Click to Subscribe
Dream
A Mythic Dimension in Fiction
© 2016 James LaFond
APR/15/16
"The conviction was growing that I had experienced all this before; it was like living an episode forewarned in a dream."
-For the love of Barbara Allen
In the passage above Howard writes of blood memory, of ghost-affirming dreams passed down through the blood of our ancestors that well up and inform us, that permit our predecessors to communicate with us across the ages. Very often such sequences in Howard's fiction are linked to the protagonist's race. But not all. Much of Howard's dreamscape is tapped into by characters who might fall asleep in a certain place, a haunted intersection of time, space and race. Even when there is a site-based conduit for the transmission of dreams, the dream is very often a projection from an extinct race whose collective ego seeps up from the timeless well of dreams to inform their temporal successors.
In Queen of the Black Coast Conan falls asleep beneath a wicked plant and is transported by way of the dimension of dreams to view a past civilizations, the ruins of which he had stumbled through like an errant child. Once awakened, he is now armed against the lingering horrors of that age that yet stalk the world of men.
In The Phoenix on the Sword Conan slumbers as an alien usurper king within the chamber of another ancient race as killers seek to creep upon him in the night. He is then warned in a well-articulated dream by a long dead wise man, for Conan occupies the Throne of this people's place and so rates another race's ghostly attention.
In Howard's imagined worlds—from pre-cataclysmic Atlantis to modern America—the dimension of dreams supersedes all; no cataclysm extinguishes it, the death of a race does not nullify its message, no palace walls are protection against it's penetrating glare, no wild land is without its ghostly song, no savage race escapes its claws, and even eons and gulfs beyond the original dreamer's wildest comprehension may not cut off the needful sleeper from the source of all myth. The worlds of Robert E. Howard are certainly of the dream, but they themselves and their imagined heroes yet dreamed as well.
Civilization
a well of heroes
‘Why, Grand-Dad,’
eBook
thriving in bad places
eBook
honor among men
eBook
when you're food
eBook
predation
eBook
time & cosmos
eBook
your trojan whorse
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
solo boxing
eBook
beasts of aryas
eBook
all-power-fighting
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
z-pill forever
eBook
the gods of boxing
eBook
the sunset saga complete
eBook
fiction anthology one
eBook
logic of force
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
by the wine dark sea
eBook
sorcerer!
eBook
advent america
eBook
songs of aryas
eBook
taboo you
eBook
orphan nation
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
night city
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
fanatic
eBook
hate
eBook
on combat
eBook
the fighting edge
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
fate
eBook
song of the secret gardener
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
the combat space
eBook
triumph
eBook
uncle satan
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
eBook
america the brutal
eBook
wife—
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
the first boxers
eBook
dark, distant futures
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
eBook
book of nightmares
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
sons of aryas
eBook
the lesser angels of our nature
eBook
within leviathan’s craw
eBook
broken dance
eBook
menthol rampage
eBook
ranger?
  Add a new comment below:
Name
Email
Message