The Anatomy of Dreams: A Novel

by Chloe Benjamin

  It took months for Anne to reveal that she had suffered sexual abuse, that it had been at the hands of her father, and that she was worried for the life of her younger sister. Keller believed our study was giving her an opportunity to safely express her anger and process her impulses. He was electric: Anne became lucid more quickly than we’d ever seen before, and her reaction to the light stimulus was perfectly in line with his theory. He saw her as a landmark case, one that could be used to lobby for grant money and legitimize interactive lucid dreaming.

  But we never saw Anne again. One day in late October, Gabe and I arrived at the lab to find Keller in his office, dazed and blinking, as if he’d just woken up.

  “She’s pulled out,” he said. He nodded at the phone, its voice mail button red. “Listen.”

  Anne rambled. She appreciated our time; she felt she had attained her goal, having seen what she’d been dreaming; and, having said as much, she felt no need to continue to participate in our study. She meandered for another minute or so—she could no longer afford the three-hour drive to Fort Bragg from San Francisco; gas prices being what they were; we understood, she was sure; $3.05 for a gallon of gas, not how it used to be; and that wasn’t counting the traffic—until Keller stopped the message.

  I had never seen him so dejected; it was as if someone had died. Gabe, with characteristic brazenness, began to tease him.

  “Cheer up, old chap,” he said, slapping Keller’s shoulder. “She’s just not the one for you. There’ll be other fish in the sea.”

  Gabe and I were disappointed, too, but deep down we were grateful to be rid of Anne. She was crafty, unpredictable, and she had made us both uneasy. When I thought of her later, I felt a retrospective squirminess. It was like the memory of having accidentally eaten an insect: an ant on a bread roll, a spider in the salad.

  That night, when we returned to the apartment, we buzzed with the wild, uninhibited energy of guests at a late-night wake. Our nervousness hung low in the room, sparking like power lines. Gabe rummaged around in the pantry until he found an old bottle of red wine. We drank, splayed on the couch, until we were more woozy than anxious.

  “To Anne,” said Gabe.

  “To Anne. May she sleep in peace.”

  We clinked, then quieted. Had we let Anne down, or had she done that to us? She had weaseled out of our hands, disappeared through a crack in the wall. Though she had been the patient, we were the ones who felt exposed.

  Gabe took another gulp of wine.

  “I won’t miss her,” he said.

  “No. Me neither.”

  Gabe put his glass on the ground. Then he placed his hand on my knee. He kept it there as I looked at him, then began to move it up my thigh. He undid the button at the top of my jeans and slid the zipper down, rested his hand on the soft, tender skin below my belly. For seconds, we eyed each other.

  Then one of us moved, and we stopped thinking. Perhaps this was what we had wanted—the end of thinking—and what suspension: it was as if we shared one set of lungs, one pulse, one thick and muscular heart. His body, older now, was only half-familiar. It felt more, I could tell; like my body, his was somehow both more confident and more vulnerable than it used to be.

  After, we lay on the living room rug, warm and panting. Rain flicked through the open window. Otherwise, the block was silent; it felt like nobody lived in Fort Bragg but us. But I wasn’t lonely anymore.

  “What took you so long?” I whispered.

  “Me?” asked Gabe. “I’ve been waiting for you this whole time.”

  •••

  We spent two years in Fort Bragg: biding our time, building our arguments, feeding our research until it grew strong like an organism. Keller may have been skittish, but he still craved institutional validation. After we had enough material to make a convincing case, he applied for a position as a visiting researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Gabe and I were at his house, cleaning up after a late dinner, when news of his acceptance came by e-mail. Keller laughed, in surprise or in vindication, his face an inch from the computer screen and filled with undisguised glee. For years he had kept his research protected, whittling it little by little. Now he could strip the tarp off the statue, leaving the Pacific Ocean and the salt air and the little blue cottage as if he had never really loved them to begin with.

  14

  MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2005

  Like all good liars, I took pride in my ability to deceive and thought it seamless. I painted my canvases black with a zealous attention to detail, allowing no trace of the original painting to shine through. Those covered-up paintings were works in themselves, as layered and intentional as what was underneath. There was only one painting I’d forgotten to black out: the one I had been working on when Thom called, on Christmas night. I’d shoved it behind the other four dark canvases and left it there.

  One afternoon in January, I came inside after scraping ice off the porch, an old shovel in hand, when I noticed that Gabe wasn’t in the kitchen where I’d left him. With the specialized intuition of the paranoid, which told me that the only possible outcome was the one I most feared, I knew he was in the attic.

  I pounded up the stairs and pushed open the door. He stood at the window, light striking his cheekbones. The four black paintings were scattered on the ground like fallen soldiers. In Gabe’s hands was the painting of Thom.

  “You didn’t tell me you were doing this,” he said without looking up at me.

  “It’s a new project.”

  “I see.”

  He held the painting up to the light. My stomach tumbled, for I knew what it showed: Thom and me on the floor of the attic, our bodies making angles as we rocked together. But I had painted it the way I always did my dreams—narrative on top of narrative, the same scene sketched over as more of it came back to me—and now the lines were dizzying, almost indecipherable. Gabe squinted at it, straining to tease out the piece’s meaning. A test: how well had I hidden it away?

