The dream-quest of unknown Kadath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a horror novella by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was begun in the autumn of 1926 and drafted by 22 January 1927, and it was left unrevised and unpublished while he lived; an Arkham House edition followed in 1943.

The story belongs to the sequence of Lovecraft's work known as the Dream Cycle, and it is the longest of those stories and the longest of his works to feature Randolph Carter. Carter is a dreamer who has seen a city in the sunset three times and can no longer find it, so he sets out across the dreamlands to look for it. The journey is the book: he crosses the region of the dream world, is warned and helped by its inhabitants, and is told repeatedly that the city he is looking for is the preserve of the gods, who do not want visitors. The threats he meets as he goes, including the demon sultan Azathoth and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, belong to the same invented pantheon that runs through the rest of Lovecraft's fiction.

The novella has been reprinted many times, both on its own and in collections that pair it with The Silver Key and Through the Gates of the Silver Key.