The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel

by Chloe Benjamin

  I hadn’t been there since we first moved in. It was a small, slanted space, the floors splintered and covered in a soft down of dust. There was one window, cracked open; each draft shook the pane. We’d thrown our boxes up here haphazardly in August, glad to be done with them, and they covered most of the floor. An extra pair of eclipse curtains was crumpled darkly in one corner. Foam peanuts were strewn across the ground, shining like plastic snow. My canvases leaned against the back wall, and my paint boxes were piled beneath an old exercise ball.

  Maybe I was only looking for something to do with my hands, but I started to clean. Before long, I sank into a state that felt as close as I’d ever come to meditation. I began by nesting the smaller boxes inside each other and stacking them in towers. With the ground partially cleared, the room doubled in size. I mopped the floors and wiped the molding, cobwebs tangling around my hands like hair. I found an area rug in one of Gabe’s boxes and set it in front of the window. I took a brass standing lamp from the living room—we never used it—and put it next to the rug. I collected the foam and bubble wrap in a trash bag. Then I brought a rag up from the kitchen and scrubbed the windowpane until it gleamed.

  As dusk fell, I leaned against the window frame. I could see the fence that separated our yard from Thomas and Janna’s. The maple trees, scarlet with fall, quivered like flame. A rabbit scampered over our porch and disappeared under the fence. I had not felt so peaceful, so hidden, in years.

  Before I left, I tidied my paint supplies. It pleased me to see the canvases in neat rows, the paints organized and boxed by color. Ringing with accomplishment, I returned to the office, where I worked more efficiently than I had in months.

  9

  MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 2002

  In June of 2002, I boarded a plane in San Francisco bound for Martha’s Vineyard. This was where Keller had a research and training compound, and it was where Gabe and I would spend the summer so I could be brought up to speed before we left for Fort Bragg that fall. I had yet to learn about Keller’s simultaneous potentialities theory of the subconscious mind, but Gabe told me it was mainstream enough to have earned him a tenured professorship at the University of San Francisco in the mideighties. Its fringier elements, though, had also attracted a cultish following of experimental academics, conspiracy theorists, and members of the artistic and political avant-garde.

  While at USF, Keller founded an interdisciplinary philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program, commonly known as PNP. But in 1995, he left to become the headmaster at our small, private boarding school, hidden in the fog and black walnut trees and upside-down rivers of Humboldt County, California. While at Mills, I’d known that Keller was a psychologist with some degree of prestige, but I hadn’t cared to learn more than that. Gabe shared the rest of this with me in the weeks before we left Berkeley. When David wasn’t home, he helped me pack and mail boxes. During work breaks, we spread out on the empty floor and ate pizza out of the delivery box as he told me about Keller. Gabe soon gave up trying to teach me about simultaneous potentialities, but it wasn’t only the theory that confused me.

  “So Keller was fully set up at USF,” I said. “A tenured professor, the founder of this groundbreaking lucidity program, and he left to head up a high school? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like he was regressing.”

  By now, we were on the plane from SFO, sitting in the seats Keller had purchased for us. These were the days when planes still served meals—something we dreaded at the time but later came to regard as a bygone luxury. We prodded the lemon chicken breast, set deep in a gelatinous yellow glaze. We unwrapped our twin bread rolls from aluminum foil and were surprised to find them still warm.

  “It’s strange, I know,” said Gabe. He speared a piece of chicken with his plastic spork and swallowed it, making a face. “Almost like he needed a vacation. All I know is that he came to Mills in ’95, just like us, and stayed for five years. Then he moved to Fort Bragg to do his own research.”

  “And you don’t know why?”

  Gabe shrugged. “There are some things I can ask him and some things I can’t. My guess is that he started off within the university system because he had to, and over time he wanted more freedom. I know he’s still connected to the university in a tangential way—he’s sort of a grandfather to the PNP program—but other than that, they seem to leave him alone.”

  Keller spent each summer on Martha’s Vineyard. The house was an inheritance, though Gabe didn’t know from whom. All he knew about Keller’s family was that his mother was a German immigrant while his father, a New York Jew with Eastern European roots, sold hats. Neither one seemed to have been particularly well-off, so I couldn’t shake the sense that the house had been given to Keller by a third party.

