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We Should Have Asked for Directions: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics”
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on February 11, 2026
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics,” first published in the September 2022 issue of Sirenia Digest. You can also find it in Kiernan’s recent Bright Dead Star collection. Spoilers ahead!
Null: On a crimson sea, a dreamer pilots a dory over mountainous waves and monstrously deep troughs. Sunlight breaks so rarely through the storm-gray clouds that it’s become mythical. Featherless not-seagulls with leathery wings wheel overhead. He doesn’t know his name or that of the woman huddled in his dory, wrapped in tattered sailcloth. She asks if he’s trying to reach shore. He replies that he must be, for he’s come from somewhere and is going somewhere else.
Long ago, the woman lived in a yellow house overlooking the sea. She grew a vegetable garden, so the sun must have shone there. She imagines she traded her name for passage over the sea. Perhaps the dreamer did the same. He assures the woman of his boating expertise, though he’s not sure he’s telling the truth. For all the waves, the air’s windless. Wouldn’t a boatman have noticed that before?
Eines: The dreamer arrives at the cathedral-vast Pumphouse, all brick and wrought iron. He climbs a spiral staircase that rises through a “tireless labyrinth” of machinery. At the top, seven ancient men pore over schematics and blueprints. One complains that the dreamer’s late for his job standing watch. He apologizes and goes to windows overlooking a desert “scrubbed raw by long ages of scouring wind and parching drought.” Nimbostratus clouds flick violet lightning towards the barren ground. What, he wonders, could approach the Pumphouse unseen?
A woman appears beside him, who used to have the guard job. She responds with sarcastic vagueness to most questions, but says the desert was once an ocean. The Pumphouse masters found it inconvenient and risky, so drained it. The wind howls and the dreamer thinks of rain.
Zwei: The dreamer enters an old-fashioned movie theater, where he’s been many times. He sits beside the only other moviegoer, a woman with golden eyes and a wolfish smile. He wishes he’d chosen another seat. The movie begins. It shows the theater exterior, the dreamer entering, seating himself, watching himself watch himself on the screen. He thinks of Russian dolls, infinite regressions. The woman’s breath smells of raw meat. She says the film’s disconcerting at first, but gets better.
Onscreen, the woman becomes an actual wolf which devours the onscreen dreamer. The actual woman assures him it won’t “be anything like that.” On screen, the well-stuffed wolf trots out into the night. The woman assures him that this is where the movie gets good—he’ll enjoy it, she certainly does.
Drei: I drive through the Virginia Appalachians to reach a lake crossed by a limestone bridge. I talk with a floating black sphere; it explains now that there’s “no gender, no sexuality, no race…no religion…” There’s no desire, no dissatisfaction, no need for government, laws, police, or prisons. But when the sphere adds that there’s also no art, I object. People “outgrew both representation and abstraction… outgrew differences in point of view and experience,” without which there is no art, only “perfect global homogeneity.” The lake holds animals from all over the world. The sphere explains that “Anthropogenic biogeographic redistribution” and “habitat reformulation” have corrected evolution and plate tectonics’ failure to distribute resources and experiences evenly. “Sameness is salvation.”
I protest: Not everyone wants to live as “unfeeling black spheres in a homogenized world.” These people, says the sphere, are shown their error, sometimes through “humane somatic discard.” I look at the lake and wonder what’s across the bridge.
Vier: The narrator roams through a deserted town. He wears no watch, nor can he remember the year. Exhausted, he sits on a park bench. Nearby is an enormous live oak, under which the shadows are darker than night itself.
A nondescript dog follows him. It’s very chatty but can’t tell him what befell the town. The dreamer’s the first person the dog’s seen in ages. Can he help it access the canned dog food in the IGA? It also insists he stop looking at that live oak; something might be even hungrier than the dog. The dreamer agrees to go to the IGA.
Fünf: In a library lapsed into “genteel shabbiness” sit six men, including the dreamer. They meet regularly to listen to a true but weird story. The dreamer’s tale concerns a cryptid he discovered while researching the Beast of Gevaudan. He obtained an obscure volume describing a man-made monstrosity used by the Nazis. This “Judenhund” could sniff out Jews but would also kill non-Jews. Its hindbody looked like a greyhound’s. Its forebody had human arms and hands and a face with huge glowing violet eyes. Its other features were hidden under matted white hair, except for rows of sharklike teeth.
