Musings on Fritz Leiber

Architecture, rats, mist, steam, smoke, smog, fog—all play very important recurring roles in the stories. As do certain recurring themes like the many false gods/religions vs the very powerful and terrifying True Gods; various degrees of adeptness with magic; interesting philosophical theses concerning the relations between men and women and between friends; the differences between city living and living in the countryside—and I'm sure many more. I'll ponder on it some more and pay attention as I read through, and add to this list when I can. I want to start to cover some of the many things Byfield didn't delve into—his book is almost entirely concerned with the influences of Lovecraft, Graves, Jung and Campbell and how those showed up in Leiber's work. But that does have a way of spreading out into many tendrils throughout the book.

Architecture plays an important role because Leiber is aware of many different kinds and uses them to set a mood or a historical/local flavor. Nehwon is a very diverse world with many different kinds of societies arrayed out across its lands. There's the cutting edge of late contemporary civlization like some of the cities, which are also hubs of decadence (some of them—Lankhmar especially), of crime (like the Thieves' Guild), of corruption, stupidity, crass commercialism, and underhanded and treacherous politics; and there are areas of barbarism, savagery, wilderness, magic and sorcery, and omn and on. Some regions have a sort of Icelandic feel (Rime Isle in particular), some feel like Medieval England or maybe the Netherlands. Lankhmar is based on a mix of ancient Rome and modern New York City, and is situated in the land of Lankhmar as well. It's often called the City of Smokes or the City of the Black Toga.

Rats are almost omni-present. Not in every place or every story, but in Lankhmar in paritcular there are always little scurrying sounds in the shadows and the gleam of tiny pairs of eyes in the darkness. Ships carrying grain or foodstuffs are never without their supplemental rodential crew, unpaid of course, but with free access and free food guaranteed.

As for the various types of smokes, mists, etc—those show up quite frequently, and they move in various ways. Sometimes it's a sea mist covering the area of an entire story's setting, and remains pretty inert. Sometimes sinister tendrils and feelers of smoke or smog come creeping down alleys and thoroughfares, much the way increasing snow and ice crept across the Cold Waste in the first story as a precursor/foreshadowing/harbinger of Mor's evil Ice Magic. And that's usually what the smokes, smogs, and fogs represent—some foul form of magic reaching through the city toward its intended vitim. It's symbolism shown in the form of a semi-transparent, gaseous, free-flowing (and often blindly-but-purposefully-groping) substance that can get in anywhere and has the tendency of making bright areas dim and clear views unclear. It clouds vision and judgement, it spreads unease and fear wherever it flows. I suppose it's used in much the same way as the rats. Both are common sights on the streets and in the apartments and buildings of New York, and both cause various kinds of cursing and fearful gibbering. They represent the rot, the filth, the decadence, the drudgery—the seedy underside of the city, which glitters on top but smolders and decays underneath, or the far-reaching access of the sudden freeze that can glue flesh to stone, or bring on the shivers of fevered sickness. They're all like the visual aspects of sicknesses or fear itself, capable of roving anywhere and getting in through every keyhole and crack, even the unseen and unknown ones.

And how perfect that in The Swords of Lankhmar there's a gigantic, unknown rat-labyrinth under Lankhmar, a dark, grungy, caricatured shadow-image of it, where all the citizens are filthy rats going about little parodies of human activities and rat-politics, and they have their own little Thieves' Guild (If I remember right) that has its filthy little paws in every aspect of government and business. This is literally a Shadow-Lankhmar, in the same way the vast labyrinth under the palace of Crete (where King Minos hid his dirtiest little secrets) was an underground twisted Shadow-version of the greatest and most lavish palace known to the world at that time, located directly above it. The grander and more glittering the public face of something is (be it a person, a business, a city, or a group), the darker and more sinister its shadow aspect is. Everything has a shadow. Simply by casting light on something you can't help but create a shadow, and the brighter you make the light, the darker the shadow gets by contrast. Leiber seems to have deeply understood these ideas and wove them all throughout the stories in manifold ways, doubtless including many I'm not aware of.

Oh, and cats! He loves cats and puts them in when he can. There aren't many in the Lankhmar stories, except of course for the Mouser, who often seems like literally a human cat. He has the postures, expressions, quirks and traits of a cat, and seems to think like one as well.* The other one I can think of is Hrissa, the snow-cat that accompanied them on their climb up Stardock. In size she's midway between a leopard and a lynx or something. Bigger than a housecat anyway. Probably nearly the same size as the Mouser actually.

