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.