The Anatomy of Dreams

by Chloe Benjamin

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  • • •

  I don’t remember much about dinner, only that we were woozy with drink by the end of it: first the gin and tonics, then two bottles of rich red wine, a post-dinner espresso splashed with bourbon. The moon rose baldly into the sky; Gabe took off one of his shoes and threw it behind his head, where it collided with an antique mirror that cracked into a delicate, spidery web and, Janna claimed, looked better now than it had before. At some point, we collapsed on the couch in their living room, a tangle of legs. I looked for the Keats book, the mossy old tome that Thom had shown me weeks before, but it was gone. Thom was singing something—Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. You are lost and gone forever . . . Did I imagine that at some point, Janna’s head rested against my chest? I don’t know how or why it would have happened, but I remember the warm sun of her skull, the streaks of hair that spread across my shoulders like purple kelp, her spindly fingers picking at the fabric of the couch.

  It must have been one or two in the morning when we stumbled out the back door to their yard. It was a gorgeous night, unexpectedly warm. I can still see Thom running back to us, gazelle-like, all legs—he’d gone somewhere and returned with boxes of bang snaps. We threw them at the ground and yelped when they exploded too close to our feet. Gabe and I kissed pressed against the fence, dense and urgent, his hands beneath my shirt. How long had it been since we had kissed like that? And then he was gone, and I was sitting with Thom beneath the juniper tree in their backyard, a tree with a thick, warped trunk like a dish towel being wrung.

  If my memories up until this point are imagistic and uncertain, here they sharpen. Here I remember not only sensory details—the leathery leaves and sharp little sticks beneath my legs; grass stains on the lap of my dress; Thom’s sweet alcoholic scent—but whole stretches of conversation. Where were Gabe and Janna? I don’t remember caring; I leaned against the juniper, its trunk kneading my back.

  “. . . the first man I ever loved,” Thom said, his nose bulbous and jagged in the blue light. “Platonically, I mean—but I did love him. I admired him so much I felt my identity bleeding into his, little by little. Have you ever had a teacher like that?”

  “No,” I said, whether or not it was true. An owl cooed in the distance.

  “No? Ah,” said Thom. “Well, he was my first poetry professor. My first real professor. And Janna was his pet.”

  “He liked her poetry?”

  “He liked— Well.” He laughed, high and breathless. “You’re a dear, Sylvie—you know that, don’t you? You’re a very sweet girl. But inside you there’s a sour center. And that’s why I like you.”

  Why that flattered me I can’t say now. It was the alcohol, I think—the scent of the muddied leaves, Thom’s voice sure as an incantation.

  “Not that I’m exempt,” he said. “I’m as dirty as they come. And I’m disgusted by it now. But, you know—I was so damn idealistic then. The art! That’s what I thought was most important. He was the writer-in-residence at our college. I’d never met a man who was brilliant in the ways he was brilliant. And I thought I could access him, if I was with her.”

  “You only started dating Janna to get close to—your professor?” It struck me as funny; I laughed, and soon Thom was wheezing with me, knocking his head against the fence. But like a summer storm, Thom’s laughter passed as suddenly as it had arrived, and once more he was confidential, solemn.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll say it. I wanted to get to him. But when I stopped thinking that way—when I fell for her, and her only, nothing more—I experienced the most incredible purity. Do you believe in purity?”

  I felt a tickle on my arm. Two ants were crawling toward the inside of my elbow. I brushed them to one side; they landed on Thom’s pant leg, though he didn’t notice.

  “I’m a changed man, Sylvie.” He ran a hand through his messy reddish hair, swift and shaky. “I’ve repented, believe me. I’ve changed”—and we both took swigs of our drinks, the dark sky ringing with stars. The wineglasses had all been dirtied, and we were drinking out of jam jars. I had never been so drunk. My mind spun and spun, a top inside my skull. The next thing I remember, I was waking up in bed, still in my orange dress, Gabe’s heavy thigh cast over mine; I was peeling back the curtains by our bed, a white November sun high in the sky.

