The Anatomy of Dreams

by Chloe Benjamin

  That day, I was reading Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections—a mystical, ardent little book—while Gabe took a trip to the market. Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome, Jung wrote. (Next to the world rhizome, someone had written rootstalk in tiny blue print.) Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

  I turned the page and found that the text had been blotted out by a dark brown stain—coffee, perhaps—that bled straight through the next ten pages. I held the pages up to the light, but that made them even more indecipherable. I closed the book and walked to the shelves, which had been organized by author. Perhaps, I thought, Keller had additional copies of some of the more famous works, and I was right: there was another Memories, Dreams, Reflections, older but otherwise identical to the one I’d been reading. The book opened reluctantly, glue cracking in the spine. As I flipped through to find my place, three yellow pieces of paper shook out and floated to the ground.

  I worried they were pages from the book itself. But when I picked them up, I saw that they came from an old notepad. They were frail and dry, covered in blue ink, and seemed to be part of a letter: each page was inscribed, in the upper right-hand corner, with Zurich, 1978, and one of the pages—the last, I presumed—was signed with Keller’s name. I glanced at the driveway; Gabe had taken the car to the grocery store one town over. Still standing by the shelves, I began to read the last page:

  keep coming back to the idea that the subconscious is made up not only of the awareness of actual experience but also of the awareness of every experience that could have happened—simultaneous potentialities which, although near misses in real life, become fully realized in the life of the brain. It’s my guess that the soul is made up of the sum of these simultaneous potentialities, that the soul has therefore an infinitely tiered or layered psychology and that it is only in traveling through these layers—which extend not up or down but inward—that self-knowledge can be achieved in any depth.

  I see this theory as being positioned at the intersection of Jungian psychology and the multiverse theories of William James and Max Tegmark, along with Alan Guth’s more recent theory of parallel universes. I’m not a physicist or a cosmologist, of course, so I’m interested less in the notion of parallel physical universes than in the implications these theories may have for the brain. If we accept the idea that out of the original particles of our universe were created a vast number of identically particled other universes, and that these universes may have evolved differently but all possessed the same original matter and therefore a playing field of identical potential—could the same not be said of the mind?

  Jung’s theory of the collective subconscious posits that in addition to the personal subconscious, each member of the human race has a subconscious of the species—a communal memory bank, an infinite vault of human instincts and experiences, which is at every moment expanding, much like the physical universe. If this is true, might the personal consciousness have too an infinite vault, not only of realized individual experience, but of potential individual experience?

  I felt a chill behind me. I turned around; the door to the library was open, and Keller stood inside it. He wore a cuffed white shirt and a pair of slacks, creased from the drive; in one hand was a folded paper doggy bag that gave off the overripe, saturated smell of food left in the sun.

  “Sylvie,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” I fumbled with the papers, pressing them back into the center of the book. “The other copy had a stain. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  Keller crossed to the desk and set the brown bag down. Then he walked back to me and shook my hand.

  “And what did you think?”

  “Of the Jung? It’s fascinating—I’ve only just started the autobiography, but I read a bit more in college and I can see why you’re—”

  “Not of the Jung. Of my letter.”

  Keller released my hand and smiled, his mouth closed. My first test. Would it be better to pretend I hadn’t read it? To admit it and compliment him? Either way, it seemed worse to lie.

  “I only read part of it,” I said. “So I don’t have much to go on.”

  “Well played.” His eyebrows were raised with a boyish kind of delight. “Our very own Pandora. Always open the box. And?”

  “I want to know more,” I said haltingly. “I recognized some of it—your theory of simultaneous potentialities—but I didn’t fully understand it.”

  “I’m not surprised. I wasn’t much older than you when I wrote that letter—my third year of graduate school. I suppose I’ve kept it for sentimental reasons. The theory itself was in its infancy and rather blurry—like one of those vast gaseous planets that takes shape only when seen from far away.”

  I had the strange feeling that he was being self-deprecating for my benefit—was it that he doubted I’d be able to understand and was trying to comfort me? But he was slyer than that; more likely, he was challenging me. I was transfixed by the sight of him. It had been years since I’d seen Keller, but my memories of his classes at Mills were sharp: straining for the answer as he stood stock-still before us, his expression impenetrable as a sphinx, his eyes glinting in the late-afternoon light.

  “Can you explain it to me?” I asked. “Your theory?”

  “Didn’t Gabriel?”

  Keller walked back to the desk and rummaged around inside the doggy bag. He came out with an apple, a compact and shiny Red Delicious, which he juggled absentmindedly in one hand.

  “He thought it’d be better for me to learn it from you,” I said.

  A white lie, but I didn’t want to tell Keller that I’d been totally unable to decipher Gabe’s explanation. I hoped he wouldn’t follow up with Gabe to ask—and this is what I was thinking about, whether or not Keller would find out how clueless I really was, when he raised his left arm and sent the apple hurtling directly for my head.

