The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel

by Chloe Benjamin

  “So you talked then?”

  “Not much. He mentioned the weather—asked did I think it was humid. I said I did. He was sort of looking around like this.”

  Gabe dropped his shoulders so his neck was long and his chin lifted, like a prairie dog. He turned his head from side to side, as if searching for someone in a crowd.

  “Well, the woman wasn’t any less awkward,” I said, though it occurred to me that awkward was the wrong word. It was more that she made me feel uneasy—as if she didn’t understand how to do small talk or wasn’t playing by the rules.

  “The weirdest part,” said Gabe, squatting, “was that when we got here, he suggested the four of us get together for dinner. He said his wife had thought of it.”

  “Really? I didn’t think she liked me very much.”

  “Why not?”

  The tape ended. Gabe turned off the TV, and we flopped to the floor, our stomachs rising and falling in unison.

  “It was just a feeling I had.”

  But the more I thought about it, I couldn’t be sure I was right. The next morning, I slipped a note under their door inviting them to eat with us that night, and despite what Gabe had told me, I was still surprised when they accepted.

  •••

  Kraft macaroni, tomato soup, cream of mushroom casserole: these were all things that my mother had made when I was growing up and that seemed painfully unsuitable now. Gabe cooked more often than I did, in part because he enjoyed it but mostly because I had not inherited certain womanly qualities from my mother, who did not have them to give me. I had never known how to bake scones or how to bounce an infant to keep it from crying. When Gabe approached me in college, I was becoming acutely aware of the differences between me and other girls, and the idea of Keller’s work—so divorced from typical gendered life, divorced even from typical human life—felt like a blessedly alternate universe.

  Now, for the first time in years, I felt real social anxiety. I wanted to prove I could play hostess. So I told Gabe I would cook and found a recipe for skewered chicken, the breasts slippery as silk in my hands. I set the table with my grandmother’s red tablecloth and a small vase, which Gabe filled with daisies he picked along the train tracks.

  Janna had called to say they’d be by at seven thirty. But it was eight when our doorbell rang, and the chicken had almost gone cold. Gabe and I had dressed up—he wore a button-up shirt with his jeans, and I had on a knee-length navy skirt—but Janna and Thomas looked like exotic birds in our entryway. She wore a short, canary-yellow dress, he a three-piece herringbone suit that looked much too hot for the late summer weather.

  “I’m Janna,” she said, turning toward Gabe. “And this is Thomas.”

  After I began to call him Thom, I found it odd she never did. I still remember the way she introduced him that day, as if it was her duty to preserve something old-fashioned and noble in him.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Thomas. He shook my hand, his grip boyishly enthusiastic; he nodded his head at the same time, the fuzzy strawberry-blond hair flapping up and down on his forehead. He wore a bow tie at his neck, and that, combined with his freckles and glasses, made him look like a character in a newspaper comic. But behind the glasses, his eyes were a deeply concentrated brown. They anchored his energy, like a mooring dropped in busy water.

  “For you,” said Janna, holding out a porcelain dish, fuchsia, with plastic wrap on top. “Blueberry soup, for dessert—something my mother used to make. Mustikkakeitto, in Finnish.”

  The words had a staccato beauty. In her high, lilting voice, they sounded sharp and delicate as glass shards.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the bowl. The liquid inside was a deep magenta stain. Gabe reached for Janna’s hand.

  “Gabe,” he said. His smile broke open as easily as it did with Keller’s patients, and he held Janna’s hand in a firm grip, then Thomas’s.

  “Quite nice of you to have us over,” said Thomas, flattening the front of his vest with his palms and looking around at our walls, which were bare. “It occurred to us too late that we should have hosted you. But here we are, and we brought Janna’s soup. Though now I wish we had something better—a housewarming plant or something, yeah? Bit bare in here, unless that’s how you like it?”

