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

375 Pages·2013·3.92 MB·English

by  Burstein

LINCOLN DREAMT HE DIED
ALSO BY ANDREW BURSTEIN
Madison and Jefferson (with Nancy Isenberg) The Original Knickerbocker: The
Life of Washington Irving Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello
The Passions of Andrew Jackson
Letters from the Head and Heart: Writings of Thomas Jefferson America’s
Jubilee: How in 1826 a
Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence Sentimental Democracy:
The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image The Inner Jefferson: Portrait
of a Grieving Optimist Edited by Andrew Burstein
Mortal Remains: Death in Early America (with Nancy Isenberg)
LINCOLN DREAMT HE DIED
The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans
from Colonial Times to Freud
ANDREW BURSTEIN
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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)
ILLUSTRATIONS
Benjamin Rush 7
A page from Dr. Rush’s lecture notes 10
Excerpt from John F. Mifflin’s dream 11
The Dreamer’s Class-Book 45
“The Artist’s Dream” 50
A Dream of Mr. Heman Harris 73
Excerpt from Louisa Park’s diary 83
The Surprising Case of Rachel Baker 99
Letter: Betsy Way Champlain to daughter Eliza 104
Watercolor by Eliza Champlain 105
Thomas De Quincey 109
Ralph Waldo Emerson 131
Edgeworth Female Seminary, Greensboro, North Carolina 164
Secret words pasted in Clay Dillard’s diary 169
Letter: William Lafayette Scott to Clay Dillard 169
Adelaide Case and family 201
Louisa May Alcott 228
“The Dreamers Dine,” a club 245
Page from Julian Hawthorne’s novel, A Dream and a Forgetting 251
“Champion Dreamer,” newspaper headline 252
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 emotions—sometimes in the form of half-forgotten
people—return 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 1931—in the depths of the Great Depression, oddly enough. In the
first decades of the republic’s 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 president’s
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 America’s 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 night’s 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 safely—by entering each other’s
nocturnal visions. For many, the literal and metaphorical dream converged, hope
of a happy reunion fixing in the conscious mind the morning after a night’s
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 today—a somewhat mysterious
hidden self. The feeling that “something was there” predated our modern