Anna Della Subin writes about sleepwalkers, grave worship, imperial Ethiopian court etiquette, visions of the flood, thirteenth-century oculists, occultists, cricket, ritualised mutiny, Dr. Death’s childhood, dreams of 9/11, the politics of the afterlife, 300-year naps. Accidental Gods, a history of men inadvertently turned into deities, is out now from Metropolitan Books in the US and Granta in the UK.