Miscellaneous

I Finally Had My Abraham Lincoln Dream

By Chris Stevenson

Isn't it written somewhere that every real American has to have an Abraham Lincoln dream before they die?  Well, last night I had mine.  I normally think that people talking about their dreams is hokey drivel and people always want to read things into dreams and make them more important indicators of a person and their psyche than reality.  I know that's more fun, but it's also bullshit.  Dreams are no mystery.  They are tied to something experienced or thought about or noticed or some faint memory, but they are not mystical.  For example, for some reason there have been a lot of TV shows about Abraman Lincoln on lately.  I thought it had to do with President's Day on in February, but they've persisted through March.  Then I thought maybe it was the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's death or something, but he was assasinated in 1865 and it's 2009...what's 2009 minus 1865...like 144?  Well anyway, it's not a round number.  So all of the shows are why I had the dream.  There was one recently that talked about the circumstances of Lincoln's burial.  I missed the first part of the show, but apparently grave robbers actually stole Lincoln's body from the original gravesite, or nearly did.  They were caught and the body was recovered, supposedly, but after that there were rumors and legends born that cast doubt on whether Lincoln's body was ever found.  Fearing another attempt to steal the body, his son arranged to have Lincoln buried in a secure underground concrete crypt.  Some of Lincoln's original honor guard members were still alive (this was taking place 30-40 years after his death) and oversaw the moving of the body and placing it in the new crypt.  Well, because of the rumors that the body wasn't actually recovered or that the grave robbers had put someone else's body in the coffin, the honor guard decided to actually open the casket to verify that it was, in fact, Lincoln's body.  It was.  So they sealed it back up and buried it under yards of concrete and that was the end of the story.

In my dream I had travelled back in time and I had become a friend and advisor of Lincoln.  It was still during the civil war, although apparently I was able to change the course of history by foiling the assassination attempt because I knew it was going to happen, even though it occurred after the Civil War ended.  Small detail.  Anyway, so Lincoln was living on borrowed time that I had given him.  Like I said, the Civil War was still going on and Lincoln was actually in the field for some reason, as was I.  We were riding around on horses and I started getting a feeling that something was going to happen.  We were in a partially forested area and we were riding far enough apart that I would lose sight of him from time to time.  I came upon a treeless knoll where I could look down on the surrounding land and that's where I saw Lincoln get assassinated in a clearing below me.  I rushed there and saw that he was dead.  The assassins never appeared, but other men and soldiers who were in our area heard the shots and the shouting and pretty soon there were quite a few Civil War-looking dudes running around.  There was a lot of shock and confusion and grief, but I was trying to keep it together because I knew it was important to preserve the site and what happened for posterity.  So I found a huge roll of aluminum screen wire and covered the whole area, cutting out holes for the trees to fit through.  That's pretty much where the dream ended and I woke up, probably because even in my dream state the level of ridiculousness had gone too far and tripped some sort of "Wait...Wait a minute..." response.

Full post as published by Cursed With Ambition on March 27, 2009 (boomark / email).