  “What is it?” he asked, finally.

  “I don’t know. I was just messing around. Playing with color and lines.”

  But maybe I had wanted him to find the painting; maybe it was I who was testing him. How much do you know about me, Gabe? How far will you go to know it? He hadn’t put the painting down; he was staring at the lower left corner, where I had painted Thom’s cast-off glasses. The glinting little lenses, the black temples folded shut.

  “Those glasses look familiar,” he said.

  “Really?” I blinked. “Huh.”

  He put the painting down on the ground and brushed his hands on his pants. When he looked up again, his face was fixed.

  “They’re Thom’s,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it?”

  I thought I had won, but now I saw I was wrong. Gabe was feigning disinterest, something he only bothered to do when he was supremely, painfully interested. He wouldn’t give up without a fight.

  “Why funny?”

  Gabe ignored this. I crouched and began to clean up the foam peanuts that had fallen out of a large, tipped-over box. He was silent, watching me.

  “Is Thom really that interesting to you?”

  “That’s a ridiculous question. First of all, Thom doesn’t have a monopoly on black-rimmed glasses. And secondly, they’re only a small part of the painting.”

  “Right. I forgot to mention the crazy lines zigzagging all over the place. And the two naked bodies.” He laughed hollowly. “I’m not blind.”

  “Gabe.” I released a long breath. “It was a dream, okay? I had this weird dream about Thom, and it freaked me out. I came up here to process it.”

  “A dream. So you’re still remembering them.”

  “I guess so. Parts of them, anyway.” I crossed my arms. “I thought you’d be happy I’m painting again.”

  “You’re changing the subject. And you’re defensive.”


  “Of course I’m defensive. You’re acting like I’ve done something wrong, like I’ve betrayed you, but I can’t help what I dream. And don’t I have the right to—to artistic freedom?”

  I was bluffing; in truth, I felt just as guilty as Gabe thought I was. But he believed me, or he wanted to—I could see it in his face. His jaw softened, and he exhaled.

  “I’m sorry.” He shook his head, ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know you can’t help it.”

  He walked out of the attic; his shoulder brushed mine as he passed me, and then I heard his heavy, quick footsteps on the stairs. A moment later, the screen door gasped open, rattled shut. He had left.

  In my first year at Berkeley, I took a psychology course that focused on love. Most interesting to me was the section on communication between couples. I learned that even the slightest change of facial expression in one partner, a raised eyebrow or a curled lip, can be enough to trigger an increase in the heart rate and adrenaline of the other. Even more striking was the fact that couples begin to look alike as they age: their faces are quite literally shaped by shared experience. It was clear that couples speak with their bodies, not just their voices; that the body is confused in its allegiances; and that, sometimes, the body betrays the mind of its owner in order to communicate something to the partner—an insurgent rushing across party lines with a letter in hand.

  I should have been relieved when the conversation was over, but I wasn’t. Gabe’s unease had amplified my own alarm, for I could no longer deny that my dreams were beginning to bulge into my days. Time was no longer fastened to my life; it had become unsewn, a hanging hem, a sibling whose days had once been braided with mine but had since moved on. I tumbled into morning feeling disoriented and incongruous, like a nocturnal creature blinking in the harsh, wrong light of dawn. Sometimes my muscles were sore, my breath short, as if I’d clenched them through the night. At other times, a faint, ebbing pleasure washed through my body.

  My dreams of Thom had grown richer and more detailed, and they had a sensory, physical weight that stayed with me when I woke up: Thom’s scissored legs around me, warm and long, sparsely patched with hair; the knobs and hollows of his face pressed against mine, soft eye sockets, ridge of nose, as he whispered something to me—a song—For there’s a change in the weather, a change in the sea. My walk will be diff’rent, my talk and my name . . . It was an old big-band song from the 1940s, a Benny Goodman song, and where had I heard it before? For it to occur in my dream, I knew, I had to have heard it somewhere. But when I played the song online, in the office with the door shut, it reminded me of Thom, only Thom, nothing more.

  Until now, I had felt helpless, resigned to the dreams as they came. Years ago, I had given up on the lucidity exercises Keller taught us in Snake Hollow. But what if I tried again? If I could train myself to be lucid—if I could watch the old machinery of my subconscious creak to life while standing apart from it—perhaps the dreams would lose their power. If I could name them, I might be able to disarm them. Maybe I could even control them.

  That night, lying in bed, I took inventory of the things around me: the bedroom door, slightly ajar; outside my window, a yawn of moon; hanging from my nightstand, the cotton skirt from which I’d scrubbed a stain the night before. When I see my hand in my dream, I will know I am dreaming, I thought as Gabe snored lightly next to me. I reminded myself of the dream signs: broken electronics, impossible feats of physics, the dead. And when I emerged in a dream, minutes or hours later, I looked for them.

  I was never aware of how the dreams began. Instead, I became conscious partway through, and it was almost like waking—slowly my eyes would seem to open and that musty, subterranean world would materialize again, always the basement, its cracked floorboards and dusty bulb. Lights didn’t turn on in dreams, and so it was light I would start with. But when I reached for the bulb’s dangling chain one night, Thom stopped me.

