Lincoln's Dreams (8 page)

“Exactly,” Dr. Stone said, looking pleased. “He could have been dreaming about Willie. The person in the coffin could have represented both Willie and Lincoln’s own fears of assassination. The combining of two people into one is very common in dreams. It’s called condensation.”

I thought of Annie and the way she had combined the two generals, A. P. Hill and D. H. Hill, into one.

“Or,” he leaned back into the chair, “it could have been something he ate.”

“So you couldn’t tell if someone was emotionally disturbed just from the dreams they were having?” I asked.

“Hardly,” Dr. Stone said. “If that were true, we’d all be certifiable. I remember a dream I had where I was using a cattle prod on my patients.” He laughed. “No, dreams by themselves can’t offer adequate evidence of emotional illness. Why?”

I realized, too late, that we shouldn’t have gotten into this. “Somebody told Broun that Lincoln’s dreams indicated that he was heading for a nervous breakdown.”

“Really? A layman, I assume. A psychiatrist would never try to diagnose on the basis of a dream.”

Well, a psychiatrist—one of his psychiatrists, as a matter of fact—had done just that, and I would have liked to tell him that Dr. Richard Madison, that good man doing research on insomnia, had done more than that, out telling him about Richard meant telling him about Annie, and I wasn’t ready to do that just yet, not until I knew a little more about Dr. Stone.

“You said dreams can be caused by something you ate?” I said before Broun had a chance to tell him who had diagnosed Lincoln as crazy. “Is that really true? Can you get nightmares by eating Mexican food before you go to bed?”

“Oh, yes. Eating causes certain enzymes to
be released into the dreamer’s system, and those trigger…

The phone rang. I turned and looked at the answering machine. Broun put his pen down. Dr. Stone leaned forward in his chair watching both of us.

“Do you want to get that?” Broun asked.

“No,” I said. I pushed the message button. “It’s probably only the librarian. She promised to get me some information on Lincoln’s dreams. I’ll call her back.”

The phone rang a second time, finally, and the message light came on. I could hear the click as the recorder started its spiel, telling whoever it was that there was no one here and would they leave a message at the sound of the tone. And who was it? Annie, saying, “I had another dream”? Or Richard, calling to tell me to stop interfering with his treatment? The message light went out.

I turned back to Dr. Stone. “You were saying?”

“Digestion can have an effect on dreaming because the digestive enzymes in the bloodstream trigger chemical changes in the brain.”

“What about drugs?” I said. “Drugs cause chemical changes in the blood, too, don’t they? Could Lincoln’s dreams have been the effect of some drug he was taking?”

“Yes, certainly. Laudanum was known to cause—”

“What about Elavil? Could it cause dreams?”

He frowned. “No, actually Elavil represses the dream cycle. All the antidepressants do, and of course the barbiturates: Seconal, phenobarbital. Nembutal. The patient usually doesn’t dream at all when he’s on those drugs. Of course, when he’s taken off them, the number and vividness increase dramatically, so I suppose you could say in that respect they cause dreams. But of course those are modern drugs,” he said, looking at Broun. “Lincoln wouldn’t have taken any of them.”

“What do you mean, increase in vividness?” I asked.

“The drugs produce a dream deficit that is compensated for by a dream rebound as soon as the patient is taken off the drugs. The patient experiences what we call a ‘storm of dreams,’ for several days, powerful, frightening nightmares that rapidly succeed each other. It’s the same thing that happens when a patient’s been deprived of sleep for several days. We usually advise against abrupt discontinuation of antidepressants and sedatives to avoid triggering a storm of dreams.” He gave me a look almost as sharp as one of Broun’s. “Are you on Elavil?”

“No,” I said. “Lincoln had insomnia after Willie died. I thought maybe his doctor might have prescribed something to make him sleep that gave him bad dreams, so I looked up ‘Insomnia,’ and it said Elavil was a recommended treatment, but obviously I was in the wrong century.” I stood up. “Speaking of sleep and drugs and digestion, would anybody like some coffee? Or does coffee give you bad dreams, too?”

“As a matter of fact, caffeine has been shown to have marked effects on dreaming.”

“I’ll make it decaffeinated,” I said, and went downstairs to the kitchen.

