Polaris – Lovecraft’s Dream City & Cosmic Reality Unraveled

Polaris Explained

Beneath the eerie glow of the North Star, reality unravels. In this mesmerizing adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Polaris, a sleepless narrator becomes haunted by dreams of a distant marble city—Olathoë—under siege. Night after night, he drifts between two worlds: one rooted in shadowy swamps, the other set amid ancient stone ramparts illuminated by an otherworldly starlight.

As the star Polaris “winks hideously like an insane watching eye,” the narrator grapples with the blurred line between dream and existence. In his dream-self, he ascends a watchtower to warn of an attack—only to succumb to sleep, dooming the city. Waking, he’s tormented by the conviction that his waking life may itself be the dream.

This story marks an early entry into Lovecraft’s dream-inspired mythos. It introduces the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the realm of Lomar, elements later woven into his broader cosmic lore.

Whether you're captivated by dream-haunted landscapes, cosmic melancholy, or Lovecraft’s deeper psychological currents—this video pulls you into a realm where the boundary between reality and reverie is dangerously thin.

• Polaris was written in 1918 and first published in December 1920 in the amateur journal The Philosopher.

• It’s the story that introduces Lovecraft’s fictional Pnakotic Manuscripts, as well as the dreamland realm of Lomar and the city of Olathoë.

• According to critics, Polaris reflects Lovecraft’s personal experiences during World War I—feelings of guilt and helplessness, mirrored in the narrator’s role as a watcher who fails to act.

• Readers and analysts often emphasize the story’s haunting ambiguity—did the narrator dream of Olathoë, or is his current life the dream? As one reader put it:

  “If both the past and the present are reality then the story reads more like a prototype of The Shadow out of Time.”