Beyond the Wall of Sleep
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written 1919
Published October 1919 in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6, p.
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. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial
consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from
the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after
waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We
may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not
necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend
them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence
on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the
winter of 1900-01, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an intern was
brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on
the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the
Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial peasant
stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-traveled
countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with
their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who
correspond exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are
non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of native
American people.
Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen, and who
was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidence of his perilous
disposition when I first beheld him. Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat
brawny frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy
blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth of
yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, since
among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist; but from the baldness of
his head in front, and from the decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down
as a man of about forty.
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From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case: this
man, a vagabond, hunter and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive
associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would
often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an
unimaginative populace. Not that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke
save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of
such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without apprehension. He himself was generally
as terrified and baffled as his auditors, and within an hour after awakening would forget all that
he had said, or at least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, hallamiable
normality like that of the other hilldwellers.
As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually increased in frequency
and violence; till about a month before his arrival at the institution had occurred the shocking
tragedy which caused his arrest by the authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep
begun in a whiskey debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself
most suddenly, with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought several neighbors to
his cabin - a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as indescribable as himself. Rushing out into
the snow, he had flung his arms aloft and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air;
the while shouting his determination to reach some "big, big cabin with brightness in the roof
and walls and floor and the loud queer music far away." As two men of moderate size sought to
restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his desire and need to
find and kill a certain "thing that shines and shakes and laughs." At length, after temporarily
felling one of his detainers with a sudden blow, he had flung himself upon the other in a
demoniac ecstasy of blood-thirstiness, shrieking fiendishly that he would "jump high in the air
and burn his way through anything that stopped him."
Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of them returned,
Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognizable pulp-like thing that had been a living man but
an hour before. None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue him, and it is likely that they
would have welcomed his death from the cold; but when several mornings later they heard his
screams from a distant ravine they realized that he had somehow managed to survive, and that
his removal in one way or another would be necessary. Then had followed an armed searchingparty,
whose purpose (whatever it may have been originally) became that of a sheriff's posse
after one of the seldom popular state troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and
finally joined the seekers.
On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken to the nearest
jail, where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his senses returned. To them he told a
simple story. He had, he said, gone to sleep one afternoon about sundown after drinking much
liquor. He had awakened to find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin,
the mangled corpse of his neighbor Peter Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods
in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his crime. Beyond these things
he seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert questioning of his interrogators bring out a
single additional fact.
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That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened with no singular feature save a
certain alteration of expression. Doctor Barnard, who had been watching the patient, thought he
noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality, and in the flaccid lips an all but
imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent determination. But when questioned, Slater relapsed
into the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer, and only reiterated what he had said on the
preceding day.
On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After some show of
uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of four
men were needed to bind him in a straightjacket. The alienists listened with keen attention to his
words, since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly
conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbors. Slater raved for upward of fifteen
minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of green edifices of light, oceans of space, strange
music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious
blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to
have done him a terrible wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In
order to reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle
that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest suddenness he ceased. The
fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder he looked at his questioners and asked
why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the leather harness and did not restore it till night,
when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his own volition, for his own good. The man
had now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly, though he knew not why.
Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned little. On the source
of Slater's visions they speculated at length, for since he could neither read nor write, and had
apparently never heard a legend or fairy-tale, his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That
it could not come from any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that
the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner. He raved of things he
did not understand and could not interpret; things which he claimed to have experienced, but
which he could not have learned through any normal or connected narration. The alienists soon
agreed that abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could
for a time completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due
formality Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and committed to the
institution wherein I held so humble a post.
I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream-life, and from this you may judge of
the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as soon as I had fully
ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed to sense a certain friendliness in me, born no doubt
of the interest I could not conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questioned him. Not that he
ever recognized me during his attacks, when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic
word-pictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours, when he would sit by his barred window
weaving baskets of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he could
never again enjoy. His family never called to see him; probably it had found another temporary
head, after the manner of decadent mountain folk.
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By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic conceptions
of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his
glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things
which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive How, I often asked myself, could
the stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a
lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of
those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious
delirium? More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before
me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something infinitely
beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific
colleagues.
And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my investigation was, that
in a kind of semi-corporeal dream-life Slater 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, and who did not appear to be of human
shape, since Slater never referred to it as a man, or as aught save a thing. This thing had done
Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to
avenge.
