Andrew Lang is best known for his Rainbow Fairy books, a lovely and extensive collection of fairy tales.

I came to this expecting something similar but with a focus on ghosts and ghost stories, but the collection is Lang’s musings on supposedly true ghost encounters, rather than ghost stories in the fictional and imaginative sense.

If you like watching ghost hunting shows or enjoy that breed of ghost-related content, this is a better written version of that sort of thing and will likely appeal to you. For me, this kind of stuff is too rooted in family legend that isn’t of much interest unless you’re part of said family. Lang, asl always, gets the most out of his material, but this one wasn’t for me.

Sorry folks and lovers of short stories such as myself, try as I might, I couldn't download this! Because I love short stories I would like to read this before I rate it so I'm just going to give it a down-the-middle 3 stars. I would love to read this, so I will acquire it myself and come back with a better rating or Oh dear! A worse one.

Special thanks anyway to NetGalley and Dover Publications for trying to provide me with this ARC.

This book was not at all what I thought it would be. It is more like an essay then a book. It has several accounts of people dreaming about ghosts and other weird happenings, and even occasionally seeing ghosts. It is pretty dry and I would not call it fascinating. Parts are written in old english and a bit hard to read. The book was originally published in 1897. I think I would of gotten more from it if when it was transcribed it was updated a bit. I guess that really couldn't happen but it would of made it easier to read.

Originally published in 1897, this book is like traveling back in time and having a conversation about, well, dreams and ghosts by the fireplace on a cold, stormy night. It is a little old-fashioned, and some stories were written in old English and were, therefore, hard to read. The theories are amazingly modern, considering this was before modern psychology, and spread through different countries and cultures. There are too many details sometimes, and the style is a little dated, but I mostly enjoyed the stories. Beware, though, this is not really a collection of tales, but more of the author compiling different and varied short stories, so the style isn't consistent.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/ Dover Publications!

Andrew Lang is most known for his collection of fairytales in his Rainbow Series. So that's probably the reason most people, myself included, thought this book was an anthology of ghostly short stories. That's not what this is.

Dreams and Ghosts is a study on ghosts, dreams and alike supernatural occurrences. It reads as a scientific article even, as the author's objective was to analyse said events with a logical lens in order to reach concrete proof. Or as close to it as possible giving the subject.

I recommend this to anyone interested in a collection of reports on the supernatural.