  I made a pathetic gasping noise and ducked to the right; the apple sloped to the ground, hitting the floor of the hallway with a dull thud, and tumbled a few more feet before coming to a stop.

  “What was that?” I asked, turning to look at the apple and then back at Keller, who was watching me with an utter lack of surprise.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “I feel—what?” I sputtered. “I feel freaked.”

  “Your heart rate is up?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re sweating?”

  “A little.”

  “And you’re angry with me.”

  “You almost hit me.”

  “But I didn’t,” said Keller pleasantly. “So why do you feel the way you do?”

  I stared at him.

  “Because you could have,” I said. “You could have hit me.”

  “Ah. Precisely.”

  He walked out of the room to retrieve the apple, then brought it back inside, rubbing it on his shirt. It had caved in on one side.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I knew you’d duck. I hoped you would, at least. But I was trying to make a point. When I threw this apple at you, I knew there were several likely outcomes. What were they?”

  “You’d hit me,” I said. “Or I’d duck before you could. Or the apple would miss me entirely.”

  “Good. The possibilities, of course, are infinite—I could have twisted my arm in swinging, sending the apple straight for one of these windows; Gabriel could have chosen to walk down the hall at that moment, in which case he would have been hit instead. But I chose to put my faith in probability. The app
le would hit you, or it wouldn’t. I’m pleased to say it didn’t. But you’re reacting as though it did. Not because it hit you—but because it could have.”

  “Right,” I said. I was still wary, but my heart rate was beginning to steady.

  “At the moment of decision,” said Keller, “at the moment of action, an infinite array of possibilities are conceived in the mind—alternate but parallel psychological universes, each with its own set of outcomes and implications. Only one of these possibilities will be actualized. But what happens to the rest? If they folded neatly into submission, disappeared into the dust from whence they came, you would be, so to speak, single-minded. You would have felt no anxious residue, no fear or anger, when the apple was no longer a threat. And yet you did feel the threat of the outcomes that were not realized; indeed, you seemed to feel that threat more acutely than you did any sense of relief that the apple, as luck would have it, sailed right over your head.”

  “And those are your simultaneous potentialities?”

  A part of me thought it made perfect sense; the other part wondered, with a flailing sense of alarm, just what I’d gotten myself into.

  “Correct,” said Keller. “I believe that these potential experiences are logged in the brain along with the actual one, that the mind processes potentialities and actualities simultaneously and that, therefore, an imagined nonevent—being hit by my apple, let’s say—has as much cognitive power as the actual event.”

  “But wouldn’t that be too much for our brains to handle at once?” I asked. “The possibilities would be infinite. How could we process all of them?”

  “You’re quite right. Thankfully, the brain is selective. We know that certain actual memories are encoded and stored long-term while others are discarded. This is true, too, for potential memories.”

  “But for memories to be stored, they have to be processed,” I said. “How can they be processed if they’re never experienced?”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “Subconsciously, maybe.” I shook my head. “But I thought you were working on sleep. What does all this have to do with dreams?”

  “I hope it has a great deal to do with dreams,” said Keller with mock solemnity. “We’ll be in a rather tight spot if it doesn’t. We already know that sleep—REM sleep in particular—plays an important role in long-term memory formation and mental health. If simultaneous potentialities are sufficiently processed and resolved in REM sleep, we find ourselves better able to focus on the reality of waking life. But what happens to patients whose sleep isn’t normative and whose emotional processes are, therefore, disrupted? Patients like the ones I see, who suffer from REM disorders?”

  “They can’t resolve them,” I guessed. “The simultaneous potentialities aren’t processed. They keep looping, and the dreamers continue to act them out, these things they’re afraid of—things that haven’t happened yet, or things that happened a long time ago. Things that aren’t real now—at least, not outside of their dreams.”

  I was babbling, spitting his words back at him less articulately than I’d been able to do in high school.

  “It’s a start,” Keller said.

  Through the open windows, I heard the crunch of shells that signaled Gabe’s arrival. The two orbs of his headlights grew brighter, spilling into the library, before the car came to a halt and the power was turned off.

  “That’ll be Gabriel,” said Keller, cocking his head at the noise. He turned back to me and smiled, but I could see he was distracted; it was as if he’d just remembered his unpacked suitcases, dinner to be made, whatever ends had to be tidied up after the previous assistant’s departure.

  “Mr. Keller?” I asked.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “The letter,” I said. “Who were you writing to?”

  If I had crossed some line, he didn’t blink.

  “My thesis adviser,” he said. “Meredith.”

  As I lay in bed that night, tossing in my UC-Berkeley boxers, his ideas seemed to me frightening and revolutionary. And they were, I discovered—though PNP was revolutionary less for its novelty than for its return to so-called archaic notions of the mind as murky, spiritual terrain, terrain whose geography was better understood by folklore and poetry than it was by pharmacology. In hindsight, I can see that Keller’s scholarly path was always one of upstream travel: the absorption of modern-day psychology into medicine and the hard sciences stranded him in murky terrain of his own, and though he had made use of his marginalization—there seemed to be a continual stream of people swimming to his rock, shaking the water off their backs, and clambering up to admire the view from the island—I know now that he worked always in fear of being delegitimized.

