Hello Everyone and welcome back to the Dream Cycle Book Club! In this thread we will be discussing the reading assignment for the past week: Celephaïs and Nyarlathotep.
For this week we have two more short stories to read: Ex Oblivione and The Nameless City.
I can't find much information on when Ex Oblivione was written, though considering it's publication in the March 1921 edition of The United Amateur, it has been given a writing date in the range of late 1920 to early 1921. It can be found via the Arkham Archivist's trusty PDF here and in audiobook format here.
The second story for this week, The Nameless City was written in January 1921. Though it is only tangentially related to the Dreamlands, it is fantastic Mythos reading. It can be read in PDF format via the same link above, and can be found as an audiobook here
On a side note: it's great to see that the community is becoming active.
I love Celephaïs. It's always this story in the cycle in which, for me, the Dreamlands start to take shape. The story reveals a permanence to the world of Dream which is independent from the conscious thought of the dreamer. Another point which becomes important later in the cycle is the fact that the Dreamlands experiences a different passage of time. Indeed, ones experience of time in the Dreamlands can vary wildly depending on their locale. We saw this also in The White Ship; the lighthouse keeper spent many aeons in the lands of Sona-Nyl, where there is neither time nor space.
Celephaïs is also a very tragic story. Though often Lovecraft's characters are nameless, something particular struck me about Kuranes' dream-name being revealed in the first sentence while we never learn his name in the waking world. Kuranes drives himself to ruin in the waking world in order to experience longer visits to his dream city of Celephaïs. Ultimately, Kuranes makes a permanent journey to the Dreamlands. In the waking world the unnamed broken body of a "tramp" is abused by the sea, a stones throw from Kuranes' ancestral home.