Inspired by Fandango’s Story Starter of February 13

Voices in the night

Voices are heard, in our sleep, during the day, as we work, or shop, or walk, thinking of other things: voices in the wind, voices in the silence of the garden. Daytime, or night, voices are present, perhaps reflections of thoughts, of half formed memories, small sounds of hidden creatures. Are they hallucinations, ordinary psychotic disorders, or something more serious?

There is a network of individuals who take these questions seriously, and, I have to say, probably rightly. We know that we are not alone, and this certainty has led to many puzzles and paradoxes. In this case, our awareness of voices may be evidence of sensitivity to what may not be perceived by others. This, in itself, leads to more uncertainties: are we hearing what is directed to us, us alone, or us and others, but not those closed to us?

Voices in our dreams

Dreams are common for many, even in times of calm and relaxation. Dreams about the present, or what is coming next, dreams about people, in our lives or about history, all dependent on what are interests, studies, worries, obsessions, are.

He woke to the sound of whispers, not knowing if they were coming from elsewhere inside the house, or from within his own mind. This experience too is quite common to dreamers. The American writer, HP Lovecraft, was a great dreamer, whose work was largely inspired, sometime dictated, by his dreams. Whispers, in the night, coming from nowhere, or are they coming from our mind?

“My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary.” (The Tomb and other tales, 1917)

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” (The call of Cthulhu, 1926)

Voices from our past, or our future?

Voices may indeed come from our own mind, but are they from the past, what we have already lived and experienced, or from our future, what may unroll as we carry on living? Are they created by our subconscious, or imposed on us, suggested in an inescapable way?

“I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven.

Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon—but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.
The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and dampness of generations.

Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lightning.

Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call “divine wrath” in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre.

One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.” (The Tomb)

Picture: Image of a menacing Cthulhu rising as the apocalypse unfolds.

The call of Cthulhu