Andrew Lang's 1897 collection of accounts of apparitions, premonitory dreams, hauntings, second sight and crisis-apparitions, drawn from historical chronicle, anecdotal report, and the case files of the Society for Psychical Research, of which Lang was a council member. The Scottish folklorist treats the material with a sceptical-but-curious anthropological eye, refusing both wholesale credulity and bluff dismissal, and arranging the cases by phenomenon rather than by argument.
The book moves from the commonplace and credible — shared dreams, prophetic coincidences, crystal-gazing — toward the more startling accounts of hauntings, wraiths, and historical ghost narratives from Scotland, Iceland, and China. Lang draws on testimony collected by the SPR alongside records from Houdini's collection, Icelandic sagas, and his own correspondents, subjecting each to the same analytic frame: whether a hallucination in the sane can ever be caused by influences from minds other than the percipient's.
Do you believe in ghosts? One can only answer: How do you define a ghost?
Preface to the First Edition
First lines
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.
Reception
A representative document of the late-Victorian psychical-research moment, when figures including William James, Henry Sidgwick and Arthur Conan Doyle treated apparitional and dream phenomena as legitimate subjects of empirical inquiry. Read in Lang's lifetime alongside Phantasms of the Living (Gurney, Myers, Podmore, 1886) as a more popular companion volume. Subsequent reception has been mixed: folklorists treat it as a useful primary archive of late-Victorian ghost-belief; SPR historians treat it as a snapshot of methodology before the field's mid-20th-century retreat from academic respectability; literary scholars read it for its influence on the Edwardian ghost-story tradition (M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood).
Frequently asked
What is The Book of Dreams and Ghosts about?
It is Andrew Lang's 1897 compilation of apparitions, premonitory dreams, hauntings, second sight and crisis-apparitions, gathered from historical chronicle, anecdote, and the case files of the Society for Psychical Research. Lang arranges the cases by phenomenon, advancing from the credible to the startling, and examines each through an anthropological lens.
Does Andrew Lang believe in ghosts?
Lang holds a studied agnosticism. He accepts that hallucinations of the sane are real, but keeps an open mind on whether such hallucinations can be caused by psychical influences from the minds of others, alive or dead. His stated position: "my mind is in a balance of doubt — it is a question of evidence."
How does this book relate to the Society for Psychical Research?
Lang was a council member of the SPR and later served as its president in 1911. The Book of Dreams and Ghosts draws directly on SPR case files alongside historical and folkloric material, and was read as a popular companion to the SPR's Phantasms of the Living (1886).