I know he's used cats in some of his other stories. In The Wanderer a rogue planet appears one day in the sky, and there's an alien cat-woman who arrives on it and comes down to Earth to hang out with the main character. He also wrote a series of stories about some of his actual cats I believe, probably to entertain his son Justin when he was young (but Fritz really probably just wanted to write about the cats). One of them is named Gummitch, and I believe there are other cats in the stories as well. In fact I think the stories are called Gummitch and Friends.

He shares his love of cats with Andre Norton, who also liked to write about cat-people and sometimes about actual cats. Or sometimes telepathic cats, like in the stories Catseye and The Zero Stone.

* In one story (was it Bazaar of the Bizarre?) he stood at the base of a wall maybe a dozen feet high and doubled his body lithely, held that posture with perfect grace for a long moment, and then leapt in one quick spring all the way to the top—a seemingly impossible distance.

This brings us right up to The Mouser Goes Below, which if I remember right (and I do) is the final story in the final book (written by Leiber anyway, and we don't count anything here that wasn't).

"Their development concludes with self-revelation in the 1988 short novel The Mouser Goes Below. The novel reflects Leiber's growing interest in neopaganism, as Rime Isle abruptly gains a witch-cult and Skeldir becomes a cult hero who, like Ishtar, descends into the underworld to find aid. The story begins when Loki awakes for the first time since Rime Isle (the story). To avenge himself on the Mouser, Loki has him sink bodily into the ground. Essentially, this descent is the Mouser's journey into his own unconscious. After taking delight so often in abusing others, the Mouser finds himself pursued by the incarnation of Pain, Death's sister, whom at one point he msitakes for the shapeshifter who was the symbol of his past in The Mer-She. Moving through the earth at supernatural speeds (or having out-of-body experiences), the Gray Mouser returns inadvertently to the scenes of earlier adventures. His first stop is the underground chambers of the half-rat Hisvet, whom his sexual obsessions focused on in The Swords of Lankhmar. Watching her torment her serving-women, the Mouser recalls Freg, a lover whose memory he repressed because he had seduced her away from Fafhrd, then treated her badly. He is aroused by Hisvet's antics, but, while he watches, Pain catches up with him."​

She does something to him that could be pleasurable, but in such a way that it's actually an unendurable torment. This story is strangely and explicitly sexual compared to the rest, partly explained by the fact that none of the pulp magazines that used to publish Leiber were still functional at the time, they had all collapsed, and the only magazine that offered to publish him was a men's magazine. I'm not sure if they wanted him to make it more sexual, or if he just took the opportunity to do so. It's a bit shocking, but it makes sense since the ways the Mouser would torment his lovers was often sexual, but not written so explicitly. The whole thing makes a lot more sense if taken as a psycho-sexual vision or experience designed to replay some of the torments he inflicted on his former lovers, and turn the torment onto him instead.

In fact, at one point Death decided to fortify the Mouser against his evil sister's devices, which he did by taking some of Fafhrd's solidity and strength and gifting it to the Mouser. As a result, while the Mouser went below, Fafhrd found himself drifting upward, into the sky. A very strange and surreal episode. He was feeling light-headed as well as light-bodied, and decided to lighten ship in order to allow himself to drift upward more strongly. He dropped all his clothes and ejected more ballast by emptying his bladder enroute, while drifting naked through the sky. I believe he was drunk at the time too. Above the clouds he found a floating airship crewed by many of his own former lovers. So he was undergoing his own psycho-sexual odyssey, same as the Mouser. But his was a bit different. If I remember right, he wanted to please all these women, and he tried, but found it impossible and passed out in the attempt. The women ferried him down to the ground and staged a mock funeral, not really for Fafhrd, but for his—um—member. They each tied a colored ribbon around it and dumped him in nothing but a cloak on the ground.

Meanwhile, the Mouser, also passed out from the intense pain of what Pain did to him, wakes hundreds of miles away (apparently, unless these are dreamlike or imaginary episodes of incredible realism) looking into Quarmall, the underground kingdom. Finding himself once again a helpless and hapless observer he reflects:

"How characteristic of most of his life . . . to be on the outside in drenching rain or blasting snow or (like now) worse and looking in at a cosy abode of culture, comfort, companionship and couth—what man wouldn't turn to thieving and burglary when faced at every turn with such a fate?"
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But in this stage of his life, here on Rime Isle, he isn't an outsider anymore. He has companionship—more than just Fafhrd now. He overhears some people in Quarmall plotting against Fafhrd. For the sake of his friend, he has the resolve to get out of his underground predicament, which he wasn't capable of doing when it was only himself in danger. Because of this unselfish act, Loki's curse loses its power and he's able to remain on the surface.

