The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel

by Chloe Benjamin

  It was difficult to breathe. But if Thomas was starting to judge me, he didn’t show it; when he spoke, his tone was light.

  “And why would anyone want to do all that work while they’re dreaming? Isn’t sleep supposed to be restorative?”

  I laughed.

  “Our patients don’t have a choice,” I said. “The people who come to us have sleep disorders—disorders that make them talk in their sleep and get out of bed.”

  Thomas crossed his legs. I could see a childlike interest in him that made me think of what he must have been like as a boy—the floppy reddish hair, the round glasses, the long limbs in miniature.

  “Still,” he said. “Why do you have to interfere in their dreams? You can’t send ’em to therapy while they’re awake?”

  “These aren’t your garden-variety sleep issues—sleep apnea, insomnia. The patients we see have disorders like somnambulism and RBD—that’s sleepwalking and REM behavior disorder, parasomnias that make them act out their dreams. Most of us are physically paralyzed during REM sleep, but these patients aren’t, and there’s nothing more dangerous than a dreamer out of bed. They can attack their bedmates, trying to fight off intruders who aren’t there. Some have even jumped out of windows. These people are disturbed at a subconscious level—and in order to help them, we have to meet them there. Lucidity enables them to realize they’re dreaming. It enables them to intervene.”

  “So you’re hacking in.”

  His face was pleasant enough, but his voice had a new edge.

  “What do you mean?”

  He leaned back on the bed, his elbows propped up behind him, and cocked his head.

  “You’re intruders. Robbing the bank of the subconscious.”

  “We’re breaking in, yes. But we’re helping them break in, too. We give patients the opportunity to see who they really are and how they came to be that way. It’s empowering.”

  “To look at something is to change it,” said Thom. “Your patients have disorders—fair enough. But you’re still opening up a part of the brain that the brain itself has tried desperately to hide. There’s got to be an evolutionary reason we don’t remember most of our dreams. Some things are better tucked away, if you catch my drift. Some books shouldn’t be read.”

  “But why?”

  “Because,” said Thom. His brow was furrowed, as if he were thinking through a particularly difficult math problem, and his voice was neutral. “Couldn’t what begins as an exercise in self-knowledge actually reveal our darkest impulses? Once we experience our dreams—not via recollection, but right there in the moment—how long is it before we start to believe that this is who we really are, what we really want, how we really feel? You’re giving people access to their dreams as they’re happening, which must make the dreams feel infinitely more real—more believable. Couldn’t they lose track of what’s real and what’s not? Doesn’t the line begin to blur?” He sat up again and looked at me. “When does one’s dream consciousness become their consciousness, I mean? Maybe the dreams themselves aren’t dangerous. Maybe what’s dangerous is putting people in contact with them.”

  He raised his eyebrows. My body was taut. This was exactly what I hadn’t wanted—someone doubting us, rummaging around and jumbling the thesis we had so painstakingly pieced together. I felt a part of myself begin to close off, like a person running to guard a half-open door. But it also felt even more important that I persuade him.

  “Okay,” I said. “Two years ago, we saw a patient with RBD. She was thirty-five, a single mother of two. Ten years earlier, her house was burglarized while she was asleep, and that’s when her symptoms started. Back then, she was living alone. When she met her husband, her symptoms decreased—but five years later, they divorced, and her RBD came back. One night, she thought she saw a man crouched in the corner of her bedroom. She jumped on him, and that’s when she woke up, alone and bloody. She’d leapt onto her bedside table—knocked out four teeth and shattered a rib.”

  “Jesus,” said Thom.

  “With our training, she was able to become lucid. Once she realized she was dreaming, she could recognize the intruders for what they were—figments of her imagination, echoes of the past. She hasn’t had an incident since.”

  That woman was one of our greatest, cleanest successes; without her, I doubted that Keller’s work would have been commissioned by the university.

  “So that’s the goal, then? Healing the troubled souls of disordered dreamers? There’s no other motive?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Thom shrugged. He looked upward, and his glasses caught the light of the lamp.

  “You’re looking at human capacity,” he said, “and trying to see how far it can be stretched. But who benefits more: the individuals you’re studying, or science?”

  “Well, we hope to benefit both of them.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “It’s just that experimental research isn’t usually so charitable.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m all for asking questions, friendly debate, whatever you want to call it—but you really don’t know very much about us. We’ve been refining this procedure for years, trying to make sure it runs as smoothly and ethically as possible.”

  “But smoothly and ethically are two very different things,” Thom said. “And sometimes, I imagine, they’re completely at odds.”

  I must have visibly bristled, because he seemed to realize he was crossing a line. He smiled, more warmly this time, his eyes wide with apology.

  “Listen, I didn’t mean any harm. I tend to ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s one thing you’ll learn about me, if we get to know each other better. It’s a nervous mechanism, partly.” He rubbed his palms together. “Besides, I’m an academic. I like these sorts of exercises. To me, it’s a theoretical debate—it isn’t personal.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “You certainly have the right to ask questions.”

