JOURNAL OF POSSIBLE PARADIGMS Issue 7, Fall 1998

DreamTime NOW!

Lucid in Lovecraftian Dreamlands Thom Laaki

When I was first asked to contribute to this magazine (if that is what you call on-line publications) I really didn't know what I would write about. While SMiles and I have shared an interest in alternate possibilities of existence possible, I really do not have the perspective that he has on the subject. I am first off a skeptic of most things "unquantifiable." Even of concepts that can be proven

statistically tangible I am some what of a nominalist- I believe most concepts to be conveniences of language, useful in expressing subjective impressions of the surrounding reality but not in really effecting it. A dream to me is the subconscious talking to itself and not some tap into something deeper, such as a collective consciousness. So given these conflicting view points a juxtaposition

seemed rather difficult. But last August it presented itself in a dream.

Reading H.P. Lovecraft's The Doom That Came To Sarnath collection before falling asleep, my mind was filled by speculations on the impossible and fantastic descriptions of what the writer called the Dreamlands. In this dream, I was sitting before a ridge of haze extending from the horizon and I was trying to picture the "impossible geometry and wonders of far off Kadath," the horrible dances of the unsettling Beings of Ib, and the cousin of the cat, the Sphinx." I realized I was dreaming because my mundane-bound mind wouldn't allow me to fathom such unreal things outside of campy, cartoonish illustrations. Then somehow the works of Clark Ashton Smith crept into my memory. I recalled a quote he cryptically let slip about "finding the land that was ancient before Atlantis." My lucid dream became very tangible all at once. My disbelief dissolved bit by bit until red sand-covered hills settled before me in front of the miasma.

Pure emotional joy reeled through me. I was grasping not only a vision of a distant place but I was catching a hold of the fleeting concept behind the place. I understood why Smith was drawn to this place, its truth was undeniable to me. I was flying on a wave of perception, a complete oneness with the mindset of the authors of such indescribable places. I felt like I was awake. My own consciousness had receded into the perspective of a piece of fiction that I would one day read.

Then I looked down. Not actually but I felt that distant piece of fiction that is me and realized I was completely outside of it. Fear; the strongest emotion I can think of, pulled me into myself once again. Wherever I was I felt skulls and rib bones by my ankles and heard rats scuffle inches away. It was a moment of terror. I wanted to take a step to avoid the unseemly things around me. My legs ached with the sleep caused paralysis. With that physical pain , I was in myself again no longer falling towards the great, collectively forgotten place.

A soothing feeling came over me. An undeniable female presence was around me. On the radio next to my bed was playing Lori Anderson's "O' Superman." Once again I was someplace else. A chilly energy calmed me. The female I felt was the ever-present Earth-Mother and I was yet another incarnation of the Sun-King. I felt tied to the life around and knew what it was to be dead. The steady drone of a synthesized note of music became a pulse I was aware of but didn't feel. Sadly for me at that moment this feeling began to pass. I was once again somebody trying to go back to sleep. I shut off the radio and let the sounds of traffic off in the distance lull me in.

Whether I actually tapped into some universal truth discovered by me through the works of weird fiction and mythology I had read, or I had experienced an intense lucid dream with emotional resonance coloring my impressions is irrelevant. I was in one of those ELF-Infested Spaces that SMiles talks about.

