The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

What It's About

First published in 1897, this is a collection of first-hand accounts of dreams, visions, hallucinations, and ghostly encounters, gathered by the folklorist Andrew Lang. Organised into chapters covering dreams, visions, crystal-gazing, hallucinations, wraiths, and ghosts, the book presents around eighty reported experiences spanning the two preceding centuries, related either in Lang's own words or through direct quotation from witnesses. The preface opens with the question "Do you believe in ghosts?" and sets the tone for what follows: less a work of proof than an entertaining survey of the uncanny.

Key Concepts

Lang is chiefly interested in the blurred line between dreaming and waking experience, and in hallucination as a possible explanation for reported hauntings — without dismissing the accounts outright. The book continues the psychical research Lang began in his earlier Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894), balancing a scientific, questioning temperament against genuine curiosity about phenomena that resisted easy explanation in his time.

About the Author

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, historian, and anthropologist, born in Selkirk and educated at St Andrews University and Balliol College, Oxford, later becoming a fellow of Merton College. Though best remembered today as a collector of fairy tales, Lang maintained a lifelong interest in psychical research and was elected President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1911.