Connie Willis - Lincolns Dreams

Bantam Books by Connie Willis

DOOMSDAY BOOK
FIRE WATCH
LINCOLNS DREAMS
IMPOSSIBLE THINGS
BELLWETHER
REMAKE
UNCHARTED TERRITORY
TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG
MIRACLE AND OTHER
CHRISTMAS STORIES
PASSAGE

To
Courtney and Cordelia

Special thanks to my research assistants,
the SmithsBrooke and Karolyn, Brien
and Juliefor wandering among
the tombstones of Fredericksburg and
Arlington, asking questions and taking
notes, searching for clues.

W hile I was working on Lincolns Dreams, any number of people asked me why I was writing a book about the Civil War, but no one at all asked me why I was writing a book about dreams. Instead, when I told them what the book was about, they began telling me about dreams they had had, as if I could tell them what they meant.

I had no idea. I have no idea what any dreams mean. All the latest research seems to indicate that they dont mean anythingthat they are nothing more than the nervous systems charwoman, tidying up after the days events, taking out the trash. And that makes very good sense. (Why else would we dream about empty creamer packets that steal a parakeet?) But something in us rebels at the idea that theyre the days detritus, because dreams so obviously mean something.

Freud thought so, too. He wrote his dreams down in painstaking detail (they are as ridiculous as oursfull of flower monographs and false teeth) and pored over them, trying to decipher their meaning. He decided they were dispatches from our unconscious: longing sighs and murmured memories and cries for help, all sent in a complicated code.

And that seems logical, too, until it comes to the deciphering. (The creamer packets clearly represent your yearning for your mothers breast ) Because its not a code, its another language. And their images cant be reduced to symbols. Dreams are something more, something else.

Abraham Lincoln dreamed his own death. He heard the sound of crying and asked the guard, Who is dead in the White House? and the guard said, The President. And its perfectly clear what that dream meant. You dont need a codebook to tell its a warning. Yet I find myself puzzling over it, and over that other dream of his, the one he dreamed before every significant event of the war, the one he dreamed the night before he died. In that dream, he was in a boat, drifting toward an unknown shore, and you dont need Freud for that one either.

Or if you insist on the charwoman theory, it is scarcely unusual that death was on his mindthere was at least one assassination attempt a week, and he had already heard the sound of crying in the White House when Willie died. And yet, in spite of all this logic, I find them staying with me like a dream, the code impossible to decipher, troubling me, haunting me.

As the Civil War haunts me. In the first part of Lincolns Dreams, Jeff is offered a job researching the long-term effects of the Vietnam War. He turns it down. Im busy studying the long-term effects of the Civil War. And I guess thats what I was doing, too, writing this book. Because the Civil War isnt over. Its images, dreamlike, stay with usyoung boys lying face-down in cornfields and orchards, and Robert E. Lee on Traveller. And Lincoln, dead in the White House, and the sound of crying.

The Civil War disturbs us, all these long years after, troubling our sleep. Like a cry for help, like a warning, like a dream. And we pore over it, trying to break the code, its meaning just out of reach.

It may be that life is not mans most precious possession, after all. Certainly men can be induced to give it away very freely at times, and the terms hardly seem to make sense unless there is something about the whole business that we dont understand. Lives are spent for very insignificant things which benefit the dead not at alla few rods of ground in a cornfield, for instance, or temporary ownership of a little hill or a piece of windy pasture; and now and then they are simply wasted outright, with nobody gaining anything at all.

Bruce Catton
Mr. Lincolns Army

They bred such horses in Virginia then,
Horses that were remembered after death
And buried not so far from Christian ground
That if their sleeping riders should arise
They could not witch them from the earth again
And ride a printless course along the grass
With the old manage and light ease of hand.

Stephen Vincent Benet

T raveller died of lockjaw two years after Robert E. Lee died. I looked that up one day in February, the day I went out to see where Abraham Lincolns son Willie had been buried. I had been looking for the grave for over a year, and when I finally found it in a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln, I ran out of the library still carrying the book. It set off an alarm, and one of the librarians came out on the steps and shouted after me, Jeff, are you all right? Jeff!

It was snowing hard that day, a wet spring snow. It took me nearly an hour to drive out to the old cemetery in Georgetown. I dont know what I thought Id find, some clue maybe to where Annie was and what had happened to her, some message that would tell me what had happened to all of them, Tom Tita and Ben and the rest of the soldiers who had died in the Civil War and were buried together under granite squares no larger than a scrap of paper.

But there wasnt anything there, not even Willie Lincolns body, and I went back to Brouns house and got out Freemans four-volume biography of Lee and tried to find out what had happened to Traveller.

As with everything else that had happened, there were both too many clues and not enough. But eventually I found out what I needed to know, the way I had found out where Willie had been, the way I had found out what was causing Annies dreams. After all, that was what I was good at, wasnt it, looking up obscure facts? Traveller had lived two years. He had picked up a nail and gotten lockjaw. They had had to shoot him.