Author of "Black Medicine," "Strange Tales From Santo Domingo," etc.
My fear is an intangible fear; yet to me it is terribly real. Reason tells me that my experiences are but the figments of realistic nightmares, while my inner consciousness tells me that what I have gone through has been something more than disordered imagining. I know, in my mind, that it has all been a dream, or a series of dreams.
Yet how can I explain to myself those strange red dots on my hands, my face, my neck?
These are very real. They are not hallucinations, for such of my friends as still come to see me at intervals have noted the dots and remarked upon their peculiar appearance.
This fact it is that is slowly but surely driving me to the very door of the insane asylum. Damn it, I know they have all been dreams! Yet dream creatures do not leave their marks upon the body of the dreamer.
But I had best go back and tell it all from the beginning.
I believe that from childhood I dreamed at intervals, widely spaced intervals, of a little secluded valley which had no location except in the recesses of my subconscious mind. It has always been a sunless valley, with a dark cloud hiding the sun. Miasmatic mists have hung like airy shrouds in the still air above the valley's floor. There has been no breeze in this valley, nor anything that lived or moved. The air has been good, freighted with a musty kind of perfume that has ever tantalized my sensitive nostrils; but it has always been air with a strange sort of chill to it that has ever caused me to waken shivering from my dream. I have called the place a valley, yet I do not know for sure that it is a valley, since only my imagination has walled the valley in. It is as though somewhere beyond the mists and the black cloud there were a circle of high hills which I cannot see, just beyond the reach of my vision.
Always, in my dream, I enter the valley through a narrow cleft in the walls of stone. I know it is a cleft, though I have never seen the walls, for countless times have I believed that, by putting forth my hands, I could have touched the walls on either hand—and I have always feared to put forth my hands, lest they encounter nothingness, and this knowledge of nothingness where I had expected walls might cause my mind to collapse with thoughts of wide immensities, or caverns, bottomless, on my right hand
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