  “Thank you,” said Thom.

  I knew he was trying to pull me out of whatever cramped box I had gotten myself into. But what I needed was some way to trust him. This arch, impish Thom I didn’t trust; but I remembered the way he had recited the Keats poem at dinner—or started to, anyway—his voice a heavy, kicked-along stone.

  “What was the rest of the poem?” I asked. “The Keats poem, the one you mentioned at dinner?”

  In his face there was both pleasure and surprise; he looked like a boy who did not often know the answers in class but who, called upon this time, had only to open his mouth.

  “‘In spite of all,’” he said, “‘some shape of beauty moves the pall from our dark spirits.’”

  “I thought it would be more positive,” I said.

  “But it is,” said Thom.

  From downstairs there came sounds of laughter: Gabe’s raucous and guttural, Janna’s climbing higher octaves. When we walked down, Gabe’s head was hanging back, his shoulders shaking.

  “Janna was just telling me—she was telling me—” It was a kind of laughter I rarely saw in him: keeled over, full body. “It was a terrible joke . . .”

  They were sitting at the table, bowls of half-eaten blueberry soup in front of them. Janna crossed her hands in front of her, trying to quiet. Then she turned to Thom and me.

  “Three children walk into the woods,” she said. “But only one child returns, carrying a bag of bones. The child’s mother says, ‘Whose bones are those, my darling?’ And the child looks at her and beams and says, ‘The ones who walked too slow.’”

  She grinned. The points of her canine teeth reminded me of a cat. Thom shook his head.

  “It’s awful,” said Gabe. But it took minutes for him to quiet down, and even when he did, little puffs of laughter escaped into the night.

  5

  BERKELEY,
CALIFORNIA, 1999

  In August of 1999, I arrived on the UC-Berkeley campus along with five thousand other freshmen. I carried with me my dad’s beat-up blue duffel bags and a leather backpack with a magnetic closure, which my mother bought to replace the corduroy JanSport I’d carried around at Mills. I can still picture the softened blue fabric, which had lost all sense of structure from years of carrying my color-coordinated binders and drawn-on, heavy books—none of which I’d brought to Berkeley, believing their lessons behind me.

  There was a tangible feeling of precipice that fall. By 1999, theories of climate change had made their way to Rutgers Newark, where my parents taught. Earlier that year, some of their colleagues had attended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and over the summer, the heat wave that swept the northeastern U.S. killed forty people in Philadelphia alone. Now they complained about the weather in Berkeley, saying it was too cold for summer in California, that fifty-nine degrees wasn’t natural, and even though I reminded them that the coldest winter Mark Twain ever saw was the summer he spent in San Francisco—and he had lived in the 1800s—they merely squinted at the campus, uncomforted.

  It was more than just the weather, of course. As we drew closer to the year 2000, even the most skeptical among us wondered what the millennium would bring. In my psychology course, we spent a unit on millennium predictions—the Tribulation, the second coming of Christ, the war of Armageddon. Some of the other students complained of nightmares. But I found myself magnetized by the predictions, the Rapture especially—all of the living and born-again dead rising into the sky like paper lanterns, their bodies lit from the inside and translucent as white sheets.

  Still, there were moments when all this was forgotten, when we gathered close to the radiator in somebody’s room and told stories from what felt like our past lives. My years at boarding school lent me a new exoticism. Even mundane details—the hall monitors, the curfews, the night privileges that came with senior year—took on a new, storied life when told to an audience who had only ever lived with their parents. My roommates—Donna, a pole-vaulter from Texas, and a Southern California transplant named Mallory—wanted to know how I’d ended up at boarding school in the first place. But when I told them that I went to Mills not because I showed exceptional promise, like the recruits, but because my father had gone there and received a hefty discount on my tuition, they seemed deflated.

  “Oh,” said Mallory from the bunk bed above Donna’s, turning again to her San Francisco magazine. She’d ordered it to be sent to her university mailbox despite the fact that we lived in Berkeley, an hour away by train. “So you were a legacy.”

  I’d heard the term before, but I’d never really thought it applied to me. I found little in myself of my father’s legacy. Thin and heavily bearded, he studied cuneiform script and made a hobby of erecting tiny wooden ships in glass bottles. When I was little, I thought it was a miracle, and he wouldn’t show me otherwise—he presented them to me when he was finished, gleaming with pride, and I gaped at the size of the ship inside and how it was so much larger than the neck of the bottle.