After their twinned ordeals summing up their sexual lives and providing some karma for them (in the Mouser's case anyway), they both realize that sex is no longer the primary way they relate to women. They also both learn that they have adult children. The Mouser's liutenant Pshawri is his son by Freg, and a moon-priestess and ship's prostitute named Fingers (actually a teenaged girl, not quite an adult) is Fafhrd's daughter. These are quite sobering realizations of the kind that really turbo-charge maturity (if the person in question is ready for it).

I'm very close to the end of the book now (Witches of the Mind). Only four and a half pages left. There probably isn't any more about the Twain, but Leiber did write some of his best sci-fi (and maybe horror?) stories in this late period of his life. I may or may not cover that stuff, we'll see when I read it.

I should make it clear that—or at least my own understanding of these parallelled experiences is that—they were like dreams, in that neither one had any control over what he experienced or his own reactions. The events and reactions were pre-ordained just as they are in dreams, where we frequently do things we would never actually do in waking life. They were summations and reiterations of many of the choices the Twain had made as younger (and less mature) men, and of a type they would no longer make.

The events of The Mouser Goes Below are sort of a continuation and intensification of what happened in the previous story, The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars, in which both are overcome by what Leiber termed old-man obsessions—the Mouser for little worthless objects lying on the ground such as screws and walnut shells and pieces of frayed string or what he considers interesting pebbles, while at the same time Fafhrd becomes fascinated with the stars, and is always thinking about them, even when engaged in conversations with people or when indoors. To the extent that each becomes completely distracted and absent-minded. I forget what the reason was—it was some kind of curse put on them.

So, you've got the Mouser, the one who's closer to the ground to begin with, constantly looking down, and Fafhrd yearning toward the stars. Then in the next story the mouser actually goes underground—even farther downward than his attention went before, while Fafhrd goes sky-high. This is the way Leiber thinks—he'll either intensify an idea or maybe reverse it or play with it in some way and manage to make it fascinating. And of course, as always, if something happens to one of them, either the same happens to his partner or its opposite.

I've finally finished reading Witches of the Mind. I was right—there's no more mention of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, except to say that in his later years he was writing even more slowly than he always had, and was having trouble with his eyesight, and that The Mouser Goes Below took him five years to write. The two stories that did get discussed are Our Lady of Darkness and The Button Molder. I've read the former long ago, and bought it again recently in anticipation of delving into it once more. I remember being astonished by it in the 90's. One of those images that etched themselves indelibly into my mind was what he called a Scholar's Mistress. The protagonist was a young writer named Franz (only two letters different from Fritz, and also a very Germanic name) who was in mourning for his recently-deceased wife. Franz is irritated by a particular building that blocks his view of the stars, and Fritz had written in his Locus column that he was himself annoyed at that building, for that very reason. It sounds like Fafhrd's star-gazing was yet another autobiographical element (and makes me wonder if Harry Otto Fischer had confessed in a letter to an obsession with small objects he would find on the ground?).

Oh, but I was going to explain what a scholar's mistress is—it's a collection of books of horror and the supernatural that he keeps arrayed on his bed, on the side formerly occupied by his wife, that gives him a sense of comfort, as if she's still lying there. And it implies that since her death he's taking refuge entirely in reading, research, and writing, rather than engaging with life.

I want to write something up about the end of the book, but I need to mull it over a bit first. I might spew it out later tonight, or possibly tomorrow. Don't think it means this thread is over—now that I've finished the book I can begin to see the full shape of it—of Leiber's life (certain aspects of it anyway). Often at this point is when the more interesting ideas begin to roll in (that doesn't mean they will necessarily).

Now that it's clear stargazing was an interest of Leiber's (actually I already knew that, remember the earlier story where the protag had a telescope on his roof?) and conjectured that Harry Otto Fischer might have become fascinated with 'smalls' (small worthless objects found on the ground), I'm thinking more deeply into the fact that he first presented those ideas as old-man habits in The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars and then decided to physicalize them, by having the Mouser get sucked underground bodily and Fafhrd drift off (as his attention did) toward the stars. I don't really have anything else to say about it, just the fact that he took a habit of each of them and physicalized it in the way Cronenberg tends to do. I've written before on this blog about that—he would take an inner psychological condition and find a way to manifest it physically in the form of erupting mutating flesh or some other body horror mechanism.

