of Lovecraft's tales.
The interesting idea that I found in this short tale is how the dream explorer (Randolph Carter?) enters the world of dream. Rather than descending the 70 steps of light slumber, passing the guardians at the cavern of flame, and descending further on the 700 steps of deeper slumber, the protagonist of this short tale finds the path to projecting his dreaming consciousness by intense study of the stars. Over many years, he comes to recognise patterns in the sailing of stars in the night sky. These patterns reveal secret vistas, hidden in plain sight, and bridges to the dream world in the skies.
Which is your favourite way in which the dreamlands have been reached in Lovecraft's writings? Though Unknown Kadath is my favourite tale, this interpretation of celestial bridges more readily inspires my imagination than descending the 700 steps.