I am approaching the great altar, which is rayed like a starfish, hollowed and scooped out in the center, and filled with some red fluid (blood?). My attention wanders to the vast bas-relief cut on the wall behind this curious star-shaped altar, and with a thrill of unearthly and mind-chilling horror I recognize thereupon the ghastly likeness of that primordial jade image from the waters off Ponape—but ten thousand times more huge, and incredibly detailed, with almost photographic clarity—oh my God! The thought suddenly seizes me that it is a likeness done from a living model—I awake screaming, my throat raw, with my housekeeper clutching her kimono about her bosom and asking me if I am well. Well? I hardly know ... such dreams as this cannot originate in my mind ... unless put there by Another!
(DREAM 4; PERHAPS 3)
On another night, I find myself approaching a great monolithic temple on the summit of an immense height. It is again night, and an evil, sickly moon leers down through coiling medusa-mists ... people are all about me as I ascend the height—weeping, kneeling, huddled. They are not quite completely human—squat, hunched, anthropoid, with very much more body hair than is normal today, almost amounting to a pelt. There is a vaguely Asiatic look to them, lemon-yellow skin, slanted eyes black and liquid, prognathous jaws and heavy brow-ridges.
The worshipers are striving to avert some threatened doom or punishment, purhaps natural; and as I advance up the long slope (covered, I notice, with what looks like Jurassic conifers!), the ground shudders beneath my heel and thunder growls in the mist-veiled sky—suddenly, a line of black mountains on the horizon burst into flame, one by one! A range of volcanoes, sulfurously alit in sequence, like a row of candles ignited in turn by some unseen Hand! The people around me—or subhumans—are moaning some hellish, grunting litany—"Idh-yaa, Ythogtha; Cthulhu; Nug—”
Suddenly a crevice opens in the earth at my very feet—world deep, black as the Pit itself! It fills rapidly with gurgling slime and the hunched and moaning worshipers shrink back in nameless dread from the immense, wet, glistening, white, pulpy, worm-like—I can not stand it; I force myself awake ....
(DREAM 5)
In this dream I am descending slowly through graduated levels of green light, which grow steadily more dim; it is as if I am sinking (or being drawn down?) into the depths of the ocean. The sensation of cold wet darkness pressing upon me is stifling, oppressive ... then I am floating above a mounded plain of slick black mud. It is drowned in green-black gloom, and little is visible ... now I approach a truly immense crater or chasm in the ocean's floor ... I glide over the lip and descend, it seems, for a very long rime ... the crater seems to be miles deep ... the last vestiges of emerald light slowly fade into utter and abysmal blackness.
When at last I reach the floor of the great depression I can somehow see again—I think the oily ooze that covers the crater floor is dimly phosphorescent with decay or radioactivity ... now I am nearing a huge mound in the center of the crater ... it resolves gradually our of the all-but-impenetrable gloom ... it is a structure of some kind, but it has not the workmanship of human hands, the stone blocks are Cyclopean, and the rows of truncated pillars are ... it is the Temple of which I have dreamed, and dreamed, and dreamed, before! It is the House of Zoth-Ommog—oh Christ save me—that sickening light! Thar gloom-piercing light that blazes from the Elder Sign on the Door—No, damn you, I will not touch it ... remove it ... release ...—I must WAKE UP—
(DREAM 6 OR 7)
The drug that Wollstone prescribed has done me no good at all, I perceive, for I have now for seven consecutive nights dreamed the same dream, precisely identical in all respects: I am standing in my nightclothes on the beach at Wexton Pier on the outskirts of Santiago; I am shivering with the cold, but brimming with a weird and terrible exaltation ... clenched in my hands is a sheet of written matter—something I searched and searched for in the Copeland papers—the Invocation of the Yuggya—the Great Invocation from the damnable and loathsome copy of the Yuggya Chants that raving idiot Copeland purchased from the Lascar sailor on the San Francisco waterfront—oh, God, I am going to read it aloud—with a terrific effort of will that leaves me shaking and gasping with exhaustion, I wrench myself awake ... I must burn that copy of the Invocation—yes, and the filthy old book, too! I ... must ....
(DREAM 7; PERHAPS 6)
Tonight as I fell asleep, I passed into a very deep slumber as if drugged, although I have taken none of the prescription the last two nights, fearing the after-effects, which leave me lax and unresponsive and curiously lacking in will. ... From this heavy slumber I came gradually half-awake within my dream, and Someone was whispering to me in a soft, guttural, seductive voice—had been whispering to me for a long time before I wrenched myself half-awake—suddenly I awoke completely, found myself trembling before the wide-open window, incoherently repeating over and over, "No! No! I will not do it!"
But what was the window doing open? Surely, I closed and locked it before retiring—as I do every night, when the wind blows in from the sea ... and what was that slime or jelly smeared all over the window-sill—like slime from a snail-track, but if so, it was the very Father of all Snails ....
I must see a doctor—soon.
(DREAM 8)
My condition is steadily deteriorating; now, somnambulism is included among my symptoms, for Mrs. Wilkins says she has found me walking in my sleep seven times in the past week and a half, and once she found me lurching down the driveway toward the street ... I asked her (half-dreading to hear the answer), which direction was I heading? She says the Waterfront—toward the Pier.
I must burn that Invocation; and the horrible ancient book I copied it from; and I would to God I had not let the Directors persuade me to print that lengthy narrative from Copeland’s translation of the Zanthu Tablets or that hellishly suggestive excerpt from his Asian diary in the Journal of Pacific Antiquities! Why in God’s name didn't I tell them how much I know—I could at least have hinted at the mind-blasting TRUTH behind his cursed Xothic legend-cycle!
Some things we were not meant to know.
Some things it is ... dangerous to learn ....
Last night the Voice came again and whispered to me for hours as I lay half-conscious. ... Oh, I would like to see far Addith where the Metal Brains dwell, and Zaoth with its old books cut on plates of lagb metal from Yuggorh, books that predate the creation of the earth by thirty-seven million years. ... God help me, I would like to see primal and doom-fraught Mu before the Towers of Fire from Betelgeuze whelmed and trampled it down beneath the rolling waves ... the Yuggya can disembody my thought-lattice (they whisper) and set me free in time and space ... to visit Celaeno and Yith and Ymar, and horrible Shaggai ... but I will not be the agent of the Old Ones, nor burden my soul with the massive guilt of the slaughter of this planet ... which will certainly follow if I do Their bidding, and loose frightful Zoth-Ommog from his Deep ... Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy Name—