When I was in my 20’s I made up a connective mythology around my nightmares, inspired also by Lovecraft’s writing. Lovecraft himself had terrible nightmares, and he would sometimes use the fruit of his subconscious as monsters in his tales. For example, he dreamt of the facelessnightgaunts, and then used them in his novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and his poem The Fungi From Yuggoth.

I collected relevant nightmares in a file on my Mac, though the introduction of the document states that the collection is a book called the Liber Timoris and that the writings are the chronicles of a young drifting ascetic who spent his life trying to find out the source of his cursed visions. The book was divided into three sections: dreams transcribed, travel diaries, and scraps of information culled from other books – grimoires and the like – that help to tie the dreams to the mythos of the “deathless beyonders.” Oh yes, it’s true.

In short, I dreamt of (among other things): an ancient, massive metal tower that was built by a dead pre-human civilization for some arcane killing ritual, and a group of men were trying to unlock its secrets by sending people to their death in it; a green-glowing, amorphous, floating monster that comes out under moonless nights and calls out with an alien noise–like a siren, anyone who hears the call is drawn to it and then die at the sight of the monster; twin boiling, adhesive living oozes that stretch out of the earth to fight eachother at certain times in some cosmic cycle; a sleek, black, semi-canine, semi-humanoid beast that stalks & kills any intruder in its territory around a lake–it’s immortal but it exists alongside that which lives in the lake–an enormous rubbery globe of swollen tattered flesh that (when it surfaces) stretches probing tendrils (that look like male genitalia) and can reveal (with a mouth that looks like female genitalia) the secrets of how to survive/dismiss the other ‘stalker’; a race of marine humanoids whose skin resembles that of those black-mirrored, deep-sea, bioluminescent fish-they come out of the sea depths to complete secret errands and in their presence nobody who is sleeping can awake; travelling with a cult who travelled to a pier during a storm to summon up an immense rippling, semi-fluid, pink primordial thing from the sea which in turn slays the summoners with thrashing, acidic arms; being trapped in a room with row upon row of brown, twisted, man-eating creatures and seeing behind them, as they came towards me, a cyclopean monster-god trapped in a towering shard of ice, alive and using its powerful alien gaze to mercifully transport me away; A monumental, algae-encrusted, glyph-covered slab, raised by an ancient alien race, that through some evil force of will causes the R’lyeh-like city around it to crumble and slide into the sea; Being, in a canoe, told secrets of the universe by an old Indian medicine man, whose true nature–that of a three-eyed, bulbous, many-lobed alien thing with dark leathery skin–was revealed when rain hit his face, and who I killed by beheading with an oar; a desert human slave camp run by shadowy inhuman outsiders who stole babies and mounted them to coiled apparatus so that as the children grew they would grow into the metal constructs and become one with them for some unknown use in a war against other aliens, and this info was written down and smuggled out of the camp by a man who brought it to a secret temple, but he was followed by the outsiders and so he hid the book and took his own life to thwart them.

And Chris submitted a few of his weird dreams to the Liber Timoris as well!

This entry is dedicated to Janet’s weird nightmare.