Mind Out of Time:

Identity, Perception,
and the Fourth Dimension
in H. P. Lovecraft’s
“The Shadow Out of Time” and
“The Dreams in the Witch House”

Paul Halpern and Michael C. LaBossiere

Distilling Horror from Modern Science

■■ In recent decades, the later works of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) are

particularly noteworthy for their incorporation of scientific and philosophical
ideas into horrific tales. In the tradition of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe
and H. G. Wells, Lovecraft came to find that connections with science lent
realism to his imaginative tales, drawing readers in and then jolting them with
his conclusions. Lovecraft lived in a time of startling transition in the world
of science. His personal outlook was profoundly affected by the introduction
of elements such as probability and relative perspectives in physics. Uniquely
for his time, he saw that chaotic undercurrents in relativity, quantum physics,
non-Euclidean geometry and related subjects would offer new avenues for
terrifying readers while exploring questions of perception and identity. He was
one of the first to introduce the concept of hyperspace to literature (Leiber).

Extrapolation, Vol. 50, No. 3 © 2009 by The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College

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Examining two of Lovecraft’s tales published in the 1930s, “The Shadow

Out of Time” (1936) and “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1933), we will
demonstrate how he remarkably weaves the scientific and philosophical
discourse of the age into riveting narratives of horror lurking beyond. Perhaps
it is because he found the ideas of modern physics alien to commonplace
experience he had the insight to employ them as means toward eliciting fright.
Interwoven among the scientific references in Lovecraft’s stories are ample
connections to the occult. “The Dreams in the Witch House” includes a witch,
a malign familiar and many stock elements of classic supernatural horror tales.
“The Shadow Out of Time” involves an exchange of minds. During the Golden
Age, many scholars derided such a mixture of science and what was called
pseudoscience. We argue this interplay provides a vital time capsule of the
belief system of the times, the mingled presence of these elements offering an
indication of how many thinkers of his day (such as Theosophists and members
of the Society for Psychical Research) believed in supernatural events and
thought they would eventually become embraced by a new kind of science.
Lovecraft takes a different approach in his stories. Rather than having sci-
ence expand its boundaries to include genuine supernatural phenomena through
brand new theories, the alleged supernatural phenomena are instead accounted
for in scientific terms through existing models of nature. Thus, science is not
so much embracing the supernatural as reducing it to a manifestation of the
natural. Lovecraft’s fascinating approach to science and the supernatural is
further illustrated by the fact that he reverses the usual technique for ghostly
fright. Rather than breaking the laws of science with supernatural means and
thus generating fear, he creates a feeling of horror by showing that the common
sense views of physics and nature (that is, the old Newtonian views) are the
comforting fantasy. In contrast, the counterintuitive “new physics,” the true
scientific reality, provides the source of horror.
This essay does not provide a broad reading of Lovecraft (which would
result in a work that would rival a shoggoth in size) but rather shows how he
applied concepts in modern physics and philosophy, along with supernatural
elements, in his stories of alien horror. We will examine how Lovecraft may
have been influenced by Russell, Santayana, Einstein and other contemporary
philosophers and scientists in his efforts to use contrasts between the solidity
of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics and the malleability of non-
Euclidean geometry and modern physics to generate scenarios of terror. Yet at
the same time, Lovecraft was equally comfortable injecting what many would
call pseudoscience into his tales. This curious juxtaposition of science and
pseudoscience offers valuable insight into the evolving framework of beliefs
about nature.

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Science Fiction as a Time Capsule

of Changing Scientific Narrative

Lovecraft’s horrific visions of startling physics mixed with otherworldly

terror in tales such as “The Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Shadow
Out of Time” provide evidence of the metamorphosis of scientific boundaries.
It is an essential feature of science that the borders between confirmed fact,
unverified hypothesis, and demonstrated falsity shift over time. With each new
era, novel experimental techniques and theoretical methods have revealed new
features of the world and dispelled false premises, while opening up additional
areas of speculation. For example, Roentgen’s discovery of X rays in 1896 cast
aside earlier notions that all light was visible or near-visible, while inspiring
investigations of additional forms of unseen radiation such as gamma rays
and—much later—neutrinos. It also stimulated discussion about other types of
hypothetical invisible connections, such as psychic communication (Luckhurst,
Invention 139), that the mainstream scientific community has since largely
dismissed for want of proof. Interestingly, such discussions are often later
removed from the “official” history of science—thus creating the impression
that such matters were never scientific. This sort of revisionist history helps
foster the illusion that the boundaries and categories of science are fixed.
However, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, even the categories of sci-
ence are transient. In The Archeology of Knowledge he cites, for example, the
distortion inherent in considering the field of psychiatry as a uniform construct.
“At the beginning of the nineteenth century,” he writes, “this discipline had
neither the same content, nor the same internal organization, nor the same
place in medicine, nor the same practical function, nor the same methods as
the traditional chapter on ‘diseases of the head’ or nervous diseases’ to be
found in eighteenth century medical treatises” (179). With the shifting currents
of science, the lines of demarcation between science fiction, non-speculative
literature, and pure fantasy have undergone subsequent changes. In many
cases new discoveries have rendered certain one-time science fiction (SF)
elements either a mundane aspect of conventional stories or, conversely, too
far-fetched to remain in the genre—particularly in the subcategory of hard-SF.
For instance, while a story about nuclear warfare written in the late 20th cen-
tury would not necessarily be designated as SF, the tale would certainly fall
into that category if it had been written in the 1930s or earlier—such as in the
case of “The World Set Free”(1914) by H.G. Wells. On the other hand, now
that robotic probes have actually explored the surface of Mars, the John Carter
stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, if written today, would likely be consigned
to the fantasy category.

