Another odd dream

by H P Lovecraft

I have lately had another odd dream--specially singular because in it I possessed another personality−a personality just as definite and vivid as the Lovecraft personality which characterises my waking hours.

My name was Dr. Eben Spencer, and I was dressing before a mirror in my own room, in the house where I was born, in a small village of northern New York state. It was the first time I had donned civilian clothes in three years, for I was an Army surgeon with the rank of 1st Lieutenant.

I seemed to be home on a furlough--slightly wounded. On the wall was a calendar reading Friday, July 8, 1864 I was very glad to be in regular attire again, though my suit was not a new one, but one left over from 1861.

After carefully tying my stock, I donned my coat and hat, took a cane from a rack downstairs and sallied forth upon the village street. Soon a very young man of my acquaintance came up to me with an air of anxiety and began to speak in guarded accents. He wished me to go with him to his brother−my professional colleague Dr Chester−whose actions were greatly alarming him.

I, having been his best friend, might have some influence in getting him to speak freely−for surely he had much to tell. The doctor for the past two years had been conducting secret experiments in a laboratory in the attic of his home, and beyond that locked door he would admit no one but himself. Sickening odours were often detected near the door, and odd sounds were at times not absent.

The doctor was aging rapidly. Lines of care−and of something else−were creeping into his dark, thin face, and his hair was rapidly going grey. He would remain in that locked room for dangerously long intervals without food and seemed uncommonly saturnine. All questions from the younger brother were met with scorn or rage−with perhaps a little uneasiness, so the brother was much worried, and stopped me on the street for advice and aid.

I went with him to the Chester house, a white structure of two stories and attic in a pretty yard with a picket fence. It was in a quiet side street, where peace seemed to abide despite the trying nature of the times. In the darkened parlour, where I waited for some time, was a marble-topped table, much haircloth furniture and several pleasing whatnots covered with pebbles, curios and bric-a-brac. Soon Dr Chester came down−and he had aged. He greeted me with a saturnine smile, and I began to question him, as tactfully as I could, about his strange actions.

At first he was rather defiant and insulting. He said with a sort of leer, ‘Better not ask, Spencer! Better not ask!’

Then when I grew persistent (for by this time I was interested on my own account) he changed abruptly and snapped out, ‘Well, if you must know, come up.’

Up two flights of stairs we plodded, and stood before the locked door. Dr Chester opened it, and there was an odour. I entered after him, young Chester bringing up the rear. The room was low but spacious in area and had been divided into two parts by an oddly incongruous plush red portiere. In the half next to the door there was a dissecting table, many bookcases, and several imposing cabinets of chemical and surgical instruments. Young Chester and I remained here, whilst the doctor went behind the curtain.

Soon he emerged, bearing on a large glass slab what appeared to be a human arm, neatly severed just below the elbow. It was damp, gelatinous and bluish-white, and the fingers were without nails.

‘Well, Spencer,’ said Dr Chester sneeringly, ‘I suppose you’ve had a good deal of amputation practice in the army. What do you think, professionally, of this job?’

I had seen clearly that this was not a human arm, and said sarcastically, ‘You are a better sculptor than doctor, Chester. This is not the arm of any living thing.’

And Chester replied in a tone that made me blood congeal, ‘Not yet, Spencer. Not yet!’

Then he disappeared again behind the portiere and emerged once more, bringing another and slightly larger arm. Both were left arms.

I felt sure that I was on the brink of a great revelation, and awaited with impatience the tantalisingly deliberate motions of my sinister colleague.

‘This is only the beginning, Spencer,’ he said as he went behind the curtain for the third time. ‘Watch the curtain.’

And now ends the fictionally available part of my dream, for the residue is grotesque anti-climax. I have said that I was in civilian clothes for the first time since ‘61−and naturally I was rather self-conscious. As I waited for the final revelation, I caught sight of my reflection in the glass door of an instrument case and discovered that my very-carefully-tied stock was awry. Moving to a long mirror, I sought to adjust it, but the black bow proved hard to fashion artistically. And the whole scene began to fade−and damn the luck! I awaked in the distressful year of 1920, with the personality of H.P. Lovecraft restored. I have never seen Dr Chester, or his young brother, or that village since. I do not know what village it was. I never heard the name of Eben Spencer before or since. Some dream! 

Who's the author of a dream?

I had a dream. No, wait, don’t go. It’s brief and it raises an interesting point.

In the dream I was in a screening room. Somebody said that the movie we were about to watch was remarkable in comprising a single take with a fixed camera position.

The movie opened in the middle of an empty building site. The camera panned around, looking at the surrounding streets but not moving from its position in the middle of the site. Workers appeared. As the camera turned, it took in a wall. Hang on, that wall wasn’t there a moment ago. I noticed the workers moved in jerky time-lapse animation. The building began to sprout up around the camera – which was either watching it being built, or more likely (because that wall was complete in an instant, and free-standing) being demolished in reverse.

OK, so here’s what I find interesting. The dream started with a story hook, that we were about to watch an entire movie with the camera fixed in place, then went on to reveal how that could be. Now, I’ve experienced a lot of sequential narratives in dreams, sometimes complex and fiendishly inventive, but they’re usually like life: event A happens, then B, then C. That’s what the Russian Formalists called fabula.

But this dream was siuzhet, an author’s rearrangement of sequential events to create a story. And what’s odd about that: who is the author? If that kind of thing happened in real life we’d be tempted to believe in God or the Matrix. In a dream – well, you know there is a mind capable of storytelling there, but it can’t both withhold information and be surprised by it. Or can it?

I have three theories.

1. My dreaming self imagined the hook and then improvised a movie concept to fit it.
2. There are two parts of the brain at work. One is the spectator. The other creates the dream; it devised the idea, then presented the spectator self with a hook before going on to reveal the answer.
3. The entire dream was manufactured out of fragments at the moment of waking, so that any sense of narrative sequence is entirely retrospective.

The third answer is unlikely because we know that dreams are usually experienced sequentially in real time. If you take a cat and chemically suppress the blocking of motor functions that usually occurs during sleep, you can see it swiping at an insect that it’s dreaming about – and you can even track the imaginary movement of that insect. So, to cats at least, dreams do occur in real time; they aren’t just manufactured on waking.

So that leaves the improvisation theory or the divided brain theory. As a writer, and even more as an umpire of role-playing games, I’m pretty good at coming up with off-the-cuff solutions to story problems. That probably is the explanation of what’s going on here. But I’m sharing it because I’d like to find out if anybody else has experienced dreams with a storytelling structure to them. Did you ever feel like a spectator in the screening room of your own dreaming skull? Comments welcome.