top shelves. The seat was piled high with books, and his cat was on top of them, sound asleep.
“I was at the library doing research on dreams and getting nowhere,” I said, relaxing a little, “so I don’t know what Lincoln’s dreams mean either.” Or why you’re here, I thought. Broun had been curious about Richard’s odd behavior the night of the reception. I wondered if he had invited Dr. Stone over to try to find out why Richard had reacted so violently to his questions about Lincoln or whether he was simply trying to “run this dream thing to ground.”
“Tell Jeff here what you were saying to me about Freud,” Broun said eagerly.
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?”
“Oh, yes. Eating causes certain enzymes to be released into the dreamer’s system, and those trigger…
The phone rang. I turned and looked at the answering machine. Broun put his pen down. Dr. Stone leaned forward in his chair watching both of us.
“Do you want to get that?” Broun asked.
“No,” I said. I pushed the message button. “It’s probably only the librarian. She promised to get me some information on Lincoln’s dreams. I’ll call her back.”
The phone rang a second time, finally, and the message light came on. I could hear the click as the recorder started its spiel, telling whoever it was that there was no one here and would they leave a message at the sound of the tone. And who was it? Annie, saying, “I had another dream”? Or Richard, calling to tell me to stop interfering with his treatment? The message light went out.
I turned back to Dr. Stone. “You were saying?”
“Digestion can have an effect on dreaming because the digestive enzymes in the bloodstream trigger chemical changes in the brain.”
“What about drugs?” I said. “Drugs cause chemical changes in the blood, too, don’t they? Could Lincoln’s dreams have been the effect of some drug he was taking?”
“Yes, certainly. Laudanum was known to cause—”
“What about Elavil? Could it cause dreams?”
He frowned. “No, actually Elavil represses the dream cycle. All the antidepressants do, and of course the barbiturates: Seconal, phenobarbital. Nembutal. The patient usually doesn’t dream at all when he’s on those drugs. Of course, when he’s taken off them, the number and vividness increase dramatically, so I suppose you could say in that respect they cause dreams. But of course those are modern drugs,” he said, looking at Broun. “Lincoln wouldn’t have taken any of them.”
“What do you mean, increase in vividness?” I asked.
“The drugs produce a dream deficit that is compensated for by a dream rebound as soon as the patient is taken off the drugs. The patient experiences what we call a ‘storm of dreams,’ for several days, powerful, frightening nightmares that rapidly succeed each other. It’s the same thing that happens when a patient’s been deprived of sleep for several days. We usually advise against abrupt discontinuation of antidepressants and sedatives to avoid triggering a storm of dreams.” He gave me a look almost as sharp as one of Broun’s. “Are you on Elavil?”
“No,” I said. “Lincoln had insomnia after Willie died. I thought maybe his doctor might have prescribed something to make him sleep that gave him bad dreams, so I looked up ‘Insomnia,’ and it said Elavil was a recommended treatment, but obviously I was in the wrong century.” I stood up. “Speaking of sleep and drugs and digestion, would anybody like some coffee? Or does coffee give you bad dreams, too?”
“As a matter of fact, caffeine has been shown to have marked effects on dreaming.”
“I’ll make it decaffeinated,” I said, and went downstairs to the kitchen.
Broun had another phone there, a separate line. I called the number of the phone in the upstairs study, and before it could ring, punched in the remote code that would play back the message. The only message on the