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An amusing anecdote illustrates how the validity of a particular technology

affects whether or not a story is considered SF. In his poignant story “Light of
Other Days” (1966), Bob Shaw describes slow glass, which is a special sub-
stance that can, to people’s joy and sorrow, recall images from the past. Like
many SF stories, this one attracted the attention of real scientists and students
of science and technology. “Years ago, in a class taught at Stevens Institute
of Technology, Samuel R. Delany had to explain to a student who had done
the math proving that slow glass didn’t work, that it was science fiction, not
fact; if it did work, then the story would no longer be SF but merely literary
realism” (Hartwell and Cramer 60). Thus, SF writers face something of a
dilemma. If they stray too far from the channels of established science, then
they run the risk of their stories being categorized as fantasy. However, if they
stick too closely to the science of their day, they run the risk of not writing SF
but rather literary realism. This situation is further complicated by the passage
of time and the march of science and technology. What happens—to be a bit
metaphorical—to a SF story when tomorrow becomes yesterday?
In the case of the pulp fiction of the early decades of the twentieth century,
emerging technologies and new disciplinary categorizations caused many of
these stories to seem dated by the period after the Second World War. In his
introduction to A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool, Michael Levy describes how the
1919 lost-world novel, published at the start of the pulp era, was harshly criti-
cized in the 1950s by some of the Golden Age generation of SF writers such as
James Blish. In his essay “Exit Euphues: The Monstrosities of Merritt,” Blish,
writing under the pseudonym of William Atheling Jr., attacked the substance
as well as the style of the work, mocking its lack of scientific validity along
with its “windy and cliché-ridden style” (81). He continued, ‘The scientific
rationale—regardless of how convincing it may have seemed in 1919, when
terms like magnetism and radioactivity were apparently being allowed to mean
anything an author found it convenient, like Humpty Dumpty, to say that they
meant—has been turned by time into nonsense” (81).
Yet, as Levy’s introduction points out, rather than simply dismissing the
many inaccuracies of works from the pulp era such as Merritt’s, it is instructive
to view them as windows into modes of thinking of the times.

True, [Merritt] sometimes got his facts wrong and . . . he had an almost uncanny abil-
ity to choose what would turn out to be the losing side of many scientific debates of
the day, but, on the other hand, Merritt simply knew an enormous amount about an
incredibly wide range of topics, and this knowledge is clearly reflected in his works. . .
The Moon Pool features cultural references from a wide range of religious folkloric,
philosophical, and occult traditions. Merritt works in what was then the new material
from biology, botany, astronomy, physics, and chemistry. (xl)

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Levy also notes the influence of the occult in the novel, particular its infusion of
Theosophy, a system of mystical beliefs founded by Helen Blavatsky in 1875.
The use of supernatural elements (as opposed to, for example, extraterrestrial
references that made clear contact with physical science) fell out of favor by the
time of SF’s Golden Age. Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”(1934)
marked a kind of turning point in demonstrating a keen awareness of the need
to establish deep scientific justification for all plot elements (in this case, silicon
rather than carbon as the basis for life). Hard SF writers of the mid-to-late twen-
tieth century would eschew the occult and treat earlier pulp stories that included
it as akin to an embarrassing uncle.
As the pulp era recedes further into history, many contemporary critics have
revisited its narrative through a more balanced perspective, recognizing that
its mixture of true science, questionable “pseudoscience,” and the unvarnished
occult reflects the spirit of the times. Considering the place of pseudoscience
in the analysis of SF, Roger Luckhurst notes,

What the term hopes to hide are those passages of history where the boundaries
between science and its others are impossible to determine, where experiments are
leaky or inconclusive or where expertise proved difficult to police. Since it is in these
interstitial places where SF and its cognates find their habitat, we need to explore
these terrains without using a term that has already pre-judged what is delimitable as
true and false science. (“Science Fiction” 405)

Luckhurst explains that the use of more neutral language in describing the specula-
tions of the past could open up a more balanced analysis of fiction that employs
such constructs. Consequently, “SF might be regarded as the cultural record of
these multiple, speculative possibilities—sometimes right, accurately predict-
ing the trajectory of normal science in advance, but often gleefully, delightfully,
gorgeously wrong. There is no shame in this, no error of faculty or cognition:
the interval is SF’s niche habitat” (405).
In other words, one mistaken approach to the history of science has been
to go back and retroactively expunge aspects of the narrative after the “truth”
has been sorted out. This cleaning up involves casting the unsuccessful sci-
ence uncritically into the bin of pseudoscience—a place where it can be safely
dismissed as unworthy of respectful historical consideration. In terms of SF,
the main impact is that stories based on so-called pseudoscience have been cat-
egorically dismissed as idle fantasy rather than part of the legitimate narrative.
On the contrary, what has been disregarded as fantasy and pseudoscience often
constitutes a telling snapshot of the changing state of science. As such, pulp
stories with pseudoscientific motifs, such as Lovecraft’s tales, offer valuable
insight into the cultural analysis of science.