Broun had another phone there, a separate line. I called the number of the phone in the upstairs study, and before it could ring, punched in the remote code that would play back the message. The only message on the machine was Broun’s. “I’m on my way down from New York, Jeff I should be there around ten. I’m meeting with a Dr. Stone from the Sleep Institute at eleven. He’s been doing dream research in California, and I thought I’d see what he had to say about Lincoln’s dreams.”

I put the coffee on and tried to call Annie. There was no answer. I found a tray and put Styrofoam cups and the cream pitcher and sugar bowl on it. I tried Annie’s number again. Still no answer.

She’s sleeping, I told myself. Her subconscious is trying to make up for the REM sleep she lost when she was on the Elavil. It was a logical enough explanation.
When Richard took her off the Elavil, she had had a “storm of dreams,” that was all. The dead Union soldiers and the horse with its legs shot off were nothing more than her subconscious trying to make up for lost time. When her dream deficit got caught up, she would stop dreaming about lost dispatches and Springfield rifles, and there was nothing to worry about.

But I had asked her, “When did Richard take you off the Elavil?” and she had told me it was
after
the dreams got suddenly clearer and more frightening, not before. Besides, the “storm of dreams” was only supposed to last a few days. Annie had had the dream about Antietam at least two weeks after Richard had taken her off the Elavil. And she had been dreaming about the dead Union soldiers for over a year.

Broun’s cat had followed me downstairs. I looked in the refrigerator to see what the caterers had left behind and found half a plate of soggy crackers with shrimp salad on them. I set it on the floor and tried to call Annie again, and then went back upstairs with the tray.

They were talking about prodromic dreams. “A Dr. Gordon did a study on prodromic dreams a couple of years ago at Stanford on tuberculosis patients,” Dr. Stone said, “but I don’t think he found anything conclusive. The study I was working on in California …”

Dr. Stone stopped talking when I came into the study. Broun stood up and began heaping papers and books on one side of his desk to clear a space for the tray. I set it down.

“Dr. Stone was just going to tell me about his project,” Broun said.

“Yes,” Dr. Stone said. “The project I headed up in California involved using a probe on different parts of the brain. The probe produces an electrical charge that provides a stimulus to a localized region of the brain, and the patient, who’s under local anesthetic only, tells us what he’s thinking. Sometimes it’s
a memory, sometimes a smell or a taste, sometimes an emotion.

“The probe is used randomly, touching a large number of areas in a very short time, too short a time for the patient to respond individually to the stimuli. Then the patient is asked to describe everything that he’s seen, and we compare the transcript of his account with transcripts of dream accounts obtained by traditional methods. We’ve come up with a statistically significant correspondence. And the most interesting aspect of it is that even though we know there’s no connection between the images in the account, the patient connects them all into a coherent, narrative dream.”

Well, so much for suggesting Annie change doctors. Dr. Stone might not tell her she was crazy, but what if he decided the best way to get at the “real” meaning of the dreams was to put her on an operating table and open up her head? What Annie needed was a doctor who would listen to her dreams and try to find out what was causing them instead of trying to force his own theories on her, and I was beginning to think there wasn’t any such thing.

“You mean there was some kind of electrical shock in Lincoln’s brain and he saw a coffin and then made up the rest of the dream?” Broun said.

“Made up
is the wrong word,” Dr. Stone said. “We have to remember that although the dream occurs in the subconscious, the memory of it occurs in the conscious mind. The dream is translated into the conscious mind, and it may be in that translation process that the dreams take on their narrative aspect. It may be the same kind of process that takes place when we watch film. We’re seeing individual frames, but it looks like they’ve moving. Persistence of vision, it’s called. Maybe there’s a corresponding persistence that translates unrelated impulses into the dream we remember.”

Broun poured a cup of coffee and handed it to me. “These impulses,” he said, “where do they come from?”

“The initial results of our study indicate that the brain is processing the factual material of the day for storage.”

Broun handed him a Styrofoam cup full of coffee. “Do you take anything in your coffee?” he asked.

