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Lincoln went to bed and saw visions of people mourning around a corpse in theWhite House. Lincoln asked a guard who had died. In the dream, the guard said that it was the president— killed by an assassin.Ten days later, JohnWilkes Booth would shoot President Lincoln.

The ScientificTake:

Sifting through Life According to the National Sleep Foundation, there is no clear explanation as to why we dream.How- ever, Rosalind Cartwright, PhD, professor and chairman in the Department of Psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and other researchers say that dreams are essential for incorporating memories, solv- ing problems, and handling emotions. The ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle theorized that dreams were a way that people could safely act out un- conscious desires, and many psychoanalysts of the 19th and 20th centuries believed in this notion as well. A lot of these scientists, such as Freud, thought that objects and events in dreams might symbolize wak- ing concerns. For instance, being chased in a dream might represent some real-life worry. There are said to be 5,000 dream symbols that can be translated in such a

President Abraham Lincoln is said to have foreseen his own death in a dream 10 days before he was assassinated.

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