  The conversation was so peculiar I almost wondered if I had remembered it wrong. But from the window I could see the juniper tree, wrenched, and when I looked at the lap of my skirt, there were the grass stains, there were the little lines where twigs had scraped the fabric.

  • • •

  The next night, I dreamed I stood alone at an abandoned intersection in a small, plain town. To my left, wheat fields stretched fuzzy and golden; to the right was a boarded-up ice cream shop. The wind lifted my hair, blond and streaked with black. In one hand I held a whirligig that turned with the wind, spinning light. The wind stilled as if in wait, and the whirligig stopped moving. Then a flush of blackbirds rose from the field, arcing through the sky with a thick flapping noise, like the pages of a thousand books being turned. When they cleared, I saw a hot air balloon.

  It moved through the sky with a stately elegance, unhurried as a mayor at a small-town parade. Its progress was so slow that I didn’t know it was manned until a figure no bigger than an insect clambered to the rim of the basket and tumbled, flailing, over one side.

  It was the first dream I had fully remembered in years. I woke slick with sweat, gasping, and looked for Gabe. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, arms two pointed wings. The clock on my bedside table shone 4:23, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep. So I stepped out into the hall, closing the bedroom door quietly behind me.

  My mind was dizzy, caught in the groggy purgatory between sleep and wakefulness, and I was still half-drunk. But I climbed the stairs to the attic and dusted off a clean canvas. Then I carried my paint boxes to the rug in front of the window. Kneeling, I began to mix black and white until I found something that matched the tenor of that pale gray sky.

  The dream began to sharpen as I painted it. In shaping the great rainbow bulb of the balloon and its brown thatched basket, I saw the way the figure inside had first leaned out of it, looking down, as if gauging where to land. Why? Because he was harnessed to a parachute, and I remembered it now: a pillowy lavender arc that looked quilted from below, floating toward the ground at the same leisurely pace as the balloon.

  I wasn’t paying attention to the way the painting looked. My goal was not the finished product but the accuracy of my recollection. I was painting what I remembered as I remembered it, and the only way to do that was to paint right on top of what I had done only moments before. And so, as the flyer came nearer and nearer to the intersection where I waited with my whirligig, I painted him again and again—because now I was sure that it was a him, that the gangly legs hung from a pale torso brushed with hair as rough and golden as wheat; that up close, he smelled like alcohol and juniper, and if I were to pull up his shirtsleeve—which I would do as soon as he landed—I would find two ants crawling down one arm in slow procession.

  I stepped away from the canvas and stared at it for the first time as a whole. It was cluttered, kaleidoscopic: the balloon traced over and over, the man’s insect legs stretching toward the ground like an alien craft. My face was messily drawn and stretching apart, covered in whirligigs.

  It was nothing I wanted to see again. I took a tube of black paint and squirted it across the canvas. With my widest brush, I swiped the paint from left to right, top to bottom. Light was beginning to inch up the sky, darkness drawing back like a tarp, but I was exhausted. When I returned to bed, Gabe was right where I had left him, as if no time had passed at all. I fell with surprising ease into a simple, passive sleep that must have lasted for hours. The next thing I remember was a soft rapping noise at the door,
Gabe’s broad nose poking through, the snuffling noise of his laughter.

  “Sylvie,” he whispered. “Sylvie, my God, wake up. It’s already one o’clock.”

  • • •

  I spent the next week in a haze. My sleep was fitful and uneven: too much, or not enough. During the day, it was all I could do to stay awake. I told Gabe and Keller I thought I was coming down with a cold. Keller had me cover shifts at the sleep clinic, where all I had to do was sit bleary eyed at the front desk. At night, I fell asleep immediately, and I woke blank as a baby.

  I thought I was back to my old patterns until a cold Tuesday morning in the beginning of December. I dreamed of Thom; this time, there was no mistaking it. We were in an enclosed, dimly lit space with a desk and one chair, but we huddled on the floor as if in a bunker. Spread across the floor in front of us were old photographs that Thom showed me one by one. A dull, dusty-chained bulb provided a dim shaft of light. An orange cat slipped between us, purring.