  “Don’t be rude,” said Janna. “Thomas says the first thing that comes to his mind, and usually the first thing isn’t the best. They’ve just moved in, they haven’t got time to get the place decorated. It was that way for us, too, in the beginning—everything packed away in boxes and boxes.”

  Later, I would marvel at the change in Janna. Alone, she hadn’t seemed to worry about small talk and propriety, but with Thomas she acted like a moral handler. As time went on, I began to notice that he did the same to her, however subtly. They seemed to exist in this constant state of checks and balances, one catching the other whenever they swung too far.

  But I didn’t have time to sort through this then; I was too busy feeling embarrassed about the state of our walls, for the truth was we had nothing in boxes. Gabe had wanted to hang some of my paintings, but I didn’t want to look at them every day. Each piece felt like a minor exorcism, a dredging up of all the silt and sludge that collected around my consciousness. When I finished one, I felt accomplished, but I never thought they were beautiful.

  As we sat down at the table, a train approached. We paused to listen to it whistle, then howl.

  “It’s a lovely noise,” said Janna, her back erect. “I always like it when I hear one go by.”

  I found it intoxicating, too, like a missive from another world. The trains came through erratically that year; we never knew what they were carrying or when the next one would come. But if it was at night, and we were asleep, I always woke up.

  I’d put the chicken back in the oven to keep it hot, and it had dried, but Janna professed to love it. I felt too jittery to eat much, so I asked questions: How long had they lived here? What did Thomas do? He was a graduate student in the English department, he told us, studying Romantic poets of the nineteenth century

  “My third year here,” he said. “But we try to get out in the summers. This year we went to South Carolina to see my mother—didn’t get back until August.”

  “Thomas was studying for his preliminary exam,” said Janna. “He read two hundred books, and then he wrote eight essays in eight hours. Doesn’t it sound awful?”

  “I was supposed to read two hundred books,” said Thomas, with a bite of chicken. “I read one fifty. No—make that one forty. I shouldn’t lie to myself, I skimmed at least ten. How can you skim Lord Byron? The point is, you can’t.”

  “Sounds like a huge task,” said Gabe, leaning forward. “And what about you, Janna? Are you involved in the university?”

  “Nope,” said Janna. She swallowed a sip of wine. “I garden.”

  “She used to study botany,” said Thomas. “Before that it was biology. She likes the way all the little parts of a thing fit together.”

  “No, if I’d liked it I would have stayed,” said Janna, with a sharp look at Thom. “I dropped out our senior year of college. I’d rather be touching things, you know, than reading about them. But let’s talk about the two of you—where did you meet?”

  Though she’d been effusive about the chicken, she hadn’t eaten much of it. Now she picked the chunks off the skewer with her fingers and grouped them on one side of her plate. Gabe and I looked at each other.

  “It was in high school,” I said.

  “High school!” said Thomas. “Fantastic!”

  “Thomas goes wild for a good love story,” said Janna. “Were you sweethearts back then?”

  “We for dated a while,” said Gabe. “But then we went in separate directions. We got in touch again partway through college, before Sylvie’s senior year.”

  He grinned at me and put a hand on mine on top of the
table. I was soothed by its warmth, but I wished he had taken my left hand—the one beneath the table, closest to him.

  “Those are the best kind of relationships,” said Janna. “Ones with a long history. Thomas and I are the same way. We met in our first year of college, in the only poetry class I ever took—Keats.”

  “‘In spite of all,’” said Thomas, “‘some shape of beauty—’”

  His voice changed as he recited the poem, steadying and becoming lower in pitch. There was something commanding about his presence now. But Janna waved a hand, cutting in.

  “Oh, stop, they don’t want to hear it. I certainly don’t. It’s been a summer of hearing him go on about Keats, and Blake, and Coleridge—don’t look at me that way, sweet, you know it’s true—and Wordsworth, and Goethe, and who’s that annoyingly emotional man who’s always going on about social ills?”

