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 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 sort;

so that few assemblies of the young and gay were unknown to us.

Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly resented,

but which my friend considered a lesser evil than solitude.

Especially was he afraid to be out of doors alone when the stars were shining,

and if forced to this condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted by

some monstrous thing therein.

He did not always glance at the same place in the sky- it seemed to be a different place

at different times.

On spring evenings it would be low in the northeast.

In the summer it would be nearly overhead.

In the autumn it would be in the northwest.

In winter it would be in the east, but mostly if in the small hours of morning.

Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him.

Only after two years did I connect this fear with anything in particular;

but then I began to see that he must be looking at a special spot on the celestial vault whose

position at different times corresponded to the direction of his glance- a spot roughly

marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.

We now had a studio in London, never separating,

but never discussing the days when we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal

world.

We were aged and weak from our drugs, dissipations,

and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of my friend

had become snow-white.

Our freedom from long sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb more than an hour

or two at a time to the shadow which had now grown so frightful a menace.

Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to

buy.

My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new materials,

or energy to fashion them even had I possessed them.

We suffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank into

a deep-breathing sleep from which I could not awaken him.

I can recall the scene now- the desolate, pitch-black garret studio under the eaves

with the rain beating down; the ticking of our lone clock;

the fancied ticking of our watches as they rested on the dressing-table;

the creaking of some swaying shutter in a remote part of the house;

certain distant city noises muffled by fog and space;

and, worst of all,

the deep, steady,

sinister breathing of my friend on the couch- a rhythmical breathing which seemed to measure

moments of supernal fear and agony for his spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden,

unimagined, and hideously remote.

The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial impressions and

associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind.

I heard a clock strike somewhere- not ours, for that was not a striking clock- and my

morbid fancy found in this a new starting-point for idle wanderings.

Clocks- time- space- infinity- and then my fancy reverted to the locale as I reflected

that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the rain and

the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast.

Corona Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread,

and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now be glowing unseen through the

measureless abysses of aether.

All at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component

in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds- a low and damnably insistent whine from very

far away; droning,

clamoring, mocking,

calling, from the northeast.

But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul such

a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks and excited

the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to break down the door.

It was not what I heard, but what I saw;