Burstein - Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud

Lincoln Dreamt He Died

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Lincoln Dreamt He Died

The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud

Andrew Burstein

LINCOLN DREAMT HE DIED

Copyright Andrew Burstein, 2013.

All rights reserved.

For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the U.S.a division of St. Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

ISBN: 978-1-137-27827-2

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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Burstein, Andrew.

Lincoln dreamt he died : the midnight visions of remarkable Americans from colonial times to Freud / by Andrew Burstein.

p. cm.

1. Dreams. 2. Celebrities. 3. United StatesHistory19th century. I. Title.

BF1091.B98 2013

154.630973dc23

2012038454

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by: Letra Libre, Inc.

First edition: June 2013

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

For NGI and JMB

Our life is two-fold: Sleep hath its own world,

A boundary between the things misnamed

Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,

And a wide realm of wild reality.

And dreams in their development have breath,

And tears, and torture, and the touch of joy;

They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts.

Lord Byron (1816)

Contents

ix

Preface: The Language We Speak to Ourselvesxi

xix

Part One

To 1800

Part Two

18011860

Part Three

18611900

Illustrations

Preface

The Language We Speak to Ourselves

D reams. They are like most of the people we have brushed past in life, remaining in the forefront of our minds for only a short while and then fading into the background. Some are gone forever, others called to mind when we are given the right stimulation. The saying Life goes on applies to mind-stories as much as to our memory of old acquaintances. For without a written or visual reminder, memory displaces what is past in order for us to focus on the immediacy of our strenuous, need-driven personal lives.

Dreams. Like the dead, they linger inside us by the strength of imagination. Think of all the personal history that has vanished from your mind, matters you once cared about but have long since ceased to reflect on. There is just too much to remember. New events create new kinds of longing. The dream is one means by which half-forgotten emotionssometimes in the form of half-forgotten peoplereturn to our active thoughts.

The American dream. It is our timeworn metaphor for a life of opportunity that builds self-confidence and affords security. Yet the popular phrase was not coined until 1931in the depths of the Great Depression, oddly enough. In the first decades of the republics history, the word dream was more often applied to illusory and easily dismissed ideas than to the collective hopes of a people.

The literal dreams of Americans past cannot be easily summed up. They are, in a word, astonishing. Also, conflicted. A surprisingly superstitious Abraham Lincoln memorized the dream-infused poems of Lord Byron and firmly believed in the most ominous of his own involuntary visions. According to the presidents intimate friend Ward Lamon, who served as a personal bodyguard, Lincoln manifestly prophesied his own violent death when, in a dream, he saw two versions of himself: one appeared hale and hearty, the other deathly pale. This unbanishable dual-image dream said to Lincoln that he would stay safe for a time, but not live out his life beyond the presidency. Photographs show that he aged considerably in office while prosecuting the bloodiest of Americas wars. As to how much he dwelled on the contrivances of his unconscious mind, we have some good and provocative testimony.

The sixteenth president was not alone among American notables in contemplating dream life. Like Lincoln, Mark Twain was quite credulous when it came to prophetic possibilities within certain of his dreams. Far from home, Louisa May Alcott, the celebrated author of Little Women, surrendered to her sister an exquisite example of one nights time-bending encounter with absent family members. Founding-era dreamers John and Abigail Adams communicated their tortured feelings by telling each other what they saw in their sleep. What did Thomas Jefferson think of dreams? How about the idealistic essayist and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson, or his younger neighbor, the beloved dissident Henry David Thoreau?

Answers are forthcoming. But the most pressing, pathos-driven dreams of earlier generations are those of ordinary people whose private letters and diaries tell precious stories. The sweethearts of Civil War soldiers visited them on the battlefront in the only way it could be done safelyby entering each others nocturnal visions. For many, the literal and metaphorical dream converged, hope of a happy reunion fixing in the conscious mind the morning after a nights fantasy played itself out.

Nor is it anachronistic to speak of an American subconscious in historical relief. The word subconscious was first tried in the time of Lord Byron. The dream-spinning author Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater was tremendously popular in America, used subconscious in the 1830s and 1840s in the same sense we employ it todaya somewhat mysterious hidden self. The feeling that something was there predated our modern prodding of the subconscious mind.

Some changes in perception were more dramatic. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, bizarre content in dreams came to be interpreted in less arbitrary ways than it had in previous decades. Many dream narratives exited the realm of fright and intimidation to become downright playful; exultant dreams gradually took on shades of complexity. Then Sigmund Freud ventured across the ocean. It was as if Americans had been waiting for his assurances that their dreams contained something worth knowing; in the early twentieth century, they embraced Freuds theory of dream interpretation and readily succumbed to the psychiatrists couch.

D reams are a formative element in the construction of individuality. They are unusual, but nonetheless real, delineators of culture, exposing the fragile nature of belief while sketching the boundaries of popular imagination. As a historian and biographer, I found the prospect of doing an investigative history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans dreams completely irresistible.

Pleasing nostalgia comes as easily to the sleeper as horrifying images do, as most of us have experienced for ourselves. Early American literature contains a strong sampling of both kinds of emotion. It is only natural to wonder about errant nighttime thoughts, and to ask what, if anything, they explain over the course of a human life. But a cultural history of American dreams? Until now, no one has meticulously studied these widely archived but poorly indexed scraps of a broad demographic, isolating recorded dreams and charting change over time. Weaving their absurd sensations into a crazy quilt of a no-longer-existing consciousness promises, in the end, to tell us new things about the life of the mind, then and now.