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Night Gallery: “The House”

Dreams. We all have them. And every now and then, some of us have special dreams. The dreams so real that you do not even realize that they are dreams till you wake up. Dreams in which you are basically powerless to control your actions because the minute you try to do just that, the dreams stop.

Elaine Latimer -- the character that actress Joanna Pettet plays in “The House” -- has such a dream. Over and over again, she dreams of taking a long drive in the country, only to come across a mysterious house out in the middle of nowhere. She has no idea who or what lives there yet she is always compelled by the dream to stop and knock on the door. But then she always turns and drives away before anyone answers the door, only to start the whole process all over again the next time she dreams.

Why does Ms. Latimer dream so much about a house she’s never seen before? How come she never sticks around to see who answers the door? The episode never quite answers these questions but then it isn’t quite meant to. Instead we get clues throughout the episode which may or may not be correct.

For example, we learn early on that Ms. Latimer has been seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Mitchell. During part of the period she has been having her recurring dreams, she has been staying at a sanitarium and has been treated for depression. Although she comes across as a rather likable woman, another patient at the sanitarium describes her as being too dreamy. Almost as if Ms. Latimer was so out of touch that she even made other mental patients feel uncomfortable.

As the episode opens, Ms. Latimer is preparing to leave the sanitarium and return to the outside world. She worries that the dream may be a sign of some recurring mental condition but Dr. Mitchell does not seem too worried by it.

Then Ms. Latimer goes out driving during her first week out and comes across a house which looks just like the one in her dreams. The house is for sale because it is supposedly haunted but the really weird part about it is the way Ms. Latimer seems able to describe every detail of the interior without ever having been there before.

Is she psychic? Or just particularly lucky?

She ends up buying the house on a whim and then she moves in. Shortly afterwards, the dreams start up again. She is driving again and still stopping at the house but she still does not wait around for an answer.

One day she takes a quick catnap in an upstairs bedroom and gets awakened by what sounds like a knock on the front door. But there is no one there when she gets to the front door. The realtor who sold her the house comes by shortly afterwards but he claims to have seen no one on the road.

After the realtor leaves, Ms. Latimer calls Dr. Mitchell. But in the midst of her phone call, she hears yet another knock on the front door. She puts down the phone to go investigate and then...

What happens next?

Ah, that would be telling.

I will say this: the final emotion I saw on Ms. Latimer’s face seemed to be not so much fear or elation but rather disappointment. Why it seemed to be disappointment, I can’t really say. However, dream analysts do like to say that when you dream about a house, you’re usually dreaming about your body. So perhaps that explains Ms. Latimer’s mystery.

Perhaps.