Lincoln's Dreams

I called Annie.

“I’m glad you called,” Richard said. “I wanted to apologize for my outburst the other day.”

“I want to talk to Annie.”

“She’s asleep right now,” he said, “and I don’t want to wake her up. I know I was out of line the day before yesterday. I was just so upset about her condition. She was obsessed with the idea that she could obtain factual verification for her dream.”

He sounded completely different from the man who had warned me to keep away from Annie. His voice was calm and professional. “It’s a common phenomenon, but a dangerous one. The patient attempts to distance threatening dream images in his dreams by believing they have an objective reality of their own.”

I recognized the voice now. He had worked on it all through medical school. The voice was one of the psychiatrist’s most important tools, he had told me when he was studying psychoanalysis. The proper voice could be used to obtain the patient’s trust, inspire confidence, and convince the patient that the psychiatrist had his own best interests at heart. I had told him I didn’t care what it could do, just not to use it on me.

He was using it now.

“By convincing herself that the house in her dream is Arlington House,” he said, “she is trying to protect herself from the latent material in the dream. The half-buried dead man becomes a Union soldier instead of the image of her own personal trauma, the cat becomes a real cat instead of the symbol of her need to uncover the repressed memory that’s causing the dreams.”

“The cat is a real cat. His name’s Tom Tita. He got left behind when Lee moved out of Arlington.”

“You’re confusing manifest content with latent content,” he said, inspiringly, compassionately. “We all dream real things, objects and people we’ve seen, things we’ve read about or seen in the movies, memories. They make up the visible content of our dreams. But the subconscious puts those real people and objects and memories to its own uses. It’s a process called dream precipitant conversion. Let’s say Annie had a cat as a child.”

“She never had a cat. And she didn’t see this cat, either, or read about it someplace. It’s Tom Tita.”

“I’m sure she was convinced of that when she insisted on going to Arlington, and that was why I objected to the trip. But I was wrong. The trip produced a catharsis, a breakthrough. She realized the house in the dream was really her own house, and that the half-buried soldier was a symbol of her own repressed guilt.”

“What’s the cat a symbol for?” And what about her bandaged hands? I was about to say when I realized that Richard, calm and inspiring and compassionate, hadn’t said a word about the second dream. And what did that mean? That she hadn’t told him? Or that she didn’t want to believe what I had told her and had chosen to accept Richard’s explanations: repressive guilt and manifest content and dream precipitant conversion. Terms that meant no more than bilious fever and rheumatic excitement and were as much help to the patient.

“I want to talk to Annie,” I said.

“I’ll let her know you called as soon as she wakes up,” the Good Shrink said. “I have to warn you that she may not want to talk to you. She identifies you with her rejection of her psychosis.”

I hung up on him and went back inside to Lincoln, who had had terrible dreams, too. But nobody had tried to convince him the East Room wasn’t the East Room. Nobody had told him the corpse with the black cloth over its face was a symbol for repressive guilt or a neural impulse chosen at random by his hormones. Nobody had asked him what he’d had to eat before he went to bed.

Kate brought the bibliography over to me. “I’ve starred the ones we have,” she said, pointing at ink notations in the margin, “and marked the branches these are at. Do you want me to have the branches send them over here?”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll go get them tomorrow.”

“What’s Broun’s new book about?”

“Abraham Lincoln,” I said.

“Oh, I didn’t know Lincoln was sick.”

“What?”

“Prodromic dreams are dreams people have when they’re sick and they don’t know it yet. What disease was Lincoln suffering from?”

“Bad dreams,” I said.

Broun was back when I got home, standing in the solarium looking at his African violets. I handed him the bibliography. “Did anybody call?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said stiffly. “I left the machine on so you wouldn’t miss any of your messages. Did you find out where Willie Lincoln was buried?”

“No.” I started up the stairs. “Was Lincoln sick when he was shot?”

“He was obsessed with the Civil War,” he said bitterly.

I went on up the stairs and into the study and shut the door, but there were no messages on the answering machine, and Annie didn’t call.

I spent most of the next day rounding up the books listed in the bibliography so Broun could take them with him. The galleys came Federal Express in the afternoon. It was overcast all day, and cold. Broun’s plane didn’t leave till five-thirty, and by the time we left for the airport it was getting foggy.