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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Book of Dreams and Ghosts," Andrew Lang crafts a captivating anthology that explores the intersections of the supernatural, folklore, and the human psyche. Combining rigorous scholarship with vivid storytelling, Lang delves into a plethora of ghost tales and dream interpretations from various cultures, providing a rich tapestry of narratives that evoke both wonder and unease. His distinctive literary style marries a methodical analytical approach with lyrical prose, creating an immersive reading experience. The book situates itself within the burgeoning field of folklore studies in the late 19th century, reflecting a growing fascination with the esoteric and a challenge to rationalist paradigms of the time. Andrew Lang, a Scottish poet and anthropologist, was deeply influenced by his wide-ranging interests in mythology, folklore, and the oral traditions of various cultures. His extensive travels and scholarly pursuits led him to collect and translate numerous tales, infusing "The Book of Dreams and Ghosts" with authentic voices from afar. Lang's background as a member of the literary and academic circles of his era underpins this work's significance, as he sought to bridge the gap between the empirical and the mysterious. This collection is a must-read for enthusiasts of supernatural literature, history, and anthropology. Lang's ability to weave together meticulous research with enthralling narratives invites readers to reflect on the enduring power of dreams and the spectral, urging us to consider the unseen forces that shape our realities. Dive into this thought-provoking exploration to unlock the mysteries that lie between the realms of the living and the spectral. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
Table of Contents
Introduction
Where waking reason meets the shadowy testimony of dreams and apparitions, Andrew Lang assembles a calm, inquisitive casebook that asks how we should treat stories people insist are true without yielding either to credulity or contempt.
The Book of Dreams and Ghosts is a late nineteenth-century work of nonfiction by the Scottish writer and folklorist Andrew Lang, positioned at the crossroads of folklore, anecdotal psychology, and the then-fashionable debate over the unexplained. Rather than a single narrative, it presents a panorama of reported experiences drawn from various times and places—often Britain and Europe—gathered from chronicles, private letters, and published accounts. Written in the urbane, essayistic manner characteristic of its era, the book situates uncanny material within a measured, literate frame that values curiosity, plain description, and cautious reasoning.
The premise is simple and disarming: Lang collects tales of dreams that seem to anticipate events and of encounters that appear to exceed ordinary sense, then offers brief commentary that weighs their plausibility. The reader’s experience is episodic and reflective, a sequence of vignettes that combine the chill of the uncanny with the decorum of a scholar’s notebook. The voice is courteous, ironic at times but never dismissive, and the mood oscillates between homely intimacy and quiet dread. Instead of plot, the interest lies in pattern, accumulation, and the delicate calibration of wonder against doubt.
Across these pages, persistent themes emerge: the borderland between sleeping and waking, the tug-of-war between coincidence and causation, the reliability of memory and testimony, and the cultural afterlives of stories that refuse to die. Lang treats ghostly narratives not merely as entertainments but as documents of human experience, registering fear, hope, grief, and the need to find meaning in contingency. Dreams become tests of how minds make connections; apparitions raise questions about perception and expectation. The book thus stages a conversation between personal conviction and public evidence, inviting readers to consider where certainty ends and interpretation begins.
Lang’s method is deliberately modest. He does not claim to prove the supernatural; he gathers, organizes, and compares, noting corroborations when available and alternative explanations when they suggest themselves. He draws on historical anecdotes and contemporary testimonies, attentive to dates, sources, and the mundane details that anchor extraordinary claims. Throughout, he aligns himself with a broad, civil skepticism that coexisted with the psychical research of his day, resisting dogmatic conclusions in favor of patience and proportion. The result is neither a debunking tract nor a credulous scrapbook, but a reflective inquiry into what counts as evidence in matters that test the edges of proof.
For modern readers, the book’s relevance lies in its steady gaze at how beliefs are formed and shared. Questions that preoccupied Lang—how to weigh hearsay, how stories spread, how memory colors the past—remain central in an age saturated with testimony and contested facts. Its pages anticipate later conversations about cognitive bias and the social life of rumor, yet they also preserve the intimate texture of experiences that statistics cannot easily contain. As a reading experience, it offers measured unease rather than shock, intellectual play rather than doctrine, and a humane willingness to sit with uncertainty.
Approached in this spirit, The Book of Dreams and Ghosts becomes an invitation to read attentively, to notice how narrative shapes belief, and to keep company with a writer who respects both curiosity and restraint. Expect variety, brevity, and a cultivated tone that prefers questions to conclusions. Expect, too, a carefully arranged cabinet of cases that encourages comparison and reflection without insisting on a final key. Lang’s balance of detachment and sympathy gives the collection its lasting charm, making it a companionable guide for anyone interested in the strange traffic between imagination, experience, and the claims of evidence.
Synopsis
Andrew Lang assembles in The Book of Dreams and Ghosts a wide-ranging dossier of narratives concerning unusual experiences, drawn from letters, diaries, legal records, folklore, and testimonies supplied to researchers. He opens by stating his limited aim: to present cases with as much detail and sourcing as possible, without asserting a doctrine about spirits or the afterlife. He distinguishes dreams, apparitions, and poltergeists, and indicates the criteria by which he will weigh a report, such as contemporaneous documentation and independent witnesses. The introduction sets a measured tone, urging restraint, and situates the work within the late Victorian interest in psychical research.
