Book of Dreams and Ghosts-Andrew Lang

Preface to The Book of Dreams and Ghosts.

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The Book of Dreams and Ghosts is by Andrew Lang.

Preface to the New Impression.

Since the first edition of this book appeared, eighteen ninety-seven, a considerable number of new and startling ghost stories, British, foreign, and colonial, not yet published, have reached me.

Second sight abounds.

Crystal gazing has also advanced in popularity.

For a singular series of such visions in which distant persons and places unknown to the gazer were correctly described by her, I may refer to my book, The Making of Religion, eighteen ninety-eight.

A memorial stone has been erected on the scene of the story called The Fowl Fords, page two sixty-nine, so that tale is likely to endure in tradition.

July eighteen ninety-nine.

Preface to the First Edition.

The chief purpose of this book is, if fortune helps, to entertain people interested in the kind of narratives here collected.

For the sake of orderly arrangement, the stories are classed in different grades as they advance from the normal and familiar to the undeniably startling.

At the same time, an account of the current theories of apparitions is offered in language as free from technicalities as possible.

According to modern opinion, every ghost is a hallucination, a false perception, the perception of something which is not present.

It has not been thought necessary to discuss the psychological and physiological processes involved in perception, real or false.

Every hallucination is a perception as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there.

The object happens not to be there.

That is all.

Footnote.

Principles of Psychology, Volume two, page one fifteen, by Professor William James, Harvard College, MacMillan's, London, eighteen ninety.

The physical processes believed to be involved are described on page one twenty-three and one twenty-four of the same work.

End of footnote.

We are not here concerned with the visions of insanity, delirium, drugs, drink, remorse, or anxiety, but with sporadic cases of hallucination visiting people only once in a lifetime, which seems to be by far the most frequent type.

These, says Mr. James, are on any theory hard to understand in detail.

They are often extraordinarily complete, and the fact that many of them are reported as veridical, that is, as coinciding with real events such as accidents, deaths, etc., of the persons seen, is an additional complication of the phenomenon.

Footnote.

Principles of Psychology, Volume two, page one thirty, by Professor William James, Harvard College, MacMillan's, London, eighteen ninety.

End of footnote.

A ghost, if seen, is undeniably so far a hallucination that it gives the impression of the presence of a real person, in flesh, blood, and usually clothes.

No such person in flesh, blood, and clothes is actually there.

So far, at least, every ghost is a hallucination.

That, in the language of Captain Cuttle, you may lay to without offending science, religion, or common sense.

And that, in brief, is the modern doctrine of ghosts.

The old doctrine of ghosts regarded them as actual spirits of the living or the dead, freed from the flesh or from the grave.

This view, whatever else may be said for it, represents the simple philosophy of the savage, which may be correct or erroneous.

About the time of the Reformation, writers, especially Protestant writers, preferred to look on apparitions as the work of deceitful devils who masqueraded in the aspect of the dead or living, or made up phantasms out of compressed air.

The common sense of the eighteenth century dismissed all apparitions as dreams or hoaxes or illusions caused by real objects, misinterpreted, such as rats, cats, white posts, maniacs at large, sleepwalkers, thieves, and so forth.

Modern science, when it admits the possibility of occasional hallucinations in the sane and healthy, also admits, of course, the existence of apparitions.

These, for our purposes, are hallucinatory appearances occurring in the experience of people healthy and sane.

The difficulty begins when we ask whether these appearances ever have any provoking mental cause outside the minds of the people who experience them, any cause arising in the minds of others, alive or dead.

This is a question which orthodox psychology does not approach, standing aside from any evidence which may be produced.

This book does not pretend to be a convincing, but merely an illustrative collection of evidence.

It may or may not suggest to some readers the desirableness of further inquiry.

The author certainly does not hope to do more, if as much.

It may be urged that many of the stories here narrated come from remote times, and as the testimony for these cannot rigidly be studied, that the old unauthenticated stories clash with the analogous tales current on better authority in our own day.

