Name: Hypnos (1922), 14th Story in The Dream Cycle of H . P. Lovecraft
Uploaded: 2014-04-03T22:32:48.000Z
Duration: 19 min 29 s
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Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights,

The subjunctive

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,

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 frensy 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

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

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

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

Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection with

anything of the world as living men conceive it.

They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which

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,

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

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,

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,

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

demon 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

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

Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us;

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.