Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

Jung’s theory of the collective subconscious posits that in addition to the personal subconscious, each member of the human race has a subconscious of the species — a communal memory bank, an infinite vault of human instincts and experiences, which is at every moment expanding, much like the physical universe. If this is true, might the personal consciousness have too an infinite vault,not only of realized individual experience, but of potential individual experience?

I felt a chill behind me. I turned around; the door to the library was open, and Keller stood inside it. He wore a cuffed white shirt and a pair of slacks, creased from the drive; in one hand was a folded paper doggy bag that gave off the overripe, saturated smell of food left in the sun.

“Sylvie,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” I fumbled with the papers, pressing them back into the center of the book. “The other copy had a stain. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Keller crossed to the desk and set the brown bag down. Then he walked back to me and shook my hand.

“And what did you think?”

“Of the Jung? It’s fascinating — I’ve only just started the autobiography, but I read a bit more in college and I can see why you’re—”

“Not of the Jung. Of my letter.”

Keller released my hand and smiled, his mouth closed. My first test. Would it be better to pretend I hadn’t read it? To admit it and compliment him? Either way, it seemed worse to lie.

“I only read part of it,” I said. “So I don’t have much to go on.”

“Well played.” His eyebrows were raised with a boyish kind of delight. “Our very own Pandora. Always open the box. And?”

“I want to know more,” I said haltingly. “I recognized some of it — your theory of simultaneous potentialities — but I didn’t fully understand it.”

“I’m not surprised. I wasn’t much older than you when I wrote that letter — my third year of graduate school. I suppose I’ve kept it for sentimental reasons. The theory itself was in its infancy and rather blurry — like one of those vast gaseous planets that takes shape only when seen from far away.”

I had the strange feeling that he was being self-deprecating for my benefit — was it that he doubted I’d be able to understand and was trying to comfort me? But he was slyer than that; more likely, he was challenging me. I was transfixed by the sight of him. It had been years since I’d seen Keller, but my memories of his classes at Mills were sharp: straining for the answer as he stood stock-still before us, his expression impenetrable as a sphinx, his eyes glinting in the late-afternoon light.

“Can you explain it to me?” I asked. “Your theory?”

“Didn’t Gabriel?”

Keller walked back to the desk and rummaged around inside the doggy bag. He came out with an apple, a compact and shiny Red Delicious, which he juggled absentmindedly in one hand.

“He thought it’d be better for me to learn it from you,” I said.

A white lie, but I didn’t want to tell Keller that I’d been totally unable to decipher Gabe’s explanation. I hoped he wouldn’t follow up with Gabe to ask — and this is what I was thinking about, whether or not Keller would find out how clueless I really was, when he raised his left arm and sent the apple hurtling directly for my head.

I made a pathetic gasping noise and ducked to the right; the apple sloped to the ground, hitting the floor of the hallway with a dull thud, and tumbled a few more feet before coming to a stop.

“What was that?” I asked, turning to look at the apple and then back at Keller, who was watching me with an utter lack of surprise.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I feel — what?” I sputtered. “I feel freaked.”

“Your heart rate is up?”

“Of course.”

“You’re sweating?”

“A little.”

“And you’re angry with me.”

“You almost hit me.”

“But I didn’t,” said Keller pleasantly. “So why do you feel the way you do?”

I stared at him.

“Because you could have,” I said. “You could have hit me.”

“Ah. Precisely.”

He walked out of the room to retrieve the apple, then brought it back inside, rubbing it on his shirt. It had caved in on one side.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I knew you’d duck. I hoped you would, at least. But I was trying to make a point. When I threw this apple at you, I knew there were several likely outcomes. What were they?”

“You’d hit me,” I said. “Or I’d duck before you could. Or the apple would miss me entirely.”

“Good. The possibilities, of course, are infinite — I could have twisted my arm in swinging, sending the apple straight for one of these windows; Gabriel could have chosen to walk down the hall at that moment, in which case he would have been hit instead. But I chose to put my faith in probability. The apple would hit you, or it wouldn’t. I’m pleased to say it didn’t. But you’re reacting as though it did. Not because it hit you — but because it could have.”

“Right,” I said. I was still wary, but my heart rate was beginning to steady.

“At the moment of decision,” said Keller, “at the moment of action, an infinite array of possibilities are conceived in the mind — alternate but parallel psychological universes, each with its own set of outcomes and implications. Only one of these possibilities will be actualized. But what happens to the rest? If they folded neatly into submission, disappeared into the dust from whence they came, you would be, so to speak, single-minded. You would have felt no anxious residue, no fear or anger, when the apple was no longer a threat. And yet you did feel the threat of the outcomes that were not realized; indeed, you seemed to feel that threat more acutely than you did any sense of relief that the apple, as luck would have it, sailed right over your head.”

“And those are your simultaneous potentialities?”

A part of me thought it made perfect sense; the other part wondered, with a flailing sense of alarm, just what I’d gotten myself into.

“Correct,” said Keller. “I believe that these potential experiences are logged in the brain along with the actual one, that the mind processes potentialities and actualities simultaneously and that, therefore, an imagined nonevent — being hit by my apple, let’s say — has as much cognitive power as the actual event.”

“But wouldn’t that be too much for our brains to handle at once?” I asked. “The possibilities would be infinite. How could we process all of them?”

“You’re quite right. Thankfully, the brain is selective. We know that certain actual memories are encoded and stored long-term while others are discarded. This is true, too, for potential memories.”

“But for memories to be stored, they have to be processed,” I said. “How can they be processed if they’re never experienced?”

“Aren’t they?”

“Subconsciously, maybe.” I shook my head. “But I thought you were working on sleep. What does all this have to do with dreams?”

“I hope it has a great deal to do with dreams,” said Keller with mock solemnity. “We’ll be in a rather tight spot if it doesn’t. We already know that sleep — REM sleep in particular — plays an important role in long-term memory formation and mental health. If simultaneous potentialities are sufficiently processed and resolved in REM sleep, we find ourselves better able to focus on the reality of waking life. But what happens to patients whose sleep isn’t normative and whose emotional processes are, therefore, disrupted? Patients like the ones I see, who suffer from REM disorders?”

“They can’t resolve them,” I guessed. “The simultaneous potentialities aren’t processed. They keep looping, and the dreamers continue to act them out, these things they’re afraid of — things that haven’t happened yet, or things that happened a long time ago. Things that aren’t real now — at least, not outside of their dreams.”