Andrew Lang, the Scottish author of the perennially popular Color Fairy Stories, also wrote one of my favorite books on dreams. Titled The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, it was first published in 1897. As the title suggests, Lang’s focus is on dream encounters with the departed. He affected a cool skepticism towards his subject material, which allowed him to slide us right into the deep end, recounting cases of timefolding and interdimensional travel in dreams.
As a consummate storyteller, Lang was always alert for the story value of his material. His main question of dreams is which dreams make the best stories. He concludes that the dreams that make the best stories are those that reveal the “unknown past”, “the unknown present” and the “unknown future”.
Dreams only form subjects of good dream-stories when the vision coincides with an adequately represents an unknown event in the past, the present or the future…If we dreamed of being present at an unchronicled scene in Queen Mary’s life, and if, after the dream was recorded, a document proving its accuracy should be for the first time recovered, then there is matter for a good dream-story.
His references to his own dream life, though modest and
brief, suggest he had experiential insight into his subject: “In dreams…we see the events of the past (I have been
at Culloden fight and at the siege of
He collects
examples of shared dreams and uses
that term for them. In one case he cites, three members of the Swithinbanks
family (the father and two sons) dream the mother’s death on the same night and
discover in the morning that the dream was fulfilled.
Lang gives
several examples of dreams that revealed the location of lost objects. Thus a
lawyer dreams that a check he has lost is curled around a street railing – and
finds it at that exact place when he goes looking for it. A girl in Lang’s
family dreamed that missing ducks’ eggs
were at a place in a certain field, where they proved to be. An “Irish lady” dreamed
a lost key was lying at the root of a certain tree, and found it there.
Picture: Andrew Lang by W.B. Richmond for Century magazine.
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