Are the Old Ones real?

I'm reading Illuminations, the new short story collection from Alan Moore. A lot of my answer to the questiin, "Are the Old Ones real?" can be found in one of the stories in that book. The book just came out this month, so I don't want to give away too much and spoil a whole story for people. I'll be careful.

In one of the stories, there's a small detail of a conversation between two characters about a metal ball that is a puzzle. One of the characters explains there is a whole story involved about some kind of lizard that can, essentially, go into extremely long term hibernation. Centuries of hibernation. And the puzzle of the ball is trying to figure out whether or not it's true that one of those lizards is sleeping inside the ball. The story is set in a world that isn't clearly identified, but there's enough description of things and oddities in interaction between characters that the reader can tell it's not our world. So do these lizards actually exist in that world? We don't know. It seems the characters don't know, either. Maybe they do, and maybe it's just a story to sell the balls. The point of meditating on the ball is to come to a point of understanding and accepting that there's no way of knowing whether or not the lizard really is in there, and it doesn't matter because knowing would change nothing.

There's a point later in the story when the character who explained all of this asks her companion a question, and rather than explain how the answer doesn't matter, he makes his point by asking her whether or not there's really a lizard sleeping in the ball.

For me, the Old Ones are like lizards in a ball. In fact, I'd say that same question is presented in different words just by considering what the stories tell us. Let's assume Azathoth is real, and that he really is dreaming our universe. Then are we real? Is our universe real? Can anything be real if it's all "just a dream"? These ideas aren't original to these stories. Is Vishnu dreaming the universe?

The Old Ones are like the possibility of the lizard in the ball in another way for me. Yes, I believe they are real. That doesn't mean the names and descriptions given in the stories are accurate. I feel the same way about deities from different religions throughout history. Is Hekate real? I say She is...but does She identify Herself by that name? Names tend to originate as descriptors. Do deities even see a need for having names, or do they accept that humans need something like "Angry One" to identify them as? 

The term "force of nature" is often used to mean things like hurricanes or earthquakes. I think deities may be something like that on another level. Forces of reality, forces of experience. And maybe humans, as a whole, just can't understand that yet. So we give them names and tell their stories in ways we can understand. Why did the people of the Hellenic city-states tell the stories of the beings often recognized as "the Greek gods" in so many different ways? Maybe because the details didn't matter as long as the point wasn't lost, because it never literally happened that way.

So does it matter if Yog-Sothoth exists in the mundane understanding of "real"? I don't think so. Do I believe the Lake Monster is physically swimming in the lake? Not at all. Do I believe she's real? Absolutely, and not just contained to a lake. She is water everywhere. It's just easier to refer the her as the Lake Monster.

The Old Ones, as the stories define them, can be inventions of human imagination, and they can also be "real".

The Old Ones were.

The Old Ones are.

The Old Ones always shall be.