The Anatomy of Dreams (16 page)

I could see myself, but I was apart from myself. Like a ghost, I watched the dream me sitting with Thom on the floor—watched as he lifted the next photograph into the light, which showed a grand brick building on a hill. Below the building was a dusty path, flanked by tree trunks and globe lamps that glowed whitely as moons.

“Alumni House,” said Thom. “It's this fancy building that was gifted to the college by two filthy-rich sisters—Rose and Blanche something. All the rich alumni could sleep there whenever they were in town, and the place had a restaurant that hosted all sorts of schmoozy, hobnobby events. He used to take Janna there. I wanted so badly to get inside. I used to stand at the bottom of the hill, just taking pictures of the damn thing.”

His face floated toward me with the 3D transparency of a hologram. He reached for me with one hand. I ducked, but I wasn't fast enough, and he plucked something from my ear. I felt a
pock
, the hollow release of suction, and he held out his palm. Something fuzzy, black and yellow-spotted, wriggled inside it: a caterpillar. Suddenly, the hand was Gabe's—I saw his broad, callused palms, his long lifeline. The caterpillar inched its way across his wrist, and I felt nauseous.

“That came—out of me?” I asked. I put my finger in my ear. Empty as a whistle.

“Dreadful sorry, Clementine,” sang Gabe.

I woke at five thirty, my chest heaving, my collarbone
slick with sweat. The windows rattled, our curtains slivered apart by the cold air that came through a crack in the pane. I looked at the window, my body turned away from Gabe, as my heart rate came down. Snowflakes clung to the glass like tiny skeletons.

When I turned around, Gabe was propped up on one elbow, staring at me. We looked at each other in silence.

“Bad dream,” I said finally.

Gabe shook his head. “But you never remember your dreams.”

“I know,” I said. “It's odd.”

Gabe was staring at me with a bare kind of exhaustion—or was it resignation? He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it.

“Sleepy Sylvie,” he said, inching across the space between us, collecting me into his arms.

PART TWO

NIGHT

11

MARTHA'S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 2002

When I look back at the rest of that first summer in Snake Hollow, I am tempted to say—as much as I resist this sort of statement—that it was the best time in my life. The thrown-together dinners, Gabe chopping zucchini and eggplant, Keller pouring salt crystals into a pot of bubbling water while flipping strips of pancetta with the many-armed grace of a Hindu god; Keller taking us out to the glass-­littered beach at night, striding through the dune grass and salt-marsh hay with boyish enthusiasm—“Look!” he said, “feel something, for God's sake—get out of yourselves”; or sitting with Gabe on the floor of the library as Keller strode between us—spun through the room, it seemed to me, in my three
A
.
M
. haze (
When does he sleep?
I often wondered)—his voice ricocheting off the walls, the dim lights of the library flickering in his wake.

“We are living in a
twenty
-four/seven culture,” he said. “Convenience stores are open at all hours of the day. Twenty percent of the working population in developed countries works the night shift. Planes take off and land, universities hold classes, hospitals are staffed, all during the night hours traditionally reserved for sleep. Human beings are more pro
ductive than ever before, but they're also unhappier. They feel oppressed by the limits of their lives: the boredom, the repetition, the fatigue. What if you could use your sleep to do
more—
to receive all of the traditional regenerative benefits while problem solving, healing, even experiencing alternate worlds?”

He was jittery with enthusiasm, pacing the library like a teenager. Earlier that day, Gabe and I had traveled to Boston to watch Keller give a talk on lucid dreaming. He was even more dynamic than he'd been at Mills, his voice carrying through the auditorium, his limbs shot through with energy; it was as though, like Benjamin Button, he was aging in reverse. “This freedom, hard to imagine within the constraints of waking life,” he boomed, “is astounding, exhilarating, and inspiring. The laws of science and society are abolished. The possibilities are boundless, and the choices are yours. Wouldn't you be capable of extraordinary things?”

A college student with a bushel of red hair raised her hand. She stood when Keller called on her.

“Okay,” she said, “but people are capable of terrible things, too. What if somebody wanted to dream about hurting someone? Or killing them?”

“You're right: violence is a part of human nature,” said Keller. “But if those urges can be experienced and processed safely, within the construct of a dream, they can be put to rest.”

“And if they aren't put to rest?” shouted a man in the front row. “What if it doesn't work?”

“There will always be people who aren't helped by our research. Successfully matching patient to treatment is as complex as any marriage, and it does require trial and error. But most of the patients I see are capable, while dreaming, of being at their best: their
most
resourceful, their most creative, their most intuitive.”

