Lincoln's Dreams

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.