ng 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-nig