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Beyond the Wall of Sleep Textbook Binding – June 1, 1943

by H.P. Lovecraft (Author)

8 ratings

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Publisher

Arkham House Pub
Publication date

June 1, 1943
ISBN-10

9997539710
ISBN-13

978-9997539717
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Product details

Publisher : Arkham House Pub (June 1, 1943)
ISBN-10 : 9997539710
ISBN-13 : 978-9997539717

Best Sellers Rank: #23,933,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #26,073 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Books)
- #313,428 in Horror Literature & Fiction

Customer Reviews:
8 ratings

Customer reviews

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4 star		29%
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2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star		21%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Jim Bradford

Be Careful: A Note About the Other Reviews

Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2012

Verified Purchase

This product is NOT the collection of stories and poetry referenced in the other reviews - it is merely a copy of the short story of the same name. The hardcover and leather-bound versions listed on Amazon are a completely different product altogether.

This story, in and of itself, is not bad, but there are collections of Lovecraft's works available for Kindle that contain Beyond the Wall of Sleep and many more that would be better suited for someone looking to pick up a good Kindle version of his work - and certainly more reasonably priced that a dollar for a single short story.

This is a great buy and definitely worth the price: H.P. Lovecraft The Complete Collection

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Mir Mubashir Khalid

Short & interesting

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

Lovecraft describes a story about a delusional and schizophrenic patient who see, feel things beyond imagination. Story dives into depth of that person's mind and his delirium.

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Glenn Russell

the gothic and the fantastic, a man who lived his short life as ...

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2015

Author of the horrific, the Gothic and the fantastic, a man who lived his short life as a recluse in his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island until his premature death at age 47, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” is H. P. Lovecraft’s (1890-1939) classic tale of a reality less visible than our everyday material world. A quote from the opening paragraph: “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.” With this statement from our narrator, a young intern at a mental hospital in the state of New York during the winter of 1900, we hear echoes of the shamanic worldview of many indigenous tribespeople and, more specifically, the dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines, that is, how the world of dreams is more enduring, more intense, more meaningful and, in terms of our vital spiritual life, more real than the ordinary world perceived by our senses.
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However, this general philosophic reflection only sets the stage for the tale’s unfolding; specifically, how a 40-year old mountaineer from the rustic, wild Catskill Mountains by the name of Joe Slater is brought to the mental hospital after he brutally murdered a neighbor in a fit of insane rage. Then, once at the hospital, Joe has his first episode of supercharged frenzy requiring four orderlies and a straitjacket. The narrator relates, “Slater raved for up to fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of great edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked him.” Since Joe Slater could neither read nor write, nor was he ever acquainted with legends or fairy tales, the doctors remained baffled as to the basis or root cause of Joe’s visions, concluding the source to be nothing more definite than “abnormal dreams.”

Let’s pause here and explore an alternate explanation developed by psychiatrist Carl Jung. As a young doctor, Jung came in contact with a patient in a mental institution whose lack of education was similar to Joe Slater, a patient who suffered from paranoid-schizophrenia and reported seeing the sun’s dangling phallus whose motion caused wind to blow on earth. As it turns out, this exact ‘phallus dangling from the sun’ imagery is part of the ancient Mithraic religion practiced by many Roman soldiers and having roots in ancient Egypt. Jung concluded such a strikingly similar vision reported by his patient and incorporated into the ancient religion of Mithras arise from a common deep-seated psychic source we all share as humans, a source Jung termed the collective unconscious.

Within the collective unconscious there are certain primal images or motifs, for example, the image of the dangling phallus, and such primal images Jung termed archetypes. And each of these archetypal primal image has its shadow side, a shadow side that can be negative, destructive, and very, very threatening. Thus, employing this Jungian interpretation, the mysterious blazing entity that shook, laughed, and mocked Joe Slater, could be viewed as the shadow of a primal archetype from the collective unconscious.

Returning to the tale, the narrator goes on to relate how Joe Slater is not only a passive recipient of dream images, including the recurring image of some hideous, tormenting being, but when entering the dream world, Joe becomes an active participant with an altered identity, that is, amazing as it might seem, Joe becomes himself a being of light. We read: “This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge. From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and the luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression was sustained by his frequent references to flying through space and burning all that impeded his progress.”

If this weird Lovecraft twist isn’t enough, the tale offers us much more: the narrator’s curiosity prompts him to ask if the light being inhabiting Joe Slater is attempting to directly communicate with him, the sensitive, hyper-perceptive and open-minded intern. Such curiosity prompts the narrator to unpack a long forgotten instrument he built back in his college days, a transmitting apparatus somewhat akin to a crude radio where he could, unbeknownst to the doctors or the authorities of the mental hospital, hook up to both Joe Slater’s head and his own head in order to possibly receive transmissions or some mysterious communications from the realm of light.

Of course, since the narrator will be conducting his experiments entirely in secret, he is very well aware he is crossing the line, that his hooking up his transmitting contraption to a mental patient’s head is highly unethical. But his curiosity is simply too strong for him to resist. One wonders if H .P. Lovecraft was making a statement about the moral and ethical integrity of people working around and with patients in mental hospitals, since, after all, when the author was a three year old boy, his own father entered a mental institution where he remained until his death five years later.

Anyway, the experiments are carried out. And the findings? I wouldn’t want to spoil by saying anything more specific, but I will note how the weirdness of this tale isn’t only ratcheted up one notch but, from this point forward, we as readers are provided a triple dose of weirdness; that’s right, three more unexpected twists and bizarre turns in the unfolding of the tale’s mysterious and astonishing happening to keep any fan of fantastic Gothic horror in suspense right up until the last sentence.

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Vintage Lovecraft

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2013

It combines the mystery, the sense of vast forces beyond homan control or imagining, the immanence of huge evil separated from out world by the thinnest of veils - all you expect from Mr. Lovecraft at his best.

Still, it's only one story, and to be had at no cost elsewhere on the net.

-- wiredweird

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J. Anderson

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on February 29, 2016

Classic horror fiction that has surely inspired some of our modern masters. Well worth the read.

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Kindle Customer

What?

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2012

A little confused. This is the audio version of ONE story...not a collection.
That being said....very good story and excellent narration. Five Stars

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Top reviews from other countries

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Paulo José Cavalcanti Holanda

Gostei/Nice

Reviewed in Brazil on July 19, 2014

Verified Purchase

Um dos primeiros textos de Lovecraft. Não é tão elaborado ou profundo na temática do horror quanto o Cthulhu Mithos, mas não deixa de ser uma boa leitura.

Among the first short stories of Lovecraft, Beyond the Wall of Sleep lacks the deeper and more elaborated constitution of the Cthulhu Mythos. Nonetheless, a good reading.

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