Lincoln's Dreams

Dr. Stone leaned back into the depths of the leather chair, his hands resting easily on the padded arms, and smiled. “As I was telling Mr. Broun, dream interpretation is not a science, although Freud attempted to make his colleagues believe it was one. He claimed that dreams were a stage on which people symbolically act out the traumas and emotions that were too frightening to deal with when they were awake. A Freudian would say Lincoln’s dream was a symbolic enactment of Lincoln’s secret wishes and fears, that not only the coffin but the stairs, the guard, everything in the dream was a symbol hiding the real meaning of the dream.”

I went over to the chair, shooed the cat off, and started stacking the books on the floor beside the chair. The cat went over to the leather chair, looked speculatively at Dr. Stone’s lap, and then went over by the fire to sulk.

“Which is?” I asked.

“I’m a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don’t believe dreams have a ‘real’ meaning. They’re a physical process, and any ‘reality’ they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dreams lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams. In Lincoln’s dream, for instance, the stairs represent the descent into the subconscious, of which Lincoln is both curious and afraid, symbolized by the crying that he hears. The guard and the cloth over the corpse’s face are both symbols of Lincoln’s unwillingness to find out the secret his unconscious holds.”

I thought of Annie standing in the snow saying, “Richard says the blank paper pinned to the soldiers sleeve is a symbol for the message my subconscious is trying to send me only I’m too afraid to read it.”

“What about the corpse?” I asked. “And the coffin.”

“Oh, the coffin is the womb, of course. The entire dream’s about Lincoln’s desire to return to the safety of the womb.” He smiled. “According to the Freudians.”

“But that’s not your interpretation,” Broun said.

“No,” Dr. Stone said. “In my opinion, dream interpretation as practiced by most Freudian psychiatrists, including some of mine at the Institute, is nothing more than a fancy system of guessing. I think trying to understand the ‘real’ meaning of a dream without reference to the physical state of the dreamer is as pointless as trying to understand what a fever ‘means’ without studying the body.”

In spite of the fact that I still thought Richard might have sent him, I found myself liking Dr. Stone. He said things like “I think” and “in my opinion” and didn’t seem to think he automatically knew all the answers where dreams were concerned. If Annie told him her dream, at least he wouldn’t tell her she was crazy, and he might be able to help her. She was supposed to have seen him anyway. Maybe if I called her and told her he was back from California, she could change doctors and get out of Richard’s clutches.

“Dreams are a symptom of physical processes,” Dr. Stone was saying. “They don’t mean anything. Lincoln could have dreamed what he did for any number of reasons. He could have been to a funeral that day, or seen a hearse. Or he could have been reminded of someone who had died recently.”

“Willie,” Broun said. “Lincoln’s son. He died in the White House. His coffin was in the East Room, too.”

“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?”