Hypnos (short story)

"Hypnos"
Author	H.P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror short story
Published in	The National Amateur
Publication date	1922

"Hypnos" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, penned in March 1922 and first published in the May 1923 issue of National Amateur.

Synopsis

Hypnos is a first-person narrative, written from the perspective of an unnamed character living in Kent and later London, England. The narrator writes that he fears sleep, and is resolved to write his story down lest it drive him further mad, regardless of what people think after reading it.

The narrator, a sculptor, recounts meeting a mysterious man in a railway station. The moment the man opened his "immense, sunken, and widely luminous eyes", the narrator knew that the stranger would become his friend-–"the only friend of one who had never possessed a friend before." In the eyes of the stranger, he witnessed important knowledge of the mysteries he always sought to learn.

From this point on, he would touch his friend and sculpt him daily. At night they would commence their adventures, exploring worlds beyond human comprehension. Over time, the narrator's companion begins speaking of using their ability to transcend into the unknown to rule the universe, via a set of drugs, a thought that scares the narrator (who disavows to the reader any such hubris).

Soon the narrator is off on a foray with his friend, travelling through a void that he explains is beyond human sensation. Passing through several barriers, eventually the narrator comes to one he cannot cross, though his friend does. Opening his "physical eyes", the narrator wakes up and awaits the return of his friend, who awakes severely shaken and reticent, warning only that they must avoid sleep at all cost.

From then on, with the aid of drugs, the two avoid sleep, as each time they succumb, they both seem to rapidly age and are plagued by nightmares that the narrator refuses to explain. The story ends with the narrator explaining that one night, his friend fell into a "deep-breathing sleep" and was impossible to arouse. The narrator shrieks, faints, and awakes surrounded by police and neighbours, who inform him he has never had a friend—all there is in the room is a statue of his friend, engraved with the Greek word: ΥΠΝΟΣ (Hypnos).

Significance

Lovecraft dedicated this story to his longtime friend Samuel Loveman, who featured in the dreams that inspired Lovecraft's "The Statement of Randolph Carter" and "Nyarlathotep". Loveman suggested it was the best thing Lovecraft had ever written up to that point in time, as mentioned by Lovecraft in a letter.^[1]

The plot-germ of the story is found in Lovecraft's commonplace book, in an early entry (#23) reading, "The man who would not sleep--dares not sleep--takes drugs to keep himself awake. Finally falls asleep--& something happens."^[2]

As in many of Lovecraft's writings, the terror and the world are unknowable. This fits in to Lovecraft's common themes as to the alien and hostile nature of the universe, infinity, and the futility of everything. Even at the end of the story, the fate and the narrator's relations themselves are left up to question, again, in keeping with Lovecraft's standard modus operandi.^[3]

Connections

The story ties into other stories by Lovecraft and associated writers:

The connection between the stars and a person, is also featured in Lovecraft's "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and "Polaris."
A few of the references to Greek sculpture also appear in his previous story "The Tree."
The use of a drug to venture through a barrier is also used in Lovecraft's "Ex Oblivione."
The use of drugs to experience strange worlds (to the detriment of the user) is also featured in Clark Ashton Smith's "Chain of Aforgomon" and Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos".

Notes

↑ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, Vol. 1, p. 176.
↑ H. P. Lovecraft, Miscellaneous Writings.
↑ H. P. Lovecraft, Letters to Alfred Galpin, pp. 75-79.

References

Lovecraft, Howard P. (2004) [1923]. "Hypnos". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dreams in the Witch House And Other Weird Stories (10th Corrected Printing ed.). 80 Strand, London: Penguin Classics. ISBN 0-14-243795-6. Definitive version.

External links

Works related to Hypnos at Wikisource
Hypnos public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Works by H. P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle

Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Case of Charles Dexter Ward The Whisperer in Darkness At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time

Short stories	"The Tomb" "Dagon" "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" "Polaris" "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" "Memory" "Old Bugs" "The Transition of Juan Romero" "The White Ship" "The Street" "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" "The Statement of Randolph Carter" "The Terrible Old Man" "The Tree" "The Cats of Ulthar" "The Temple" "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" "Celephaïs" "From Beyond" "Nyarlathotep" "The Picture in the House" "Ex Oblivione" "Sweet Ermengarde" "The Nameless City" "The Quest of Iranon" "The Moon-Bog" "The Outsider" "The Other Gods" "The Music of Erich Zann" "Herbert West–Reanimator" "Hypnos" "What the Moon Brings" "Azathoth" "The Hound" "The Lurking Fear" "The Rats in the Walls" "The Unnamable" "The Festival" "The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air" "The Call of Cthulhu" "Pickman's Model" "The Silver Key" "The Strange High House in the Mist" "The Colour Out of Space" "The Descendant" "History of the Necronomicon" "The Very Old Folk" "Ibid" "The Dunwich Horror" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"

Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" "The Curse of Yig" "The Mound" "Medusa's Coil" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Out of the Aeons" "The Tree on the Hill" "Till A’the Seas" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Thing in the Moonlight"

Juvenilia	"The Mystery of the Grave-Yard" "The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist"

Poetry	Fungi from Yuggoth

Essays	"Supernatural Horror in Literature" To Quebec and the Stars The Cancer of Superstition Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity

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