Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“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.

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.