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Envisioning the Fourth Dimension

One posited way of physically locating the supernatural would be through
the presence of an extra dimension beyond physical space (Henderson 25).
This notion forms a common element in “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The
Dreams in the Witch House.” These tales suggest that our familiar perception of
living in the here and now is simply an illusion and that forces from beyond (the
past, the future, or realms outside of space and time) can invade our dwellings
and our lives at any juncture. Lovecraft thus uses a new element, dimensionality,
to enhance the fear of the unknown that is the staple of horror tales.
The concept of a fourth dimension supplementing the standard spatial trio
of length, width and height can be traced at least as far back as a 1754 article
titled “Dimension,” written by the French mathematician Jean d’Alembert, that
appeared in the Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert. D’Alembert
wrote that it is “possible to conceive of more than three dimensions. . . by regard-
ing duration as a fourth dimension” (Diderot and D’Alembert 1010). Another
early reference to the fourth dimension as time was Joseph-Louis Lagrange’s
description in The Theory of Analytical Functions. Like D’Alembert’s con-
cept, it was rooted in the physics of motion. Newtonian mechanics includes
time, along with the three position variables, as the principal coordinates
delineating the state of a body. Lagrange grouped these parameters into a
natural quartet. Mentions of the fourth dimension were few and far between
until the pivotal work of 19th century German mathematicians Carl Friedrich
Gauss, Bernard Riemann and others introduced the concept of non-Euclidean
higher dimensional manifolds (geometric surfaces). Non-Euclidean refers to
axiomatic geometries in which Euclid’s parallel postulate (a point outside of
a line uniquely defines a second line parallel to the first) does not apply. Non-
Euclidean geometry in three-dimensions is equivalent to curvature within a
greater four-dimensional space, often called “hyperspace.” For example a
system in three dimensions in which no parallel lines exist (each pair of lines
must eventually intersect) is equivalent, in the constant curvature case, to a
hypersphere—the generalization of a sphere within hyperspace.
In 1869, British mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, drawing on the
work of Gauss and Riemann, as well as extensions of those ideas by his col-
league William Kingdon Clifford, published an article in the inaugural volume
of Nature emphasizing the need to visualize realities of four- or higher-dimen-
sions. As Sylvester wrote, “Mr. Clifford. . . and myself. . . have all felt and
given evidence of the practical utility of handling space of four dimensions,
as if it were conceivable space”; they continued, “As we can conceive beings
(like infinitely attenuated book-worms in an infinitely thin sheet of paper)
which possess only the notion of space of two dimensions, so we can imagine

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beings capable of realizing space of four or a greater number of dimensions”

(238). Sylvester’s “book-worm” remark alluded to an analogy first suggested by
Gauss imagining such a creature crawling along a flat page, not seeing anything
beyond it, and believing that the two-dimensional surface encompassed the
full range of reality. Similarly, although we are confined to three-dimensions it
could well be the case that other directions exist beyond observation. Sylvester
called upon mathematicians to recognize such higher-dimensional possibili-
ties. Following the publication of Sylvester’s article, the pages of Nature were
replete with a lively debate about the reality of higher dimensions. In 1873,
responding to rising interest in topic, Clifford translated Riemann’s thesis into
English and published it in the same journal (Riemann).
Three years later, what had been the abstract talk of mathematicians became
fodder for sensational news stories due to the London trial of American medium
Henry Slade. On October 1, 1876, Slade faced criminal charges due to his
enriching himself through fraudulent claims of supernatural powers, including
conducting séances and producing messages on slates remotely. Taking special
interest in the trial, German physicist Johann Zöllner argued that Slade’s abili-
ties stemmed from knowledge of penetrating the fourth dimension. In 1877,
he conducted a series of experiments involving Slade that included feats such
as having him remove objects from sealed containers, untie knots seemingly
impossible to remove, and read messages embedding in slabs. In various talks
and writings, such as in his book Transcendental Physics, Zöllner offered these
exploits as proof of a deep connection between the world of the spirit and an
invisible, higher-dimensional realm. Consequently, as American architect
Claude Bragdon pointed out, “Zöllner’s name became a word of scorn, and the
fourth dimension a synonym for what is fatuous and false” (38).
Zöllner was far from the only figure to associate higher dimensions with
the domain of the supernatural with the goal of “scientifically” understanding
the latter. Well-known German physicist Wilhelm Weber, a protégé of Gauss
and a pioneering researcher in electromagnetism, shared Zöllner’s views and
witnessed some of his experiments. In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research
was founded in London to promote the study of telekinesis, extrasensory per-
ception, and related phenomena. Its early members included luminaries such
as physicist William Crookes and philosopher William James. The possibility
of higher dimensions embodying the spiritual realm formed a significant part
of the society’s discourse—enough to be satirized in Oscar Wilde’s 1887 tale
“The Canterville Ghost,” which involves characters interested in “psychical
research” and imagines a spirit vanishing into the fourth dimension:

The Canterville ghost stood quite motionless in natural indignation; then, dashing the
bottle violently upon the polished floor, he fled down the corridor, uttering hollow

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groans, and emitting a ghastly green light . . . There was evidently no time to be lost,
so, hastily adopting the Fourth dimension of Space as a means of escape, he vanished
through the wainscoting, and the house became quite quiet. (Wilde 183)

Higher dimensions would become an important component of Theosophy.

