googling "lovecraft portals" on a hunch got me to this reddit thread where someone claimed there was interdimensional travel in "dreams in the witch house" (1933)
reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/co
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(this is an aside but slightly further down in the google search results is an old forum thread from 2006 where a few people are quite seriously discussing interdimensional portals and wondering how lovecraft knew about them. fascinating stuff)
cocthulhu.proboards.com/thread/549/lov
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the text of "dreams in the witch house" is linked below. the main character travels to eldritch places in his dreams by exiting the universe through a fourth dimension and coming back in somewhere else. he ties this to old magic + weird angles
hplovecraft.com/writings/texts
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the descriptions of the dreams themselves kinda reminds me of what i've read people write about DMT experiences which is striking 🧐
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the wikipedia article about dreams in the witch house says lovecraft was inspired by a lecture given by de sitter called "the size of the universe," and a book by eddington called "the nature of the physical world". i can't make heads or tails of the septimius felton thing
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in "the size of the universe" de sitter describes how to produce a state-of-the-art-for-1932 estimate of the radius of the universe, he says between 2 and 20 billion light years (current estimate is 46ish, they didn't have inflation yet)
adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1932PASP.
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(interesting science history thing here: in 1932 the word "galaxy" was apparently not yet used to refer to galaxies other than the milky way! its etymology just refers to the milky way. de sitter describes here how to infer that the milky way is a "spiral nebula")
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tbh i don't have a clear sense of what exactly lovecraft was getting out of de sitter's work here. maybe a general sense that mathematics is capable of telling you surprising and nontrivial facts about the structure of the universe 🧐
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yeah, maybe the idea of hyperbolic space (closely related to anti-de sitter space)? which has potentially horrifying properties, like that:
(exponentially) vast volumes can lurk within normal-sized perimeters; and
you can be in close proximity to too many things at once
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Pratchett’s dungeon dimensions almost seem to gesture at that idea and include many obvious parody lovecraftian beings wiki.lspace.org/Dungeon_Dimens