Gabe and I had similar conversations with Keller at Snake Hollow, sitting around the dinner table or sprawled on the leather couches in the library. At these moments, Snake Hollow felt almost like Mills—or some bare-bones version of Mills, the school stripped of its landscape and buildings and students until all that was left was Gabe and Keller and me. Keller taught us his theory of interactive lucid dreaming, the same theory that would later bring us to Madison. His research participants were what he termed interactives: people who, due to a medley of possible disorders, exhibited unusual activity in sleep.

Keller's participant criteria were so specific that his applicants were few in number but generally ideal in demographic. They had to have vivid dreams that they could at least partially recall; they had to have been aware of at least two episodes of sleep activity in the past six months, whether through their own report or that of a partner; they could not be taking any pharmaceutical or recreational drugs; and they could not have been diagnosed with any psychiatric illness unrelated to sleep. Most of the patients who came to us had struggled for years to control themselves. Some had resorted to sleeping zipped-up in sleeping bags; others tied themselves to their bedposts and cleared their rooms of breakable objects before sleep.

Our patients were usually diagnosed with one of two disorders: REM behavior disorder, also known as RBD; and parasomnia overlap disorder, a dysfunction that incorporates symptoms of both RBD and sleepwalking. Both cause the loss of muscle atonia, the physical paralysis that normally ­occurs during REM sleep. As a result, these patients—who often suffer from trauma-related nightmares—are able to rise from bed and act out their dreams. The differences between the two disorders may have seemed small to an outsider, but they were significant to us. Patients with RBD rarely open their eyes or leave their bedrooms, but they have nightmares
that cause them to violently, clumsily defend themselves. As a result, they're prone to injury and unintentional destruction: an RBD patient might topple a table, slam into a dresser, or hurt the very real body of the partner lying beside them. Sleepwalkers are more dexterous, capable of complicated motor skills, sexual activity, and conversation; many can even drive. Most of the time, sleepwalking takes place during non-REM sleep, separate from dreams. But patients with parasomnia overlap disorder—the ones Keller studied—sleepwalk during REM sleep, when dreaming occurs.

And what were the dreams that Keller's patients were compelled to act out? Usually, they were horrifying, trauma processing and self-protection gone terribly awry. Keller saw this as evidence of the mind's obsession with safety and defense. He believed that nonparalyzed REM sleep was the site at which dysfunctional dreamers experienced the unresolved simultaneous potentialities of their waking lives, like alternate tapes that played on a loop. He believed, too, that training in lucid dreaming would give patients much-needed self-­knowledge—and the capacity for intervention.

But earlier research in lucid dreaming had proved the technique also offered a myriad of benefits to normative sleepers: adventure and fantasy, nightmare resolution, problem solving, even physical healing. The term
lucid dreaming
was coined in 1913 by Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, an acquaintance of Freud, who discovered that lucid dreamers were able to think clearly, act intentionally, and remain cognizant of the circumstances of waking life—all while experiencing a dream world that felt equally real. Interest in lucid dreaming flagged until the late 1960s, when van Eeden's paper was reprinted in books by dream scholars Celia Green and Charles Tart. In 1987, Stephen LaBerge—a psychophysiologist with a bachelor's degree in mathematics—founded the Lucidity Institute. LaBerge did more than validate the study
of lucidity in academia: he also created the first technique for lucidity induction and developed a series of light-emitting devices that made lucid dreaming available to an increasingly curious public. Some of Keller's funding came from the normative dreamers who attended his classes and retreats—people who wondered, as he did, what the mind had to offer when exercised to its full potential.

Keller's timing was impeccable: his research also emerged in the midst of a cultural fascination with the unconscious mind and its capacity for violence. As part of my reading that summer, I was expected to familiarize myself with two watershed trials. In 1988, a person was acquitted, for the first time, of murder while sleepwalking. Ken Parks, an unemployed high school dropout in his midtwenties, had risen from sleep and driven fourteen miles to the home of his in-laws. He nearly killed his father-in-law, and he stabbed his mother-in-law to death. He woke several hours later to find himself standing above her body, with no memory of the event and a faint feeling of pain in his hands. He was acquitted on the basis of sleepwalking at a trial whose verdict was later upheld by the Canadian supreme court, which declared that his actions were due to a noninsane automatism. The supreme court believed that Parks's actions were so rare, so anomalous, that they would never be repeated; but the Parks case, it turned out, would set a controversial precedent.

