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Writer's note:

“Do you think that dreams can be a message?” Alex asks Bryce this question at the end of Scene 4, after a particularly alarming nightmare. As many of you already know, the inspiration for this play was a dream, though not a nightmare. And it certainly felt like a message.

I started reading HP Lovecraft in college. A wonderful friend of mine introduced me to the world of cosmic horror; I had read a lot of adventure pulp stories while growing up, but the world of pulp horror was new. The “King in Yellow” stories of Robert W Chambers came next, and he introduced them to me via "Dungeons & Dragons", the role-playing game of some infamy, in an original adventure based on the story The Yellow Sign. In it, my character and his lady-love were the victims of the Stranger, the Grub-faced thing who arrives in darkness and corruption to reclaim the titular pendant, and take the sanity of those unfortunates who possess it. The images and impressions of that one gaming session have never left me, and as I later read the stories that inspired it, I was inexplicably attracted to the uncomfortable feeling that we don't know what lurks in the darkest corners of the cosmos.

Lovecraft cited Chambers as a major influence, and his unfortunate protagonists were often beset by madness as the result of exposure to cosmic realities, much in the same way as Chambers' characters. In the 130 years since these stories were written, the things that we fear have changed. No longer daunted by the prospect of death, no longer fearing the fires of hell, we seem to have become a culture that fears pain and suffering more than anything that might end it. But madness, the loss of our sense of control over our destinies, even if that destiny is oblivion, continues to haunt us, a shadow on the wall of our minds.

I don't remember the dream. I remember awakening with an urgent need to write it down, but it didn't have a plot, or events. It was merely the juxtaposition of two apparently warring ideas: faith and reason. By faith, I mean the general belief that the universe exists for a purpose, that there is something numinous, a higher level of reality that we only dimly perceive. Whether it is God, spirits or the matrix, it is hard to escape the sense that there must be a pattern to all this existence we experience. We perceive patterns in reality that seem to point to something more, but they are bafflingly difficult to interpret, almost as if those who created them enjoy puzzles, or wish to test us. On the other hand, the scientific revolution's appeal to pure reason has called into question all of these speculations, showing the mechanical and predictable nature of all that we can test. Thankfully, the universe makes sense and can be examined, but that does not mean that it was designed to be so. I cannot adequately make either of these arguments, and at my core I do not believe that argument will persuade many to change their view, or even that changing this view is necessary. What I found fascinating was that I could simultaneously hold both of these views in tension, and it somehow made sense. Had I gone mad?

Perhaps sanity is overrated. “Of course, that depends on a rather loose definition of 'insane'.” as Bryce later says. You can judge for yourself, now that you have seen my work.