Dreams in the Witch House

Dreams in the Witch House is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, part of the Cthulhu Mythos cycle of horror fiction. 


Walter Gilman, a student of mathematics and folklore at Miskatonic University, rents an attic room in the "Witch House," a house in Arkham that is rumored to be cursed. The first part of the story is an account of the house's history. The house 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 the attic's 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. Among the elements, both organic and inorganic, he perceives shapes that he innately recognizes as entities which appear and disappear instantaneously and at random. Several times, his dreaming-self encounters bizarre clusters of "iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles," as well as a rapidly changing polyhedral-figure, both of which appear sapient.


Gilman also has nightly experiences involving Keziah Mason and her rat-bodied, human-faced familiar, Brown Jenkin, which he believes are not dreams at all. In other dreams, Gilman is taken to a city of the "Elder Things" and even brings back evidence that he has actually been there—a miniature statue of an "Elder Thing" which he breaks off from a balustrade within the city. The statue is made of unknown materials and a strange kind of alloy. Gilman also finds an inexplicable urge to return to the remote worlds visited in the dreams.


Gilman's odd experiences seem to escalate as he dreams that he signs the "Book of Azathoth" under the commands of Keziah, Brown Jenkin, and the infamous "Black Man" (a form of the malign Nyarlathotep, which is, like Azathoth, a deity in the fictional world of the Cthulhu Mythos). Gilman is later taken to Azathoth's throne at the "Center of Chaos" by this group and is even forced to be an accomplice in the kidnapping of an infant. He awakes to find mud on his feet and the news of his involved kidnapping in the city's newspaper.