The dreamer has also heard of an unpublished account by an Austrian rabbi who immigrated to Israel, The Book of the White Hound. He hasn’t been able to access it yet. As proof of his story, the dreamer produces an eighty-year-old black-and-white photo…
Null: The dory runs aground on a rocky island. The dreamer and woman sit on the beach while not-seagulls wheel overhead. The woman holds a cigar box full of keepsakes: a plastic Virgin Mary, a silver medallion, an antique key. Though the dreamer apologizes for not landing near her home, the woman gives him her box. She discards her tatters and sheds her skin, to emerge as a praying mantis/jellyfish hybrid. It drifts away, leaving the dreamer contemplating the unclimbable black cliffs guarding the island’s interior. Perhaps he’s nameless because he’s only a ferryman. Taking the cigar box, he returns to his dory.
* * *
What’s Cyclopean: The dream sea is “the color of a cardinal’s feathers, the color of sindoor, of Turkey Red and the delicate petals of Remembrance Day poppies.”
The Degenerate Dutch: In a stuffy library, the dreamer tells the story of a Nazi monster created to hunt Jews (and anyone else who happened to be in the way).
Libronomicon:The future of the spheres has removed all books that might offend someone, anyone. Which, eventually, means removing all the books—all “memories of discrimination or slavery or colonialism or genocide or discovery or freedom or joy.”
Presumably this includes the books cited during the storytelling session: Le Démon Pâle: Le Récit d’un Soldat (ostensibly in German despite the title being French), and The Book of the White Hound.
Weirdbuilding: Are those leathery-winged creatures in the sky perhaps nightgaunts?
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I admire authors who can get something story-ish out of their dreams. Mine tend toward “late for a flight while stuck in an overflowing bathroom during the apocalypse,” with emphasis on the terrifyingly unusable toilet. My little corner of the Dreamlands is not the sort that a weird fiction author ought to get assigned, but I suspect that I’m better off not complaining to the management.
Kiernan’s travelogue has that same sense of being stuck in the middle, cut off from either assignment or resolution of goal. But the settings seem worthier of sharing. Dream stories will almost always be fundamentally mood pieces, but I like the way the different dreams interweave, echoing characters and fears and tropes in a way that feels both story-like and dreamlike. [ETA: Unlike Anne, below, it didn’t occur to me that the different dreams might belong to different dreamers. After some consideration, I find them interesting as aspects of the same set of anxieties and obsessions, and am sticking with the idea of one dreamer tossed from dream to dream.]
My first reference for dream stories is usually Lovecraft, who wrote snippets of actual dream, and the Dreamlands themselves—though of course he’s taking a page from Dunsany and Poe. These set the boundaries of what you can do with such a tale: you have to have enough logic for the paragraphs to hang together, but not so much that it stops being plausible as a dream (or a place that’s a source of dreams). You need continuity of mood and setting, but also the weird shifts that make dreams so wondrous and frightening.
Kieran manages that balance admirably. The pumphouse guard struggles with the same uncertain, maybe impossible sort of goal as the man at the tiller, but the pumphouse has also destroyed the sea he was navigating. The woman is an uncomfortable companion no matter where encountered, and regardless of whether she’s a wolf hanging over your shoulder or a mantis-jellyfish abandoning you on a desert island. You’ll never know where you’re going, or if the journey will end, or who you started out as. Emptiness, forgetfulness, endless repetition. And someone keeps counting in German in the background.
Religion weaves through the dream-places too: gospel stations in the “high places” of Appalachia, even in the face of a far-future sphere promising the destruction of all sources of difference (religion included alongside art). A rabbi records a Nazi “hound” with about as much resemblance to a dog as the Hounds of Tindalos.
Travelogues tell you about the places a traveler has gone. Usually, though, they include both landmarks and maps to find them, destinations and routes. Separate those out, and it’s hard to tell which is which. The dory can’t be following a route, because we will never know where it came from or where it meant to go, or even if such things exist. The pumphouse sits amid impassible desert. The Appalachians are unstuck in time. The storytelling library is in New York, but we never see the city out the windows. If you, too, are an oneironaut, you will learn nothing here about how to reach specific places or times. The best you can get is the reassurance that, if you find yourself in one of these dreams—and can remember anything from beyond the dream—you are there in company.
