Inspirations
Welcome to our first Key of Dreams post.
Some of you here may know us from our previous critically acclaimed immersive experiences (The Locksmith’s Dream) and others may be new but either way, welcome. I’m very excited about this project and looking forward to giving you a few insights as we travel this strange dreamscape together.
Horror fiction in general and weird fiction in particular have always been a deep rooted pleasure of mine. From reading Point Horror books with my cousin during summer holidays, watching scary movies with my mum and my teenage addiction to James Herbert and Steven King, horror has consistently been a part of my life. It has been my go-to comfort and solid companion.
““It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.””
When Ivan suggested an immersive theatrical project based on the works of Lovecraft and the weird fictions writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries - I leapt at it. I immersed myself in rereading the books I hadn’t picked up in years and devoured them. I listened to the audiobooks and podcasts while walking. I got excited.
But, the times we live in are very different to then. Attitudes often considered ‘normal’, of that period are at best problematic now and those that were already considered extreme are now abhorrent and rightly so. No matter how much we love the works of these people, we can’t entirely ignore this.
We do not share in the racist, sexist and xenophobic views that were held and expressed by these authors. I do however, appreciate their skill in the weird sphere and want to romp in the playground that they helped shape.
The Key of Dreams is inspired by a range of authors. While H. P. Lovecraft is almost certainly the author with the highest general name recognition, he is not the only author whose work we will be drawing on. We are also drawing on the works fellow resident of Providence, RI, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Welsh author Arthur Machen, British ghost story greats, Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James, and more.
Over the next few weeks, I want to spotlight a few of these authors. To tell you something of why they inspire me,
Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen was born in Monmouthshire and lived his early years not far from our beautiful venue at Treowen. Machen wrote some exceptionally well received stories including ‘The Great God Pan’ and ‘The White People.’ He also wrote The Bowmen, written in the first person narrative style as an eye-witness account of a supernatural incident at the Battle of Mons. While he did not write to deceive, the text was seen by many to be a true account of the events and gave rise to the legend of The Angel of Mons.
While some of his work can be quite tricky to read, and quite a slog to get though, Machen had a great desire to capture in literature "rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown" which he called ‘ecstasy’. Parts of his work, inspired Guillermo del Torro’s ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’
“There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper.”
Unlike Lovecraft, who was a staunchly sceptical of anything supernatural - regardless of what he wrote in his literature and experienced in dreams (but more of that another time), Machen had a fascination with the mystical. Raised in the Christian tradition but with interests in occultism and paganism, he read widely and became exceptionally knowledgeable in the fields of Alchemy, Kabbalah and Hermeticism. After the death of his wife, he became involved with the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn. He is cited as a pioneer of Psychogeography which is described as “exploration of urban environments that emphasises interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes,” which is evident in works like The Hill of Dreams and which Aleister Crowley (whom Machen hated), said they contained ‘majickal truth’.
Treowen
For the first Key of Dreams event, we will be back in Treowen, just 40 miles from where Machen grew up in Llanddewi Fach. It is stunningly beautiful, wild countryside, filled with history and folklore. Even closer to Treowen is the village of Trellech with its own strange and unusual history as recently documented by Matthew Green in his book Shadowlands. Treowen itself has a wonderfully deep history full of surprises, ambiguities and intrigue. While there are certainly plans to expand to different venues in the future, there are still so many stories of this place just waiting to be told.
As with Machen and other author’s in our list of inspirations, the weaving of real and imagined, of history, folklore and outright fiction is what excites us. The blurring of the boundary between what is real and what is created and a sense of apophenia, (Ivan will certainly speak of this at great depth another time!) how everything is connected. I delight in the idea of scratching the surface and finding another layer beneath and more beneath that and wondering how just deep it goes. That is the heart of the Key of Dreams.
