Hypnos | Page 2

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 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 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
vacum beyond all thought and entity. 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. 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 frensy 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