  We took a cab from the airport in Vineyard Haven, and as Gabe paid the driver—a tall, sweating boy in a limp polo shirt who couldn’t have been any older than us—I stared at the wide expanse of the compound. It looked like three original houses, descending in size, had been pressed up against each other and were now linked. Gabe told me they were constructed in the late 1870s. Like many of the homes in Vineyard Haven, which had been built in the same neocolonial, Cape Cod style, Keller’s compound had a symmetry and stately sense of proportion that seemed to me impenetrably masculine. Each house was sided with unpainted cedar shingles, which had originally been a rosy tan; over time, they took on the silver-gray sheen of moth wings. In front of the houses curved a crushed-shell driveway, long enough to hold three or four cars, though only one was parked there.

  The entire compound was surrounded by dense, shade-giving trees, which keeled toward the house as if obligated to protect what was inside it. The landscape was new to me—the vicious storms of greenflies; the tall grasses that swayed with the airy fullness, the intention, of ghostly bodies—and I rarely ventured off alone. Fog curtained the beginning and end of each day like an ongoing play, and I feared that I would get lost inside it—that I would disappear into the gauze like the beetlebung trees and the vast, pale ocean. It didn’t help that I couldn’t find the house on any Vineyard Haven map. It lay at the end of an unpaved, dead-end road called Snake Hollow. Whenever Gabe and I talked about it afterward, we referred to the houses not as “Keller’s compound” or “the place on Martha’s Vineyard” but as Snake Hollow itself.

  The day of our arrival was muggy and overcast. Every so often, the sun broke through, brief and dazzling. As our cab driver backed out of the narrow road—off to pick up another batch of tourists, no doubt—a young woman came out of the house and walked toward the car parked in the driveway. She wore a cut-off pair of jean shorts with Birkenstocks and a baggy, short-sleeved T-shirt. When she came closer, I saw that she was pretty: African-American, with round, long-lashed eyes and hair that coiled up and out. She carried a bundle of clothing and a worn denim backpack over one shoulder, both of which she chucked in the open trunk of the car.

  “What’s up?” she called to Gabe as we walked toward the front door. Gabe carried his bags easily, but I had fallen behind, dragging my wheeled suitcase choppily over the shells. “This the new one?”

  Gabe nodded.“This is Cassidy,” he said as I caught up. “Cass, meet Sylvie—your replacement.”

  “You’re such a dick,” said the girl. But she was laughing, shaking her head. She leaned on the open car door, one knee bent. “Take care, okay?”

  “I will,” said Gabe. He hugged her briefly and slapped the roof of the car. “You say hi to San Francisco for me.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Cass, slinging her body into the driver’s seat. “Your old stomping grounds.”

  She flashed another smile, small white squares of teeth like Chiclets, and pulled out of the driveway.

  “Who was that?” I asked as Gabe took out a ring full of keys and wedged one of them in the lock of the front door.

  “Summer assistant—one of the kids in the PNP program. They
come here on fellowships, stay for a few weeks, a month.” The lock gave, and he pushed the door open with his shoulder. “You’re taking her place. Come on in.”

  The house was filled with pastel light, as it often was that summer: the sun slanting through the kitchen blinds in lemony streaks or filling the library, while setting, with the orange sherbet of evening. Keller’s old lamps emitted a warm glow, more heat than color. At night, they lent the house a dreamy haze, a sense that things were not quite what they seemed. Although the house was Keller’s, it seemed to both obey and resist his mastery. Like a double agent, it dropped clues: an open window; thin walls that allowed sound to pass; a piece of softened yellow paper with blue handwriting, fluttering out of an opened book like a leaf from a late fall tree.

  “Make yourself at home,” said Gabe, leading me into a small, white kitchen from which the Atlantic Ocean could be seen. “Keller gets back on Monday.”

  “He isn’t here?”

  “He decided to go to a conference in Boston—sort of a last-minute thing. So I told him you’d spend the weekend getting acquainted with the place. And you can start your reading.”