I also want to go deeper into what I mentioned a little ways up on this page—that

the events of The Mouser Goes Below are like a dream made physically manifest in the waking lives of the protags.​

These things are very closely correlated. Actually he's been doing this all along. If you have your characters' Anima and Shadow figures materialize as living beings they encounter in waking life and must struggle with, you're already mixing dream and waking life. That was happening all throughout the series, as well as in his science fiction and horror stories. Robert Graves was definitely doing the same. A case might be made that Lovecraft did as well (I haven't really thought into that yet).

And in fact now I'm wondering if I didn't subconsciously pick up on all this while reading Leiber throughout my life. Maybe it's where I came up with the idea to do the same in the Beastseekers? If so it was entirely subliminal. I had no conscious awareness Leiber was doing any of that. Quite likely I at least picked up on the generally dreamlike/surreal elements in his work and that's what drew me to his writing.

The Mouser emerging from his underground ordeal and Fafhrd awakening on the cold hard ground after his mock funeral can both be described as rebirths, and that's what they both represent psychologically/maturity-wise. A rebirth is exactly what Campbell called the culmination of the Hero's Journey. I sort of left this off before and wanted to get it in real quick.

* * *​

"A compromise between the benign Anima and the earlier Anima/Shadow appears in Leiber's recent allusion-structured work. When Leiber fictionalizes his guilt over his wife's death, confrontations with the Anima/Shadow end with his protagonists overwhelmed by it, much as in the Sxities. Yet, starting with the 1977 novel Our Lady of Darkness, the Anima/Shadow becomes more complex as it merges with the concept of the Anima as a guide to the Self. Contrary to appearances, the Shadow and the Self are not contradictory archetypes in this instance. Although Our Lady of Darkness assigns the Shadow and the Self to seperate figures, as aspects of the Anima they work together. The guide to the Self urges the protagonist to confront the Shadow, and the confrontation with the Shadow drives him to realization of the Self. Both archetypes have a role in Individuation."
​

In Fritz Leiber and Eyes his son Justin suggests that, like Jorge Louis Borges or Thomas Pynchon, his father is exploring "The pollution of reality by dream, or of dream by reality." Without using the term Justin Leiber implies that his father creates a post-modernist structure. The novel consists of many diverse texts and oral narratives, including the journal of Weird Tales writer Clark Ashton Smith as well as the city directories and records the protagonist researches and the pile of occult and horror literature arrayed on his bed. The postmodernism comes from the fact that the novel raises the question of which narratives are trustworthy and which are not, and it rarely gives answers.

But while Our Lady of Darkness is as playful as postmodernism, its complexity is not an end in itself or a product of complete absurdity. Apparenlty Leiber's purpose was the exact opposite of postmodernism. He doesn't revel and glory in the confusion of labyrinthine narratives with no exit or meaning in sight—the protagonist completley rejects that approach. Franz Western is a fantasist who needs to clearly distinguish between fantasy and reality so he can mediate between them for others. Specifically he needs to lessen his reliance on the books and research materials that sustained him through his three years of grief.

Leiber invents a new metaphysics for modern times and the city in the form of a book called Megapolismancy, written at the turn of the century by an invented author, which suggests that the accumulation of people, concrete, and electricity is gradually creating daemonic paramental entities that can be controlled by the use of certain symbols. Apparenlty he did such a good job with it that many people into witchcraft and theosophy asked him when and how he made the discovery.

Franz Western, after overcoming his alcohol addiction and grief over his wife's death, wakes each morning and confronts the Sutro TV Tower (a real New York building), which he sees as a "demigoddess" that mediates between him and the universe. Well crap, that's a gigantic man-made mountain-woman-goddess much like Stardock. A sort of White Goddess. I'm getting strong Ghostbuster vibes here—a building that focuses and concentrates supernatural influences. It's also specifically an Anima figure. That's what they do is mediate between you and the world, and particularly between you and your inner world of the unconscious.

In this story and The Button Molder the protagonist decides in the end to try to connect with life and explore new experiences rather than languish in misery or the past.

