“I began to have nightmares of the most hidous description, peopled with things which I called Night-Gaunts - a compound word of my own coinage. I used to draw them after waking (perhaps the idea of these figures came from an edition de luxe of Paradise Lost with illustrations by Doré, which I discovered one day in the parlor). In dreams they were wont to whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed, the while fretting & impelling me with their detestable tridents. It is fully fifteen years - aye, more - since I have seen a Night-Gaunt, but even now, when half-asleep & drifting vaguely along over a sea of childhood thoughts, I feel the thrill of fear… & instinctively struggle to keep awake.”
HPL, Selected Letters I 34-35
“I did not move, but transferred my perception from point to point at will. I occupied no space and had no form. I was only a consciousness, a perceptive presence. I recall a lively curiosity at the scene, and a tormenting struggle to recall its identity; for I felt that I had once known it well, and that if I could remember, I should be carried back to a very remote period - many thousand years, when something horrible had happened. Once I was almost on the verge of realisation, and was frantic with fear at the prospect, though I did not know what it was that I should recall.”
HPL, Selected Letters 1.62
“Several nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city - a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills.There was not a soul in this vast region of stone paved streets and marble walls and columns, and the numerous statues in the public places were of strange bearded men in robes the like whereof I have never seen before or since. I was, as I said, aware of this city visually. I was in it and around it. But certainly I had no corporeal existence. I saw, it seemed, everything at once; without the limitations of direction.”
(continues…)
HPL, Selected Letters 1,62
“What do we know of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and out notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy and life which lie at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.”
HPL, From Beyond
