Category: Archive

Many people are familiar with H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, a fictional world of dreams that exists like an unseen nimbus around our physical Earth.  What they may not know is that Lovecraft created the Dreamlands as a setting for a cycle of fantasy-adventure stories in the tradition of Lord Dunsany.  While these stories retain much of HPL’s trademark Cosmic Horror, they are self-evidently lighter and more optimistic in tone than his darker works around Cthulhu and the Old Ones.

Nowhere is this more evident, in my opinion, than in his short story The Strange High House in the Mist:

“In the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kingsport. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And later, in still summer rains on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of those dreams, that men shall not live without rumor of old strange secrets, and wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night. When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff’s rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faëry.”

It is a profound parable on the importance of mystery in our lives, and of seeking that mystery despite the opinions of others and the conventions of polite society.

It takes about 20 minutes to read, and if you are at heart what Lovecraft would call a Dreamer, I assure you it will be well worth the effort.

There are any number of audio versions floating around as well, and this particular story lends itself well to the spoken word.  This is my favorite version – I really like the narrator’s voice, cadence, etc: