Beyond the Wall of Sleep Part 1 I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pauses 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 plural symbolism,
There are still a certain remainder whose mundane 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 when lost to terrestrial consciousness is indeed sojourning in another and incorporeal 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 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 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 intern,
Was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so incessantly.
His name,
As given on the records,
Was Joe Slater,
Or Slater,
And his appearance was that of the typical Tennyson,
Catskill Mountain region,
One of those strange,
Repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly vastness of a little-traveled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren.
Among these odd folk who correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South,
Law and morals are non-existent.
Joe Slater,
Who came to the fore in the early 1900s,
Was a man of the mind of a man who was non-existent,
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 front,
And from the decayed condition of his teeth,
The head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.
From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case.
This man,
A vagabond,
Hunter,
And trapper,
Had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates.
He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time,
And upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace.
Not that his form of language was at all unusual,
For he never spoke save in the debased étoile of his environment,
But the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness that none might listen without apprehension.
He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors,
And within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said,
Or at least all that had caused him to say what he did,
Relapsing into a bovine,
Half-amiable normality like that of the other hell-dwellers.
As Slater grew older,
It appeared,
His aberrations had gradually increased in frequency and violence.
Till about a month before his arrival at the institution had occurred,
The shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the authorities,
One day near noon,
After a profound sleep begun in a whisky debauch,
At about five of the previous afternoon,
The man had roused himself most suddenly with a manner so horrible and unearthly that they brought several neighbors to his cabin,
A filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as indescribable as himself,
Rushing out into the snow.
He had flung his arms aloft and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air,
All the while shouting his determination to reach some big,
Big cabin,
Brightness in the roof and walls and floor,
And the loud queer music far away.
As two men of moderate size sought to restrain him,
He had struggled with maniacal force and fury,
Screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain thing that shines and shakes and laughs.
At length,
After temporarily felling one of his detainers with a sudden blow,
He had flung himself upon the other in a demonic ecstasy of bloodthirstiness,
Shrieking fiendishly that he would jump high in the air,
Burn his way through anything that stopped him.
Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic,
And when the more courageous of them returned,
Peter was gone,
Leaving behind an unrecognizable,
Pulp-like thing that had been a living man but an hour before.
None of the Mountaineers had dared to pursue him,
And it is likely that they would have welcomed his death from the cold.
But when several mornings later they heard his screams from a distant ravine,
They realized that he had somehow managed to survive,
And that his removal,
In one way or another,
Would be necessary.
Then had followed an armed searching party,
Whose purpose,
Whatever it may have been originally,
Became that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom popular state troopers had by accident observed,
Then questioned,
And finally joined the seekers.
On the third day,
Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree,
And taken to Albany,
Where he was examined as soon as his senses returned.
To his examiners,
He told a simple story.
He had,
He said,
Gone to sleep one afternoon,
About sundown,
After drinking much,
Much liquor.
He had awaked to find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin.
The mangled corpse of his neighbor,
Peter Slater,
At his feet.
Horrified,
He had taken to the woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his crime.
Beyond these things,
He seemed to know nothing.
Could the expert questioning of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact?
Slater slept quietly,
And the next morning he wakened with no singular feature,
Save a certain alteration of expression.
Dr.
Barnard,
Watching the patient,
Thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality,
And in the flaccid lips an all-but-imperceptible tightening,
As if of intelligent determination.
But when questioned,
Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer,
And only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.
On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks.
After some show of uneasiness in sleep,
He burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him in a straitjacket.
The alienists listened with keen attention to his words,
Since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive,
Yet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbors.
Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes,
Babbling in his backwards 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 at him.
This vast,
Vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible wrong.
To kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire.
In order to reach it,
He said,
He would soar through the abysses of emptiness,
Burning every obstacle that stood in his way.
Thus ran his discourse,
Until with the greatest sadness he ceased.
The fire of madness died from his eyes,
And in dull wonder he looked at his questioners and asked why he was bound leather harness,
And did not restore it till night,
When he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his own volition.
For his own good,
The man had now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly,
Though he knew not why.
Within a week,
Two more attacks appeared,
But from them the doctors learned little.
On the source of Slater's visions,
They speculated at length.
For since he could neither read nor write,
And had apparently never heard a legend or fairy tale,
His gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable.
That it could not come from any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner.
He raved of things he did not understand and could not interpret,
Things which he claimed to have experienced,
But which he could not have learned through any normal or connected narration.
The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble,
Dreams whose vividness could,
For a time,
Completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man.
With due formality,
Slater was tried for murder,
Acquitted on the ground of insanity,
And committed to the institution wherein I held so humble a post.
I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream life,
And from this you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case.
He seemed to sense a certain friendliness in me,
Borne no doubt of the interest I could not conceal in the gentle manner in which I questioned him.
Not that he ever recognized me during his attacks,
When I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic word-pictures,
But he knew me in his quiet hours,
When he would sit by his barred window weaving baskets of straw and willow,
And perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he could never enjoy again.
His family never called to see him,
Probably it had found another temporary head,
After the manner of decadent mountain folk.
By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic conceptions of Joe Slater.
The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike,
But his glowing,
Titanic visions,
Though described in a barbarous and disjointed jargon,
Were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive.
How I often asked myself,
Could the imagination of a cat-skilled degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius?
How could any backwards dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium,
To the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension,
Something infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific colleagues?
And yet,
I could extract nothing definite from the man.
The sum of all my investigation was,
That in a kind of semi-lucid dream life,
Slater wandered or floated through the vast and prodigent valleys,
Meadows,
Gardens,
Cities,
And palaces of light,
In a region unbounded and unknown to man,
That there he was,
No peasant or degenerate,
But a creature of importance and vivid life,
Moving profoundly and dominantly,
And checked only by a certain deadly enemy,
Who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure,
Who did not appear to be of human shape,
Since Slater never referred to it as a man or even a thing.
This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong,
Which the maniac,
If maniac he were,
Yearned to avenge.
