"About ten days ago I retired very late. I had been waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have long been in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I . soon began to dream. There seemed to be deathlike 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. It was 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 of 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, some 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 awakened me from the dream. I slept no more that night and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."
This version is from Carl Sandburg's Lincoln. The ultimate source is a recollection written down many years later by Ward Hill Lamon, an old friend and associate of the president. As with most things historical, the account is not without its detractors or doubters. The time of Lamon's anecdote was just a few days before Lincoln's death.
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