He begins with ordinary dreaming, noting prevailing theories about memory, suggestion, and the play of recent impressions. From this familiar ground, Lang moves to dreams that appear to correspond with real events unknown to the dreamer at the time. He avoids elaborate theorizing, instead presenting illustrative cases where time, place, and content seem strikingly matched. He frames each with details about sources and dates, and when available, the steps taken to verify them. The sequence advances from mundane aberrations of sleep toward instances that challenge coincidence, keeping the reader attentive to the incremental rise in evidential complexity.
A substantial portion addresses warning or premonitory dreams, in which sleepers receive vivid impressions of danger, death, or loss. Lang records episodes where a dream reportedly prompted timely actions, later confirmed by news or discovery. He underscores the need to filter retrospective embroidery by requesting early written accounts or corroborating witnesses. Explanations such as chance, subconscious inference, or selective memory are considered beside the testimonies. The organization groups like cases together, allowing patterns to emerge, such as repeated imagery or family clustering, while also noting failures where reported dreams did not match subsequent events with sufficient precision.
Lang then turns to dreams that seemingly lead to tangible outcomes, including the finding of lost articles, the identification of locations, or clues in criminal inquiries. He does not claim judicial weight for such stories, but he preserves the sequences of decisions, reports to authorities, and later confirmations when they exist. He is attentive to coincidence and the possibility that dreams focused attention on already available hints. The narrative maintains a catalogue format, brief but sourced, and pauses for remarks about proportionality, emphasizing that even vivid cases must be compared against the unrecorded multitude of idle or erroneous dreams.
From sleep he proceeds to waking visions and apparitions, especially the crisis cases where a figure is seen or heard at the approximate hour of a persons death or distress at a distance. Lang cites instances with synchronized clocks, letters, or newspaper dates used to check timing. He indicates cases with multiple percipients sharing the experience, offering a different evidential profile than solitary vision. Without pronouncing on causation, he outlines competing ideas such as telepathy between minds and simple coincidence amplified by memory. The arrangement parallels the dream chapters, building from single reports to clusters that suggest recurrent motifs.
Next he assembles reports of haunted houses and disturbances categorized as poltergeist activity, characterized by raps, thrown objects, or unexplained movements. Many are tied to particular households and brief periods, often with adolescents present. Lang provides excerpts from letters, parish notes, or magistrates records when available, and he acknowledges the difficulty of observing such phenomena under control. He records allegations of trickery alongside accounts by careful witnesses, and he notes the frustrating irregularity of the events. The section emphasizes patterns of localization, the cessation of activity with changes in inhabitants, and the rarity of physical injury.
Lang devotes attention to traditions of second sight and family portents, drawing material from Scottish Highlands narratives, Irish banshee lore, and Scandinavian sagas. He places these within a historical continuum, noting similarities in motifs across centuries and cultures. He distinguishes between literary embellishment and cases preserved in private correspondence or parish histories. The discussion raises the problem of cultural expectation shaping what is noticed and reported, without dismissing the convergence of independent testimonies. Sequences of genealogical omens and repeated forms of warning are outlined, offering the reader a view of how persistent beliefs intersect with sporadic incidents.
To balance anecdote with inquiry, Lang reviews experimental efforts in thought transference, crystal gazing, and hypnotism conducted by contemporary investigators. He provides summaries of protocols, controls, and results, including mixed outcomes and frequent ambiguities. The intent is not to prove a mechanism but to show how disciplined observation might approach elusive experiences. He stresses the importance of dated notes, blind procedures, and independent observers, while acknowledging the ease with which bias or error can intrude. This section situates the narratives within broader attempts to test claims without presupposing supernatural agency, keeping the focus on method and documentation.
In closing, Lang reiterates that the book is a collection of testimony, not a proof of doctrines. He offers possible lines of explanation, ranging from subconscious inference and chance to telepathic communication and survival after death, while deferring judgment. The concluding remarks invite readers to maintain a critical but receptive stance, to preserve records carefully, and to avoid hasty generalization from striking incidents. The overall message emphasizes sober collection of evidence and comparative study across types of cases. By aligning folklore, personal documents, and early experiments, the book proposes a cautious groundwork for future psychical research.
Historical Context
Published in London in 1897, Andrew Lang’s The Book of Dreams and Ghosts emerges from the late Victorian United Kingdom, a time when industrial modernity, imperial reach, and mass literacy intersected with a vigorous culture of scientific debate and popular fascination with the unseen. Its “setting” is less a single locale than a transhistorical map: ancient Greece, early modern Scotland and England, and nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Yet the book is anchored in the fin-de-siècle milieu—university science, metropolitan periodicals, and parlour séances—where statistics, testimony, and comparative anthropology were mobilized to test extraordinary claims. Lang, a Scottish classicist steeped in folklore, wrote within London’s networks of journals, societies, and newspapers that circulated such inquiries nationally and abroad.
