Dream Passage of the Day

[G. S. Carnivals]

Because when the sky
begins to darken,
as if rotting before our eyes,
and when our bones
begin to change,
growing soft with decay,
we know that all the ways
of our lives
have been leading us,
and can only lead us,
to this degenerate little town.
And then we may understand
that everything around us,
everything within us,
has a direct point of contact
to that secret place,
that source of all things.
Dreams, for instance,
the dreams of our sleep
wherein every mind is destined
to go twisted and tilting
into lands of swift magic.
These dreams alone would make the case -
if anything were ever needed
in the way of evidence.
These dreams alone
would put us in close view
of those grimy windows
behind which diseased faces
peek out through the glass,
as if they are waiting for
someone to arrive -
as if they are waiting
for everyone, sooner or later,
to enter their little town.

Thomas Ligotti - "This Degenerate Little Town"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"In the new dream the dead may not rest very long. Sometimes their rightful blackness is revoked, deserved silence foreclosed, their blissful sense of nothing cut off at closing time. And now these faithful patrons of annihilation, loyal customers of the abyss, these quiet tenants of paradise are thrown out on their ear like lowlife riffraff booted from a respectable establishment. Back down to earth, you wretches! Having no place else to spend eternity, they try to make the best, in other words the worst of it."

Thomas Ligotti - "Ghost Stories for the Dead"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"'You see how mad those townspeople are?'

I had said nothing specifically about any townspeople, only the strange woman, who might have come from the countryside of my imagination. 'They spread lies even in your dreams,' she continued. 'So I hope you will listen to me from now on and never again mention that town. This is for your own good, Allan.'

Ever since then I have never initiated this subject in conversation, though occasionally Adelaide forgets herself and alludes to the matter, saying: 'Oh, those horrible people.' But I do not talk about them; I do not even think about their unspeakable lives. I cannot help, however, those things that come to me in dreams. Adelaide cannot blame me for what happens there.

And lately I feel there has been some terrible trouble with my dreams, though not only the ones about the town. There are other dreams, more - how shall I say it? - more loathsomely reverberant in their power. I only hope that this power will soon exhaust itself in the coming nights, like a frightening storm throughout which one is allowed to sleep.

Please let this be so."

Thomas Ligotti - "Allan and Adelaide: An Arabesque"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"Arthur Emerson eventually slept that night, but he also dreamed. His dreams were without definite form, a realm of mist where twisted shadows glided, their dark mass shifting fluently. Then, through the queerly gathered and drifting clouds of mist, he saw a shadow whose dark monstrosity made the others seem shapely and radiant. It was a deformed colossus, a disfigured monument carved from the absolute density of the blackest abyss. And now the lesser shadows, the pale and meager shadows, seemed to join in a squealing chorus of praise to the greater one. He gazed at the cyclopean thing in a trance of horror, until its mountainous mass began to move, slowly stretching out some part of itself, flexing what might have been a misshapen arm. And when he awoke, scattering the bedcovers, he felt a warm breeze wafting in through a window which he could not remember having left open."

Thomas Ligotti - "The Prodigy of Dreams"

[G. S. Carnivals]

A fisherman finds a crimson starfish in his net, glistening like fresh blood. It has a single ruby eye. Using his knife, the fisherman digs out the eye and throws the body of the starfish back into the sea. That evening, he takes the eye home with him. He carefully hides it on a high shelf in a corner where the eye glows with a soft red light in the darkness. That night the fisherman dreams. He dreams of pink coral caves beneath the sea, where lazy octopi feed and schools of silver fish dart in the clear water. He dreams of rusted ships half-buried in the ocean mud and how, inside those ships, bleached skeletons dance with the cold sway of the current. He dreams of forgotten pillars and marble walls, broken and tumbled and grown over with crusted barnacles and the green slime of centuries. In the morning the fisherman wakes. He fetches the starfish eye to show to his friend, the town jeweler. But the eye is no longer as it was. It has shrunk to a wrinkled pea, hard and black. And when he touches it, the eye collapses into gray powder.

Thomas Wiloch - "The Starfish Eye"

[Neurospaston]

"When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me."

