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.
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