A Dream by H.P. Lovecraft; A Story by Clark Ashton Smith

It is commonplace that creators of horror fantasy often turn to their nightmares for source material, or to the “hypnogogic state”, that period just before drifting off to sleep when ideas unravel from the constraints of reality and daytime concerns and begin to flow towards phantasmagoria and dream.  

Dreams and Horror Writing  

J. N. Williamson describes this condition as a state of heightened creativity, perhaps associated with theta brainwaves.  He recommends choosing a setting that is free of distractions and approaching the hypnogogic state without preconceptions about what is to be accomplished—“A vital point:  Never is this a case of forcing anything.”¹  Bring only paper and pen, and observe the stream of ideas and images that come to mind.  

Though not referring specifically to the hypnogogic state, Stephen King recommends that the aspiring horror writer have a regular time and place for writing, just as one does for sleeping– “…to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep…”  In both activities, King says we learn to be still, so that our minds can “…unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daily lives.”²   

But what happens when dreams and ideas emanating from the unconscious of one author inform the creative products of others?  H.P. Lovecraft, among others in his circle, made a regular habit of sharing dream imagery and content with his fellow writers, not merely reserving them for his own use.  

In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, dated 11/29/1933, H.P. Lovecraft describes two recent dreams in vivid detail.  According to August Derleth and James Turner, the first of these two dreams was developed into a novel later written by Derleth.  The second of Lovecraft’s dreams may have been the basis for a story Clark Ashton Smith published a couple years later in Weird Tales, “The Treader of the Dust” (1935).³   

A Nightmare of Lovecraft’s 

In Lovecraft’s dream he visits an old address—598 Angell Street, in Providence. “Everything was as it was around 1910”, Lovecraft writes, and he is impressed with the dust-filled decrepitude of pictures, furniture, and books: even items that he taken with him to newer abodes “…were there in their old positions, sharing in the general dissolution and dust-burial.” He flees the sepulchral house when he hears footsteps approaching from his old room. “I would not admit to myself what it was I feared to confront…”, which may have been his own reflection in “the mouldy, nitre-encrusted mirror in the hall.” 

Terrified, Lovecraft runs about a block up Angell Street, through the ancient, ruined dream neighborhood of 1910, and approaches 454 Angell Street. He woke from the dream at this point, shivering. “At the last moment my great fear seemed to be of passing my birthplace and early home…”  

A Story by Clark Ashton Smith 

Whereas Lovecraft’s dream is autobiographical, (or “psycho-autobiographical”)—as much of his writing tends to be—Clark Ashton Smith’s improvisation on this material takes it in a different direction entirely. In “The Treader of the Dust”, the narrator, an antiquarian scholar very much in the Lovecraftian mold⁴, returns to his home after a three-day absence. As in Lovecraft’s dream, he surveys an advanced stage of decay and decrepitude, seemingly accelerated by decades of sifting dust and disintegration.  

As in the dream above, there is something terrifying in the house that the narrator cannot face. The story opens with these lines: “It was after interminable debate and argument with himself, after many attempts to exorcise the dim, bodiless legion of his fears, that John Sebastian returned to the house he left so hurriedly.” Denial is a recurring refrain in the opening paragraphs.  

Sebastian denies the obvious: the house and its residents are succumbing to what we learn later is an inadvertent invocation Quachil Uttaus, “the ultimate corruption”. This was brought about by the accidental reading of a key passage from The Testaments of Carnamagos, part of that library of forbidden books invented by Lovecraft, Smith, Howard and others—and loaned to each other on occasion. 

The narrator re-reads the key passage again, his arrogant skepticism dissolving along with the contents of his house when he realizes that even reading the passage silently to himself “…must incur a grave risk if in his heart there abide openly or hidden the least desire of death and annihilation.” He realizes he is doomed, and now has no energy or strength to flee his approaching fate. “Yet surely there had never been in his heart the least longing for death and destruction.” Had there? 

“The Treader of the Dust” is more of a prose poem than a story, an effective meditation on the inevitability of death and decay, the ravages of time, and our denial of the same.  The house that the narrator returns to is clearly depicted as a tomb, filled with a dusty darkness impervious to the wan light of sundown and the feeble glow from electric lamps. The tone is very similar to that in Clark Ashton Smith’s necromantic-themed stories in his Zothique cycle.  

Why does Sebastian return after three days? Why this specific timeframe?  It seems to me that this is Smith playing with cultural and religious motifs. Who else was gone for three days and then returned? Unlike Christ, who dies, is buried, then “…rose again on the third day…”⁵ Smith’s character leaves the tomb-like house, visits the living, and then returns to join the dead. This grim reversal of the resurrection story is consistent with Smith’s preoccupation with decadence, irony and inescapable doom. 

Unconscious to Unconscious 

Lovecraft’s letter and Smith’s subsequent story is one of many examples of how these authors and others in their circle influenced each other’s work. Near the close of his letter to Smith, Lovecraft mentions having sent another dream— “…my mediaeval, roof-monster dream…” to Robert Bloch. The future author of Psycho (1959), was a high school student at that time. Lovecraft wrote that he “…will be amused to find out what the kid did with the idea.” It would be fascinating to explore how, by sharing their nightmares, these authors communicated at the deepest level with each other’s minds, and through their various stories, our own. 

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¹“A World of Dark and Disturbing Ideas”, by J.N. Williamson, in Writing Horror, edited by Mort Castle, (1997). 

²On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King, (2000) 

³H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1932-1934, edited by August Derleth and James Turner, (1976). 

⁴Pun intended. 

⁵Nicene Creed, (325).