Lovecraft's Dreaming Part IV

We see that the child, Howard, probably was traumatized by his grandmother's death. He had already broke from her by rejecting Jesus (and Santa Clause), but he snuck to the attic and precociously studied "religion" by reading Dante's Paradise Lost.

Amazingly, the child ignored the nude figures and decapitated torsos of Dore, and focused on the winged demons. These became his nightgaunts who tried to dsh him against mountains.

He conflates his childhood nightmare with his adult dreaming. These adult incidents are reminiscent of sleep paralysis - his "struggle to keep awake".

Nest, let's explore if Lovecraft practiced "directed dreaming". For that we will use George Noory's recent book, Workers in the Dark.

Lovecraft's Dreaming Part I

HPL started dreaming early ...

"I began to have nightmares of the most hideous description, peopled with things which I called night-gaunts ... these figures came from an edition deluxe of Paradise Lost with illustrations by Dore ... it is fully fifteen years ... since I have seen a nightgaunt, but even now, when half-asleep ... I feel a thrill of fear ... & instinctively struggle to keep awake. That was my own prayer back in '96 - each night - to keep awake & ward off the night gaunts!"

This is when he was 6 years old and a bot after his grandmother passed.


referenced as SL.I. 34-35, note 4 in HP Lovecraft In His Time: A Dreamer and a Visionary, S T Joshi, Liverpool University Press, 2001, pp. 19-20. As an aside, this is an abridgement of HP Lovecraft: A Life, ST Joshi, Necronomicon Press, 1996,