Reading from The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, 2008, Del Ray, NY, pages 29-34, originally published in Weird Tales, February 1928

Men sit together on a “wide veranda,” looking out over “broad shadowy lawns” toward “the dim mountains that frame the eastern skyline” as night falls and a hot southern haze rises from the land. One gets the feeling of a boarding house for men. The scene is murky and atmospheric. The story of the dream snake is not.

Faming is a man there, sitting on his chair, starting wildly about as he tells his friends of the terrible dream that had haunted him since “babyhood.” Faming is known to be unimaginative and fears that his behavior will cause him to be locked up as a “lunatic” rather than have him judged eccentric.

The tale he then tells is of a reoccurring dream that he was a white man lording it over some ‘hindoo servant’ on an African plantation, and of a hideous monster that stalked him through those dreams.

At the very time Howard wrote, not far away from his Texas home, on the island nation of Haiti, white U.S. Marines were spending some time in Haiti enforcing stipulations of the Monroe Doctrine. Haiti had been a notoriously brutal white over brown over black slave nation that went down in a cataclysmic social upheaval, which Howard used as a model for numerous Kane and Conan stories.

There are black men alive today from Detroit and Chicago, who trace their lineage down the Mississippi to refugee ancestors from Haiti, and I have spoken to them. The nature of the French Revolution in the West Indies, from which Haiti rose as a troubled nation, was so horrific that the descendents of those who survived it even attribute supernatural agency to the fall of the famously cruel French Colony. Howard was either in contact with men who had travelled to or served in Haiti, or was working from Lothrop Stoddard’s classic history, The French Revolution in San Domingo. ‘The Curse Of Heaven’ Certain eccentric types were also beginning to travel to Haiti for a close to home 'safari' On Safari With A Boy Named Ford.

The Dream Snake is a story of racial guilt and vengeance for ancestral wrongs down through Time and across Space, and is central to Howard’s obsession with racial memory.