  “Are you crazy?” He batted my hand down like a fly. “Gabe might see.”

  The threat was enough to freeze me in place. Now, I don’t know whether I was afraid of Janna or of what I’d find when I pulled that string—but I was distracted, for Keller’s wife had reappeared. She never spoke, but she watched us. She wore a red suit jacket and skirt, her expression impassively appraising: she was either fascinated by us or very, very bored. Sometimes, she sat in a chair across from me and trimmed her hair, staring into my face as if it were a mirror. Other times, she ignored us entirely: she inspected the room or leaned against the wall, humming like a teenager waiting for a train to arrive. Another time, Keller’s orange cat wound between us before settling on her lap.

  Thom followed my gaze.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked, his voice low.

  The woman caught my eye, one brow raised in an elegant, sideways S.

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  “Sure you do,” said Thom, wheedling me.

  Thinking felt like swimming through sludge. I had mastered one task, at least: I knew I was dreaming. But what was I supposed to do now?

  “Don’t know how to,” I said. “How to wake myself up.”

  “Then don’t bother.”

  “You’re no help.”

  “You don’t need my help.” Thom scooted over toward me and laid his head on my lap, crossing one leg over the other. His feet were long and wide, the bones raying out like fans. “You’ll wake up in the morning.”

  “But what do I do until then?”

  The cat slinked by, and Thom grabbed it. He held her above his head, his large palm beneath her stomach. The cat bristled, her back arching, before relaxing in his grip. Her legs, dangling toward the ground, twitched and went limp.

  “A thousand things,” he said. “We could have a staring contest. A wrestling match. Play blackjack. Run away. Though there are plenty of fun things we can do right here.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows.

  “Don’t be disgusting,” I said, but as if watching a film I couldn’t stop, I kissed him. He tasted muddy and sweet, and I did it again.

  “Stay awhile,” murmured Thom.

  With his hand behind my neck, he held me close. Why did it feel so good to kiss him? He had none of Gabe’s forceful need, his blunt charisma; Thom was coy and languid, drawing me to him before pulling back again. His body lacked the tight density of Gabe’s—the hard chest or thickly muscled arms. When I pressed my fingers into Thom’s skin, it was responsive, but through it I could feel bone.

  He lit a candle. It made his face glow gold, then red. Light played other tricks on me, too. Sometimes, I climbed the stairs to look out of a small window set in the basement door. The sky was an inky black, unnaturally matte, like dried paint. I could see nothing else—no shapes, no garden, no stars.

  “Why can’t I see stars?” I once asked Thom. I shook him by the shoulders, and his head bobbled, moving from shoulder to shoulder like a scarecrow’s.

  And then I was in bed with Gabe, and it was his shoulders I was shaking, though his head remained fixed in place, his sturdy rottweiler’s neck unmoving. His eyes were wide and focused.

  “Because we live in a city,” he said. “There are streetlamps. Light pollution. We aren’t in the middle of nowhere anymore.”

  Could it be possible that something about the winter—the light pollution, the atmospheric density—had blotted out the stars? One night, I stayed up to see. I sat on the side of our bed with a glass of water. We had returned at three P.M. after a long session at the lab, and now it was evening. I was exhausted, and the urge to sleep tugged at me like a riptide—the strongest urge we have, I’ve often thought, greater than hunger or sex. But I waited as the digital clock beside the bed shone six thirty, then seven, then eight.

  It was eight thirty when they began to appear. Like guests at a lavish party, some were early, others fash
ionably late, but one by one they filled the sky. Hyades, Cygnus, Pleiades. The Seven Sisters with their assigned seats at the table. Assured that I had indeed been dreaming, I fell asleep as if taking my rightful place below them—Gabe and I clustered in bed, assigned to our roles: in the mind as on earth, on earth as in the heavens.

  •••

  A door had sealed off between Gabe and me, and we squinted at each other through the peephole. I couldn’t tell him that I was afraid of the dreams that still took me at night, or how much Anne’s reentrance into our lives had disturbed me. It was difficult to tell where his loyalties lay, and we were spending less time alone. Keller, so rarely a presence in our house, had begun to stop by unannounced; or at least it seemed unannounced to me, as I was never there when he arrived. I pushed through the door with grocery bags or library books, my face flushed and muscles rigid from the cold, and there he was—sitting with Gabe at our kitchen table or washing a glass at the sink.

  “Sylvie,” Keller would say, nodding, and Gabe would jump in: “Adrian was in the neighborhood.” Or, gesturing to the newspaper spread out on the counter: “Another article about Anne’s case. Have a look. Where’ve you been, by the way?”

  Keller didn’t live nearby, and he had no reason to be there unless he was coming to see us. I suspected he wanted to make us feel he was there during an obviously disturbing time—though I wasn’t sure whether he meant to comfort us zor keep tabs on us.

  Gabe thought he was lonely.

  “You know what Anne meant to him,” he said after Keller had stayed over for dinner and two drinks before finally shuffling out the door around eleven.

  I eyed him from the sink, drying my hands on a dish towel.