  Gabe took two glasses from the cabinet above the sink, filled both with water, and brought one to me. The water was milky with bubbles. I swallowed.

  “Hey,” Gabe said, more gently. “Let’s put your things away in the bedroom.”

  He must have detected my disorientation. I nodded and followed him down the hall, which gave off the sweet, musty odor of old wood. I knew, of course, that there would be long days of study here. But my memories of life in Berkeley were still so fresh that I wondered whether I’d made the right choice. My withdrawal from the university had been unsettlingly easy: I only had to go to the registrar’s office and request a cancellation form. I’d imagined there would be someone who’d try to convince me to stay—a final test to be passed, like the spry, hopping creature at the final level of a video game. But the registrar was an ancient-looking woman who barely looked up before sliding a white form across the desk.

  “This is all I need?” I asked.

  “We’ll see,” said the woman, staring at her computer screen. “Are you an athlete?”

  “No.”

  “An international student?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been issued a call to active military duty?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you withdrawing for medical reasons?”

  I shook my head.

  Finally, the woman looked at me with brief appraisal, like an experienced doctor who could issue a diagnosis after a cursory glance at a wound, a rash, a swollen knee.

  “Then all you need is this,” she said, passing me a second form, an application for readmission, across the table.

  I brought the application for readmission to Snake Hollow like a talisman, a reminder that I had not traveled too far into my decision for it to be undone. I hadn’t even told my parents I’d pulled out of college. I just said I was taking the summer to “reassess my options,” that a job had materialized and I wanted to see if it had any staying power before committing to the fall semester. They were alarmed, as I knew they would be. Minutes after I wrote by e-mail, I received a phone call from New Jersey with both of them on the line.

  “Have you considered what you’ll do if it doesn’t work out?” my father asked, his voice booming through the receiver with more volume than it ever had in person. “Really picture what we’re talking about here. You’re twenty-two, twenty-three, you get bored or you get fired—”

  “I mean, God forbid, it could be later than that,” said my mother. I pictured her face, which must have acquired the look of valiant determination it did whenever she was fighting a losing battle with one of her children: her forehead creased, her eyebrows inching toward one another—eyebrows that, in their persistent, wiry growth, always seemed a bit too long for a woman.

  “She could be twenty-eight,” my mother said, continuing. “She could be in her thirties. You could be in your thirties, Sylvie, without a job or a college education, and what do you do then? You go back to school at thirty-five, that’s a very big undertaking. My God, I couldn’t go back to college now. I can teach college, but I couldn’t go back to college.”

  “So maybe I’ll teach college,” I said. I felt raw and loose and panicked.

  “Listen, honey, nobody’s laughing,” said my mother.

  “But I have what every college graduate wants,” I said. “A place to stay, a steady income, a job with one of the biggest researchers in my field. Besides, it’s Mr. Keller. You guys love Mr. Keller.”

  “I wouldn’t say we love him,” said my father. “We like him just fine. But we like the idea of you staying in school a lot more.”

  When Gabe returned, rubbing vigorously at his head with a towel, I was sitting on the bunk bed that was mine for the summer. The room had eight bunks in all, so we called it the Bunk Room. It had been created to accommodate larger groups of visiting researchers, but now Keller used the room to house a few assistants at a time, which meant that most of the beds remained empty. The compound’s original bedrooms functioned as guest rooms for people moneyed enough to come to the Vineyard for consultations and training sessions. Keller couldn’t perform the sleep assessments that we would later do in Fort Bragg and Madison—the compound didn’t have the equipment—but he often led seminars and retreats on lucid dreaming.

  The people who came to these workshops weren’t patients; their sleep was entirely normal. Lured by the novelty of lucid dreaming and the spectacular promises made by Keller’s promotional materials (WORLD SIMULATION, read one pamphlet: Just as a flight simulator enables people to safely fly, lucid dreaming can allow you to experience any imaginable world), they came in droves on weekends: coiffed East Coast housewives, UMass undergrads in Teva sandals, eccentric elderly couples, even the rare celebrity. Itching at the limits of their own lives, they longed to try on new worlds like T-shirts, to slip easily into their fantasies and discard them before the plane ride home.

