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watching eye which strives to convey some
strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.

 
B EYOND THE W ALL OF S LEEP
    This story probably dates to the spring of 1919. Lovecraft later remarked that it was inspired by an article in the New York Tribune (April 27, 1919) about the
     work of the New York State Constabulary in the Catskill Mountains. In that article, the name “Slater or Slahter” actually appears. Lovecraft had no personal knowledge of this region
     at this time (he would visit it years later), but he did know an aged poet, Jonathan E. Hoag (1831–1927), who lived in the area, and he may have gained some suggestions about its history
     and topography from Hoag. The story, first published in Pine Cones (October 1919), anticipates some features of “The Shadow out of Time.”
    I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.
    — SHAKESPEARE
    I HAVE FREQUENTLY 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 permits 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 reverie filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the winter of 1900–1901, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as
an interne 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-travelled 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 the 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 first I 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 ties exist; but from the baldness of his head in