It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralyzing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, and in them there is not an abyss of agonizing cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest and most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.

—H.P. Lovecraft