Although its founder herself dismissed talk of higher spatial dimensions
(Blavatsky 251–52), a prominent Theosophist C.W. Leadbeater coined the term
“astral plane” as the realm of the supernatural and equated it with the fourth
dimension. He explained that “Short of really gaining the sight of the other
planes, there is no method by which so clear a conception of astral life can be
obtained as by the realization of the Fourth Dimension” (Horne vii).
Grounded in geometric theory, rather than supernatural speculation, Edwin
Abbott’s romance about dimensionality, Flatland (1884), remains the quintes-
sential treatment of the topic. In his humorous exposition, Abbott fleshed out the
book-worm idea by pondering an entire two-dimensional society oblivious to
the world of solids just beyond its plane. Abbott’s protagonist, A. Square, is able
to contemplate another dimension only after a being from the third dimension,
called Sphere, whisks him along that direction and he can witness from above the
true landscape of his flat world. A lesser-known, more methodical treatment of
envisioning a fourth spatial dimension lies in the works of Abbott’s contemporary,
British mathematical Charles Howard Hinton. Hinton was convinced that with
proper training individuals could develop the ability to imagine four-dimensional
objects, which he deemed “tesseracts.” Beginning with his treatise “What is the
Fourth Dimension?” (1884), Hinton used analogies to show how four-dimensional
geometries could be sliced up and encompassed by the mind.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell pointed out the merits of Hinton’s exer-
cises as a means for broadening one’s awareness of reality. As he wrote in a
review of Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (1904):

The merit of speculations on the fourth dimension. . . is chiefly they stimulate the
imagination, and free the intellect from the shackles of the actual. A complete intel-
lectual liberty would only be attained by a mind which could think as easily of the
non-existent as of the existent. Toward this unobtainable goal, non-Euclidean geometry
carries us a stage; and some degree of emancipation from the real world is likely to
be secured by the readers to whom this book is addressed. (580)

In contrast to Russell, the philosopher George Santayana saw little merit in

speculating about unobservable things such as unseen dimensions, except to
make a point about the futility of such exercises. In The Life of Reason, Santayana
employed the fourth dimension as a rhetorical device to describe hypothetical
domains inaccessible to human awareness. He described the possibility, for

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example, of a goddess of retribution living in a realm beyond space and time,

but dismissed the need to include such extrasensory entities in a description of
reality, contending that “Imagined facts, which even if by any chance real—for
such a goddess [of divine punishment] may, for all we know, actually float in
the fourth dimension—are quite supernumerary in my world, and never, by any
possibility, can become parts or extensions of the experience they are thought
to explain” (13). In a later work, Scepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana once
again connected a hypothetical spiritual realm with a fourth dimension beyond
ordinary experience. “Understanding [the supernatural],” he wrote, “must be
bought at a price: at the price of escaping into a fourth dimension, of not being
that which we understand” (162).
As Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi has pointed out, Russell and Santayana
were Lovecraft’s “philosophical mentors,” whom he likely first read between
1927 and 1929 (Dreamer 293). Lovecraft appreciated their emphasis on the
scientific method and materialism as opposed to invoking the spiritual. Con-
ceivably, Lovecraft’s interest in Russell and Santayana could have helped shape
his attitude toward the fourth dimension. In particular, Santayana’s association
of higher dimensions with the supernatural could have had an influence on
Lovecraft’s attitude toward the subject. Another source for such a connection
could have been Theosophy. Scholar Robert M. Price has pointed out the links
between Lovecraft’s works and Theosophical texts. As Joshi remarks, “Love-
craft, of course, did not believe in Theosophy, but found many of its cosmic
speculations imaginatively stimulating” (“Explanatory Notes” 393). Therefore,
it is interesting that Lovecraft’s sources included a mixture of hard science,
philosophy, and what Luckhurst, borrowing the nomenclature of Seymour
Mauskopf, has called “marginal sciences” (“Science Fiction” 405).
A critical influence on Lovecraft’s scientific conceptions was Einstein, who
comprised an important source for his notions of dimensionality. Einstein’s
theory of relativity, as interpreted by the Russian-German mathematician Her-
man Minkowski, hearkens back to the temporal interpretation of the fourth
dimension. It updates Newton by tying space and time more closely together.
In 1908, Minkowski showed that Einstein’s equations of special relativity—
showing the effects of near-light-speed on clocks, yardsticks and scales—can
be elegantly written by assuming that space and time are a single entity, called
spacetime. By the early 1910s, Einstein came to embrace this view, and would
later present the concept of time as the fourth dimension in his popular accounts.
Spacetime as a four-dimensional manifold then became an essential aspect of
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a theory that, among other predictions,
posits that the gravitational effects of stars such as the Sun can bend light.
When in 1919, astronomical observations during a solar eclipse seemed to

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verify the amount of light-bending predicted by general relativity, Einstein’s

findings became international famous. A 1922 eclipse, recorded by observers
from the Lick Observatory while based in Australia lent additional support to
the theory and bolstered its fame even further.
Einstein’s startling conclusions, as confirmed by the eclipse measurements,
had a wrenching effect on Lovecraft’s views of the objective nature of reality.
As Lovecraft wrote in May 1923 to James F. Morton:

My cynicism and scepticism are increasing, and from an entirely new cause—the
Einstein theory. The latest ellipse observations seem to place this system among the
facts which cannot be dismissed, and assumedly it removes the last hold which real-
ity or the universe can have on the independent mind. All is chance, accident, and
ephemeral illusion—a fly may be greater than Arcturus, and Durfee Hill may surpass
Mount Everest—assuming them to be removed from the present planet and differently
environed in the continuum of space-time. . . All the cosmos is a jest, and fit to be
treated only as a jest, and one thing is as true as another. (231)

