Lesson 3: Nightmares

The Nightmare Worlds of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft

Many of Poe’s tales read like like a nightamre. Some of these include “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The last-mentioned will be dealt with in subsequent lessons. For this lesson, I would like to take a brief look at “Premature Burial”. Poe begins the story with a factual discussion of suffering, and then moves to the specific depiction of the nightmare of being buried while alive. He calls it “the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.” (Poe, 1993 Wordsworth Classics: 271). And mortality is indeed the prime concept here. We fear what we do not know. We fear death and we fear the grave. Most badly we fear being in the grave prematurely.

In his story Poe continues to relate several tales from historical figures buried alive and the agonies they suffered. The most horrid of these I found is a story of a woman buried in her family vault. She had been mistaken for dead and buried alive. She died in terror, trying to get out by beating her fists against he door.

Finally Poe ends with his hero, a first-person narrator who was subject to death-like swoons. This man lived in perpetual fear of being buried alive. Upon waking one day he found that his nightmare had come true. But I would hate to spoil the story for you. In the final section of this lesson is a website where you can read the ghastly tale. There is enough there to provide nightmares for a long, long time.

Nightmares are particularly scary, because there is nowhere to run and no light switch to flip in your dream world. The darkness is all-pervading. You cannot run and you cannot hide. Your darkest fantasies are real and they are out to get you. And your feet are nailed to the floor.

Particularly poignant is a story that Lovecraft took directly from a nightmare. The heroes were the author himself and a writer friend. The friend had gone into a dark tunnel to investigate some sort of archealogical find. The author remains above ground. From the darkness he suddenly hears his friend screaming at him to run, and then silence. The only response to the author's calls is a ghastly voice saying to the author that his friend is no more.

This nightmare story depicts the fear of the dark and also suggests live burial, being in a dark, underground place. This becomes the grave of Lovecraft’s unfortunate nightmare friend. Also in later works by this author those among humankind who were particularly sensitive, artistic or both, would have strange nightmares about the end of the world or the monsters coming to devour the earth. Dreaming therefore played an important role in depicting Lovecraft’s horror. Lovecraft takes the unknown and the supernatural further than Poe does in his story. In Poe, the fear is of a largely imaginary nature. The woman interred with her dead family for example, must have conjured several spooky images of rotting skeletons and corpses just beyond the dark surrounding her.

Nightmares can take many forms. They are basically dark and filled with nameless threat, or the uncanny, as previously discussed. Whether we are children or adults, nightmares, like death, do not diminish much in the terror that they invoke.

As in the tale by Poe, nightmares are not limited to dreams. They sometimes come true. Especially adult nightmares such as those pertaining to money and security. In Chapter VI of Danse Macabre Stephen King deals with the all too real nightmare of the modern American, for example.

Sleep well!

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