BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP was written before STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER but saw print after CARTER, both appearing in amateur zines before seeing reprint in WEIRD TALES. SLEEP is therefore the first true manifestation of HPL's great talent.
Herein the author first articulates his idea that human who experience dreams that suggest weird, transmundane realities are in truth tuned in to such cosmic abnormalities. The narrator is an employee at a mental asylum who just happens to be experimenting with a telepathy machine. He gets the chance of a lifetime when Joe Slater, a dirt-poor, uneducated Catskills man, is sent to the asylum for having killed one of his fellows in a moment of violent delirium.
The "alienist," as he is sometimes termed, is fascinated that an utterly ignorant specimen of "white trash" can relate "chaotic but cosmic word pictures." In particular Slater rants about beholding some malign entity, a "thing that shines and shakes and laughs," that seems to be his enemy, and that Slater feels "himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy." The alienist has no empathy for the confused mental patient, reflecting much of the author's contempt for Slater; the narrator just wants to get to the bottom of the mystery.
His early efforts are unsuccessful, but Slater takes a turn for the worse, apparently dying due to the "turmoil in his brain." It's at this point that the experimenter attaches his telepathy machine to both Slater and himself. Falling asleep, the alienist finds himself experiencing spectacular extraterrestrial planes of existence. He also communicates with a being of pure light, who purports to be "an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep." HPL may have derived this basic notion from occult concepts of "higher selves," though he ties the concept into SF-concepts such as time-travel and alien life, since the light-being's kind can also inhabit the dreams of creatures like "the insect-philosophers" from the fourth moon of Jupiter. The light-being concludes his colloquy with the narrator by expressing the hope that he will someday re-encounter the alienist in his light-form, but only after the light-being gains vengeance on his enemy, located out near "Algol, the Demon Star." The narrator wakes and finds Slater dead, and later hears of what seems to be a massive stellar explosion in the area of Algol.
Many commentators have talked about HPL's abhorrence for non-white races, and sometimes even for white ethnicities that the author considered decadent. I don't deny that he sported these racist views to make himself feel superior. Yet it's interesting that the first example of a wretched ethnicity in HPL's fiction-cosmos is lowborn "white trash," and the author treats Slater just as condescendingly as he would ever treat any other ethnic figure. Even when Slater is dead, the alienist can't resist commenting on his "hideous face" and "repulsively rotten fangs." In my opinion HPL was always separated from most of humanity thanks to his superb intellectual attainments, meaning that he related no better to most whites than he did to non-whites. Yet because HPL knew that he was of the same common clay as the most ignoble human being, and thus his fiction is filled with examples of his fear of degenerating into something inferior. (In Jungian terms Slater would be "the shadow" who incarnated that dominating fear of bodily devolution.) But in contrast to this trepidation, HPL poses the possibility of enchanting, ethereal vistas of the sort he experienced in his most cosmic dreams-- and SLEEP is notable for giving both sides equal symbolic representation.
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