On the night of Tuesday the eleventh of April, 1865, the President of the United States dreamt that he heard subdued weeping in the lower corridors of the White House. He walked toward the sound. He came to the East Room. He found there a black-draped catafalque, a corpse in funeral vestments, and a guard of Union soldiers. He asked a soldier, who answered: The President. He was killed by an assassin. Three nights later he was shot at Ford's Theatre.

His name was Abraham Lincoln. He was fifty-six. The Civil War had just ended. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox on the ninth of April, 1865. Lincoln had spent the night of the eleventh of April at the White House. He told the dream the following morning to two people. His personal friend and former United States Marshal Ward Hill Lamon. His wife Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln referred to the dream in her own letters after the assassination.

Lincoln gave Lamon the dream in detail. He said he had wandered the dark lower corridor of the White House, had followed the sound of weeping, had passed soldiers stationed at intervals, had come to the East Room, and had found the catafalque, the corpse, and the guard. He said he had asked one of the soldiers who was dead, and the soldier had answered: The President of the United States. Killed by an assassin. Lamon recorded the conversation in his contemporaneous notes and published the full account in his Recollections of Abraham Lincoln in 1895. Lincoln himself told other visitors at the White House over the next two days that the dream had troubled him. On the evening of Friday the fourteenth of April, 1865, three nights after the dream, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford's Theatre.

Lincoln died at twenty-two minutes past seven on the morning of Saturday the fifteenth of April, 1865. From the evening of Tuesday the eighteenth of April through the morning of Wednesday the nineteenth of April, 1865, his body lay in state on a black-draped catafalque in the East Room of the White House, with a guard of Union soldiers around it, exactly as he had described the scene to Ward Hill Lamon and Mary Todd Lincoln on the morning of the twelfth of April.

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