The Anatomy of Dreams (14 page)

“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 wondered, 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.

All this didn't even include the ancillary texts. Keller also left me a pile of photocopied nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and biblical passages. A note was paper-clipped on top:
Consider the cultural role that night has played throughout history
.

“Sure thing,” I muttered, staring at the two-inch stack. “What does he want, an essay?”

I expected Gabe to fire off a snarky comment, but he only smiled.

“It's interesting,” he said. “You'll see.”

He was right. After a morning spent with the
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
, this stuff was practically a guilty pleasure, as entrancing as it
was unsettling. The Bible spoke of the lunacy that consumed those who worshipped the moon over God. But I was most disturbed by the nursery rhymes; the fact that these poems were written for children belied their currents of temptation and darkness:

Boys and girls,

rise from your beds

and join the moon

above your heads.

Leave your sleep

and heed the call

out the door

and o'er the wall.

The wind awaits,

the sky so bright:

come and play

all through the night.

We felt Keller's presence in the Bunk Room, too. Gabe and I slept like guests in a hostel, politely compartmentalizing the shared space. It wasn't that I'd expected us to fall all over each other as soon as we got a minute alone, but this civil distance still hurt. Hadn't Gabe suggested he'd recruited me in part because he felt something for me, something more than friendship, or had I been wrong? And if I had been wrong, then what was I doing here? Sure, I had also been tempted by the job security and the extraordinary opportunity, but it was clear to me now: I had come for Gabe. It was as if no time had passed at all, and I was sixteen again, excruciatingly aware of our bodies in space. When he left the room, my heart relaxed like the muscle it was, and when he came close to me—both of us chopping vegetables by the kitchen sink, our elbows inches apart—the space between us seemed to glow. We ate
dinner together—bachelor's pasta sauces and kitchen sink salads—but even then, our topics were safe; whatever tunnel had opened up between us during our conversation in Berkeley seemed to have sealed off again.

Perhaps, I thought, Gabe felt responsible for me and my process of acclimation; perhaps it seemed best to professionalize our interactions now that we were on Keller's turf and not the floor of David's empty apartment. But my nerves were a lit city, buzzing with rush-hour traffic. It was Gabe—stocky, bullheaded, conspiracy-theorist Gabe, incorrigible smart-ass, organizer of dining-hall raids—who now went to bed at nine thirty, who brought me out to the back porch and pointed out with hushed solemnity the dark, oily leaflets of poison ivy that crawled across the Vineyard. The Gabe I knew would have trampled through the ivy in bare, callused feet, as if its consequences did not apply to him.

For distraction, I submerged myself in Keller's research. He was coming back on Monday, so that afternoon, I took the latest volume of
Health Psychology
and settled in a nook in the library
.
It was a gorgeous old room, with heavy mahogany furniture and French windows, separated by pillars, which let in great shafts of light. Shelves of old tomes stretched from the floor to the ceiling on one side of the room; against the opposite wall, a trio of leather couches had been arranged in a half hexagon. The wood floor was covered with a ruby-colored afghan, and several tattered leather footstools stood beside the higher bookshelves.

I loved its clarity. The other rooms were cluttered with kitschy, regional bric-a-brac: vases stuffed with seashells, porcelain fishermen, thin floral teacups that trembled hysterically on their shelves whenever somebody walked through the kitchen. More than once I came across a rusty pair of bird-watching binoculars, and on the back porch was a lobster trap, made of wood and netting, that the seminar guests reportedly went
wild over. Keller thought the items were junky, but he still employed a live-and-let-live policy, as if they were an inherited nuisance—barnacles on the anchor of the house or native spiders who would, in the end, outlive him. I was not surprised when I learned that he preferred to work in the library.

That day, I was reading Jung's
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
—a mystical, ardent little book—while Gabe took a trip to the market.
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome
, Jung wrote. (Next to the world
rhizome
, someone had written
rootstalk
in tiny blue print.)
Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

I turned the page and found that the text had been blotted out by a dark brown stain—coffee, perhaps—that bled straight through the next ten pages. I held the pages up to the light, but that made them even more indecipherable. I closed the book and walked to the shelves, which had been organized by author. Perhaps, I thought, Keller had additional copies of some of the more famous works, and I was right: there was another
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
, older but otherwise identical to the one I'd been reading. The book opened reluctantly, glue cracking in the spine. As I flipped through to find my place, three yellow pieces of paper shook out and floated to the ground.

I worried they were pages from the book itself. But when I picked them up, I saw that they came from an old notepad. They were frail and dry, covered in blue ink, and seemed to be part of a letter: each page was inscribed, in the upper right-hand corner, with
Zurich,
1978
, and one of the pages—the
last, I presumed—was signed with Keller's name. I glanced at the driveway; Gabe had taken the car to the grocery store one town over. Still standing by the shelves, I began to read the last page:

keep coming back to the idea that the subconscious is made up not only of the awareness of actual experience but also of the awareness of every experience that could have happened—simultaneous potentialities which, although near misses in real life, become fully realized in the life of the brain. It's my guess that the soul is made up of the sum of these simultaneous potentialities, that the soul has therefore an infinitely tiered or layered psychology and that it is only in traveling through these layers—which extend not up or down but inward—that self-knowledge can be achieved in any depth.

I see this theory as being positioned at the intersection of Jungian psychology and the multiverse theories of William James and Max Tegmark, along with Alan Guth's more recent theory of parallel universes. I'm not a physicist or a cosmologist, of course, so I'm interested less in the notion of parallel physical universes than in the implications these theories may have for the brain. If we accept the idea that out of the original particles of our universe were created a vast number of identically particled other universes, and that these universes may have evolved differently but all possessed the same original matter and therefore a playing field of identical potential—could the same not be said of the mind?

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.