Awake But Dreaming Peter Stenshoel I awoke and was looking out the windows of our house where the outdoor electric light illumined an evergreen tree which has grown tight to the window. Suddenly I got the impression of a thorough infiltration of our house by an army of forces whose will was diametrically opposed to ours, and who had so many tricks up their sleeves that it was impossible to know what to do next. I could just make out some shadowy shapes, or so I thought, which confirmed my irrational fear. On top of the feeling of invasion was the more standard feeling that the world was in imminent danger of earthquakes, fires, and other natural disasters. After lying there basically assessing the situation, I jumped out of the bed with a shriek, and ran to the front door. I wanted to study, I imagine, for evidence of break-in. I saw the three locks all where they should be, with Miriam's ring of keys in the door as is always the case during the night. Paradoxically, my mind in the hyper-alarmed state it was in, I took what should have been reassuring and translated it as the exact opposite: seeing her keys in the door terrified me; it was proof that some class of entities had tampered with our reality. Miriam called to me from the bed. I began to realize that nothing was wrong, but as I sat in a chair next to the bed, a near-shock reaction set in. I shivered and stammered, unable to remain calm. Perhaps I cried; I cannot recall. I had been rocked to my emotional foundations, all by a chimera. Interpretations can cut a myriad of ways. The evil clutch of sleep which Jeff Lewis speaks of is an obvious tack, wherein evil entities much like the theocrats of Kyle Griffith's War In Heaven, who are essentially insane disembodied creatures, take pains to suck power away from unsuspecting humans, to plan to harvest them in death through grand deception. Like Adam Gorightly's dream of looking through the magnifying stained-glass construct, only a few of us can see these rank deceivers for what they are, as the rest of the world blithely goes to hell in a hand basket. Another way to interpret it is as a sample of dementia or schizophrenia. Millions of poor souls on Earth suffer this way 24 hours a day, and thousands of them have to live on the streets of the United States since the Reagan administration succeeded in throwing them out of (arguably preferable) institutions. After this tiny little taste, I shall always have a gauge by which to understand the vicissitudes of mind, and the precarious balance between perception and delusion. And yet...I can never dismiss the thought that these people are living out the consequences of the denial of the rest of us that anything is wrong. Then there is the not unreasonable hypothesis of a post-traumatic stress reaction. I have gone on record with my UFO sightings and entity memories with varying levels of credibility and dubiousness. Perhaps as my process of discovery continues, I get closer and closer to the initial terror of an abduction experience: the Strieberesque "body terror"/fight or flight/sense of being surrounded and invaded from within and without. A subheading under the post-traumatic stress disorder umbrella is the principal I call "Cat and the Spookski". In Minnesota "spookski" is a word for full head gear to protect one from the cold blasts of winter. Only eye and mouth holes reveal evidence of a human head beneath. The cats in my old Minnesota house went wild with fright when three of us stepped in wearing these things, and would only calm down after we removed the spookskis. In other words, the evil I sense could be exclusively my initial dumb human/animal understanding of the event. In which case this fear is nothing more than a part of the DNA survival system which is too antiquated to easily allow for simple meetings with alien races. Given this scenario, we might say those who obsess on Satanism, demonology, Demiurgic, archonic, Lovecraftian or Phildickian imagery have not trained themselves properly to the next step of integration required for species survival. These are the people who cannot square John Mack's conciliatory approach to alien abductions, think of him as a traitor to the race, and perhaps prefer Budd Hopkins alarmist homiletics or the Cooper/Hamilton/Lear campfire stories. (We all love to be scared silly once in a while.) I will admit that coming from a tradition with a devotional component, it is perhaps easier for me to ultimately laugh off superparanoia as a tragic misreading of the notion of chains of numinosity which consistently travel from above to below as evolutionary processes proceed. A casual check usually reveals that, among those who have outgrown the religion of their childhood, those brought up in Roman Catholicism as children are more prone to need to see religion as twisted, possibly evil crutch, than say, those brought up as Protestants. Because Protestantism literally contains the word and concept "protest", there is already an appeals process built in which allows for free thinking, no matter what the authorities try to tell you! Think about it. Another interpretation of my experience is that increasingly popular item within alien abduction study; the Object Lesson. Someone or something wants to show me how easy it is for the mind to twist a harmless situation into one of abject terror. (In fact, thinking back on this morning's fright, I can honestly say it is beyond anything I remember feeling. Akin, perhaps to Whitley Strieber's states of primal fear.) Our "gray Neighbors" could want me to be very careful when making statements about them or their intent. Or, perhaps our brains, or the collective unconscious, or a morphogenetic field within the "state of nature" occasionally allows us to come to the brink of fear as a teaching technique. As you can see, I have not made up my mind about this. I worry when I see Jeff Lewis write off his past beliefs with such finality. Does he imagine his present ones will reign forever? Here is the crux of our growing brand of inquiry: how to engage in proclamation and discussion without premature intellectual commitment. I think we are grappling with how the syntax of such discussion works. Remember, it's not a contest about who is "right" or "first" to discover the "answer." This is a conversation about ultimates using penultimate symbols called language. Our English variety of symbols are particularly maimed, in the sense that, unlike, say, Japanese Kanji, our words are not, in and of themselves, particularly rich in meaning. I think this might lend to our confusion that ideas are either one thing or another, that values are either 1 or 0, = or -, that final arbiters exist in a spectacularly unimaginative form, in what we might call a "2-suit." I think final arbiters could well be more likely to dress in a kilt covering a dress covering slacks, all draped with a cape, a huge fedora, about five necklaces of different metals and alloys. See Also: SMiles' DreamTime Logos

Nanook's Nook's ET Contact Dreams