But these ancient legends are given, not as evidence, but for three reasons.

First, because of their merit as mere stories.

Next, because several of them are now, perhaps for the first time, offered with a critical discussion of their historical sources.

Lastly, because the old legends seem to show how the fancy of periods less critical than ours dealt with such facts as are now reported in a dull, undramatic manner.

Thus, number one, the Icelandic ghost stories have peculiar literary merit as simple dramatic narratives.

Number two, everyone has heard of the Wesley ghost, Sir George Villiers' specter, Lord Lyttelton's ghost, the Beresford ghost, Mr. Williams' dream of Mr. Percival's murder, and so forth.

But the original sources have not, as a rule, been examined in the ordinary spirit of calm historical criticism by aid of a comparison of the earliest versions in print or manuscript.

Number three, even ghost stories, as a rule, have some basis of fact, whether fact of hallucination or illusion or imposture.

They are, at lowest, human documents.

Now, granting such facts of imposture, hallucination, or what you will, as our dull modern narratives contain, we can regard these facts, or things like these, as the nuclei which our less critical ancestors elaborated into their extraordinary romances.

In this way, the belief in demoniacal possession, distinguished as such from madness and epilepsy, has its nucleus, some contend, in the phenomena of alternating personalities in certain patients.

Their characters, ideas, habits, and even voices change, and the most obvious solution of the problem in the past was to suppose that a new, alien personality, a devil, had entered into the sufferer.

Again, the phenomena occurring in haunted houses, whether caused or not by imposture or hallucination or both, were easily magnified into such legends as that of Grettir and Glam, and into the monstrosities of the witch trials.

Once more, the simple hallucination of a dead person's appearance in his house demanded an explanation.

This was easily given by evolving a legend that he was a spirit escaped from purgatory or the grave to fulfill a definite purpose.

The rarity of such purposeful ghosts in an age like ours, so rich in ghost stories, must have a cause.

That cause is, probably, a dwindling of the myth-making faculty.

Anyone who takes these matters seriously as facts in human nature must have discovered the difficulty of getting evidence at first hand.

This arises from several causes.

First, the cocksure common sense of the years from 1660 to 1850 or so regarded everyone who had experience of a hallucination as a dupe, a lunatic, or a liar.

In this healthy state of opinion, eminent people like Lord Brougham kept their experience to themselves or, at most, nervously protested that they were sure it was only a dream.

Next, to tell the story was, often, to enter on a narrative of intimate, perhaps painful domestic circumstances.

Thirdly, many persons now refuse information as a matter of principle or of religious principle, though it is difficult to see where either principle or religion is concerned if the witness is telling what he believes to be true.

Next, some devotees of science aver that these studies may bring back faith by a side wind and, with faith, the fires of Smithfield and the torturing of witches.

These opponents are what Professor Huxley called dreadful consequences arguifiers when similar reasons were urged against the doctrine of evolution.

Their position is strongest when they maintain that these topics have a tendency to befog the intellect.

A desire to prove the existence of new forces may beget indifference to logic and to laws of evidence.

This is true, and we have several dreadful examples among men otherwise scientific.

But all studies have their temptations.

Many a historian, to prove the guilt or innocence of Queen Mary, has put evidence and logic and common honesty far from him.

Yet this is no reason for abandoning the study of history.

There is another class of difficulties.

As anthropology becomes popular, every inquirer knows what customs he ought to find among savages, so, of course, he finds them.

In the same way, people may now know what customs it is orthodox to find among ghosts, and may pretend to find them, or may simulate them by imposture.

The white sheet and clanking chains are forsaken for a more realistic rendering of the ghostly part.

The desire of social notoriety may beget wanton fabrications.

In short, all studies have their perils, and these are among the dangers which beset the path of the inquirer into things ghostly.

He must adopt the Stoical maxim, be sober and do not believe in a hurry.

If there be truth in even one case of telepathy, it will follow that the human soul is a thing endowed with attributes not yet recognized by science.

