Beyond The Wall Of Sleep
Topic: by Lenny
Nightmares in the Danvers Asylum.

All quotations taken from “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” by H.P. Lovecraft (1919).

I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences - Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism - there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier.

Growing up in Western Pennsylvania did nothing to prepare me for the oppressive North Atlantic Gothic character of the New England states. I have been in Providence, Rhode Island for five years. Like every other city in the country, Providence is in the business of turning its every square inch into a mall. The remaining depth of New England will soon be paved over, to make way for The Gap. Modern Culture thrives on this sanitation. Historical re-enactments are a thriving industry and all summer, up and down the Atlantic coast you will find students from Connecticut and Eastern Massachusetts dressed as pilgrims, grabbing a quick beer before they have to get back to the ship, selling images of clean scrubbed, G-rated colonists that never existed. Dreams of Disney Pilgrims do not betray the nightmares cultivated in New England’s collective unconscious.

H.P. Lovecraft’s stories often explore the intersection of nightmares and madness. This isn’t an academic exploration - Lovecraft had no formal education beyond High School. This is art, informed by Lovecraft’s intuitive grasp on the nightmares of the region.

Lovecraft, a lifelong residence of Providence, was a pale, quiet man who had some significant problems. His parents both died horrible deaths in Butler Hospital, which was, and still is, an insane asylum. Butler is adjacent to Swan Point Cemetery, Lovecraft’s final resting place. He liked to spend moonless nights walking down the hill from his mother’s apartment on Angell Street to Prospect Terrace, where the signal fires of the American Revolution could be seen from as far away as Boston, to the graveyard at the Cathedral of St. John. His mind racing, he would return to his desk and begin the creative act; channeling the vision and the voice of the subconscious the only way that his waking mind would allow.

It is a cool, warm night in June 2003. Thoughts of graveyards and ghosts accompanied me as I walk through the the grounds of the old Danvers State Hospital. There lies no doubt - among people that believe in this sort of thing - that the grounds and buildings here are haunted. Often Lovecraft would write about things so terrible that just one glimpse would strike a man mad. This is one of the few times in my life that I thought I just might see what he meant.

I am staring up at the Kirkbride building. The architecture is so gothic that it has to have been made for the movies. On the spot that now houses the main building of the asylum was once Hathorne House, birthplace of the infamous Johnathan Hathorne, who sentenced nineteen innocent people to the gallows and many more were left to die in jail. This happened in Salem Village, located at present-day Danvers, Massachusetts.

When Danvers State Hospital was established in 1878, it was a state-of-the art facility, whose every nuance - from its location to the architecture of the buildings - was chosen for its therapeutic qualities. One hundred and twenty-six years later, I find myself touring the cemetery grounds with a flashlight. The dead are but some remains of the noble dream of Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, the institution’s first superintendent. His stated goal was to give “the humblest of unfortunates” the same care that the best families of nearby Boston and Cambridge were afforded.

At each outburst… I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own, constantly making delicate adjustments… accordingly I continued my experiments, though informing no one of their nature.

With time, such care came to include lobotomy, electroshock and hydrotherapy.

By the 1950s, the institution housed upwards of twenty-six hundred patients, though its capacity was originally six hundred. Twenty-six hundred people who were all dreaming of escape, of a vivid life, moving proudly. Could they forget the asylum, even in their dreams? Or did dreams turn to nightmares when invaded by a certain deadly enemy?

The sum of all my investigation was, that in a kind of semi-corporeal dream-life… [he] wandered or floated through resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities, and palaces of light, in a region unbounded and unknown to man; that there he was no peasant or degenerate, but a creature of importance and vivid life, moving proudly and dominantly, and checked only by a certain deadly enemy, who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure...

In 1992 came the closure of the Danvers asylum. The National Guard helped transport the last of the patients to their new homes, mostly smaller, residential facilities, as is now the norm. The age of the “insane asylum” is by all definitions over. It is said that when Danvers closed down many of its ex-residents, the ones with nowhere else to go, would return to wander the empty grounds.

I find a spot on the ground and sit down. As I look around, I try to imagine what it would be like to be imprisoned here, to live under these gray skies and eventually die, only to be noted on a small, round marker with no name, only a number. It has been over ten years since the facility was closed. The buildings are scheduled for demolition. What will they put here in its place? A strip mall? Will the people there also dream of escape?

Providence, RI
July 2003