In 1999, the year I left for college, Keller testified as an expert witness at the trial of Scott Falater, a Mormon and father of two. That night, Falater attempted to fix the pump that filtered water for his backyard pool, but he went to bed when it became dark around nine thirty. About half an hour later, Falater rose, just like Ken Parks, and returned to the pump. What happened next is the product of expert conjecture and the eyewitness account of Greg Koons, Falater's neighbor, who saw Falater drag the stabbed body of his wife,
Yarmila, into the pool and drown her. Falater then changed into his pajamas, tucked his bloody knife and work clothes into the wheel well of his car, and returned to bed. He woke, along with his children, to the sound of police dogs. Yarmila had been stabbed forty-four times, and though the evidence proved resolutely that Falater had killed his wife, he never regained any memory of the event.

The court ordered an array of psychological tests, but the murder could not be tied to a psychotic episode, a seizure, or a dissociation disorder. The psychiatrist could not diagnose him with any psychiatric illness, and Falater's scores on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory showed him to be almost ideally normal, with no psychopathic tendencies. They found only that Falater had been anxious about an ongoing struggle at work, which had left him feeling insecure and emasculated, and that his sleep had suffered. Falater had begun to use caffeine pills during the day, and at night, his rest was difficult and uneven.

Unlike Ken Parks, Scott Falater was pronounced guilty. The prosecution argued that Yarmila's murder had been consciously planned and executed, and the jury was not ready to believe something as outlandish as the idea that Falater had been sleepwalking. But the case became a point of contention in an ongoing debate about the role of sleep in emotional regulation—and what happens when the regulation process is disturbed. Keller saw a disordered dream life as a critical indication of unrest in the patient's waking life—a place of uninhibited, instinctive emotionality, and therefore, a site of both great danger and great healing.

“For dreamers to return to a state of mental health,” he said, “they must understand their dreams, not erase them. The patients I see keep cycling through the same nightmares for a reason. And until they discover
what
that reason is, they'll never be safe—and neither will their bedmates.”

Keller wanted Gabe and me to be able to dream lucidly before we helped him to train others. He taught us the MILD technique, Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams, developed by Stephen LaBerge. It was a four-step process that Gabe picked up with relative ease, but I was never really able to access it, as much as I understood it conceptually. The first step was dream recall. Like Keller's workshop participants, we slept with notebooks beside us, writing down whatever we could remember as soon as the alarm went off. Next came reality checks: in order to recognize a dream state, Keller taught his patients to look for certain common markers. I
knew
the signs: difficulty reading words, flashing lights or ill-defined light sources, problems with mechanical objects, and, of course, the dead. I knew to meditate before bed—my body soft and relaxed until the edges of the waking world began to smudge and dissolve—but as soon as I sank into sleep, my mind went dark until I woke, disoriented and increasingly frustrated. Step three, lucid affirmations—commands programmed into memory and recalled later, while dreaming—was even more hopeless. Keller had me focus on my hand—
When I see my hand in my dream
, I was to repeat to myself,
I will know I am dreaming
—but whether I saw my hand in my dream or not, I never remembered it. The final step was to visualize a recent dream while awake, but since I couldn't remember my dreams, I spent most of these sessions lying irritably on my blue mat.

Finally, Keller encouraged me to wake myself out of REM sleep with an alarm clock and immediately write down whatever I could remember. I still couldn't grasp whole narratives, but this method allowed me to piece together the recurring dream that occupied my mind that summer. Perhaps I would have been able to remember even more if I had not stopped the alarm clock system. I didn't want to know any more of the dream, and I didn't want there to be a document that pre
served it. I destroyed what I had, feeding it into the shredder when Gabe and Keller were out, and I never brought it up with Keller again.

In the dream, I stood before a mirror in an old public bathroom, which seemed to be part of a previously grand hotel that had fallen into disrepair. The bathroom had beautiful details: crown molding, tarnished gold faucets, turquoise-and-black-tiled walls. The mirror was so foggy and stained that I couldn't see myself clearly. I turned on the faucet, but no water came out, though I could hear it running in the pipes.

At some point an elderly woman came into the bathroom. She was unremarkable—of medium build, white-haired, dressed in a dignified, old-fashioned way. The only exotic thing about her was the purse she carried: large and rectangular, like an antique doctor's bag, with a giant metal buckle. It was made of a gleaming purple material that appeared, upon closer inspection, to be snakeskin. I observed the purse with interest but was otherwise indifferent to the woman. She walked into a stall; I heard a muffled drop as the purse was set down on the floor. I tried the faucet again, and this time, water rushed out.

I stared at the water before turning the faucet off again. The woman emerged from the bathroom stall. She was naked from the waist down. She still wore a silk blouse and cardigan, but her pressed pants and heels, even her underwear, had been removed. Between her legs was a rough gray pelt. She did not seem to notice me; she washed her hands in the water—there was no soap—and glanced briefly in the mirror. Then she walked out of the bathroom as perfunctorily as she had arrived.