  If I had known then what I do now, perhaps I would have been able to see Keller as he was: an aging, proud, and anxious man, unwavering in his convictions, persuasive in speech, but prone to paranoia and hermeticism. It should come as no surprise that someone so convinced of the mystery and idiosyncratic depth of the human mind should be self-isolating. But I could not help but see him, through the years, as a kind of martyr: brilliant, exiled, and lonely as a god.

  10

  MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2004

  As October gave way to the stark skies of November, its spindly, barren trees, I was surprised to find a cream envelope beneath the porch door of our house: perfectly square, licked shut, with a calligraphic scrawl—G + S—in black ink. I opened it in the kitchen while Gabe slept off the late study we’d monitored the night before.

  Greetings, pals—

  Janna and I’d be delighted if you’d treat us to your presence(s) on the eve of 25 November. We’ll give thanks, we’ll drink copious amounts of liquor, and, Janna willing, we’ll eat the appropriate troughs of food, American and otherwise. Come in your finest around the hour of five, post meridiem—and bring something to contribute, you lazy fucks.

  Hugs—

  T.

  I read the letter twice in a row with a seeping feeling of delight. It had been years since I’d had a proper Thanksgiving meal—not since I lived with my family. Gabe and I had a halfhearted tradition of eating dinner at an ethnic restaurant, though I’d never really been sure whether we did it out of protest or laziness. Thom’s letter made me feel normal. We were the sort of young people who had neighbors, had friends; we would go to their house for Thanksgiving, and we would fall asleep, along with the bulk of the country, at the pathetic hour of seven thirty or eight, bloated and sewn-in as stuffed animals.

  I decided to make a sweet potato dish, something roasted that I was sure I couldn’t mess up. After picking up the ingredients in town, I stopped at the Goodwill on State Street. Keller paid us fairly well—even better now that we worked for the university—but I was my mother’s daughter, and most of it went into savings. Usually, I was attracted to clothes in muted colors, though perhaps attracted is the wrong word; it was more that I knew these were the styles that suited me and I had resigned myself to our partnership. Today, though, I wanted something different. I brought home a suede skirt in a rich and dusty orange and paired it with a low-backed black top; as I closed the bedroom window, cool air brushed my spine. When I added the little gold hoops Gabe had given me for my twenty-third birthday and a pair of bronze heels, I felt almost unlike myself.

  “You look great,” said Gabe, in a tone I tried not to take for surprise, as he came downstairs to meet me. He had dressed up, too: he wore a starched navy shirt and a skinny green tie with his Chucks.

  “So do you,” I said. Had he gotten a haircut, or was the structure of his face always so clear—the sharp jaw, the deep-set and crinkled hazel eyes?

  As we crossed the lawn to Thomas and Janna’s house—a bottle of wine in Gabe’s hand, the sweet potato dish in mine—we could have been any young couple. We rang the doorbell and waited on the porch, Gabe’s sneaker tapping the planks.

  Janna op
ened it. Her hair was newly streaked with purple and pulled into a bun, so that the stripes collected in a clean knot at her crown. She wore an orange dress, too, but hers was the neon color of construction signs. It ended in a feathery skirt at her hips. Beneath it she wore sheer brown tights and no shoes.

  “Oh, look!” she said, clapping. “You’re the same color as your potatoes!”

  I looked down; it was true. She kissed Gabe twice, once on each cheek.

  “Come in, come in,” she said. “I’ve got to attend to the table, but Thomas will get you a drink.”

  With this she whirled out of the kitchen, and Thom sauntered in from the living room. The oven was releasing small curls of smoke. Thom paused in front of it and stared quizzically at its dials before turning to us.

  “Hello, friends,” he said. “What can I get you? Wine? Martini? Gin and tonic?”

  “Gin and tonic, please, sir,” said Gabe.

  “Sylvie.” Thom grinned, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. “You match your potatoes.”

  “I know,” I said. “Janna mentioned—”

  “Extra,” said Janna, sweeping back into the kitchen, a butter knife in one hand. “Silly me—I set the table for five.”

  She sniffed and turned, with razorlike precision, to the oven.

  “The oven, Thomas,” she said. “The oven is smoking, darling.”

  She turned off the heat at the same time as she opened the silverware drawer next to it. After dropping the extra knife, she slid her hand into a bright blue mitt and pulled out a tray of beautiful, scallop-edged orange cups with little mounds of sweet potato inside.

  “Oh,” I said. “If I’d known you were making sweet potatoes, I wouldn’t have brought them. But yours are gorgeous. How did you make them?”

  “Easy,” said Janna, licking a bit of potato off her ring finger. “You cut the oranges in half and scrape out the insides. Fill them with mashed potatoes, throw the pulp in the trash.”

  She wiped her hands on a towel and looked at us brightly.