Glimmering images

From Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book:

Why, when the lights go out and the storytelling begins, is the most compelling tale (most convincing, most believable) a ghost story? Since most of us have no experience of ghosts in the material world, this should be the tale we least easily believe. The answer is that the story instructs its hearers to create an image whose own properties are second nature to the imagination; it instructs its hearers to depict in the mind something thin, dry, filmy, two-dimensional, and without solidity. . . . It is not hard to imagine a ghost successfully. What is hard is successfully to imagine an object, any object, that does not look like a ghost