"What is significant in Leiber's five decades of development is the way in which his circumstances and his reading constantly combine to give him a better understanding of his craft. Lovecraft's example helped Leiber to analyze himself during his crisis of confidence in the mid-1940s, and to identify the rudiments of his symbolism, then, when his ambivalence about his symbolism emerged, the timely publication of Graves' Seven Days in New Crete focused his misgivings and gave him something to react against. In much the same way, Leiber's discovery of Jung in the late 1950's justified his shift to personal cocnerns and extended his understading of his symbolism. When Leiber's recovery from grief in the mid-1970s interested him in Individuation, Campbell, DeQuincey, and Ibsen allowed him to present his symbolism by artful illusion, and to find still another new direction.

"This cross-influence of life and reading is not unique to Leiber, but what does seem unusual is how aware Leiber has been of the process. Many writers absorb literary and environmental influences unconsciously, so much so that they are afraid to analyze them too closely lest self-consciousness prevent them from writing. By contrast, Leiber seems to have used his fiction as the main instrument in a fifty year process of individuation. [...] In general, the more personal or painful his material has been, and the more he has struggled to control it, the greater his artistry has been. It is when he ignores or contradicts his attitudes, or responds to the market, that his fiction is usually at its weakest.

"This consciousness of his craft explains the sudden advances that Judith Merril observes in his work. Leiber defines himself as a thorough rather than a quick thinker, yet, once he becomes aware of his own tendencies, he realizes them quickly, and in a rather small number of works. As a consequence, he has paced developments in science fiction as no other writer has done. Even if Leiber was not worth studying for his own sake, he would still be an important figure because his development is a microcosm of the field's. Leiber and his chosen field have matured and become more literary together, and science fiction would lack some of the respect it has today without Leiber's quiet influence on better-known writers.

"Yet, despite the respect that he is held in, the science-fiction field has been slow to learn Leiber's greatest lesson: the artistry that is achieved through the manipulation of personal material. Not that readers need to know about the autobiography in Lieber's work, although the knowledge would enrich their reading, and autobiography is common enough in modern literature. [...] Despite the fact that science fiction regularly displaces the present into the future, or into imaginary worlds, those who love the field are often reluctant to investigate the ways in which the displacement is accomplished. Most readers are content to mumble about "sense of wonder" and "the willing suspension of disbelief," and I have heard too many writers express their dismay when they noticed that they were putting something of themselves into their works. Too often, the field has refused self-examination, and settled for a lack of characterization or, more recently, for a lack of original ideas. Aside from the pleasure that Leiber's work brings, its main value is its contrast to this lack of self-examination. For Leiber, more than any other science fiction writer, writing has been self-examination. In learning how to manipulate his experience into acceptable literary form, he has not only avoided the self-consciousness and posturing of those who are overly aware of style, but also gone a considerable distance towards showing that the structure and techniques of science fiction are simply a special case in the larger literary tradition."​

The other sci-fi story by Leiber I really liked (besides Our Lady of Darkness) was Gather, Darkness (and here we begin to see why the book of correspondence between Leiber and Lovecraft was called Writers of the Dark). It's been so long since I read it I could hardly remember anything, so I downloaded it and have started in on it. It's set in a furturistic technopolis run entirely by a class of techno-priests who have deliberately dumbed-down the populace into ignorant peasants so they alone can read or understand anything like science or technology or basic physics. On the first page one of the Brothers rebels and starts shouting at the crowd of dumb brute faces in the big square that they should seek freedom and knowledge and learn to engage in critical thinking—things they've been systematically deprived of by the Priesthood, which he says perhaps started out with the greatest of intentions but rapidly became drunk on its own power and control and now seeks only to maintain that at any cost. Under their bright crimson robes the priests have some sort of force field generator (Leiber uses much better words to describe it, never anything so drab and cliche) that activate with a bump of a flat hand against the center of the chest, inflating the robe out in a balloon shape and lifting the priest (if he so desires) into the air, protecting him from any physical force. Meanwhile, overshadowing the massive public square is the gigantic Cathedral, the seat of the technocratic government, the central building of which is a gigantic sculpture of the Almighty Automoton, the folds of his robes becoming the pillars of the cathedral beneath him. Shortly after the rogue priest (Brother Jarles) begins his rant, he notices a darkness looming overhead and all the dumb peasant eyes move upward in terror and shock. He spins and the god is leaning massively down, directly over him, its glowing halo lit powerfully and an arm extending straight toward him, from which a crackling lightning bolt emerges. But he's mysteriously saved by a pair of gigantic black hands clasped into a globe shape that forms around him.

