The story begins by describing how the modern world has been stripped of imagination and belief in magic.

Every night for many years, the man gazes from his window upon the stars, until he comes over time to observe secret vistas unsuspected by normal humanity.

One night, the gulf between his world and the stars is bridged, and his mind ascends from his body out unto the boundless cosmos.

[2] Suggesting that his story would involve "material of the Arabian Nights type", he wrote that I shall defer to no modern critical canon, but shall frankly slip back through the centuries and become a myth-maker with that childish sincerity which no one but the earlier Dunsany has tried to achieve nowadays.

[3]Though Lovecraft likely never got past the 480-word fragment that survives, he later wrote a novella with a similar theme, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.