The definitive version, with corrected text by S. T. Joshi, is published by Arkham House in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels and by Penguin Classics in The Dreams in the Witch-House and Other Weird Stories.

They tell Carter that nobody knows the location of Kadath, and warn him of great danger should he continue with his quest to reach the city and suggest that the gods purposefully stopped his visions.

Carter's knowledge of Dreamlands customs and languages makes his quest comparatively less risky than if done by an amateur, but he must consult entities with a dangerous reputation.

While seeking passage there, Carter is kidnapped by turbaned slavers, who take him to the moon and deliver him to horrible moon-beasts, the servants of malevolent god Nyarlathotep.

Nyarlathotep broods over his defeat within the halls of Kadath, mocking in anger the "mild gods of earth" whom he has snatched back from the sunset city.

Lovecraft included elements and characters from previous stories, many of which had been influenced by Lord Dunsany, in Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, though they are not always depicted consistently.

[9] Critics such as Will Murray and David E. Schultz, in fact, have suggested that The Dream-Quest is in effect a second attempt at completing the abandoned novel Azathoth.

[10] While the influence of the fantasies of Lord Dunsany on Lovecraft's Dream Cycle is often mentioned, Robert M. Price argues that a more direct model for The Dream-Quest is provided by the six Mars ("Barsoom") novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs that had been published by 1927.

[11] Elsewhere, Price maintains that L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was also a significant influence on The Dream-Quest, pointing out that in both books the main character chooses in the end to return "home" as the best place to be.

[12] The Dream-Quest has evoked a broad range of reactions, "some HPL enthusiasts finding it almost unreadable and others... comparing it to the Alice books and the fantasies of George MacDonald.

He expressed concern while writing it that "Randolph Carter's adventures may have reached the point of palling on the reader; or that the very plethora of weird imagery may have destroyed the power of any one image to produce the desired impression of strangeness.