Here’s a bit of fun for the summer. I’ve written a brief Lovecraftian story idea/outline, in the manner of the short entries in Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book. The challenge is to write a short story that fleshes it out and gives it a strong conclusion, much like the challenge that Lovecraft occasionally had from his ghost-writing commissioners. There may be prizes!

“A scientific or scholarly protagonist discovers that each person’s mind contains the trigger for each person’s exact date of death. This is due to the gradual layered accumulation of dream-memories over a lifetime. The human mind is born with only a certain finite capacity to retain and hold these faint and fleeting memories of past dreams, and when the mind is full of these — then death is swiftly triggered by making the body an ‘attractor’ for some form of evil or harm. But the protagonist creates a device to capture and siphon off his own dream-memories into bell-jars or some other storage devices, and by this he hopes for immortality.

Only after some months does he realise that he cannot contain his siphoned dream-memories in artificial vessels (they begin to fester and mingle there, and in doing so open up dimensional-portals which threaten to allow unspeakable hybrid dream-entities into the world, entities which he thinks he sees scratching and whispering at the glass of the bell-jars, etc). He decides that his festering dream-memories must be passed into the mind of another human, where he hopes they may be better contained. While researching how to do this, he is led to understand that it is only the balancing and calming factor of the faint dream-memories in the human mind that is keeping the human race from seeing the true cosmic horror of their situation in the universe. He has condemned himself to madness by removing too many of his dream-memories, but yet he cannot restore them (in their corrupted form) to his mind.

Can he accomplish the transfer of his now-diseased dream-memories into another, before his dream-memory deprived brain is engulfed by the shattering awareness of the nature of the horrors pressing against the glass of the bell-jars? And what will happen to the chosen recipient?”