A powerful beginning, and already we see the familiar concept of a building as a gigantic psychological figure (not apparently his own Anima in this case, but a sort of collective Shadow enforcer figure). Interesting that this one is male rather than female, doubtless in imitation of Christianity's (and Judaism's) insistence on the masculine father figure. Keep in mind Leiber spent some time as an Episcopalian minister, so he's once again writing from personal experience.

Another of the really cool things I vaguely remember is that the witches, who oppose the techno-priesthood with their nature-magic, all have familiars that accompany them—small goblinesqe homunculi that look something like little proto-humans. I don't remember them clearly, but it seems like they exhibit powerful supernatural traits and are closely related to their witch-mistresses in the manner of some other kind of psychological figure, showing actual physical damage when the witch is wounded emotionally, or something along those lines. Similar to the animal figures in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. I probably shouldn't have wirtten about them yet—the book is just getting to the point where they're showing up. So far a cadre of 'country priests' has entered the mega-city sanctuary (to the great distaste of the city-born and bred priests of the citadel) with tales of something like ghost-wolves that move like banks of mist or fog across fields and through darkness, but always fade when a light is aimed at them, or retreat somehow and refuse to be pinned down or clearly seen. These seem to be a slightly different form of the familiar-homunculi. The city-priests of course dismiss this as mere foolish superstitious dread, so common among country buffoons and bumpkins.

I just remembered there are also witches in His Dark Materials. I'd say offhand it draws heavily from Gather, Darkness. Plus there's technology in the Alethiometer and the Subtle Knife etc.

I was just looking at the cover pics at the top of the page and noticed how misty they all are. In fact it's done right—the Anima/Shadow figures on each cover are usually gigantic and seem to be rising from or emerging from the mist itself, as if projected onto the background. On the third cover (according to the way I arranged them)—Swords in the Mist—it's done exactly right, because the mist seen rising at the bottom of the image becomes the castle. The castle in the story is actually named Mist. This cements the connection between mist, fog, smoke etc and the unconscious mind, from which the various specters emerge. In fact it even connects architecture to the mist and presents them both as symbols of or mediums through which the contents of the unconscious can manifest.

That's something I hadn't thought of before—I wonder if the architecture, as well as elements of the landscape, is a part of the unconscious imagery? Since there are frequently buildings that represent gigantic Anima/Shadow figures in much the same way mountains and tents seem to, I'd say that's a pretty valid idea. And it isn't always old Gothic castles or ancient buildings—in Our Lady of Darkness it's a modern New York skyscraper. Though quite likely before that it was usually or always older buildings from an earlier age—perhaps a concept he took from Lovecraft? In Lovecraft it seems the horror usually comes from the ancient past or the depths of outer space, or underground, but as I've pointed out before, any archaeologist can tell you what comes from deeper underground also comes from farther in the past. So it seems the past and the depths of space are Lovecraft's chosen portals for the emergence of the Monsters of the Mind. He also used genetics, but that's a different symbol of the ancient past—one inside of us, encoded into our cells, rather than embedded in the earth. And yes, Lovecraft definitely drew from dream symbolism. One of his big influences was Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft even wrote stories called The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and Beyond the Wall of Sleep. Yes, I'd say he was very aware of putting dream symbols into his work. Poe was obviously also very dream-oriented. I wonder how many other writers of supernatural horror were? Doubtless quite a few, especially in the Gothic and Weird realm. It could be said that most if not all of Weird fiction was an exploration of "the contamination of dream by reality, or of reality by dream." Including Robert E Howard.

In a more general sense of course the underground, the depths of space, and the ancient past are all symbols of the unconscious. Things that come from underground, like things that emerge from the depths of a body of water, are quite frequently contents of the unconscious. I've recorded many dreams in which something that represents a thought-pattern of mine either emerges from or sinks into the ground or an ocean or a big lake. Sometimes I'm stepping over a very small creek in the woods (in a dream) and as I do it suddenly becomes much bigger and I find myself immersed completely in it. I remember a dream from way way back (probably adolescence) where I was sitting in a small rowboat with someone on a big lake at night and we began to see fish rise to the surface. They were small at first, very ordinary-looking, but they got bigger and more mysterious and frightening, until something massive and terrifying was starting to surface. The fish seemed to represnt ideas I had never encoutnered before, or some of the new experiences of adolescence/dawning adulthood.