Lovecraft was one of the first writers of speculative fiction to appreciate the
impact of Einstein’s ideas. He realized that they offered a novel flexibility and
a chance to introduce instantaneous travel through space and time as part of far-
reaching plotlines. He would mention Einstein by name in both “The Shadow
Out of Time” and “The Dreams in the Witch House” as means of explaining
the cosmic voyages the protagonists of each story undertake. Unlike Einstein,
however, Lovecraft felt comfortable linking the fourth dimension and relativity
to the supernatural. Einstein repeated cautioned against such an association.
For example, he and Leopold Infeld once wrote, “The world of events forms a
four-dimensional continuum. There is nothing mysterious about this, and the last
sentence is equally true for classical physics and the relativity theory” (207).

Lovecraft and Wells

The introduction of time travel in fiction long predates Einstein’s theories.
Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving represents an early example of the genre.
In 1881, Edward Page Mitchell, an editor of the New York Sun, published “The
Clock That Went Backward,” a story about traveling backward in time by
winding the hands of a clock in reverse. This story was rather obscure, how-
ever, until it was reprinted in the 1970s. The most famous tale of time travel,
The Time Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells was the story that likely influenced
Lovecraft the most.
Lovecraft was an avid fan of the works of Wells, and was certainly familiar
with The Time Machine. In delving into the themes of time travel and dimen-
sionality himself, he could not help but refer back to Wells’ tale. Indeed The

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Time Machine was a pioneering work in many ways. More than a decade before
Minkowski’s introduction of spacetime, it was the first fictional tale to posit
the idea of time as the fourth dimension. The Time Traveller explains:

There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and
a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between
the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness
moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end
of our lives. (4)

The story was also the first to compare time machines with devices that lift pas-
sengers in the air, such as balloons. The argument is that if the latter is possible the
former should eventually be feasible as well. As the Time Traveller argued:

You are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am
recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become
absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means
of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of
staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage
in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not
hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-
Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way? (5)

Although Lovecraft found Wells’ tale the gold standard for comparison he
believed that it had limitations—particularly in its exclusion of time travel to the
past. When Clark Ashton Smith wrote to Lovecraft with ideas for a time travel
story, Lovecraft responded with his own thoughts on enriching the genre.

Your idea for a time-voyaging machine is ideal—for in spite of Wells, no really

satisfactory thing of the sort has ever been written. The weakness of most tales
with this theme is that they do not provide for the recording, in history, of those
inexplicable events in the past which were caused by the backward time-voyagings
of persons of the present and future. . . .
One baffling thing that could be introduced is to have a modern man discover,
among documents exhumed from some prehistoric buried city, a mouldering papyrus
of parchment written in English, and in his own handwriting, which tells a strange
tale and awakes—amidst a general sense of amazement, horror, and half-incredu-
lity—a faint, far-off sense of familiarity which becomes more and more beckoning
and challenging as the strings of semi-memory continue to vibrate. (Lovecraft,
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith)

Lovecraft eventually took up his own suggestions. The plot detail he mentioned,
about finding one’s own handwriting on an ancient relic, became a pivotal part
of “The Shadow Out of Time.”

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The Spatial Fourth Dimension in

“The Dreams in the Witch House”
Curiously, before Lovecraft would attempt a tale involving travel through
a temporal fourth dimension, along the lines he had suggested to Ashton Smith,
he wrote a story involving passage through a spatial fourth dimension, “The
Dreams in the Witch House.” Though not generally considered Lovecraft’s most
successful tale, it is remarkable in its extensive allusions to the science of his
times. It is one of the earliest literary treatments of the general relativistic idea
of reality being a flexible manifold, capable of being warped and twisted, and
possibly connected with other realms. Interestingly, he invokes Santayana’s
equation of the fourth dimension as an unseen place in which creatures of myth
(ghosts, witches and so forth) could reside. He posits these intruders as alien
beings free to travel in and out of our three-dimensional world.
Lovecraft’s use of an extra spatial dimension in his tale, along with other
aspects of higher mathematics and modern science, stemmed from his inter-
est in creating credible, but terrifying scenarios. In “Supernatural Horror in
Literature,” Lovecraft discusses the key requirements that make something a
work of horror. First, “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable
dread of outer, unknown forces must be present”; second, “there must be a
hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject,
of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular
suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard
against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (4). This
reference to the “fixed laws of Nature” could pertain to Lovecraft’s interpreta-
tion of Russell. Throughout his writings Russell presented the view that the
universe is a logical and orderly place run by causal laws. His view applies
both to physics and psychology.1 Consequently, Lovecraft’s initial conception
of science—a Newtonian outlook—derived from such a steady framework.
Lovecraft saw, on the other hand, the disruption of these causal laws as
the hallmark of modern science. Ironically, given that Einstein himself was a
fervent believer in determinism, Lovecraft found Einstein’s conclusions about
relative space and time to be a source of chaos and unpredictability. Einstein
theory, as we have seen, led him to regard the universe as lacking fixed laws and
being a place of chance and illusion. Lovecraft seems to have been genuinely
disturbed by the implications of this theory and he no doubt recognized that
it could be employed within his stories to create the same feeling in others.
He clearly recognized that dimensions beyond the third could be employed
as effective tools in horror stories. Such dimensions are, in the natural order
of things, unknown to humans. Further, the use of these extra dimensions
provides an effective way of violating the deterministic “laws of Nature,” in