W.Shakespeare sonnet XLIII

[Jezetha]

Quote Originally Posted by G. S. Carnivals

A fisherman finds a crimson starfish in his net, glistening like fresh blood. It has a single ruby eye. Using his knife, the fisherman digs out the eye and throws the body of the starfish back into the sea. That evening, he takes the eye home with him. He carefully hides it on a high shelf in a corner where the eye glows with a soft red light in the darkness. That night the fisherman dreams. He dreams of pink coral caves beneath the sea, where lazy octopi feed and schools of silver fish dart in the clear water. He dreams of rusted ships half-buried in the ocean mud and how, inside those ships, bleached skeletons dance with the cold sway of the current. He dreams of forgotten pillars and marble walls, broken and tumbled and grown over with crusted barnacles and the green slime of centuries. In the morning the fisherman wakes. He fetches the starfish eye to show to his friend, the town jeweler. But the eye is no longer as it was. It has shrunk to a wrinkled pea, hard and black. And when he touches it, the eye collapses into gray powder. Thomas Wiloch - "The Starfish Eye"

I was reminded of this:

Atlantis

Clark Ashton Smith

Above its domes the gulfs accumulate.
Far up, the sea-gales blare their bitter screed:
But here the buried waters take no heed—
Deaf, and with welded lips pressed down by weight
Of the upper ocean. Dim, interminate,
In cities over-webbed with somber weed,
Where galleons crumble and the krakens breed,
The slow tide coils through sunken court and gate.

From out the ocean's phosphor-starry dome,
A ghostly light is dubitably shed
On altars of a goddess garlanded
With blossoms of some weird and hueless vine;
And, wingéd, fleet, through skies beneath the foam,
Like silent birds the sea-things dart and shine.

[G. S. Carnivals]

"Darkness. Bed.

But he could not sleep, not to say he did not dream. Hypnagogic horrors settled into his mind, a grotesque succession of images resembling lurid frames from old comic strips. Impossibly distorted faces painted in garish colors frolicked before his mental eye, all entirely beyond his control. These were accompanied by a series of funhouse noises which seemed to emanate from some zone located between his brain and the moonlit bedroom around him. A drone of half-thrilled, half-horrified voices filled the background of his imagination, punctuated by super-distinct shouts which used his name as an excuse for sound. It was an abstract version of his mother's voice, now robbed of any sensual quality to identify it as such, remaining only a pure idea. The voice called out his name from a distant room in his memory. Samuel, it shouted with a terrible urgency of obscure origin. Then suddenly - trick or treat. The words echoed, changing in sense as they faded into silence: trick or treat - down the street - we will meet - ashes, ashes. No, not ashes but other trees. The boy walked behind some big maples, was eclipsed by them. Did he know a car was following him that night? Panic. Don't lose him now. Don't lose him. Ah, there he was on the other side. Nice trees. Good old trees. The boy turned around, and in his hand was a tangled web of strings whose ends extended up to the stars which he began working like kites or toy airplanes or flying puppets, staring up at the night and screaming for the help that never came. Mother's voice started shouting again; then the other voices mixed in, becoming a foul babbling unity of dead voices chattering away. Night of the Dead. All the dead conversed with him in a single voicey-woicey.

Trick or treat, it said."

Thomas Ligotti - "Conversations in a Dead Language"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"To experience such a dream as this on a single occasion might very well be the stuff of a haunting, lifelong memory, something that perhaps might even be cherished for its unfathomable depths of feeling. But to suffer over and over this same nightmare, as I soon found was my fate, leads one to seek nothing so much as a cure to kill the dream, to reveal all its secrets and thus bring about a selective amnesia."

Thomas Ligotti - "The Spectacles in the Drawer"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"It was only when I had entered this foggy void that the true sense of dream, the inherent dread of my visions, was restored to me. Here was a sort of reservoir into which the depths of my dreams were being directed, leaving only a shallow spillover that barely trickled through my nights. Here, I say, without knowing really what place or plane of being it was: some spectral venue, a vacant lot situated along the backstreet of sleep, an outpost of the universe itself... or perhaps merely the inside of a box hidden away in the house of an old woman, a box in which something existed in all its insensible purity, a cloudy ether free of tainted forms and knowledge, freely cleansing others with its sterile grace."

Thomas Ligotti - "Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel"