eff Johnston is a historical researcher working for a best-selling author of U.S. Civil War novels, a somewhat harried but likable young man who is dedicated to his employer, Broun, and their chosen area of study. Empathetic and resourceful, with a tendency to get caught up in whatever small crisis the moment offers, Jeff is scrambling to get through a publicity party for Broun's latest book when an old college friend—now a successful psychiatrist working with the Sleep Institute—turns up at the event with a young patient in tow.
In the moment when he and Annie meet, Jeff's life is changed forever. He learns she is under psychiatric care because she is suffering from intensely distressing nightmares. Unfortunately, Richard has been unable to stop Annie's dreams—instead, Jeff discovers to his horror, his friend has entered a romantic relationship with his patient even as her symptoms grow worse. During their brief encounter at the party, Annie claims the nightmares aren't her dreams at all ... that they belong to someone else entirely. When she describes one, Jeff recognizes images from the Civil War, and the enigma she represents deepens.
Even though Annie knows virtually nothing about the war, her dreams are packed with historically accurate details. Jeff is able to identify many of the events and people she sees during her harrowing nights, and his ability to explain their significance gives her significant relief. His actions bring Jeff into conflict with Richard, though, and soon he and Annie are on the run, hiding from Richard and Broun both as they seek a rational explanation for the increasingly vivid and frightening nightmares.
Weighing the tragic cost of war
Readers need not be experts on the Civil War to feel the impact of Lincoln's Dreams, Connie Willis' shattering 1987 debut. Jeff spells out the meaning of every facet of Annie's dreams, effortlessly communicating all the important facts about the war. The author's real focus is less on the details than the horrifying numbers of very young men who were killed in the conflict. The true dreamer—the entity whose visions have consumed Annie's nights—is Robert E. Lee, a ghost understandably haunted by those wasted lives.
Despite its otherworldly content, Lincoln's Dreams is no simple ghost story. Defying genre boundaries, Willis mixes elements of alternate history, psychiatry and pharmacology in a piece that is as notable for its depth of research as it is for profound suspense. Jeff does not look to the occult for answers about Annie's condition: he turns to science. It is in science that he finds the link between Annie and Lee—and that link is ominous indeed.
In a book so concerned with the subconscious mind and its mechanisms, it is no surprise that the author packs her story with overt symbolism. Everyday items like answering-machine messages and cats are imbued with deep importance; meanwhile, the novel's characters become the Civil War soldiers of Annie's dreams. Richard is cast as an unsympathetic Gen. Longstreet, and even a waitress who brings the pair coffee turns up in the next nightmare. Jeff is Lee's horse Traveler, faithfully bearing Annie from one dreamed battlefield to the next as he races to understand a situation that threatens to overwhelm them both.
With gripping suspense, a timeless mood and one of the genre's more unusual love stories, Lincoln's Dreams is one of those books that deserves the widest audience possible.
