Beyond the Wall Of Sleep

I have often 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 permit 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 revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose
one afternoon in the winter of 1900-01, 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 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-traveled 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 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 I first 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.