"About ten days ago, I retired very late.
I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front.
I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber,
for I was weary. I soon began to dream...
There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me.
Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping.
I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.
There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing,
but the mourners were invisible.
I went from room to room; no living person was in sight,
but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along.
I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me;
but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?
I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this?
Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking,
I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered.
There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque,
on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments.
Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards;
and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse,
whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully.
"Who is dead in the White House?"
I demanded of one of the soldiers,
"The President,'" was his answer;
"he was killed by an assassin.'"
Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream.
I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream,
I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."
Linncoln dreamt this shortly before his assassination.
But it wasn't the only premonition: While in his chamber in Springfield in 1860,
he saw a strange vision while looking in a mirror: a double image of himself.
One face glowing of life, the other ghostly pale, white.
The mystery had its meaning, which was clear enough to him:
the life like image showed a safe first term as President;
the pale one told that death would overtake him before the close of the second...
News
Introduction
Boat of everything. Mircea Eliades dream
Descartes 3 dreams. November 10, 1619
Dr Jekyll and mr Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson
Fantastic voyage. A long and twisted tale
Keules chemical dream. A vision of benzenes structure
Lincolns premonition. Who is dead in the White House?
Mary Shelleys dream. First vision of Frankenstein
Parallel world. Traffic accident on the hyperway
Swedish library. The unknown book
The sky, the Sun and the Ocean. The word for world is water
Vision without words. An experiment with Burroughs
Whitmans trance. My favourite trees
A3 Poster. Get all dreams on print
Quotes
Links
"Nightmare" (1781) by Henry Fuseli
"Dream" (1910 by Henri Rousseau, french post-impressionist