The Dreams in the Witch House is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft written in January/February 1932, it was first published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales. The story was probably inspired by the lecture The Size of the Universe given by Willem de Sitter which Lovecraft attended three months prior to writing the story. Several prominent motifs—including the geometry and curvature of space, and a deeper understanding of the nature of the universe through pure mathematics—are covered in de Sitter’s lecture. The idea of using higher dimensions of non-Euclidean space as short cuts through normal space can be traced to A. S. Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World which Lovecraft alludes to having read in his letters.

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The Dreams in the Witch House By H. P. Lovecraft

Synopsis

Walter Gilman, a student of mathematics and folklore at Miskatonic University, takes an attic room in “the Witch House”, a house in Arkham thought to be cursed. The first part of the story is an account of the history of the house, which once harboured Keziah Mason, an accused witch who disappeared mysteriously from a Salem jail in 1692. Gilman discovers that for the better part of two centuries many of its occupants have died prematurely.

The dimensions of Gilman’s attic room are unusual, and seem to conform to a kind of unearthly geometry. Gilman theorizes that the structure can enable travel from one plane or dimension to another.

Shortly after moving into the attic Gilman begins experiencing bizarre dreams, in which he seems to float without physical form through an otherworldly space of unearthly geometry and indescribable colors and sounds. Several times in his dreams he has nightly experiences involving Keziah Mason and her rat-bodied, human-faced familiar, Brown Jenkin, which he believes might not be dreams at all. In other dreams Gilman is taken to a city of the “Elder Things”

On May Eve (Walpurgis Night), Gilman dreams that Keziah and Brown Jenkin are sacrificing the kidnapped child in a bizarre ritual. He thwarts Keziah by strangling her, but the cursed rat manage to complete the ritual, then escapes into a triangular abyss.

Awakening, Gilman hears an unearthly sound that leaves him deaf. He tells fellow boarder Frank Elwood his horrific story. At night he starts screaming. Elwood running in Gilman’s room witnesses his horrible death.

EXTRA

“The Dreams in the Witch House” was made into a short segment for Showtime cable television’s Masters of Horror series, directed by Stuart Gordon, under the title H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch-House.

A much looser adaptation inspired by the tale was the the 2022 episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities directed by Catherine Hardwicke with Rupert Grint as Walter Gilman

The Dreams in the Witch House (DART production) - As is standard with DART productions, The Dreams in the Witch House is presented as a 1930s-style radio broadcast. Running to a total of 74 minutes

Point-and-click and RPG-adventure videogame based on The Dreams in the Witch House from Atom Brain Games