Weekly Short Story: Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H.P. Lovecraft

After Edgar Allen Poe in the nineteenth century and before Stephen King and a plethora of successful horror fiction writers in the past one, there was H.P. Lovecraft, who in the early twentieth century wrote a number of short stories and novellas in this genre.  His tales were marked by an extraordinarily detailed and diverse imagination, with his descriptions of bizarre places and entities reading as if from one who experienced it all firsthand. One of my favorite short stories of his is Beyond the Wall of Sleep...

In 1901 there is a man incarcerated in a mental institution who had killed several people on a violent rampage.  It seems that this man, who is uneducated and ignorant, has recurring dreams of vivid and bright intensity in which he is flying among the stars and pursuing his enemy who had wronged him...although in his waking life on Earth he has no such adversary.  Upon awakening from these disturbing dreams, Joe Slater is extremely violent and speaks incoherently of the wonders he has experienced.  An intern there, interested in knowing exactly what Slater is experiencing but unclearly expressing, has invented an untested telepathic device and decides one night to surreptitiously connect his mind to the dreamer's...

Beyond the Wall of Sleep brings up a common theme in fiction of different genres: that dreams contain aspects of objective reality and truth, and are not just one's own subjective mental constructions.  And in our time we're accustomed to the notion of "hitching a ride" on another's dreams through the movie Inception.  The author combined these two ideas to create a window to an interstellar battle, although his scientific knowledge was sorely lacking: at one point an observer from Earth notes a simultaneous event near the star Algol, which happens to be 90 light-years distant...

H.P. Lovecraft writes in a highly ornate literary language, but his stories in essence are more like ghost tales told around a campfire...it's in this sense that I read his literature.  He can get a bit carried away with his descriptive language and can also be somewhat frantic about his storytelling, but it does have the effect of riveting the reader's attention.  Also, reading Lovecraft stories isn't a very big investment of time due to their brevity. And they are all now available in the public domain...here's a link to Beyond the Wall of Sleep: [link]...