  “Shelley,” said Thomas, and cackled. “‘Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’”

  “Besides, we haven’t even asked what you do,” said Janna. “Do you see what I mean? We get talking about poetry and then real life goes out of the conversation entirely. Gabe—you tell us.”

  I wondered if she remembered my own evasiveness at her house several days before and thought she might get a more direct reply out of Gabe. Either way, I was happy to let him give our answer. He was better at it than I was—I got tripped up trying to tell the truth.

  “It’s not very exciting,” said Gabe. “We’re sleep researchers in the Center for Neuroscience. Mainly, we’re studying consciousness and REM cycles. We look at the point when dreaming begins and the extent to which the dreamer is conscious of that shift.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Janna.

  “Well, there are different ways. We use a polysomnogram to measure the stages of sleep through brain activity, muscle tone, eye movements, and so on—this tells us when the subject is in REM sleep. That’s when dreaming occurs. Our next job is to figure out whether or not they’re aware of it.”

  Thomas leaned back in his chair, dropping his fork onto the plate with a clatter.

  “You don’t ask them, I presume? ‘Sorry, don’t mean to bother you, but are you dreaming yet? No? Whoops, carry on then, just pretend I’m not here.’”

  “No, we use a mask,” I said, smiling. “It’s equipped with two LEDs—light-emitting diodes—which we flash a certain number of times once the subject’s in REM. They’re supposed to respond to the flashes by making an eye-movement signal: two pairs of horizontal eye movements, left-right, left-right, if they’re asleep and conscious of it. If no signals are made, we can assume they aren’t conscious.”

  “Like we said,” Gabe said, shrugging, “it’s not very interesting.”

  “It’s hardly uninteresting,” said Janna. “I’d like to try it sometime. You don’t need a new subject, do you? Hook me up to the machine—I’ll tell you if I’m awake.”

  She was leaning in, her tattooed arm cast across the table. I was transfixed by her combination of toughness and delicacy, her body pale as a mirage.

  Thomas laughed, staring at Janna with his eyebrows raised, and Gabe followed him.

  “I’ll put you on our list,” Gabe said. “Lots of people trying to get in for this kind of research, you know.”

  “Vying for their chance to be shot through with light and made conscious,” said Thomas. “Oh, to be new-born!”

  Gabe rubbed my hand. I was relieved that we’d squeezed through without too much probing. This was the explanation we gave to our oldest friends, the nurses at the sleep clinic, even our parents. It wasn’t untrue, exactly—our studies started by measuring consciousness this way—but it was only a small slice of what we did. Gabe was in favor of saying we studied sleep medication, but lying so blatantly made me uneasy. And more than that, I wanted to be known, wanted desperately, even then, to be found out.

  We cleared the table with Thomas and Janna’s help. When Thomas excused himself to use the bathroom, Gabe began to do dishes, and Janna offered to dry them. By the time they had almost finished, Thomas still hadn’t returned.

  I went upstairs to look for him. The bathroom was empty, its door creaking open. But the light in our bedroom was on, and when I ducked my head inside the door frame, I found him sitting on our bed.

  He was perched on the edge, holding up to the light a locket my mother gave me. Usually I left it on my bedside table, but Thomas had hooked the chain around his index finger. The locket had been opened to reveal two photos: one of my mother, and one of me. He tapped the edge with his other index finger, so that it turned around and around, tangling on the chain.

  When he saw me, he smiled, bright and sheepish.

  “So sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to go out of bounds. I used the bathroom, and then I wandered in here. I sat down to have a look at the trains. Well, the place where trains would be. The empty trainless place.”

  The locket was still on his finger. I held out my palm, and he gave it back to me.

  “I tend to fidget,” he said. “I just picked it up to have something to do with my hands.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, though I was spooked. I wanted to get him back downstairs, but he spoke before I could suggest it.

  “You’re welcome to call me Thom.”

  “All right.”

