Observations placeholder
Lincoln, Abraham – ‘In the old days God and his angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams’
Identifier
024910
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Premonitions: A leap in to the future – Herbert Greenhouse [1971]
There is evidence that Lincoln was a deeply religious man, though not in a church-going sense, and that he was impressed with the dreams and visions of the biblical prophets. "If we believe the Bible," he was quoted as saying,
"we must accept the fact that in the old days God and his angels came to men in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams."
He believed that a universal Intelligence sent messages in these subliminal states but that such messages were in code and needed to be deciphered.
Lincoln had many dreams and visions and took them all seriously. He saw running through them a thread that was leading to an inevitable personal disaster. According to his close friend Ward Hill Lamon, he believed that
"the star under which he was born was at once brilliant and malignant; the horoscope was cast, fixed, irreversible and he had no more power to alter or defeat it in the minutest particular than he had to reverse the law of gravitation."
Lincoln told Lamon that all his life, from boyhood on, his dreams had indicated that he would rise to a great height and then suddenly fall.
The famous death dream occurred shortly before the assassination, on a night, according to one version, when he had attended a performance of the opera Faust [see separate observation].