Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

by Thomas Ligotti

“Yet why should I speak of waking from these dreams? For to awaken, as I once understood this miracle, means to reclaim a world of laws which for a time were lost, to rise into the light of the world as one falls into the darkness of dream. But for me there is no sense of breaking through the envelope of sleep.

Where is the writer from some molding backwater of the earth—the city of Bruges itself, that withered place which some dreamer has described as ‘a corpse of the Middle Ages that sings to itself from innumerable bell-towers and lays bony bridges across the black veins of its old canals.’