  I could see myself, but I was apart from myself. Like a ghost, I watched the dream me sitting with Thom on the floor—watched as he lifted the next photograph into the light, which showed a grand brick building on a hill. Below the building was a dusty path, flanked by tree trunks and globe lamps that glowed whitely as moons.

  “Alumni House,” said Thom. “It’s this fancy building that was gifted to the college by two filthy-rich sisters—Rose and Blanche something. All the rich alumni could sleep there whenever they were in town, and the place had a restaurant that hosted all sorts of schmoozy, hobnobby events. He used to take Janna there. I wanted so badly to get inside. I used to stand at the bottom of the hill, just taking pictures of the damn thing.”

  His face floated toward me with the 3D transparency of a hologram. He reached for me with one hand. I ducked, but I wasn’t fast enough, and he plucked something from my ear. I felt a pock, the hollow release of suction, and he held out his palm. Something fuzzy, black and yellow-spotted, wriggled inside it: a caterpillar. Suddenly, the hand was Gabe’s—I saw his broad, callused palms, his long lifeline. The caterpillar inched its way across his wrist, and I felt nauseous.

  “That came—out of me?” I asked. I put my finger in my ear. Empty as a whistle.

  “Dreadful sorry, Clementine,” sang Gabe.

  I woke at five thirty, my chest heaving, my collarbone slick with sweat. The windows rattled, our curtains slivered apart by the cold air that came through a crack in the pane. I looked at the window, my body turned away from Gabe, as my heart rate came down. Snowflakes clung to the glass like tiny skeletons.

  When I turned around, Gabe was propped up on one elbow, staring at me. We looked at each other in silence.

  “Bad dream,” I said finally.

  Gabe shook his head. “But you never remember your dreams.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s odd.”

  Gabe was staring at me with a bare kind of exhaustion—or was it resignation? He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it.

  “Sleepy Sylvie,” he said, inching across the space between us, collecting me into his arms.

  PART TWO

  NIGHT

  11

  MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 2002

  When I look back at the rest of that first summer in Snake Hollow, I am tempted to say—as much as I resist this sort of statement—that it was the best time in my life. The thrown-together dinners, Gabe chopping zucchini and eggplant, Keller pouring salt crystals into a pot of bubbling water while flipping strips of pancetta with the many-armed grace of a Hindu god; Keller taking us out to the glass-­littered beach at night, striding through the dune grass and salt-marsh hay with boyish enthusiasm—“Look!” he said, “feel something, for God’s sake—get out of yourselves”; or sitting with Gabe on the floor of the library as Keller strode between us—spun through the room, it seemed to me, in my three A.M. haze (When does he sleep? I often wondered)—his voice ricocheting off the walls, the dim lights of the library flickering in his wake.

  “We are living in a twenty-four/seven culture,” he said. “Convenience stores are open at all hours of the day. Twenty percent of the working population in developed countries works the night shift. Planes take off and land, universities hold classes, hospitals are staffed, all during the night hours traditionally reserved for sleep. Human beings are more productive than ever before, but they’re also unhappier. They feel oppressed by the limits of their lives: the boredom, the repetition, the fatigue. What if you could use your sleep to do more—to receive all of the traditional regenerative benefits while problem solving, healing, even experiencing alternate worlds?”

  He was jittery with enthusiasm, pacing the library like a teenager. Earlier that day, Gabe and I had traveled to Boston to watch Keller give a talk on lucid dreaming. He was even more dynamic than he’d been at Mills, his voice carrying through the auditorium, his limbs shot through with energy; it was as though, like Benjamin Button, he was aging in reverse. “This freedom, hard to imagine within the constraints of waking life,” he boomed, “is astounding, exhilarating, and inspiring. The laws of science and society are abolished. The possibilities are boundless, and the choices are yours. Wouldn’t you be capable of extraordinary things?”

  A college student with a bushel of red hair raised her hand. She stood when Keller called on her.

  “Okay,” she said, “but people are capable of terrible things, too. What if somebody wanted to dream about hurting someone? Or killing them?”

