Lincoln's Dreams

Connie Willis, winner of two Nebula Awards and one Hugo Award, has here created a wondrous, rhapsodic work. Marvelously multilayered, moving from dreamscape to landscape, from the questing mind to the obsessive heart, Lincoln's Dreams is a profound, bittersweet tale of love and duty, courage and destiny, and of two people who discover the kinetic secret world that lies between dreaming and remembering.

For Jeff Johnston, a young historical researcher for a Civil War novelist, reality is redefined on a bitter cold night near the close of a lingering winter. He meets Annie, an intense and lovely young woman who suffers from vivid, recurring nightmares.

Annie's psychiatrist is convinced that the meaning of her terrifying dreams is rooted in a repressed Freudian trauma. The head of the Sleep Institute where Annie has been a patient is equally convinced that the dreams are merely the manifestation of the brain's physical processes. But Jeff, who has just spent the last six months doing research on General Robert E. Lee, recognizes the events in the dream immediately. Troubled by what he thinks may be happening, he goes for help to his employer, Thomas Broun, but Broun is preoccupied with someone else's dreams: the strange, prophetic dreams of Abraham Lincoln.