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a way consistent with chaotic aspects of modern physics, and revealing the
terrible vulnerability of humanity.
Appropriately enough, Lovecraft makes the tale’s protagonist, Walter
Gilman, a mathematics and science student at Miskatonic University in the
mythic city of Arkham. Gilman has sought out the gabled “Witch House” as
a place of residence because he believes that legends swirling around it could
have a profound connection with modern physics and extra dimensions. In
that geometrically-irregular abode a woman named Keziah Mason used to live
until she was tried and jailed for allegedly practicing witchcraft. Mysteriously,
she managed to escape from Salem Gaol without explanation—the only clue
being the appearance of a strange furry creature that fled from her cell. Later,
various townspeople claimed to have seen this creature on repeated occasions
and nicknamed it “Brown Jenkin.” Suspecting that Keziah’s disappearance had
something to do with connections through higher dimensions, Gilman hopes to
uncover the secret both through his learning and his explorations of the nooks,
corners, and slanted ceilings of the “Witch House.” These combined studies
propel him into a state of heightened anxiety:

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and
quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with
folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind
the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner,
one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (300–01)

The reference to non-Euclidean calculus is a clear allusion to the distorted

geometries of Einsteinian general relativity. Although the standard interpretation
of quantum physics does not pertain to spacetime distortion, Lovecraft brings
that field into the story as well. Indeed he amplifies this connection by having
Gilman speculate that Keziah somehow had insights beyond that of “Planck,
Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter” (302).
Gilman’s sanity erodes as he learns more and more about what oddities
lie beyond the reaches of mundane perception. Bizarre geometries flood his
dreams and he becomes increasingly mortified by the implications of his noc-
turnal musings. Part of Keziah’s horror is her ability to move freely outside
of the restrictions of space and time that bind everyone else—even into the
realm of nightmares. Somehow Gilman’s mind has learned to retrace the path
of Keziah Mason into these otherwise inaccessible reaches: “He had been
thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must
lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old
Keziah Mason—guided by some influence past all conjecture—had actually
found the gate to those regions” (303–04).

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The story is interesting in that it contains a very early reference to theories

about connecting our part of the universe with others by means of a geometric
portal. Such a passage is now known as a traversable wormhole and has been
the subject of serious inquiry since the 1980s, through the scientific work of
Kip Thorne and others. Thorne’s research was motivated by a question asked
by Carl Sagan, who, in writing his novel Contact, wondered if it would be pos-
sible to distort spacetime geometries in order to allow safe and speedy passage
between our region of the cosmos and distant abodes. Along with his student
Michael Morris, Thorne discovered general relativistic solutions that would
in principle permit beings to tunnel through spacetime’s fabric. Lovecraft’s
description of Gilman’s research about the possibility of such portals is thereby
extremely prescient.

[Gilman] was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations,

and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and
other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was
a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of
approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions
as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs themselves—or even as
fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole
Einsteinian space-time continuum. . .
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of
the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-
dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this
could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any
being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth
dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part
of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets
might be able to live on certain others—even planets belonging to other galaxies,
or to similar dimensional phases of other space-time continua - though of course
there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically
juxtaposed bodies or zones of space. (306–07)

Intriguingly, Lovecraft was also quite prescient in anticipating that portals through
spacetime could lead to voyages through time as well as spatial journeys. Such
would be the scientific conclusion of Thorne’s group as well, much later (Morris,
Thorne and Yurtsever). Lovecraft was clever enough to anticipate the bold impli-
cations of general relativity that spacetime distortions could allow the subjective
time of one individual to be slower, even frozen, with respect to others. Perhaps,
he speculates in the tale, it could even produce a kind of “fountain of youth:”

Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such
a belt one might preserve one’s life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic

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metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one’s
own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and
emerge at some remote period of the earth’s history as young as before. (322)

Ultimately, Gilman’s explorations prove fatal when he is killed—apparently

by Brown Jenkin. Rather than a benign avenue of discover, the gateway to the
fourth dimension proved a source of deadly incursions into our world. Love-
craft’s ending echoes the longstanding theme in literature—presented in works
such as Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”—
that too much scientific knowledge can be perilous. Lovecraft provides a twist
on this theme. While Gilman’s search for knowledge does lead to his demise,
his doom is something of a reversal on the usual theme. In Frankenstein and
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” tragedy occurs because a character tampers with an
otherwise benign natural order. In Gilman’s case, he does not create a mon-
ster by tampering with nature. Rather, he discovers that reality is a monstrous
horror and thus meets his doom. In many ways, this change nicely captures
the distinction between the view of a basically benign watchmaker’s universe
in Newtonian physics and the sort of universe revealed to Lovecraft by the
“Einstein Theory.” The search for knowledge is still presented as a potential
road to doom, but it is a new type of doom for a new type of science.

