"Liminal Spaces": Dreams, Death, and the Disorderly Dead

Whilst much recent work has discussed popular beliefs about ghosts and the relationship between the dead and the living in the early modern English context, none of these works have sufficiently explored the idea of liminality, nor have historians fully engaged with the significant link between ghosts, dreams and death. I will attempt to redress this neglect and suggest that there is a fundamental link between these categories and experiences which sheds important light on contemporary worldviews and the way that the supernatural was at the heart of confessional debates and ultimately became a contested space and source of collective anxiety and fixation. The links between ghosts and dreams are that the dead could easily cross the borders in dreams and frequently do in the personal and printed accounts. Drawing on the work of anthropologist, Victor Turner, I will suggest that the state of dreaming was the ultimate liminal state – a gateway between the world of the dead and state of sleep (also closely aligned with death) and the world of the living and state of reality. It was this theological ambiguity and liminality that made both ghosts and dreams significant religious and ideological contested spaces and beliefs. These arguments and themes will be applied to three broad categories of the supernatural: dreams and the dead, ghosts and apparitions and finally the Scottish phenomena of second sight.