  “If you like.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “All right,” he said, my words, and smiled.

  The window by the bed was open; outside, a group of flies—the last survivors of the summer hatch—whined softly. Thom turned, swinging his legs around to face me instead of the train tracks.

  “What do you really study?” he asked. “What within sleep?”

  “Consciousness and REM cycles, like Gabe said. We make physiological recordings—”

  “I remember what Gabe said.” He picked at the threading on my comforter for a moment, then dropped it down. “It just seemed a bit simplistic. First of all, there’s a word for what you’re studying. It’s lucidity, or lucid dreaming—when a person’s aware that they’re dreaming. Am I right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which is why I find it hard to believe that’s all you’re measuring,” said Thomas. “It’s been done. I learned about dreaming and lucidity in a couple of intro psych classes—long before you became involved in this kind of research, I presume. Some of the Romantics even knew about it: Thomas De Quincey, Coleridge, Keats.”

  “You’re right—we’re not the first to study lucid dreaming. But we’re doing something different.”

  I paused, and Thomas looked at me with expectation. I’m not sure when I made the decision to tell him more than I had ever told anyone else, but I know it was before that moment. Maybe it was when I followed him upstairs, leaving Gabe and Janna in the kitchen, or maybe it was even earlier—the first time I saw them, returning home in the storm.

  “Accounts of lucid dreaming have been around since the fifth century,” I said. “Saint Augustine wrote about it first, and Tibetan Buddhists recorded their experiences in a funerary text. Back then, it was used to access a higher spiritual plane, even to relieve stress and problem-solve. It was treated like an escape. But we think of it as a return.”

  “To?”

  “To the self,” I said. “We dream in metaphors. If you’re having car troubles, you’re feeling powerless. Failing a test? You’re insecure, unprepared. Trapped? Well, that one’s obvious. The brain is like an excellent fiction writer: every part of a dream is laden with meaning that can be unlocked, analyzed, and understood. We hide our greatest hopes there, our deepest fears. And when we learn to read our dreams, so to speak—not retrospectively, when we wake up, but right there in the moment—we’re reading the story of who we really are.”

  “Isn’t that just Freud?” asked Thom.

 
“Partly.” I sat down beside him, my palms beneath my thighs. “Freud’s ideas make up the bedrock of dream interpretation, so it’d be impossible for us to avoid his influence—not that we’re trying to. Freud was the first to suggest that dreams give us access to the unconscious mind; he called them the royal road, the king’s highway. Dreams are almost entirely visual, but he gave us a language with which to talk about them, and it still holds up. Analysis is essentially an act of translation.”

  “You’re old-school, then,” said Thom. “These days, don’t most people believe that dreams are meaningless? The brain sloughing off nervous tension?”

  “It’s true. Our ideas aren’t popular. But dreams involve a whole host of brain mechanisms—they’re as rich in neurological activity as many conscious processes. There’s just too much going on for us to explain them away as random nerve firings.”

  Thom grinned. “Do you believe in Freud’s other ideas, too, then? The sexual complexes? The idea that all dreams are wish fulfillment?”

  I shook my head. “That’s where we’re more aligned with Jung. He thought dreamers could tap into resources of creativity and ingenuity, imagination and adventure. Healing, too. Besides, Freud never studied lucid dreaming. He relied on dream recollection, which means his patients reported their dreams after they woke up. But memory is fallible—it’s what makes eyewitness accounts notoriously unreliable—and that means the conscious mind isn’t trustworthy. Lucid dreaming allows patients to experience their dreams in real time. It gives them a panoramic view.”

  “A sense of narrative,” said Thom.

  “Exactly. Lucid dreaming also vastly improves dream recall, which means patients can work through their issues in the moment—and come away with a more thorough memory of what happened. It isn’t enough to go cherry-picking for symbols. Freud looked for the metaphors, but he didn’t string them together. He didn’t look for the full story.”