The Temporal Fourth Dimension in “The Shadow Out of Time”

Although Lovecraft briefly mentions time travel in “The Dreams in
the Witch House,” he fully develops the concept in “The Shadow Out of Time.”
Once again, he makes use of the work of Einstein in an attempt to lend scien-
tific weight to the story. The protagonist is similarly an academic, a Political
Economy professor at Miskatonic named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee. Unlike
Gilman, Peaslee has little interest in the occult. This difference in attitude
between the two protagonists befits the different tone of the stories. While
“Dreams” makes use of classic horror imagery such as witches, “Shadow”
eschews such references and relies on an alien motif—making the story as
much SF as a tale of terror.
Peaslee journeys through time—though not physically and not through
his own volition, in the manner of Wells’ Time Traveller. Indeed, his body never
ventures into the past or future. Rather, he travels through time mentally. In the
story his consciousness is exchanged with that of one of the Great Race—an
ancient race of cone-like entities that long preceded humankind on Earth. We
further learn that the bodies of the Great Race had been taken over long ago
by minds from a dying world. As such, the Great Race is actually a race of
possessed beings. Their minds will eventually, according to the story, flee to

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the far distant future to take over the bodies of a beetle-like race so as to avoid
disaster once more. In the meanwhile, they prefer to exchange identities with
unwitting humans such as Peaslee.
Peaslee’s mind is torn from his body, dragged millions of years back in
time and placed within an alien body for a period of years. Thus, he finds
himself in a non-human body in the ancient past. During his captivity he writes
out all he can remember of his own time. Before his mind is sent back to the
present-day, its conscious memories are wiped clean, leaving him with disturbed
amnesia about what he had been doing during that period. Gradually, through
his dreams and ruminations, he begins to recall some of his experiences—
scarcely believing they are real until he finds evidence from the past in the
form of his own handwriting on an ancient tablet. During the period in which
Peaslee’s mind has been transferred to an entity in the distant past, his body
has been occupied by the mind of a member of the Great Race. Awkwardly,
at first, the alien learns all it can about the language and culture of Peaslee’s
native time, gathering as much information as possible. This fits in with the
goal of the Great Race to

[learn] all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through
the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even
through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. . . In its vast libraries
were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth’s annals-histories and
descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records
of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies. (351)

Interestingly, the Great Race never seems to use its vast knowledge to
prevent disaster. Rather, they simply flee it. In order to avoid perishing as
their original world died, the Great Race arrived on earth by exchanging minds
with the cone-bodied beings native to earth. While the Great Race survived,
the original minds of the cone-bodied beings perished in horror. To avoid yet
another race-ending disaster, the Great Race flees to the far distant future and
take over the bodies of the intelligent, beetle-like beings that will ascend after
the time of humanity. Perhaps Lovecraft was aware of the paradoxes involved
with knowledge of the future and elected to bypass them by having the Great
Race simply flee disaster rather than taking action to prevent it. Family mem-
bers are shocked by what they see as Peaslee’s extremely odd behavior—not
realizing that an alien is in control. His wife divorces him, his son temporarily
abandons him, and his family life falls apart. When the mission is complete,
the alien constructs a machine to return its consciousness to the past. Their
minds are exchanged once more. Thus Peaslee finds himself back in his own
body and his own time—sensing only that much time has been lost.

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While Lovecraft seems to be the first to write a story about mental time
travel, it is reasonable to suppose that he could have been inspired The Time
Machine’s description of “recalling an incident very vividly. . . [and] jump[ing]
back for a moment” (5). Whereas Wells presents this as a brief part of an argu-
ment, Lovecraft develops it into the key device for his story. Mental time travel
offers one possible resolution of the apparent contradiction between the relativ-
istic concept of time and space being on equal footing and our commonplace
experience that the past is gone forever. Lovecraft alludes to the former concept
when he writes in the story, “Dr. Albert Einstein . . . was rapidly reducing
time to the status of a mere dimension” (342). Dislocating minds rather than
bodies sidesteps the tricky issue about physically traveling backward in time
and disturbing the delicate chain of cause and effect. Instead, physical events
could well be causal while minds leap backward and forward through time,
somehow free of the chains that bind objects in time. After starting to glean
his situation, Peaslee says, “My conception of time, my ability to distinguish
between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered so
that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind
all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages” (342).
Lovecraft thus wonderfully introduces the notion that the perception of the
ever-changing present-moment could well be a feature of human perception,
rather than a fundamental feature of reality. Lovecraft was not the first to view
time in this manner. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, argues that
time is not a feature of reality but a way that humans experience reality. This
view of time provides an excellent philosophical foundation for time travel.
The mind is not so much traveling through time as changing its perception.
In discussing human perception of time, Kant notes how God is traditionally
viewed as being outside of time and capable of seeing past, present and future
“simultaneously.” While lesser minds could not match God’s capabilities, they
could presumably shift their perceptions (or have them shifted) in ways that
would be, in effect, time travel.

