The Book of Dreams and Ghosts | Page 4

the Windham MS. 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".
CHAPTER I
Arbuthnot on Political Lying. Begin with "Great Swingeing
Falsehoods". The Opposite Method to be used in telling Ghost Stones.
Begin with the more Familiar and Credible. Sleep. Dreams. Ghosts are
identical with Waking Dreams. Possibility of being Asleep when we
think we are Awake. Dreams shared by several People. Story of the
Dog Fanti. The Swithinbank Dream. Common Features of Ghosts and
Dreams. Mark Twain's Story. Theory of Common-sense. Not Logical.
Fulfilled Dreams. The Pig in the Palace. The Mignonette. Dreams of
Reawakened Memory. The Lost Cheque. The Ducks' Eggs. The Lost
Key. Drama in Dreams. The Lost Securities. The Portuguese
Gold-piece. St. Augustine's Story. The Two Curmas. Knowledge
acquired in Dreams. The Assyrian Priest. The Deja Vu. "I have been
here before." Sir Walter's Experience. Explanations. The Knot in the
Shutter. Transition to Stranger Dreams.
Arbuthnot, in his humorous work on Political Lying, commends the
Whigs for occasionally trying the people with "great swingeing
falsehoods". When these are once got down by the populace, anything
may follow without difficulty. Excellently as this practice has worked
in politics (compare the warming-pan lie of 1688), in the telling of
ghost stories a different plan has its merits. Beginning with the
common-place and familiar, and therefore credible, with the thin end of
the wedge, in fact, a wise narrator will advance to the rather unusual,
the extremely rare, the undeniably startling, and so arrive at statements
which, without this discreet and gradual initiation, a hasty reader might,
justly or unjustly, dismiss as "great swingeing falsehoods".
The nature of things and of men has fortunately made this method at

once easy, obvious, and scientific. Even in the rather fantastic realm of
ghosts, the stories fall into regular groups, advancing in difficulty, like
exercises in music or in a foreign language. We therefore start from the
easiest Exercises in Belief, or even from those which present no
difficulty at all. The defect of the method is that easy stories are dull
reading. But the student can "skip". We begin with common
every-night dreams.
Sleeping is as natural as waking; dreams are nearly as frequent as
every-day sensations, thoughts, and emotions. But dreams, being
familiar, are credible; it is admitted that people do dream; we reach the
less credible as we advance to the less familiar. For, if we think for a
moment, the alleged events of ghostdom--apparitions of all sorts--are
precisely identical with the every-night phenomena of dreaming, except
for the avowed element of sleep in dreams.
In dreams, time and space are annihilated, and two severed lovers may
be made happy. In dreams, amidst a grotesque confusion of things
remembered and things forgot, we see the events of the past (I have
been at Culloden fight and at the siege of Troy); we are present in
places remote; we behold the absent; we converse with the dead, and
we may even (let us say by chance coincidence) forecast the future. All
these things, except the last, are familiar to everybody who dreams. It is
also certain that similar, but yet more vivid, false experiences may be
produced, at the word of the hypnotiser, in persons under the hypnotic
sleep. A hypnotised man will take water for wine, and get drunk on it.
Now, the ghostly is nothing but the experience, when men are awake,
or apparently awake, of the every-night phenomena of dreaming. The
vision of the absent seen by a waking, or apparently waking, man is
called "a wraith"; the waking, or apparently waking, vision of the dead
is called "a ghost". Yet, as St. Augustine says, the absent man, or the
dead man, may know no more of the vision, and may have no more to
do with causing it, than have the absent or the dead whom we are
perfectly accustomed to see in our dreams. Moreover, the
comparatively rare cases in which two or more waking people are
alleged to have seen the same "ghost," simultaneously or in succession,

have their parallel in sleep, where two or more persons simultaneously
dream the same dream. Of this curious fact let us give one example: the
names only are altered.
THE DOG FANTI
Mrs. Ogilvie of Drumquaigh had a poodle named Fanti. Her family, or
at least those who lived with her, were her son, the laird, and three
daughters. Of these the two younger, at a certain recent date, were
paying a short visit to a neighbouring country house. Mrs. Ogilvie was
accustomed to breakfast in her bedroom, not being in the best of health.
One morning Miss Ogilvie came down to breakfast and said to her
brother, "I had an odd