As a newbie to the Jackson area, I’ve been reading my way through a self-taught course on southern culture. I started with Welty and Foote, and visited Vicksburg to get a sense of what things would have actually looked like during the Civil War. I had a mild obsession with the Civil War; I wanted to understand the sacrifices that people made, where they made them, and what it must have felt like.

I came back to this feeling recently reading Lincoln’s Dreams by Connie Willis. The book is technically science fiction, but it’s the quiet kind of science fiction that is more grounded in science and history than anything else. On a dark and stormy night, Jeff meets Annie at a book release party. Jeff is a research assistant to a famous Civil War novelist, and Annie is his old college roommate’s sleep study patient (and undercover girlfriend). Whenever Annie sleeps, she finds herself tortured by vivid Civil War dreams. Upon further investigation, Jeff determines that all the dreams must come from the perspective of General Lee.

As Lee’s soldiers march through Annie’s head, she and Jeff take off to try and find the cause before the doctors can lock her away or Jeff’s boss can try and use her as a human research experiment. When Jeff isn’t guarding Annie from her own subconscious, he spends his time desperately trying to figure out the cause of Annie’s dreams before it is too late. The science of dreams is also addressed: Are Annie’s dreams the result of some terrible metaphysical mix-up, or just a result of some dangerous drug cocktail?

While well researched, the strength of the book is really in the emotional punch of Jeff and Annie’s journey. As they become more sleep deprived and malnourished, they find themselves reluctantly recreating the journey that Lee and his men also took all those years ago.

If you’ve never tried the science fiction genre (or just didn’t think it was for you), this book is a great starting point. It’s a beautiful and moving look at southern culture and duty in the modern age. -HJ

Lincoln’s Dreams by Connie Wilson (Bantam, 1992)

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