Hypnos
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Mar 1922
Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. 5, pages 1-3.
Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men go to bed
daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the
result of ignorance of the danger.
- Baudelaire
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that
the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no
return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and
knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned phrensy into
mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was - my only friend, who led me and went
before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!
We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd of the vulgarly curious. He was
unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion which imparted to his slight black-clad body a strange
rigidity. I think he was then approaching forty years of age, for there were deep lines in the face, wan and
hollow-cheeked, but oval and actually beautiful; and touches of gray in the thick, waving hair and small
full beard which had once been of the deepest raven black. His brow was white as the marble of
Pentelicus, and of a height and breadth almost god-like.
I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's statue out of antique Hellas,
dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and
pressure of devastating years. And when he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black
eyes I knew he would be thenceforth my only friend - the only friend of one who had never possessed a
friend before - for I saw that such eyes must have looked fully upon the grandeur and the terror of realms
beyond normal consciousness and reality; realms which I had cherished in fancy, but vainly sought. So as
I drove the crowd away I told him he must come home with me and be my teacher and leader in
unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word. Afterward I found that his voice was
music - the music of deep viols and of crystalline spheres. We talked often in the night, and in the day,
when I chiseled busts of him and carved miniature heads in ivory to immortalize his different
expressions.
Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection with anything of the world
Hypnos by H. P. Lovecraft
as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and
consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in
certain forms of sleep - those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but
once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such
an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its
sardonic source when sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little and ignore it
mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has
said that all time and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has
done no more than suspect. I had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and
partly succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courted terrible and forbidden
dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old manor-house in hoary Kent.
Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments - inarticulateness. What I learned and saw
in those hours of impious exploration can never be told - for want of symbols or suggestions in any
language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations;
sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of
receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space - things
which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general
character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every period of revelation
some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and present, rushing aerially along
shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses, and occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and
typical obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds of vapors.
In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes together. When we were
together, my friend was always far ahead; I could comprehend his presence despite the absence of form
by a species of pictorial memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange light and
frightful with its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful cheeks, its burning eyes, its Olympian brow, and
its shadowing hair and growth of beard.
Of the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us the merest illusion. I know only
that there must have been something very singular involved, since we came at length to marvel why we
did not grow old. Our discourse was unholy, and always hideously ambitious - no god or daemon could
have aspired to discoveries and conquest like those which we planned in whispers. I shiver as I speak of
them, and dare not be explicit; though I will say that my friend once wrote on paper a wish which he
dared not utter with his tongue, and which made me burn the paper and look affrightedly out of the
window at the spangled night sky. I will hint - only hint - that he had designs which involved the
rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and the stars would move at his
command, and the destinies of all living things be his. I affirm - I swear - that I had no share in these
extreme aspirations. Anything my friend may have said or written to the contrary must be erroneous, for
I am no man of strength to risk the unmentionable spheres by which alone one might achieve success.
There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacua beyond
all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us;
Hypnos by H. P. Lovecraft
perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my
memory and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid
succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we had
previously known.
My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I could see
the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too-youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became
dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I
could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms
can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.
I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed. Struggling
anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream and opened my physical eyes to the tower studio in whose
opposite corner reclined the pallid and still unconscious form of my fellow dreamer, weirdly haggard and
wildly beautiful as the moon shed gold-green light on his marble features.
Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying heaven keep from my sight
and sound another thing like that which took place before me. I cannot tell you how he shrieked, or what
vistas of unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say that I
fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered and shook me in his phrensy for someone to keep away
the horror and desolation.
That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken, and portentous, my
friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must never venture within those realms again.
What he had seen, he dared not tell me; but he said from his wisdom that we must sleep as little as
possible, even if drugs were necessary to keep us awake. That he was right, I soon learned from the
unutterable fear which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed.
After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with a rapidity almost
shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten almost before one's eyes. Our mode of life
was now totally altered. Heretofore a recluse so far as I know - his true name and origin never having
passed his lips - my friend now became frantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not be alone, nor
would the company of a few persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of the most
general and boisterous sort; so that few assemblies of the young and gay were unknown to us.
Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly resented, but which my
friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he afraid to be out of doors alone when the
stars were shining, and if forced to this condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted
by some monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in the sky - it seemed to be
a different place at different times. On spring evenings it would be low in the northeast. In the summer it
would be nearly overhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest. In winter it would be in the east,
but mostly if in the small hours of morning.
Hypnos by H. P. Lovecraft
Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I connect this fear with
anything in particular; but then I began to see that he must be looking at a special spot on the celestial
vault whose position at different times corresponded to the direction of his glance - a spot roughly
marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.
We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days when we had sought to
plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and weak from our drugs, dissipations, and
nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of my friend had become snow-white. Our freedom
from long sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb more than an hour or two at a time to the
shadow which had now grown so frightful a menace.
Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to buy. My statues and
ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new materials, or energy to fashion them even
had I possessed them. We suffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathing
sleep from which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene now - the desolate, pitch-black garret
studio under the eaves with the rain beating down; the ticking of our lone clock; the fancied ticking of
our watches as they rested on the dressing-table; the creaking of some swaying shutter in a remote part of
the house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog and space; and, worst of all, the deep, steady, sinister
breathing of my friend on the couch - a rhythmical breathing which seemed to measure moments of
supernal fear and agony for his spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously
remote.
The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial impressions and associations
thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike somewhere - not ours, for that was not
a striking clock - and my morbid fancy found in this a new starting-point for idle wanderings. Clocks -
time - space - infinity - and then my fancy reverted to the locale as I reflected that even now, beyond the
roof and the fog and the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona
Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now
be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All at once my feverishly sensitive ears
seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds - a
low and damnably insistent whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the
northeast.
But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul such a seal of
fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions
which caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It was not what I heard, but what I saw; for in
that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained room there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of
horrible red-gold light - a shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed
only upon the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous
and strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal space and unshackled time,
when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those secret, innermost and forbidden caverns of
nightmare.
Hypnos by H. P. Lovecraft
And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep-sunken eyes open in terror, and the
thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and
flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark, teeming,
brain-shattering fear than all the rest of heaven and earth has ever revealed to me.
No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but as I followed the memoryface's
mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its source, the source whence also the whining came, I,
too, saw for an instant what it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking epilepsy which
brought the lodgers and the police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor
could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But
always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and
against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.
Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by the strange and hideous
thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which can mean nothing if not madness. They have
said, I know not for what reason, that I never had a friend; but that art, philosophy, and insanity had filled
all my tragic life. The lodgers and police on that night soothed me, and the doctor administered
something to quiet me, nor did anyone see what a nightmare event had taken place. My stricken friend
moved them to no pity, but what they found on the couch in the studio made them give me a praise which
sickened me, and now a fame which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald, gray-bearded, shriveled,
palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and praying to the object they found.
For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the thing which the shining
shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is all that remains of my friend; the friend who led me on
to madness and wreckage; a godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas could yield, young with the
youth that is outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and
dense locks waving and poppy-crowned. They say that that haunting memory-face is modeled from my
own, as it was at twenty-five; but upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica -
HYPNOS.