Throughout Yharnam, the voices of the citizenry murmur and scream through locked doors and barred windows. Their words feel targeted, accusatory, laden with knowledge they shouldn't possess:
"We all know who's at fault. We know precisely who it is."
"It's all your fault!"
"Away, away!"
And upon entering the Hunter's Nightmare, a disembodied voice speaks—belonging to no visible character, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once:
"Curse the fiends, their children too, and their children forever true."
If Yharnam exists as Laurence's anesthesia nightmare—his consciousness processing the consequences of his choices—then these voices take on devastating clarity. They are not random mob dialogue. They are self-accusation given form.
In dream logic, the population of a nightmare often represents fragmented aspects of the dreamer's psyche. The Yharnamites, then, are not merely victims of the scourge—they are Laurence's guilt made manifest, speaking the truths his waking mind cannot bear to acknowledge:
"We all know who's at fault. We know precisely who it is." becomes the suppressed knowledge that he is responsible—that blood ministration, the scourge, the endless hunt all stem from his choices.
"It's all your fault!" is literal self-blame, the dreamer screaming at himself through the mouths of those he destroyed.
"Curse the fiends, their children too, and their children forever true" reflects the generational horror of what he unleashed—corruption that doesn't end with one death, one transformation, but spreads endlessly through bloodlines.
"Away, away!" is the desperate attempt to expel guilt, to push away responsibility—but in a nightmare, it always circles back.
This framework explains why the mob's rage feels so targeted, even though they've never seen the Paleblood Hunter before. In the dream's internal logic, they have seen you. They know who you are because they are you—fragments of conscience that recognize the source of their suffering.
Every cry of "Beast!" becomes double-edged: they're hunting beasts, yes, but they're also naming what Laurence became. The beast they hunt is the beast within him. The scourge they fear is the scourge he created.
The Surgery Altar scene, viewed through this lens, transforms from historical record to psychological horror. The Church dissecting Laurence's cadaver isn't merely what happened—it's his nightmare of being taken apart and examined by others, his body becoming the very source of corruption he unleashed while he can only watch, trapped in the moment of his own autopsy.
He is not the surgeon here—he is the subject, powerless. The creator of blood ministration has become its ultimate specimen, dissected by the very institution he founded.
If Edinburgh is a mad god's dream, and Yharnam is Laurence's, then the entire city becomes guilt architecture:
Gehrman's murmur—"Oh, Laurence... somebody help me..."—takes on new tragedy. He's not waiting for external rescue. He's trapped in the dreamer's nightmare, begging Laurence himself to wake up and end it. But the dreamer doesn't recognize his own voice.
When the Paleblood Hunter finally frees Gehrman—whether by accepting his mercy, refusing and taking his place, or transcending into a new form—it's Laurence keeping his promise at last. Not through recognition or reunion, but through the slow, agonizing process of remembering who he is, what he's done, and choosing to end the nightmare he created.
The voices of Yharnam never stop accusing.
Because guilt never sleeps.
It only dreams itself into cities, into hunts, into endless night.
And somewhere beneath the surgery altar, the cadaver remembers:
This was all your fault.
We know exactly.