Beyond the Wall of Sleep

The Lovecraft Project:

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding.

The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Fiction. The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories.

There will be spoilers, of course.

—> You can read or listen to the short story for free here.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

The short story opens with a discussion on the power of dreams that is rather straightforward in its structure: unlike Polaris, who worked with the same subject matter by immersing us into the main character’s perspective – thus,  making the narrative mirror the disorienting effect of dreams – Beyond the Wall of Sleep prefers to “tell” rather than “show”. The narrator, therefore, explains in plain terms how dreams can serve as fickle gateways to other planes of existence, foreshadowing what is to come in a not-subtle manner.

The story is about a man named Joe Slater, who one day is dragged into the very same mental hospital the protagonist works in. This Slater – or Slaader, the narrator is unsure – is presented in an unfavorable light, if we’re using euphemisms here. Prejudice against natives is in full display, as the narrator calls Slater “repellent”, “primitive”, “barbaric”, “hideous”, and, of course, “dangerous”, besides saying that the man lived in a “filthy” cabin with “a family as indescribable as himself.” This indescribable, however, works more as a generic pejorative term, since as we can see the narrator has already proved to be fully able to describe the man with a very wide range of slurs.

There’s a good deal of determinism at work in the story, as Slater’s abhorrent nature is linked to the region he calls home: because his people lived in the mountains – the narrator explains with a matter-of-fact tone –, isolated from the civilized world, the “decadent mountain folk” devolved over the course of time, making their “general mental status […] below that of any other section of the native American people.”

And, even among this primitive, unimaginative people, who live in a “bovine, half-amiable” state – Lovecraft’s unrestrained racism would have given Bram Stoker a run for his money – Slater was still deemed a strange figure: he slept a lot and, when awake, used to talk about bizarre, “unearthly”  things that made his neighbors fear him even though they could not possibly begin to understand the content of his speeches.

Slater’s peculiar babblings – the narrator tells – quickly evolved into violent episodes, when he got into a mad frenzy and attacked those near him. Alienists are, then, summoned to diagnose the man and they argue that his dreams are the cause of his outbursts. Slater is so weak, with a mind so feeble that he can’t even sleep right, being easily overcome by his own dreams: “The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for a time completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man.”

The racism in Beyond the Wall of the Sleep is not something you can remove from the narrative without changing the story: the characterization of Slater as a biologically inferior man is the crux of the matter. As the protagonist explains, the thing that makes Slater’s case so interesting is precisely the contrast between his pitiful nature and the grandiloquence of his dreams: whereas he’s lesser in every way imaginable, his dreams are magnificent and awe-inspiring. The narrator’s obsession is all about figuring out how is it possible for such a hideous man to have access to such beautiful imagery: “The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous and disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive.”

In a bizarre turn of events, the protagonist reveals that he has conceived a machine that is able to read people’s minds: since “human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular motion, convertible into ether waves of radiant energy,” he just had to create a radio that could capture this motion and transmit it to another human being. If he says so, who we are to argue? The narrator, then, sets out to test this machine on Slater, and one day he actually succeeds.

Here, the Lovecraftian motif of the “unspeakable” makes the story a bit more interesting because it works against the narrator. Slater, after all, was incapable of fully conveying what he was experiencing in his dreams, lacking the cognitive and linguistic ability to translate the images into words. Therefore, when the protagonist gets to live the same dream and the word “indescribable” remains in the description, he shows that he’s just as inept as his patient.

In the dream, the narrator suddenly refers to Slater’s spirit as a “brother of light,” but any semblance of empathy or equality soon evaporates when the narrator wakes up and watches Slater’s eyes glowing in an odd blue light: in the dreamworld, they were brothers, because they were not themselves. When the protagonist describes that “an external influence” was taking hold of Slater’s body, he is saying that the hillman was never getting a glimpse of another life, but being possessed by another being entirely. The dream was not a window to a past life, but a door to another presence.

When this ethereal being speaks to the narrator, they mark the importance of the distinction, leaving no doubt as to how Slater should be regarded by us: “He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much of an animal, too little a man,” they explain, proving that ethereal beings from another realm can be as blatantly reactionary as the worst members of the human race.

Its speech rapidly grows to tackle matters of cosmic horror, however: the being talks about how the universe is filled with things that we puny humans cannot begin to comprehend – lest the knowledge turn us mad. Mad, however, is precisely what the protagonist’s superiors call Slater, dismissing the protagonist’s account of the events as the delirium of an overworked white man. The narrator, however, ends with a note, in which an astronomer talks about a new star – a star mentioned by the ethereal entity with the blue eyes – which should serve as final proof of the veracity of his tale.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep, therefore, is a poor follow-up to Polaris, offering a problematic story that is much more straightforward than its predecessor – losing part of its appeal in the process, as “straightforward” is not something you can usually call a dream – and much, much more racist as well.

January 21, 2025.