Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American writer, poet, literary critic and essayist, recognized as one of the greatest writers of horror literature together with Edgar Allan Poe and considered by many to be one of the precursors of Anglo-American science fiction. His works, a contamination between horror, soft science fiction, dark fantasy and low fantasy, have often been described, even by himself, with the term weird fiction (where weird stands for "strange"), being recognized among the main origins of the modern literary genre of the new weird.
The Dreams in the Witch House is a short horror story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, first published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales. It represents a pinnacle of Lovecraft's later style, where he successfully bridges the gap between traditional Gothic horror and the emerging genre of science fiction. The story is set in the fictional, mist-shrouded city of Arkham, Massachusetts, a recurring location in the Cthulhu Mythos.
The narrative follows Walter Gilman, a student of mathematics and folklore at Miskatonic University. Driven by a morbid curiosity, Gilman rents a room in the "Witch House", a building rumored to have been the home of Keziah Mason, an old woman who escaped the Salem witch trials in 1692. Gilman is particularly interested in the house because of its strange architecture; the walls and ceilings are built at odd, non-Euclidean angles that seem to defy physical laws.
As Gilman delves deeper into his studies of quantum physics and higher dimensions, he begins to experience feverish dreams. In these nightmares, he is pulled through the sharp angles of his room into abysses of cosmic space, guided by the crone Keziah Mason and her familiar, Brown Jenkin-a grotesque, human-faced rat. The story suggests that what ancient legends called "witchcraft" was actually a primitive understanding of mathematics and the ability to travel through the fourth dimension.