It cannot be denied that this is a serious consideration, and that very startling consequences might be deduced from it, such beliefs, indeed, as were generally entertained in the ages of Christian darkness which preceded the present era of enlightenment.

But our business and studies of any kind is, of course, with truth, as we are often told, not with consequences, however ruinous to our most settled convictions, or however pernicious to society.

The very opposite objection comes from the side of religion.

These things we learn are spiritual mysteries into which men must not inquire.

This is only a relic of the ancient opinion that he was an impious character who first launched a boat, God having made man a terrestrial animal.

Assuredly, God put us into the world of phenomena and gave us inquiring minds.

We have as much right to explore the phenomena of these minds as to explore the ocean.

Again, if it be said that our inquiries may lead to an undignified theory of the future life, so far they have not led to any theory at all, that, also, is the position of the dreadful consequences arguifier.

Lastly, the stories may frighten children.

For children, the book is not written any more than if it were a treatise on comparative anatomy.

The author has frequently been asked, both publicly and privately, do you believe in ghosts? One can only answer, how do you define a ghost? I do believe, with all students of human nature, in hallucinations of one, or of several, or even of all the senses.

But as to whether such hallucinations, among the sane, are ever caused by psychical influences from the minds of others, alive or dead, not communicated through the ordinary channels of sense, my mind is in a balance of doubt.

It is a question of evidence.

In this collection, many stories are given without the real names of the witnesses.

In most of the cases, the real names and their owners are well known to myself.

In not publishing the names, I only take the common privilege of writers on medicine and psychology.

In other instances, the names are known to the managers of the Society for Psychical Research, who have kindly permitted me to borrow from their collections.

While this book passed through the press, a long correspondence called On the Trail of a Ghost appeared in The Times.

It illustrated the copious fallacies which haunt the human intellect.

Thus it was maintained by some persons, and denied by others, that sounds of unknown origin were occasionally heard in a certain house.

These, it was suggested, might, if really heard, be caused by slight seismic disturbances.

Now many people argue, Blunderstone House is not haunted, for I passed a night there and nothing unusual occurred.

Apply this to a house where noises are actually caused by young earthquakes.

Would anybody say, there are no seismic disturbances near Blunderstone House, for I passed a night there and none occurred? Why should a noisy ghost, if there is such a thing, or a hallucinatory sound, if there is such a thing, be expected to be more punctual and more pertinacious than a seismic disturbance? Again, the gentleman who opened the correspondence with a long statement on the negative side cried out, like others, for scientific publicity for names of people and places.

But neither he nor his allies gave their own names.

He did not precisely establish his claim to confidence by publishing his version of private conversations.

Yet he expected science and the public to believe his anonymous account of a conversation with an unnamed person at which he did not and could not pretend to have been present.

He had a theory of sounds heard by himself which could have been proved or disproved in five minutes by a simple experiment.

But that experiment he does not say that he made.

This kind of evidence is thought good enough on the negative side.

It certainly would not be accepted by any sane person for the affirmative side.

side.If what is called psychical research has no other results, at least it enables us to perceive the fallacies which can impose on the incredulity of common sense.

In preparing this collection of tales I owe much to Mr. W.

A. Craigie, who translated the stories from the Gaelic and the Icelandic, to Miss Elspeth Campbell, who gives a version of the curious Argyll tradition of Ticonderoga, rhymed by Mr. Robert Lewis Stevenson, who put a Cameron where a Campbell should be, to Miss Violet Simpson, who found the Wyndham manuscript about the Duke of Buckingham's story and made other researches, and to Miss Goodrich Freer, who pointed out the family version of the Tyrone ghost.

End of Preface Chapter 1 of The Book of Dreams and Ghosts This is a LibriVox recording.

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For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Ben Tucker The Book of Dreams and Ghosts by Andrew Lang Chapter 1 Arbuthnot, in his humorous work on political lying, commends the Whigs for occasionally trying the people with great swinging falsehoods.