| "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" | |
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| Short story by H. P. Lovecraft | |
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 Text available at Wikisource | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Publication | |
| Published in | Pine Cones |
| Publication type | Magazine |
| Publication date | October 1919 |
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is a science fiction short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1919 and first published in the amateur publication Pine Cones in October 1919. [1]
A former intern and a worker of a mental hospital relates his experience with Joe Slater, an inmate who died at the facility a few weeks after being confined as a criminally insane murderer. He describes Slater as a "typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region, who corresponds exactly with the 'white trash' of the South", for whom "laws and morals are nonexistent" and whose "general mental status is probably below that of any other native American people". Although Slater's crime was exceedingly brutal and unprovoked, he had an "absurd appearance of harmless stupidity" and the doctors guessed his age at about forty. During the third night of his confinement, Slater had the first of his "attacks". He burst out from an uneasy sleep and into a frenzy which was so violent that it took four orderlies to restrain and strait-jacket him. For nearly fifteen minutes he gave vent to an incredible rant. The words were in the voice and couched in the paltry vocabulary of Slater but the onlookers could construe from the inadequate language a vision 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 would soar through abysses of emptiness 'burning' every obstacle that stood in his way.
The ranting stopped as suddenly as it had started. This was the first of what would become nightly "attacks" of a similar nature. The peripheral otherworldly images of Slater's visions were different and more fantastic with each successive night, but always there was the central theme of the blazing entity and its revenge. The doctors were perplexed with Slater's case. Where did a backward man like Slater get such visions, when surely an illiterate rustic like him would have had little if any exposure to fairy tales or fantasy stories? Not that there were stories similar to Slater's. Why, too, was Slater dying?
As an undergraduate, the intern had built a device for two-way telepathic communication which he had tested with a fellow student with no result. The device was designed around his principle that thought was ultimately a form of radiant energy. Heedless of any ethics, he attached himself with Slater to the device as Slater lay near death. With the device switched on, he received a message from a light being whose experiences had been what were transmitted through Slater's medium. This being explained that, when not shackled to their physical bodies, all humans are light beings. The thought-message went on to explain that, as light beings within the realm of sleep, humans can experience the vistas of many planes and universes which remain unknown to waking awareness.
The intern understood that the light being would now become completely incorporeal, and finally undertake a last battle with its nemesis near Algol. Slater died then, and there were no further transmissions. That night an enormously bright star was discovered in the sky near Algol. Within a week it had dimmed to the luminosity of an ordinary star and in a few months it had become barely visible to the naked eye.
Lovecraft said the story was inspired by an April 27, 1919 article in the New York Tribune . Reporting on the New York state police, the article cited a family named Slater or Slahter as representative of the backwards Catskills population. [2]
The nova mentioned at the end of Lovecraft's story is a real star, a nova known as GK Persei; the quotation is from Garrett P. Serviss' Astronomy with the Naked Eye (1908). [2]
The title of the story may have been influenced by Ambrose Bierce's "Beyond the Wall"; Lovecraft was known to be reading Bierce in 1919. Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam , which concerns the concept of hereditary memory, contains the passage, "Nor...did any of my human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep." [2]
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" was first published in October 1919 in Pine Cones, an amateur journal edited by John Clinton Pryor. It was subsequently reprinted in The Fantasy Fan (October 1934) and Weird Tales (March 1938). [2]
The book Science-Fiction: The Early Years describes the concepts of both "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and "From Beyond" as "very interesting, despite stiff, immature writing." [3]
The Cthulhu Mythos is a mythopoeia and a shared fictional universe, originating in the works of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The term was coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent and protégé of Lovecraft, to identify the settings, tropes, and lore that were employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. The name "Cthulhu" derives from the central creature in Lovecraft's seminal short story "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928.
The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The British first edition was published by Chatto & Windus in 1895.
"The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928.
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"The Colour Out of Space" is a science fiction/horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in March 1927. In the tale, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of an area known by the locals as the "blasted heath" in the hills west of the fictional town of Arkham, Massachusetts. The narrator discovers that many years ago a meteorite crashed there, poisoning every living being nearby: vegetation grows large but foul-tasting, animals are driven mad and deformed into grotesque shapes, and the people go insane or die one by one.
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Beyond the Wall of Sleep is a collection of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories, poems and essays by American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was released in 1943 and was the second collection of Lovecraft's work published by Arkham House. 1,217 copies were printed. The volume is named for the Lovecraft short story "Beyond the Wall of Sleep".
Garrett Putnam Serviss was an American astronomer, popularizer of astronomy, and early science fiction writer. Serviss was born in Sharon Springs, New York and majored in science at Cornell University. He took a law degree at Columbia University but never worked as an attorney. Instead, in 1876 he joined the staff of The New York Sun newspaper, working as a journalist until 1892 under editor Charles Dana.
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Beyond Wall of Sleep public domain audiobook at LibriVox | International | |
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