  Did they do it? It was difficult to tell. There were always a few who left dissatisfied, Gabe said, but many people had been coming for years. Each month, we received testimonials: For me, learning the truth of my feelings, however painful, has opened me to my heart and to my capacity to know love, wrote Juanita Diaz, fifty-six, from Florida. And from John Simpson, thirty-four, an Afghanistan veteran from Colorado: I know that I can change a frightening situation in a lucid dream, so I don’t panic or get scared. And the strange thing is that in waking life I don’t run away either anymore. People think I’ve changed through the years, but the fact is that this is the real me coming out.

  Later that summer, we watched as a seminar group napped on blue mats spaced throughout the living room. Gabe and I were standing on the beach, fifty yards from the house, but we could see through the room’s French doors. Inside, twelve adults lay curled like fetuses, or like the pink shrimp that sometimes washed up onto the beach. Keller used yogic breathing and Eastern meditation techniques to help his guests nap during the day—it was easier and less expensive than hosting an overnight study—but I still wondered if any of them were faking it. Keller himself sat a small table, making longhand notes on one of his yellow pads as he scanned the sleepers. Beside each mat, there was a mini notebook and pen; to enhance dream recall—the first step in lucid dreaming—each patient would be asked to write down whatever they remembered as soon as the alarm went off.

  “So you believe this stuff?” I asked Gabe. The ocean slid over my feet, frothy and white as steamed milk, and I wriggled my toes into the sand.

  “Of course.”

  He picked up a piece of driftwood and chucked it into the spray. I squinted at the living room. The adults looked eerie: coiled into themselves and vulnerable with belief as Keller watched from his post in the corner. How invested could he be in these workshops, I wonde
red, in people he might only see once? That evening, after all the guests had left, I was rolling up the blue mats in the living room when I came across a stack of receipts. Keller had left them on the round table where he’d been sitting, and each one showed a charge of $425.

  It was a four-hour workshop with a break for lunch—local lobster rolls, tasting mostly of mayonnaise, which Keller ordered by the trough. I did the math: slightly over $100 per hour—certainly less than the hourly rate of most psychologists. Still, Keller’s workshops weren’t therapy sessions, not exactly; for at least one of those hours, he was watching them sleep. Something about it didn’t seem right. But it was true, I reminded myself, that Keller was in need of funding, and nobody expected him to give his research away for free.

  I didn’t ask him about it. As the summer went on, I would unlearn some of the nervousness I felt around Keller—a holdover from high school—but it was acute in the beginning. Though he was gone the weekend we arrived, it felt like he was right there with us. All through the house, discreet, typed signs hung from doorknobs or delicate nails. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH was suspended beneath a framed handkerchief, the fabric yellowed and embroidered with a tiny C.G.J. (Carl Jung’s, Gabe told me, though he didn’t know how Keller had acquired it). DOOR CLOSED WHEN IN SESSION fluttered from the doorknobs down the hall. We knew there were no sessions when Keller wasn’t there, but neither one of us ever tried to open them.

  What struck me most of all, that first weekend, was how hard Gabe worked. He woke before dawn and spent the early hours reading in a rocking chair that looked out over the back porch. When I fumbled out of bed around eight or nine, I found him entirely absorbed: his back bent over the pages, a pen in hand, glasses pushed up on the bridge of his nose. I couldn’t help but follow suit. Keller had assigned me a tall stack of thick, pungent books, the pages yellowed and tissue-soft. There were the seminal texts by Freud and Jung, along with more recent research on a range of sleep skills and disorders: Robert Stickgold’s Sleep and Brain Plasticity, Rosalind Cartwright’s The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, Trauma and Dreams by Deirdre Barrett, and Stephen LaBerge’s full canon on lucid dreaming. Then there were the studies: academic papers with minuscule print and references so obscure that each one sent me on a fact-finding goose chase. In this way I slowly spun myself a web of knowledge, painstakingly linking one idea to the next, my purview widening strand by strand.