Death Dreams And Ghosts

A collection of death, dreams, and ghost stories were gathered and presented to C.G. Jung and the author, who approaches this fascinating material from the depths of her analytic experience. ¦ among the Swiss, who are commonly regarded as stolid, unimaginative, rationalistic and materialistic, there are just as many ghost stories and suchlike as, say, in England or Ireland. Indeed, as I know from my own experience ... magic as practiced in the Middle Ages ... has by no means died out, but still flourishes today ... I can recommend it to all those who know how to value things that break through the monotony of daily life with salutary effects, (sometimes!) shaking our certitudes and lending wings to the imagination " from the Foreword by C.G. Jung. We are left in the overpowering presence of a great mystery. 9783856305802

." . . the stories we have been telling deal with living men supposed to be influencing living men. When the dead are alleged to exercise a similar power, we have to suppose that some consciousness survives the grave, and manifests itself by causing hallucinations among the living. Instances of this have already been given in "The Ghost and the Portrait," "The Bright Scar" and "Riding Home after Mess." These were adduced as examples of veracity in hallucinations. Each appearance gave information to the seer which he did not previously possess. In the first case, the lady who saw the soldier and the suppliant did not know of their previous existence and melancholy adventure. In the second, the brother did not know that his dead sister's face had been scratched. In the third, the observer did not know that Lieutenant B. had grown a beard and acquired a bay pony with black mane and tail. But though the appearances were veracious, they were purposeless, and again, as in each case the information existed in living minds, it may have been wired on from them. . . ."

Fiction. At the heart of MYSTERIOUS DREAMS OF THE DEAD is the spiritual search for a father who died in a plane crash north of Lake Superior when his son was fifteen. Mike Shintani decides in his early thirties to address the curious circumstances surrounding his father's death; the senior Shintani's body was never found, and wolves circled the crash site as if guarding the area. The impetus for Mike's search for truth is a diary he found in the basement of his home. It was obviously his father's, but it was written in Japanese. Mike never knew his father could write Japanese. He himself could neither read nor write the language. He was fortunate enough to enlist the help of Naoko Ito, a Japanese grad student at the University of Toronto. It turned out, the book was a dream diary, filled with poetry, descriptions of the surreal, and the story of a love affair with a woman named Chiemi. Chiemi is at the centre of the elder Shintani's dreams, and Naoko, after some time, seemingly disappears into thin air. Both appear as ghosts in dreams. Another great mystery of Mike's life is the behaviour of one of his best friends, Boku Sugiura, who decides one day to rob a bank, in the name of his grandfather and redress for Japanese Canadians. The two strains of the novel come together in Moose Jaw. Mike discovers the truth about his father's life and Boku's uncle (Daniel Sugiura from Terry's previous novel, THE THREE PLEASURES), a protestor in the Moose Jaw stand-off. Through elements of the Japanese ghost story (kwaidan), magic realism, and Buddhist myth, secrets are revealed and explored. MYSTERIOUS DREAMS OF THE DEAD is an imaginative examination of the effects of exile, internment, and dispersal on the third-generation of Japanese Canadians (the Sansei).

This book, written by Andrew Lang's, is a collection of supernatural tales from various cultures. Despite the subject matter, he approaches the stories with a rational and analytical attitude. The book features over 80 tales, including naked ghosts, wraiths, and dancing devils, from both the past and present. Lang leaves it up to the reader to decide if the stories are real or just vivid hallucinations. Regardless, the book remains captivating for fans of ghostly stories.