Modern Spiritualism, beginning with the Fox sisters’ rappings at Hydesville, New York, in 1848, spread to Britain by the early 1850s, filling drawing rooms from London to Edinburgh with séances, trance speaking, and table-turning. Notable figures included the Scottish-born medium Daniel Dunglas Home (active in Britain and Europe in the 1850s–1860s), Florence Cook in London (associated with William Crookes in the 1870s), and the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino, who visited Britain in the 1890s. Spiritualism’s circulation through transatlantic networks of newspapers, lecture tours, and societies created a public arena for contested evidence. Lang’s collection, while cautious about séance theatrics, aligns with this movement’s central question: can disciplined testimony illuminate apparitions and veridical dreams?
The Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in London in 1882 by academics such as Henry Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Edmund Gurney, sought to investigate apparitions, telepathy, and haunted houses using systematic methods. Its landmark study, Phantasms of the Living (1886), compiled hundreds of cases of crisis apparitions coincident with death or danger. The 1894 Census of Hallucinations—surveying over 17,000 people—reported roughly one in ten had experienced a vivid hallucination, with temporal coincidences suggesting phenomena exceeding chance expectation. Lang, sympathetic to SPR aims yet judicious in tone, draws on their casework and statistical ethos. His book mirrors their procedure—collecting dated testimonies, weighing witness independence, and distinguishing fantasy from evidence-bearing narratives.
Early modern witchcraft prosecutions formed a crucial legal and social backdrop to British attitudes toward visions and spirits. Scotland’s 1563 Witchcraft Act and England’s 1604 statute criminalized maleficium and pacts with the Devil, fueling large-scale hunts such as the North Berwick trials (1590–1592) and Scotland’s intense persecutions in the 1649–1650 decade. Accusations, often rooted in village quarrels, illness, and providential belief, resulted in hundreds of executions. Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Acts in 1736, replacing them with statutes treating witchcraft claims as fraud. Lang’s reprinting and scrutiny of older dream and “second sight” materials implicitly reframes such experiences as cultural and psychological data, contrasting judicial ferocity with the persistence of vernacular visions into the nineteenth century.
The Cock Lane ghost (1762) in London—nicknamed “Scratching Fanny”—pitted sensational claims against empirical inquiry. The haunting centered on a young girl, Elizabeth Parsons, with raps allegedly from the spirit of Fanny Lynes, connected to William Kent and William Parsons. A committee including Samuel Johnson investigated; the phenomena were exposed as fraudulent, and principal instigators received legal penalties. The episode unfolded in a rapidly expanding press culture that printed depositions, pamphlets, and rebuttals. Lang’s interest in such emblematic cases lies in their documentary richness: named witnesses, dates, and competing explanations enable him to contrast credulity, imposture, and honest misperception—key coordinates for evaluating ghost narratives historically.
The Hammersmith Ghost case (1803–1804) revealed how spectral rumor could precipitate lethal action and legal precedent. Amid reports of a white-clad apparition in Hammersmith, London, Francis Smith shot and killed Thomas Millwood—an innocent bricklayer—on 3 January 1804, claiming he mistook him for the ghost. Tried at the Old Bailey, Smith was convicted of murder under Lord Chief Baron Sir Archibald Macdonald; the Crown reprieved and later pardoned him. The case long shadowed English criminal law on mistaken belief and justification. Lang’s project intersects with this history by showing how communal fear, costume, and night-time ambiguity manufacture “apparitions,” and how the law struggles when visionary belief crosses into public order and violence.
Industrialization’s new geographies and domestic spaces shaped nineteenth-century hauntings, notably the Willington Mill House case (c. 1835–1840) near Newcastle upon Tyne, associated with the Quaker industrialist Joseph Procter. Reports detailed footsteps, apparitions, and raps observed by household members and visitors, circulating in regional papers and later collections. Such cases located the supernatural not in isolate ruins but in respectable, working households embedded in milling and river commerce. At the same time, Scottish “second sight” traditions—documented by Martin Martin in 1703 in the Hebrides and Highlands—persisted through the Jacobite risings (1715, 1745), the defeat at Culloden (1746), and subsequent Clearances. Lang links modern testimonies to these enduring vision beliefs, mapping continuity across upheaval and modernization.
As social and political critique, the book exposes fault lines in late Victorian Britain’s hierarchy of credibility. By juxtaposing servants’ statements, provincial correspondents, and scholars’ affidavits, Lang implicitly challenges class-bound dismissal of popular testimony. His sifting of frauds (e.g., Cock Lane) and tragedies (Hammersmith) criticizes sensationalist media and a legal culture ill-suited to ambiguous experiences. Engaging SPR statistics against dogmatic materialism while distancing himself from exploitative mediumship, he indicts both credulity and rigid disbelief. The work also illuminates gendered and occupational asymmetries in who is heard and trusted. In presenting dreams and apparitions as data, it urges a more democratic, accountable public sphere for weighing extraordinary claims.