  “You’re right: violence is a part of human nature,” said Keller. “But if those urges can be experienced and processed safely, within the construct of a dream, they can be put to rest.”

  “And if they aren’t put to rest?” shouted a man in the front row. “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “There will always be people who aren’t helped by our research. Successfully matching patient to treatment is as complex as any marriage, and it does require trial and error. But most of the patients I see are capable, while dreaming, of being at their best: their most resourceful, their most creative, their most intuitive.”

  Gabe and I had similar conversations with Keller at Snake Hollow, sitting around the dinner table or sprawled on the leather couches in the library. At these moments, Snake Hollow felt almost like Mills—or some bare-bones version of Mills, the school stripped of its landscape and buildings and students until all that was left was Gabe and Keller and me. Keller taught us his theory of interactive lucid dreaming, the same theory that would later bring us to Madison. His research participants were what he termed interactives: people who, due to a medley of possible disorders, exhibited unusual activity in sleep.

  Keller’s participant criteria were so specific that his applicants were few in number but generally ideal in demographic. They had to have vivid dreams that they could at least partially recall; they had to have been aware of at least two episodes of sleep activity in the past six months, whether through their own report or that of a partner; they could not be taking any pharmaceutical or recreational drugs; and they could not have been diagnosed with any psychiatric illness unrelated to sleep. Most of the patients who came to us had struggled for years to control themselves. Some had resorted to sleeping zipped-up in sleeping bags; others tied themselves to their bedposts and cleared their rooms of breakable objects before sleep.

  Our patients were usually diagnosed with one of two disorders: REM behavior disorder, also known as RBD; and parasomnia overlap disorder, a dysfunction that incorporates symptoms of both RBD and sleepwalking. Both cause the loss of muscle atonia, the physical paralysis that normally ­occurs during REM sleep. As a result, these patients—who often suffer from trauma-related nightmares—are able to rise from bed and act out their dreams. The differences between the two disorders may have seemed small to an outsider, but they were significant to us. Patients with RBD rarely open their eyes or leave their bedrooms,
but they have nightmares that cause them to violently, clumsily defend themselves. As a result, they’re prone to injury and unintentional destruction: an RBD patient might topple a table, slam into a dresser, or hurt the very real body of the partner lying beside them. Sleepwalkers are more dexterous, capable of complicated motor skills, sexual activity, and conversation; many can even drive. Most of the time, sleepwalking takes place during non-REM sleep, separate from dreams. But patients with parasomnia overlap disorder—the ones Keller studied—sleepwalk during REM sleep, when dreaming occurs.

  And what were the dreams that Keller’s patients were compelled to act out? Usually, they were horrifying, trauma processing and self-protection gone terribly awry. Keller saw this as evidence of the mind’s obsession with safety and defense. He believed that nonparalyzed REM sleep was the site at which dysfunctional dreamers experienced the unresolved simultaneous potentialities of their waking lives, like alternate tapes that played on a loop. He believed, too, that training in lucid dreaming would give patients much-needed self-­knowledge—and the capacity for intervention.

  But earlier research in lucid dreaming had proved the technique also offered a myriad of benefits to normative sleepers: adventure and fantasy, nightmare resolution, problem solving, even physical healing. The term lucid dreaming was coined in 1913 by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, an acquaintance of Freud, who discovered that lucid dreamers were able to think clearly, act intentionally, and remain cognizant of the circumstances of waking life—all while experiencing a dream world that felt equally real. Interest in lucid dreaming flagged until the late 1960s, when van Eeden’s paper was reprinted in books by dream scholars Celia Green and Charles Tart. In 1987, Stephen LaBerge—a psychophysiologist with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics—founded the Lucidity Institute. LaBerge did more than validate the study of lucidity in academia: he also created the first technique for lucidity induction and developed a series of light-emitting devices that made lucid dreaming available to an increasingly curious public. Some of Keller’s funding came from the normative dreamers who attended his classes and retreats—people who wondered, as he did, what the mind had to offer when exercised to its full potential.