The Anatomy of Dreams by Chloe Benjamin

aren’t there. Some have even jumped out of windows. These people are disturbed at a subconscious level—and in order to help them, we have to meet them there. Lucidity enables them to realize they’re dreaming. It enables them to intervene.”
    â€œSo you’re hacking in.”
    His face was pleasant enough, but his voice had a new edge.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    He leaned back on the bed, his elbows propped up behind him, and cocked his head.
    â€œYou’re intruders. Robbing the bank of the subconscious.”
    â€œWe’re breaking in, yes. But we’re helping them break in, too. We give patients the opportunity to see who they really are and how they came to be that way. It’s empowering.”
    â€œTo look at something is to change it,” said Thom. “Your patients have disorders—fair enough. But you’re still opening up a part of the brain that the brain itself has tried desperately to hide. There’s got to be an evolutionary reason we don’t remember most of our dreams. Some things are better tucked away, if you catch my drift. Some books shouldn’t be read.”
    â€œBut why?”
    â€œBecause,” 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 dreamsas 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.
    â€œOkay,” 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.”
    â€œJesus,” said Thom.
    â€œWith 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.
    â€œSo that’s the goal, then? Healing the troubled souls of disordered dreamers? There’s no other motive?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    Thom shrugged. He looked upward, and his glasses caught the light of the lamp.
    â€œYou’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 ?”
    â€œWell, we hope to