  Years later, on one of the shared computers at Mills, I used the Internet to look up how they were made. At home, we used a noisy dial-up modem that required use of the telephone line, so my brother and I were restricted to a half hour each night. Plus, it worked so slowly and theatrically that it was more of a family joke than anything else; Rodney and I had memorized the jerky song of its connection process and parroted it back and forth while setting the table or getting ready for bed. So when I got to Mills, where we could use the high-speed Internet in the library, I couldn’t believe what I’d been missing out on. It was so easy to find information, so easy to solve any problem, that I was almost afraid to trust it. The hierarchical structure of boarding school had taught me that information had to be vetted—by a textbook, by an instructor, by an administrative higher-up—before it was accepted as truth. But I was excited by the Internet, too, its free and unchecked passages. It meant that learning could also be passed from the ground up. It meant, in a small way, insurrection.

  When I returned home for Thanksgiving that year, I told my father I’d figured it out—that because the fully formed ship could never fit through the opening, the trick was to build it outside the bottle, with its sails and masts collapsed. Once you’d eased it inside, you pulled on a string that lifted the masts, and the whole ship unfolded and rose.

  I thought he would be impressed. But he looked surprised and mildly hurt, as if I’d broken an agreement we had settled on years ago. He couldn’t blame me, I thought—the inflation technique now seemed so obvious that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t put it together before. But I was irritated about more than that. It felt unfair that our relationship rested on something as fragile and miniature as a handmade ship. And if it did, I didn’t think it was my fault.

  I’d grown up with the expectation that when high school came, I’d go where my father had gone. I knew my parents thought my education was the most important gift they could give me, but it had consequences, too. My bedroom had begun to feel more and more like a childhood relic, with its museum-like inventory of past interests and art projects. My parents tried to plan special activities when I was home, but this made me feel even more like a guest. Other people knew what their fathers ate for breakfast and how to fight with their little brothers. Rodney and I saw each other so infrequently that we hardly knew which buttons to press, which ones had been updated and no longer worked the same way. We lived together like bears raised in domesticity, their wildness latent and confused, bears afraid to swipe for fear that they would only scrape at air.

  •••

  On New Year’s Eve, we gathered in the dorm common room with a bottle of Jack Daniels to watch the Times Square special. The dorm had been decorated with shiny, metallic streamers, as if matte colors had become outmoded along with grunge and floppy disks. We’d heard rumors of a problem known as Y2K, or the millennium bug—a technology crash that could paralyze everything from air traffic control to elevators, since computer systems had only been wired to support a two-digit year. On TV, the Times Square ball hung seventy-seven feet aboveground, and we wondered if this would fail, too, and stay suspended atop the flagpole when midnight turned.

  We passed around a crumpled article that someone had found online and pinned to the common room bulletin board. It was a piece from the December 1900 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, written by John Elfreth Watkins Jr. and called “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years.”

  “These prophecies will seem strange,” wrote Mr. Watkins, “almost impossible. Yet they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America.” And given the century’s lapse in time, we were all pretty impressed by what Mr. Watkins’s learned minds got right. Sure, strawberries weren’t as large as apples, as some had predicted they would be, and flies did, in fact, still exist. But it was true that automobiles had been substituted for horses, that weapons could destroy whole cities, that photographs could be taken at any distance and replicate all of nature’s colors. It was true, too, that there were airships to transport people and goods, but also to act as war vessels and to make observations at great heights above earth. Man had also seen around the world, via what would become the television: “The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus,” he wrote, “transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.”

  Heard to boom when seen to blaze—these words looped through my head that night, their old rhythm and their poetry. There was something haunting about Watkins and the human capacity to predict the future, as much as it seemed to elude us. And the predictions that hadn’t yet been realized—were they still to come? That winter co
uld be turned into summer and night into day? What of prediction number twenty-eight, his forecast for the animals?

  There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.

  It disturbed me more than the others—the animals gutted, made impotent, stripped of their dignity and their defenses. When the countdown began, my breath caught in my throat. As much as I’d scoffed at rumors of the Tribulation, even of the technology crash, what would happen if I was wrong? If human beings vanished, and so did our consciousness of the world—our inventories of plants and insects and endangered birds, our ability to predict weather patterns and measure whole populations—would the planet still know itself? Or would it be better off without our predictions and the ways we made them come true?

  But at midnight, the ball slid easily to the ground at One Times Square. The dorm elevators rose and fell just as they had before. That night, before bed, I pressed my face to the sliver of window beside my bunk and watched as a plane flew by, blinking faintly in the darkness.

  •••

  By sophomore year, my old interest in physics had flagged, and I’d decided to become a psychology major. Maybe Keller’s classes at Mills had ruined me, or perhaps I simply lost interest in the consistency of numbers. Either way, the laws of motion could no longer compete with the thrill of studying other people. The laws of human beings were counterintuitive and absurd, broken as often as they were followed.

  In the spring, my adviser suggested a class in the film department. Painting 201 conflicted with my abnormal psych requirement, and she’d heard good things about Intro to Videography.

  “At the very least, it’ll give you some good material,” she said, leaning forward. “It’s sanctioned people-watching. Legal voyeurism! A few of my kids got a lot out of it.”