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You're built to win it. Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep.

Find us at snewscast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by Bronze and Stone. Tonight, we'll read the fantasy story,

Celefias, written by H.P. Lovecraft in 1920. In it, Koranese, the child of landed English Gentry, travels to the magical city of his childhood dreams after finding himself dispossessed in the contemporary city of London. The story contrasts the bleakness of earthly reality with the splendor of a vividly imagined world, emphasizing themes of escapism and nostalgia. Part of Lovecraft's dream cycle, It offers a poetic and haunting exploration of the power of dreams. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. your body into the softness of your bed. Now take a few deep breaths. In a dream, Karani saw the city in the valley and the sea coast beyond and the snowy peak overlooking the sea and thee-painted galley that sail out of the harbor toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by the name Koranis, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name, for he was the last of his family, and alone among the millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and to remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of the people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams, and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Karani's was not modern and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, Karani's sought for beauty alone.. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams. There are not many persons who know what wonders are open to them in the stories and visions of their youth. For when as children we listen and dream, we think but have formed thoughts. And when, as men, we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with life. But some of us awake in the night with strange fantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride white horses along the edges of thick forests. And then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise. Monese came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of the house where he had been born. The great stone house covered with ivy, where 13 generations of his ancestors had lived. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night, through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and along the long white road to the village. The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane. In the streets were spears of long grass and the window-pains on either side were filmily staring. Karene's had not lingered, but had plotted on as those summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons, for it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward the channel cliffs and it come to the end of things, to the precipice and the abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unacknowing emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unlit by the crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had urged him on over the precipice and into the gulf where he had floated down, down, down. Dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and laughing winged things that seem to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the city of the valley, glistening radiantly far, far below, with a background of sea and sky, and a snow-capped mountain near the shore. Karani's had awakened the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from his brief glance that it was none other than celiface, in the valley of Uthnorghai, beyond the Ternarian hills, where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour, one summer afternoon, very long ago, when he had slipped away from his nurse, and let the warm sea breeze low him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village. He had protested then when they had found him, wakened him and carried him home. For just as he was aroused, he had been about to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky. And now he was equally resentful of awakening, for he had found his fabulous city after 40 weary years. But three nights afterward, Karani's came again to Sellefeus. As before, he dreamed first of the village, and of the abyss down which one must float silently. Then, the rift appeared again, and he beheld the glittering minorats of the city,

and saw the graceful galleys riding at anchor in the blue harbor, and watched the ginkgo trees swaying in the sea breeze. But this time, he was not snatched away, settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently on the turf. He had indeed come back to the valley of Oothnargai and the splendid city of Celefais. Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers, walked Karanis over the bubbling Nurexa on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so many years ago. And through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the marble walls discolored, nor the polished bronze statues upon them tarnished. And Caronnie's saw that he need not tremble, lest the things he knew be vanished, for even the centuries on the ramparts were the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he entered the city, passed the bronze gates, and over the onyx pavements, the merchants and camel drivers greeted him as if he had never been away, and it was the same as the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the orchid-reathed priests told him that there is no time in oothnarchae, but only perpetual youth.

Then Karani's walked through the street of pillars to the seward wall, where gathered the traders and sailors, and strange men from the regions where the sea meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the bright harbor where the ripples sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where rode lightly the galleys from far places over the water. And he gazed also upon the mountain rising regly from the shore.

It's lower slopes. And he gazed also upon the mountain rising regly from the shore.

It's lower slopes green with swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky. More than ever, Karani swished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he had heard so many strange tales, and he saw it again the captain who had agreed to carry him so long ago. He found the man, Atheb, sitting on the same chest of spices he had sat upon before, and a Theeb seems not to realize that any time had passed. Then the two rode to a galley in a harbor, and giving orders to the Orsmann commenced to sail out into the billowy, serenarian sea that leads to the sky. For several days, they glided unrelatingly over the water till finally they came to the horizon where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleacy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel, Karani's could strange lands, and rivers, and cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine, which seemed never to lessen nor disappear. At length, a thief told him that their journey was near its end, and that they would soon enter the harbor of Serenian, the pink marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the west wind flows into the sky. But as the highest of the city's

Carvin towers came into sight, there was a sound somewhere in space and Karani's awakened in his London attic. For many months after that, Karani sought the marvelous city of Sellefeas and its skybound galleys in vain, and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and unheard of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find Oothnarkai beyond the tenarian hills. One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart. And strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders. And in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it. He found an ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys, two gigantic ever-to-have risen by human hands.

And of such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn, he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees. And when the sun rose, he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers. Green foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, Carvin Bridges red roofed pagodas, that he, for a moment, forgot celifais in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked down a white path toward a red-ed pagoda and would have questioned the people of that land about it, had he not found that there were no people there but only birds and bees and butterflies.

On another night, Coronis walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly and came to a tower window, overlooking a mighty plane and river lit by the full. And in the silent city that spread away from the riverbank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have descended and asked the way to Uthnarkai had not an aurora sputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of the city and the stagnation of the Reddy River. So, Karani sought fruitlessly for the marvelous city of Sellefais, and its galleys that sail to Sirenian in the sky. Meanwhile seeing many wonders and once barely escaping from the high priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery on the cold desert plateau of Lang. In time, he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day, he began to purposefully increase his periods of sleep. Once, he went to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence, and a violet-colored gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Quranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist. Quranes was now looking forward to his return to Minaret's studded celifais and increased the amount that he slept. But eventually, he could not sleep more than he did. One summer day he was turned out of his attic and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner.

And it was there that fulfillment came and he met the knights that had come from celifais to bear him thither forever. Handsome knights they were, a stride horses, and clad in shining armor, with tabards of cloth of gold curiously emplasened. So numerous were they, that Karani's almost mistook them for an army, but their leader told him they were sent in his honor, since it was he who had created Uthnar Gai in his dreams, in which account he was now to be appointed its chief god forevermore. Then they gave Karani's a horse and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the downs of Suri, and onward toward the region where Quranes and his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but as the writers went on, they seemed to gallop back through time. For whenever they pass through a village in the twilight, they saw only houses and villagers as trusser or men before him might have seen. And sometimes they saw nights on horseback with small companies of retainers. When it grew dark they traveled more swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village which Kurani's had seen alive in his childhood and asleep in his dreams. It was alive now and early villagers curtsied as the horsemen claddered down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dreams. Karani's had previously entered that abyss only at night and wondered what it would look like by day, so he watched as the column approached its rank. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice, a golden glare came somewhere out of the east and hid all the landscape in trapebrase. The viss was a seething chaos of rosy-hit and serrullian splendor, and invisible voices sang exultantly as the nightly entourage plunged over the edge and floated gracefully down, past glittering clouds and silvery coercations. Endlessly down the horsemen floated their chargers piling the ether as if galloping over golden sands.

And then the luminous vapors spread apart to reveal a greater brightness. The brightness of the city, celifias, and the sea coast beyond. and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the galee-painted galleys that sail out of the harbor toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. And Quranes reigned thereafter over Uthnurgy and all the neighboring regions of Dream, and held his court alternately in celifias and in the cloud- serenian he reigns there still and will reign

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