Tonight we unseal the fourteenth vault in our 31 Nights of Lovecraft with The Thing in the Moonlight—not a story, but a dream. Lovecraft wrote it as a letter in 1927, describing a nightmare so vivid it clawed its way into fiction.

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In The Thing in the Moonlight, a dreamer named Howard Phillips finds himself trapped in a surreal nightmare—a reedy, fetid marsh beneath a gray autumn sky, haunted by a yellow tram car and two monstrous figures. One howls at the moon with a face like a white cone ending in a blood-red tentacle; the other drops to all fours and charges like a beast. Though he knows he’s dreaming, Phillips cannot wake. Each night, he returns to the same scene, fleeing the grotesque motorman and conductor, always alerting them, always running, and always asking: “God! When will I awaken?”

This eerie tale wasn’t originally written as a story—it was born from a vivid dream Lovecraft described in a 1927 letter to fellow writer Donald Wandrei. Years later, J. Chapman Miske discovered the letter and transformed it into a short story, adding only a few paragraphs to frame Lovecraft’s dream narrative. Published posthumously in Bizarre magazine in 1941, it’s a rare glimpse into Lovecraft’s subconscious—a raw, unfiltered nightmare that bypasses plot and logic to deliver pure, surreal dread. It’s one of the few stories where Lovecraft himself is the dreamer, blurring the line between author and apparition.

Thank you for listening in the dark with me 🖤