Anne’s Commentary
In their introduction to Bright Dead Star, Kiernan offers insight into two recurring features of their fiction: characters seeing psychiatrists and characters dreaming. About the dreams, they write:
“[My tales] are replete with dream. I would argue this technique isn’t some lazy shortcut to the mind of a character. They are, in the parlance of our computer-battered times, a hack, circumventing the firewall of the conscious mind so that we might access the chewy Tootsie Roll center.”
What a great metaphor. As a veteran Tootsie Pop fan, I know there are basically two kinds of Pop-eaters, those who patiently lick and/or suck away the hard candy coating and those who eventually just bite into the damn shell to free the chocolaty core. Kiernan visualizes the writer using dreams to crunch into a character’s unconscious mind. I’m visualizing the reverse, where the unconscious mind uses dream-tongues and dream teeth to subtly or explosively communicate with the conscious mind. Such a Tootsie Pop would be interactive candy for the adventurous, rather like Monty Python’s Spring Surprise sweetie. (Jump to the sketch titled “Crunchy Frog,” another fine confection manufactured by the Whizzo Chocolate Company.)
Ahem. And now for something incompletely different.
To “A Travelogue for Oneironautics,” Kiernan appends an author’s note. Themself an oneironaut or chronic “dream-sailor,” they often feature dreams in their fiction. Some, part of a longer narrative, are associated with a particular character. Others stand alone, as in “A Travelogue,” allowing readers to decide for themselves what the dreamer-protagonist’s “waking life” might be.
I take up that challenge.
The two “nulls” or “zeroes” bookend “Travelogue.” My guess is that their dreamer’s an avid boater. Maybe he sails on weekends, or takes his bass boat out to hook some big ones, though not as big as that snaky thing underneath his dream-dory. Maybe he’s single in waking life, but wishes he wasn’t, hence the woman who just shows up in his dory. Too bad she morphs into a mantis-jellyfish and slithers off, leaving him alone on the beach. Maybe the dreamer, though a ferryman, does have a name, say, Charon. Maybe his job’s to transport the dead from their little yellow houses to Hades. It’s a bitch of a job, especially if you fall in love with one of your passengers.
Dream “eines”: The real-life dreamer could be a Secret Service agent, or else a mall security guard. From the Pumphouse and Pumphouse masters he envisions, he’s a steampunk fan. He’s in a “What’s it all about” crisis re his career, possibly his whole life. He fanboys Daenerys Targaryen, hence the pale, white-haired, blue-eyed woman who joins him at the windows. The doorkeeper kid isn’t her son but some miscellaneous Targaryen, because you can’t love (or hate) just one.
Dream “zwei”: The real-life dreamer’s a fixture at repertory theaters: A film buff and/or snob. He even knows what a 35 mm Kinoton FP30ST projector is, and his heart beats to its click-click-click. He may be conflicted about his movie obsession, though, hence the way he finds himself watching a movie of himself watching the movie of himself, and so on in infinite regression. In real life, he’d never be brave enough to sit needlessly beside an unknown woman. That this woman turns out to be a maneater reflects his deepest fears. Or is she really only “drawn” as a maneater on screen? Meat-locker breath isn’t a good omen.
Dream “drei”: Here’s a change, a first-person dreamer. In real life, they’re into nature and environmentalism. Their favorite song is Lennon’s “Imagine,” but they wonder if its philosophy is workable. Not to the extremes the black sphere takes it! They’re also a Fahrenheit 451 fan, dream-revising the “Montag-Captain Beatty” conversational duel. They may want to escape over the bridge, but remember its guardrails are rusted out, and if one fell into that lake full of “anthropogenically redistributed” predators, game over.
Dream “vier”: The real life dreamer has watched too many shows about sole-survivors of the apocalypse. A Boy and His Dog might have made him ambivalent in his anxiety. A talking dog would make a good companion post-Armageddon, as long as you could keep it fed. Oops, another anxiety-driver.
Dream “fünf”: The RL dreamer could be a young academic approaching the horrors of an oral defense committee, hence the five other storytellers much older than he. Or he could be a tenured professor having a flashback dream. Walt Whitman’s not his favorite author. The dreamer should ditch his tired Bete du Gevaudan thesis for one about his Judenhund find. But what if the National Library of Israel won’t let him access The Book of the White Hound? This could reflect the dreamer’s struggles to access the Necronomicon or something.
That would be enough to give anyone nightmares.
Next week, join our new longread with Chapters 1-2 of Stephen Graham Jones’ Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark]
The post We Should Have Asked for Directions: Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics” appeared first on Reactor.
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