Dr. Stone leaned forward a little, making the leather in the chair creak, and took the cup. “Just black,” he said. “We’re also getting indications that external stimuli have a marked effect on dream content. Everybody’s had their alarm clock show up in a dream as a scream or a cat meowing or the sound of someone crying.”

Broun poured himself a cup of coffee and stirred cream into it. “What about recurring dreams?” he asked. “After Willie died, Lincoln dreamed about him for months.”

“The same dream?”

“I don’t know,” Broun said. He set down his cup and scrabbled in his notes. “‘Willie’s death had staggered him, haunting his sleep until the little boy’s ace came in dreams to soothe him,’” he read aloud. “That’s from Lewis. And Randall says he dreamed Willie was alive again.”

“Our study has shown that most recurring dreams aren’t the same dream at all. We used the probe randomly, repeatedly stimulating one selected region of the brain in each test. After each session, the patient would report that he had had the same dream as before, but when questioned about individual details he told an entirely different dream, though he persisted in his belief that the dreams were identical. Persistence of dreams again. Lincoln would naturally have many images of the living Willie stored in his memory that could be stimulated.”

“What about Lincoln’s dream of his own assassination?” I asked. “That couldn’t just be Lincoln putting all the day’s junk in some kind of mental file cabinet, could it? All the details fit—the coffin in the East Room, the guard, the black cloth over the corpse’s face.”

“Because his conscious mind
made
them fit. Remember,
we have no idea of what the dream was really like.” He turned and smiled crookedly at Broun, then turned back to me. “What we have is Lincoln’s account of the dream, which is something completely different.”

“Secondary elaboration,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, looking pleased. “You
have
been doing a lot of research, haven’t you? Lincoln’s real dream would have been a sequence of unrelated images, a stairway, a memory of Willie Lincoln in his coffin, a cloth of some kind, a napkin or a handkerchief or something. It wouldn’t have to be black or even cloth, for that matter. It could have been a scrap of paper.”

A scrap of paper, a cat, a Springfield rifle. It won’t wash. Dr. Stone.

“… and in the process of bringing the dream up to the subconscious and then telling it, the dream took on a coherence and an emotional importance it simply didn’t have.” He put both hands on the arms of the chair. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to get back to the Institute.”

“What if I dreamed I was upstairs in the White House and heard crying but couldn’t see anyone?” I asked. “What if when I went downstairs there was a coffin in the East Room?”

Broun reached for his cup. Coffee slopped onto his notes.

“I’d say you’d spent the whole day doing research on Lincoln’s dreams,” Dr. Stone said.

“Did you dream that?” Broun said, still holding the cup at an angle. More coffee spilled out.

“No,” I said. “So you don’t think Lincoln’s assassination dream means anything, even though everything in it happened two weeks later? You think it’s all just a matter of what he did that day and what he had for dinner?”

“I’m afraid so.” Dr. Stone stood up and set his cup on the tray. “I know this probably isn’t the sort of thing you wanted to hear, especially when you’re trying to write a novel. One of the greatest difficulties
I encounter in my reasearch is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite.”

You didn’t see her standing there in the snow, I thought. You didn’t see the look on her face. I don’t know what’s causing her dreams, but it’s not random impulses and it’s not indigestion. Annie’s dreams do mean something. There’s a reason she’s having them, and I’m going to find out what it is.

“You’ve been a great deal of help. Dr. Stone,” Broun said. “I appreciate your giving us so much of your time. I know you’re very busy.”

He walked Dr. Stone downstairs. I waited till they were almost at the bottom of the steps and then went over and hit the play button on Broun’s answering machine. There still wasn’t any message.

I tried to call Annie. She didn’t answer. Broun’s cat jumped up on the desk and dipped its head into Broun’s Styrofoam cup and began lapping delicately at the coffee. I put down the phone and picked him up by the back of the neck to throw him off.

“I take it you didn’t think too much of Dr. Stone’s theories,” Broun said from the door.

“No,” I said, depositing the cat on the floor. “Did you?”

“I thought he had some interesting things to say.”

“About Lincoln’s indigestion or about taking a cattle prod to his patients?”

“About the real meaning of Lincoln’s dreams being physical.” He sat down heavily in the leather chair. “And about the persistence of dreaming, how we take a lot of unconnected images and make them into one continuous dream.”