From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and the luminous
thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man was himself a luminous thing
of the same race as his enemy. This impression was sustained by his frequent references to flying
through space and burning all that impeded his progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated
in rustic words wholly inadequate to convey them, a circumstance which drove me to the
conclusion that if a dream world indeed existed, oral language was not its medium for the
transmission of thought. Could it be that the dream soul inhabiting this inferior body was
desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not
utter? Could it be that I was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the
mystery if I could but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians of these
things, for middle age is skeptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the head
of the institution had but lately warned me in his paternal way that I was overworking; that my
mind needed a rest.
It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular motion,
convertible into ether waves or radi ant energy like heat, light and electricity. This belief had
early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of
suitable apparatus, and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving
instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphy at that
crude, pre-radio period. These I had tested with a fellow-student, but achieving no result, had
soon packed them away with other scientific odds and ends for possible future use.
Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream-life of Joe Slater, I sought these instruments
again, and spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were complete once more I
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missed no opportunity for their trial. At each outburst of Slater's violence, I would fit the
transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own, constantly making delicate adjustments
for various hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how the
thought-impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in my brain,
but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them. Accordingly I continued my experiments,
though informing no one of their nature.
It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing occurred. As I look back across the
years I realize how unreal it seems, and sometimes wonder if old Doctor Fenton was not right
when he charged it all to my excited imagination. I recall that he listened with great kindness and
patience when I told him, but afterward gave me a nerve-powder and arranged for the half-year's
vacation on which I departed the next week.
That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent care he had
received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his mountain freedom that he
missed, or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique;
but at all events the flame of vitality flickered low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the
end, and as darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep.
I did not strap on the straightjacket as was customary when he slept, since I saw that he was too
feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder once more before passing away. But I
did place upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic "radio," hoping against hope for a
first and last message from the dream world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was
one nurse, a mediocre fellow who did not understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think to
inquire into my course. As the hours wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly in sleep, but I did
not disturb him. I myself, lulled by the rhythmical breathing of the healthy and the dying man,
must have nodded a little later.
The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and harmonic
ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand, while on my ravished sight burst the stupendous
spectacle ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire blazed effulgently
around the spot where I seemed to float in air, extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted
dome of indescribable splendor. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather,
supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains and graceful
valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes, covered with every lovely attribute of scenery
which my delighted eyes could conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal plastic
entity, which in consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that
my own brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to
me was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not
as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to me; just as it had been for uncounted eons
of eternity before, and would be for like eternities to come.
Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to
soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph,
for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping
forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether,
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that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We
floated thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around
us, as though some force were recalling me to earth - where I least wished to go. The form near
me seemed to feel a change also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and
itself prepared to quit the scene, fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of
the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous one and I
were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it would be the last time. The
sorry planet shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue
the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the hither stars to the very confines of infinity.
A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from my sudden
and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I saw the dying figure
on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking, though probably for the last time.
As I looked more closely, I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of color which had never
before been present. The lips, too, seemed unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the force
of a stronger character than had been Slater's. The whole face finally began to grow tense, and
the head turned restlessly with closed eyes.
I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged headband of my
telepathic "radio," intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to deliver. All at
once the head turned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank
amazement at what I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was
gazing at me with a pair of luminous, expanding eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have
deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was `visible in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt that
I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of high order.
At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed
my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly and was rewarded by the positive
knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed
rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of
conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary
English.
"Joe Slater is dead," came the soul-petrifying voice of an agency from beyond the wall of sleep.
My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly
gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. "He is better dead, for he was unfit
to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed
adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much an animal, too little a man;
yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover me, for the cosmic and planet
souls rightly should never meet. He has been in my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of
your terrestrial years.
"I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your
brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell
your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in
many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel
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empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the
worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that
crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its
extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!
"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence - you
who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Demon-Star It is to
meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly striven for eons, held back by bodily
encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance.
Watch me in the sky close by the Demon-Star.
"I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the coarse brains are
ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my only friend on this planet - the only soul to sense
and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again -
perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia,
perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some other form an eon hence, when the
solar system shall have been swept away."
At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, the pale eyes of the dreamer - or can I say dead
man? - commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed over to the couch and felt of his
wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell
open, disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a
blanket over the hideous face, and awakened the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to
my room. I had an instant and unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not
remember.
The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have merely set
down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. As I
have already admitted, my superior, old Doctor Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have
related. He vows that I was broken down with nervous strain, and badly in need of a long
vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professional honor
that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have come from the
crude hereditary folk-tales which circulated in even the most decadent of communities. All this
he tells me - yet I cannot forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you
think me a biased witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply
the climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from
the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Professor Garrett P. Serviss:
"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor Anderson of Edinburgh,
not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within twenty-four hours
the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded,
and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye."