iving clergyman. It is not even necessary to suppose that the
dead man was dreaming about the living person to whom, or about the
place in which, he appeared. But on the analogy of the tales in which
a dream or thought of the living seems to produce a hallucination of
their presence in the minds of other and distant living people, so a
dream of the dead may (it is urged) have a similar effect if "in that
sleep of death such dreams may come". The idea occurred to
Shakespeare! In any case the ghosts of our stories hitherto have been
so aimless and purposeless as to resemble what we might imagine a dead
man's dream to be.

This view of the case (that a "ghost" may be a reflection of a dead
man's dream) will become less difficult to understand if we ask
ourselves what natural thing most resembles the common idea of a
ghost. You are reading alone at night, let us say, the door opens and
a human figure glides into the room. To you it pays no manner of
attention; it does not answer if you speak; it may trifle with some
object in the chamber and then steal quietly out again.

_It is the House-maid walking in her Sleep_.

This perfectly accountable appearance, in its aimlessness, its
unconsciousness, its irresponsiveness, is undeniably just like the
common notion of a ghost. Now, if ordinary ghosts are not of flesh
and blood, like the sleep-walking house-maid, yet are as irresponsive,
as unconscious, and as vaguely wandering as she, then (if the dead are
somewhat) a ghost _may_ be a hallucination produced in the living by
the _unconscious_ action of the mind of the dreaming dead. The
conception is at least conceivable. If adopted, merely for argument's
sake, it would first explain the purposeless behaviour of ghosts, and
secondly, relieve people who see ghosts of the impression that they
see "spirits". In the Scotch phrase the ghost obviously "is not all
there," any more than the sleep walker is intellectually "all there".
This incomplete, incoherent presence is just what might be expected if
a dreaming disembodied mind could affect an embodied mind with a
hallucination.

But the good old-fashioned ghost stories are usually of another type.
The robust and earnest ghosts of our ancestors "had their own purpose
sun-clear before them," as Mr. Carlyle would have said. They knew
what they wanted, asked for it, and saw that they got it.

As a rule their bodies were unburied, and so they demanded sepulture;
or they had