Lovecraft, H P - Beyond The Wall Of Sleep

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 118.96KB 8 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 1919

Published October 1919 in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 2-10

I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the

occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they

belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint

and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences - Freud to the contrary with his

puerile symbolism - there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal

character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and

disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no

less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable

barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial

consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature

from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories

linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much,

yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows

such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our

waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our

truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or

merely virtual phenomenon.

It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one

afternoon in the winter of 1900-01, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I

served as an intern was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so

unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his

appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those

strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly

three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-traveled countryside has caused them to

sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately

placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond

exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-

existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of

native American people.

Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen, and

who was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidence of

his perilous disposition when I first beheld him. Though well above the middle stature,

and of somewhat brawny frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity

by the pale, sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and

never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip.

His age was unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Lovecraft, H P - Beyond The Wall Of Sleep.pdf

共8页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lovecraft, H P - Beyond The Wall Of Sleep

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: