Hypnos

Hypnos
H.P. Lovecraft
1923
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 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 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 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