Ghouls, Gugs, and the Geography of Dreams

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Part 4)

I can’t help but think that the geography of the Dream Lands could provide a map to Lovecraft’s subconscious.  That’s probably a dangerous place to go – and I won’t attempt a full scale dream analysis.  Yet it’s intriguing that a place somewhat like a graveyard is a the boundary between the fathoms of slumber and the somber cities of reality: “They emerged on a dim plain strown with singular relics of earth – old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of monuments – and Carter realised with some emotion that he was probably nearer the waking world than at any time since he had gone down the seven hundred steps from the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.”

In this place Carter meets the canine, rubbery ghouls, some of whom, at least, were once human.  The ghouls are disturbing, grave-robbing, flesh-eating creatures, but they are intelligent and surprisingly helpful to Carter.  They even have their own rather ghastly ecology, involving the huge and ravenous gugs.  “Ghouls came here often, for a buried gug will feed a community for almost a year, and even with the added peril it is better to burrow for gugs than to bother with the graves of men.”  Thus our lesser nightmares, like ghouls, are cannibals, feasting on our greater fears.  And on such guides, perhaps, we must sometimes rely, though they seem savage and monstrous – for these ghoulish things mew with their own kinds of sentience, and harbor us no particular ill will.  At least they know their way through the tenuous geography of dreams, leaving a trail of moldy bones and winding burrows.

Image: Caspar David Friedrich