What Are the Dreamlands?

The Dreamlands are a second geography this Archive tracks alongside the ordinary, waking one — a realm of cities, seas, and forests reached exclusively through sleep, first documented across a cluster of shorter chronicles and given its fullest account in the long chronicle The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. This office notes, for the record, that reaching a place only through dream is a difference in route, not a reason to doubt that the place exists; the localities below are filed with the same seriousness as Arkham or Innsmouth.

The recurring traveler through this territory is Randolph Carter, whose dossier this Archive maintains at length elsewhere. He is joined, at various points, by Nyarlathotep in one of his many guises, by Nodens, lord of the abyss, and by Atal — Ulthar's innkeeper's son, later its high priest, who appears at three separate ages across three separate chronicles.

Localities filed under this heading

Ulthar, the cat-keeping town where the killing of a cat is by law a capital offense; Celephaïs, ruled by the dreamer-king Kuranes; the sunless castle of Kadath itself, seat of the Great Ones; Cathuria, glimpsed only from a ship's rail; Hatheg-Kla, the mountain no one climbs and returns sane from; the Enchanted Wood and its Zoogs; the bone-strewn Vale of Pnath, home to the Ghasts; and the Moon's far side, territory of the Moon-beasts. Each has its own record below.

Chronicles set here

The White Ship, The Cats of Ulthar, Celephaïs, The Quest of Iranon, The Other Gods, The Strange High House in the Mist, and — the fullest single account — The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.