Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

You can help me, my precious. I know you didn’t intend things to turn out this way, but that bit of intrigue you perpetrated with the help of Miss Locher has really gotten to me. Consciously, of course, I still uphold the criticism I’ve already expressed about the basic absurdity of your work. Unconsciously, however, you seem to have awakened me to a stratum of abject terror. I will at least admit that your ideas form a powerful psychic metaphor, though no more than that. Which is quite enough, isn’t it? It’s certainly quite enough to inspire the writing of this letter, in which I plead for your attention, since I’ve failed to attract it in any other way. I can’t go on like this! With your harrowing trickery you have possessed me down to my deepest self. Please release me from this spell, and let’s begin a normal romance. However unknown may be their psychic mechanisms, it’s only emotions that matter—not zones of the unreal, not a metaphysics stripped of all that is human. In Miss Locher I believe you sent me an embodiment of your deepest convictions. But suppose I start admitting uncanny things about her? Suppose I grant that she was somehow just a dream. Suppose I allow that she was not a girl but actually a thing without a self, an unreality that, in accord with your vision of existence, dreamed it was a human being and not just a fabricated impersonation of our flesh? You would have me entertain such thoughts. You would have me think there is some mysterious affinity a...