Lincoln's Dreams

Sitting here wasn’t helping her either. I needed to be awake and alert when she had the next dream, and I hadn’t had any real sleep since we got to Fredericksburg. But I didn’t want to get up and go in to bed. I don’t know what I wanted. Maybe for Annie to wake up, to open her blue-gray eyes and look at me. Not at smoke and horses and fallen boys, but at me. To look at me and smile and say sleepily, “You don’t have to stay here with me,” so I could say, “I want to.” And what did I want her to say to that? “I’m glad you’re here. I never have the dreams when you’re here”?

Annie murmured something and turned her face ever so slightly against the pillow. There weren’t any traces of tears left, though her nose was still red. Her hair had stuck to her cheek when the tears dried, and I brushed it back off her face. Her cheek felt warm to the touch. I laid my hand against it.

She frowned as if she were disturbed. I took my hand away. Her face softened at once. She sighed and turned onto her side, pulling her knees up, drawing into herself. Her breathing steadied.

I stood up, carefully, so as not to disturb her, and took Freeman into the other room and looked up Lee’s insomnia. He had had trouble sleeping throughout the war. “I fear I shall not sleep for thinking of the poor men,” he had written to his wife a week after Antietam. If he was ever able to get to sleep before midnight, his aides were under strict orders not to wake him up unless it was absolutely necessary. He had told them that to him one hour’s sleep before midnight was worth two hours’ after that time.

I fell asleep with the volume of Freeman still open on my chest and slept till after noon, and even though my sleep hadn’t come before midnight, it was still worth its weight in gold. I felt better than I had since before the trip to West Virginia, and able to think clearly for the first time about this whole mess. I had promised I would help Annie have the dreams. There was only one way to do that, and that was to figure out what was causing them.

I checked on Annie, who was still asleep. I shaved and got dressed, took a sheet of Fredericksburg Inn stationery out of the chiffonier, and started making a list of the dreams. Arlington first, and then Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. The Lees had evacuated Arlington in May of 1861. I wasn’t sure of the date of the letter from Markie Williams that told what had happened to Tom Tita the cat, but it was sometime in 1861. Antietam was September 1862, Fredericksburg December of the same year, and Chancellorsville May of 1863. That meant the dreams were in chronological order, though they were telescoped in some way. Annie had dreamed almost a year of the war in one week, though she had dreamed about Arlington for over a year, with it only gradually becoming clearer. And there were important battles during that period of time that Annie hadn’t dreamed about at all.

I started another list on a second sheet of stationery, writing the dates of the dreams in one column and the drugs she had been taking when she had the dreams in a second column. The drugs had some connection with the dreams, though I didn’t know what it was. They had not suppressed REM sleep or kept her from dreaming at all, even though they were supposed to.

It was when Annie was on the Elavil that her dreams had suddenly become clearer, and the phenobarbital her family doctor had had her on apparently hadn’t worked at all to stop the Arlington dream. Thorazine had stopped the dreams, but she hadn’t had the storm of dreams Dr. Stone had predicted when she stopped taking it, and none of the dreams seemed to have any particular correlation with the drugs she was or wasn’t taking, so maybe there wasn’t a connection after all, and the timing of the dreams had more to do with when Lee managed to get a few hours of sleep than with the tranquilizers.

Annie was awake. I could hear her moving around, I folded up the lists and put them into my jeans pocket. I knocked on the half-open door and she opened it the rest of the way immediately.

“Have you been up forever?” she said, looking at her watch. She looked tired in spite of all the sleep. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw how late it was.”

“I could. I woke up starving to death. It’s a good thing they serve breakfast all day at the coffee shop. What say we go get some?” I pulled on my coat. “I want to go to the library this afternoon. I think I’ve got an idea of what’s causing the dreams.”

I told her about Lee’s insomnia at breakfast, and then we walked down to the library. I bought a notebook at the convenience store on the way. “I should probably be doing research on Lincoln’s dreams, too, in case the vet doesn’t find anything out,” I said.

“I’ll do that for you,” Annie said. “What do you want me to look for?”