Lovecraft and Mind

In addition to the time travel aspect of the story “The Shadow Out of
Time,” there is also the matter of the personality exchange. Peaslee is not just
traveling in time. He is also the victim of a forced exchange of consciousnesses.
Interestingly, this sort of exchange has long been discussed by philosophers.
One early example occurs in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing. In his discussion of personal identity, he presents an example in which
the consciousness of a prince is exchanged with that of a cobbler. Personal-
ity exchange occurs elsewhere in Lovecraft’s writings. In “The Thing on the

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Doorstep” (1937), Lovecraft writes about Asenath Waite (or, more accurately,
Ephraim Waite) and her ability to exchange personalities:

By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling
of exchanged personality-as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s
body and able to stare half across the room at her own body. Asenath often made wild
claims about the nature of consciousness and its independence of the physical frame-or
at least the life-processes of the physical frame. (228)

While Lovecraft could have taken the consciousness to be a purely mental pro-
cess or entity, he makes it dependent on a physical body. Describing the plans of
Ephraim, Derby says, “On, on, on, on—body to body to body—he means never
to die. The life-glow—he knows how to break the link. . . it can flicker on a
while even when the body is dead” (228). After Derby kills Asenath’s body and
buries it in the cellar, he finds that she keeps on trying to take over his body. He
says that “a soul like hers - or Ephraim’s - is half detached, and keeps right on
after death as long as the body lasts” (228).
This view of consciousness seems to have been influenced by Lovecraft’s
readings of Santayana. While Santayana’s exact philosophy of mind is not
clear, a common view is that he held to a form of epiphenomenalism. Epiphe-
nomenalism is the view that there is a one-way relation between the mental
and physical properties. On this view, the non-physical mental properties are
caused by, but do not in turn cause, the physical properties of the body. The
mind is causally inert and is, crudely speaking, a by-product of the physical
processes of the body. While Lovecraft’s view of consciousness in these stories
is not pure epiphenomenalism, the influence seems to be present. After all, a
key aspect of epiphenomenalism is that consciousness (the mental properties)
depends on the physical properties of the body. This view is, of course, also in
line with Lovecraft’s acceptance of materialism which involves the view that
whatever the nature of consciousness it must ultimately depend on matter (as
opposed to something non-physical).
In another of Lovecraft’s tales, “The Silver Key” (1926), the character of
Randolph Carter time-travels back to his boyhood. Carter does not go back
in his adult body to meet his childhood self. Rather, his mind returns to his
childhood. He seems to retain at least some of his adult memories but is care-
ful to conceal his knowledge of the future—although he sometimes says and
does things that indicate an unusual knowledge of what is to come. Lovecraft
does not explore any paradoxes or problems relating to such fore-knowledge.
Carter does nothing to change events and is careful to conceal his knowledge
of the (relative) future. For example, the young Carter of 1897 grows pale at
the mention of the town of Belloy-en-Santerre. In 1916 Carter will be mortally

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wounded there as a Foreign Legion soldier. As Carter grows older the story
comes to an end at the point where Carter returned to his childhood, using
the Silver Key and abandoning the box that contained it in his car. Despite
his apparent knowledge of what is to come, Carter takes no steps to avoid the
wound. Nor does he take any actions to otherwise change the flow of events.
Lovecraft does not give any indication as to why his time traveling characters
do not use their knowledge or change events. Perhaps he wished to avoid prob-
lems with paradoxes. Perhaps he regarded physical events as somehow fixed
in time while the mind’s perception of time can be freed from this restraint.
This would, of course, be consistent with a form of epiphenomenalism: the
time-traveling mind would be aware of the physical events to come but would
be unable to change them. As such, Carter is aware of what will happen but
perhaps he can do little more than observe events play out.
In the sequel story “Through the Gate of the Silver Key” (1937), co-written
by Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price, Carter learns that

All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and
all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one
archetypal and eternal being in the space outside dimensions. Each local being—son,
father, grandfather, and so on—and each stage of individual being—infant, child,
boy, man—is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal
being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it.
Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors, both human and
pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only phases of one ultimate,
eternal “Carter” outside space and time—phantom projections differentiated only by
the angle at which the plane of consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype
in each case. (198–99)

In the story, Carter becomes (or becomes again) the alien wizard Zkauba (who
lives in the ancient past relative to Carter) and each personality struggles for
control of the body. Carter eventually gains control of the Zkauba body and sets
out on a multi-thousand year journey to earth, arriving (amazingly enough) in
1930. There he attempts to reclaim his identity as Randolph Carter, but events
result in the Zkauba identity taking over.
The notion of archetypical and eternal beings is clearly a Platonic notion.
While it is not clear how much Plato influenced Lovecraft, Santayana’s Platonism
and the Spiritual Life (1927) might have influenced this aspect of the story.
Lovecraft also alludes in his writings to the Hindu notion of eternal cycles. The
idea that conscious minds might persist and transfer from one bodily form to
another is a recurring theme in some of Lovecraft’s writings. This notion might
also serve to explain the fact that Lovecraft’s time travelers do not act upon
their knowledge of the relative future. If there is only “one ultimate, eternal

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‘Carter’ outside space and time,” then it would seem that Carter’s past, present
and future are set and unalterable. While, as Lovecraft notes, the perception of
a specific Carter can seemingly change, the entity itself is eternal and outside of
time. As such, it would seem to be as changeless as a Platonic form. This would
also mesh nicely with the previous discussion of time as a matter of percep-
tion. Thus, Lovecraft presents a remarkably consistent view of mind and time
throughout his stories.
By employing these ideas, Lovecraft crafted masterpieces of horror that
have endured across the years. These stories not only thrill, they remind us
of the effect of the emerging modern physics and higher mathematics on the
psyche of those who fathomed the implications of these subjects. Moreover,
they offer a valuable record of an age in which many thinkers associated higher
dimensions with supernatural experiences.

Notes

We thank the editors for their useful suggestions. We also thank Roger Luckhurst for
an advanced copy of his chapter on science fiction and pseudoscience that appears
in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction.

1. See, for example, Russell’s discussion of the problem of other minds in Human
Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits and Analysis of Mind.

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