Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti Page A

your delving into speculative models of reality, sweetheart, but why this particular one? Why posit these “little zones,” as I’ve heard you call them, having such hideous attributes, or should I say anti-attributes (to keep up with your theoretical lingo)? To whimsically joke about such bizarrerie with phrases like “pockets of interference” and “cosmic static” belies your talents as a thoughtful member of our profession. And the rest of it: the hyper-uncanniness, the “ontological games,” the generally cosmic substance of these places, and all that other transcendent nonsense. I realize that psychology has charted some awfully weird areas in its maps of the mind, but you’ve gone so far into the ultra-mentational hinterlands of metaphysics that I fear you will not return (at least not with your reputation intact).
    To speak of your ideas with regard to Miss Locher’s dream, you can see the correlations, especially in the winding plot of her narrative. But I’ll tell you when these links to your fanciful hypotheses really struck me with a hammer blow. It was just after she had related her dream to me. Now riding the saddle of her chair in the normal position, she made a few remarks obviously intended to convey the full extent of her disquiet. I’m sure she thought it
de rigueur
to tell me that after her dream episode she began entertaining doubts concerning what she really was. Loan processor? Manikin dresser? Other? Other other? Rationally, she knew her genuine, factual self. However, some “new sense of unreality” undermined her complete emotional assurance in this matter.
    Surely you can see how the foregoing existential tricks fit in with those “harassments of the self,” as you style such phenomena. And just what are the boundaries of the self? Is there a secret communion of seemingly separate things? How do animate and inanimate relate? Very boring, m’dear . . . zzzzz.
    It all reminds me of that trite little fable of the Chinese philosopher (Chuang Tzu?) who dreamed he was a butterfly but upon waking affected not to know whether he was a man who’d dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming . . . you get the idea. The question is: “Do things like butterflies dream?” Answer: an unequivocal “no,” as you may be aware from the research done in this field. The issue is ended right there. Accredited studies notwithstanding—as I’m sure you would contest—suppose the dreamer is not a man or butterfly, but both . . . or neither, something else altogether. Or suppose . . . really we could go on and on like this, and we have. Possibly the most repellent concept you’ve developed is that which you call “divine masochism,” or the doctrine of a Bigger Self terrorizing its little splinter selves, precisely that Something Else Altogether scarifying the man-butterfly with suspicions that there’s a game going on over its head.
    The trouble with all this, my beloved, is the way you’re so adamant about its objective reality, and how you sometimes manage to infect others with your far-fetched convictions. Me, for instance. After hearing Miss Locher tell her dream story, I found myself unconsciously analyzing it much as you might have. Her multiplication of roles (including the role reversal with the manikin) really did put me in mind of some divine being that was splintering and scarring itself to relieve its cosmic ennui, as indeed a few of the well-reputed gods of world religion supposedly do. I also thought of your “divinity of the dream,” that thing which is all-powerful in its own sphere. Contemplating the realm of Miss Locher’s dream, I did experience a fleeting sense of that old vagary about a solipsistic dream deity commanding all it sees, all of which is only itself. And a corollary to solipsism even occurred to me: if, in any