Short Story: The Dreams in the Witch House

Overview
"The Dreams in the Witch House" follows Walter Gilman, a poor mathematics student at Miskatonic University, who takes a cheap room in an infamous Arkham dwelling known to locals as the Witch House. The house has a history tied to Keziah Mason, a seventeenth-century accused witch reputed to have communed with inhuman entities. Gilman's rigorous study of non‑Euclidean geometry and higher-dimensional calculus becomes the hinge on which the story's terror turns, as abstract mathematics and archaic sorcery converge.
Lovecraft blends academic detail with folkloric menace, using Gilman's intellectual ambition as both a sympathetic trait and the seed of his doom. The narrative shifts between the precise language of angles and the hallucinatory imagery of dream-visions, building a sense that a logical pursuit can open doors best left shut.

Plot Summary
Gilman is driven by an obsession to reconcile impossible geometries, curves and angles that suggest spaces beyond ordinary three-dimensional intuition. As he works, his nights are invaded by vivid dreams in which esoteric diagrams, a cramped alley of a city not of Earth, and a ratlike familiar named Brown Jenkin appear with increasing insistence. The dreams seem at first like eccentric phantasmagoria, but they progressively map onto a consistent, terrifying logic: the Witch House itself sits at a nexus of weird angles that permit travel between dimensions when properly calculated.
His acquaintances notice changes: Gilman grows pale, secretive, and frantic. He discovers that the seventeenth-century Keziah Mason used similar knowledge to effect strange voyages and pacts, aided by Brown Jenkin and by rituals that combine mathematical formulae with arcane chants. As Gilman's nightly excursions deepen, he experiences encounters with an inhuman companion and glimpses of a monstrous, extra‑spatial intelligence that preys upon minds willing, or compelled, to understand it. The boundary between waking life and nightmare dissolves, and Gilman becomes both a scholar and a pilgrim to the alien geometry he studies.
The story reaches a climactic crescendo when Gilman attempts to use his knowledge to move beyond dreams into a direct, waking passage across the angles. The result is catastrophic: events escalate into violence and horror, leaving Gilman's fate ambiguous to some and grotesquely clear to others. Local authorities and university colleagues are left piecing together testimony, fragments of notes, and a scene that suggests something supernatural and monstrous occurred within and above the Witch House.

Themes and Style
Lovecraft interrogates the limits of human knowledge and the perils of intellectual hubris. Gilman's mathematical curiosity is portrayed sympathetically but also as the vector that invites cosmic indifference to intrude upon human life. The story frames geometry and higher-dimensional thought not as purely abstract tools but as potentially dangerous languages that can translate mere consciousness into a medium for otherworldly entities.
Atmospherically, Lovecraft fuses the technical with the uncanny: precise references to non‑Euclidean theorems and lecture-room routines sit alongside ancestral superstition and animalistic malignancy. The resulting tone is claustrophobic and inexorable; the reader senses that comprehension itself becomes a contagion that erodes sanity and uncanny order.

Aftermath and Legacy
"The Dreams in the Witch House" stands as a striking example of Lovecraft's ability to marry scientific curiosity to cosmic horror, turning mathematics into a plot device that both explains and deepens the mystery. The tale leaves lasting questions about the nature of reality and the price paid for glimpsing what lies beyond human perceptual frames. Its images, especially Brown Jenkin and the idea of geometries as gateways, have become emblematic of Lovecraftian fiction, influencing later writers and adaptations that explore the intersection of intellect, superstition, and the unknowable.