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: somnambulism, also known as sleepwalking, or REM behavior disorder, RBD. Both cause the loss of muscle atonia, the physical paralysis that normally occurs during REM sleep. As a result, these patients—who often suffered from trauma-related nightmares—were 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.
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 very first time, of murder while sleepwalking. Ken Parks, an unemployed high school dropout in his midtwenties, had risen from sleep, 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 lu
cidly 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 preserved 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.
The door of the stall she had used swung open with a slow, rusty whine. It was empty except for the purple snakeskin purse. Loud noises came from outside the bathroom, and I knew that others would soon come in search of the purse, that I would be implicated as its new owner. I needed to move the purse, but first I had to see what was inside it. I went into the bathroom and pressed on the buckle. There was a click like the sound of a gun’s safety being switched off. The lid of the purse opened automatically, willingly. And then I woke.
I told Gabe about the dream, late at night in the Bunk Room when we knew Keller had already gone to sleep. He listened with the knit-browed interest of a psychiatrist, and though there was no judgment in his face, he couldn’t unlock the dream any better than I could. We still slept in our own beds—still barely touched, aside from the brief brush of arms as he sidled past me in the kitchen—but we had begun to talk late into the evening, Gabe leaning over the ledge of his top bunk and I looking up from below. Sometimes we talked about our dreams. Other times, we talked about Keller.
“I just don’t believe that he’s lived here, all these years, alone,” I said one warm, sticky night in July, my legs on top of the sheets. “He never had a family of his own?”
“He had a wife,” said Gabe.
I rolled to the side of the bed and craned my neck to look at him.
“You’re kidding. He was married? When?”
“Years ago,” said Gabe. “Before he came to Mills.”
“What happened to her?”
Gabe glanced at the door. The floor was so old that if Keller was still padding around, we could generally hear him.
“She died,” he said in an undertone.
“How?”
“Beats me. That’s all I know, and I’m not even sure how I know it. Keller never mentioned her to me, that’s for sure. I think it was someone at Mills who told me—maybe Mr. Cooke.”
Gabe scrunched up his nose in the way he did when he was trying to recall some fact. Then he shook his head.
“Do you think that had something to do with it?” I asked. “With why he left USF, started teaching in a high school?”
“Who knows?” Gabe shrugged, the twin curves of his shadow shoulders rising against the opposite wall. “Anyway, there’s a picture of her in Keller’s bedroom. I stumbled in there one day, thinking it was one of the studies. It’s on his bedside table. Have a look, if you want, but make sure you don’t do it when he’s around.”
It was my first glimpse of the old Gabe. And though I knew he couldn’t see me, I was grinning in the dark.
I was eager to see the photo, if only to satisfy my curiosity about the kind of woman Keller would go for. For the next few days, I glanced in his room whenever I walked down the hall, hoping I wouldn’t have to go inside to see the photo. But the door was only ever open a crack, if at all, and soon I realized I would have to be ballsier if I really wanted to go through with it.
Keller kept to a strict schedule: he went to the grocery in Edgartown on Tuesdays and Fridays, he ate dinner no later than six thirty P.M., and he took a walk to the water each day from four thirty to five fifteen. On one Thursday afternoon in late July, Gabe was out, too—Keller had sent him to the Vineyard library to find a book on Jewish mysticism. At five P.M., seized with the fear that one of them would come home early, I opened Keller’s bedroom door.
I scanned the room, which was small and spare. Most of it was taken up by a queen bed with one pillow, white sheets precisely flattened and tucked. A painting of a battered canoe hung above the bed. Beside it was a small wooden table upon which there was a pen, a few scattered sheets of paper, and a square photograph in a gold frame.
I stole closer, making sure not to disturb the books that had been set in stacks on the floor, and picked up the frame. The photo showed a woman from the waist up. She looked to be at least in her forties, older than I expected. She had a small, fervent face, her features angular and catlike and held in place by a tight network of bones. There was something severe in her expression: the sharp little nose; the lifted chin; the pursed lips, less a smile than a contraction. But in her eyes I saw a swallowed depth and vulnerability that startled me. It’s possible I’m remembering the photo incorrectly, that I’ve ascribed this vulnerability to her in hindsight. But I remember being struck by her unusual mix of challenge and urgent appeal. Her most striking feature was a helmet of bright strawberry-red hair, which had been cropped to her chin and smoothed into a bob.
At dinner that night, I realized I hadn’t noticed the angle at which the photo had been placed before I picked it up. My body grew hot, and my heart began to pound. Gabe was telling som
e joke, his mouth full of pasta, Keller glancing at him with amusement. I could excuse myself from the table and go fix the photo, if I only knew how it had originally been positioned. No; it was useless. I could only pray he didn’t look at it too closely.
Years later, I found myself in the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and I decided to look through their archives of the Chronicle in the hopes of finding a particular article about Keller’s Snake Hollow compound. After a few hours of searching, I found it in the style section of the Sunday paper on June 18, 2000—Father’s Day of that year. “Space to Dream,” it was titled: “The Prodigal Father of Experimental Dream Psychology on His Vineyard Escape.” The text itself was not very interesting: cursory details about Keller’s approach, some of which the author had gotten wrong (“Mr. Keller is most well-known for his polarizing theory of potential simultaneities”); he was clearly more interested in the Snake Hollow property, and most of the article’s space was taken up by large, full-color photos of its interior.
June of 2000 was the summer after my freshman year of college, just before Gabe returned to work with Keller, but the house looked the way it did when we stayed there together. There was the library, vast and secretive; there was the kitchen, its white cabinets and fragile china. But something about the photo of Keller’s bedroom gave me pause. The bed was the same—even the bedding had not changed—and the canoe painting still hung above it. His night table was cluttered with papers and pens that the photographer had not moved, preferring a naturalistic effect. But the picture of Keller’s wife was gone.
There are explanations for this, of course. Perhaps Keller had moved the photo, not wanting such a personal item to be included in the article; perhaps he had simply put it on his night table sometime after the article was written. But for reasons I still can’t fully articulate, the absence of the photo confirmed my suspicion that it had been placed there for my benefit, shortly before my arrival in June of 2002. I’ve never been able to prove that Keller wanted me to see it, and I doubt I ever will. But the question has stayed with me—pesky, cobwebbed—something I come back to on nights when I can’t sleep or while on a drive that doesn’t demand much of my attention. If there are no other cars, or if the road is long and flat, dotted black and white and brown by cows and dry grass—in moments like this, I let my mind float away from my body and return to the dusty attic space in me that Keller still occupies, a place with ashy shapes and sunken goods like the ruins of an old city, a place I have never really been able to leave behind.