Free The Anatomy of Dreams by Chloe Benjamin

its warmth, but I wished he had taken my left hand—the one beneath the table, closest to him.
    â€œThose are the best kind of relationships,” said Janna. “Ones with a long history. Thomas and I are the same way. We met in our first year of college, in the only poetry class I ever took—Keats.”
    â€œâ€˜In spite of all,’” said Thomas, “‘some shape of beauty—’”
    His voice changed as he recited the poem, steadying and becoming lower in pitch. There was something commanding about his presence now. But Janna waved a hand, cutting in.
    â€œOh, stop, they don’t want to hear it. I certainly don’t. It’s been a summer of hearing him go on about Keats, and Blake, and Coleridge—don’t look at me that way, sweet, you know it’s true—and Wordsworth, and Goethe , and who’s that annoyingly emotional man who’s always going on about social ills?”
    â€œShelley,” said Thomas, and cackled. “‘Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’”
    â€œBesides, we haven’t even asked what you do,” said Janna. “Do you see what I mean? We get talking about poetry and then real life goes out of the conversation entirely. Gabe—you tell us.”
    I wondered if she remembered my own evasiveness at her house several days before and thought she might get a more direct reply out of Gabe. Either way, I was happy to let him give our answer. He was better at it than I was—I got tripped up trying to tell the truth.
    â€œIt’s not very exciting,” said Gabe. “We’re sleep researchers in the Center for Neuroscience. Mainly, we’re studying consciousness and REM cycles. We look at the point when dreaming begins and the extent to which the dreamer is conscious of that shift.”
    â€œHow can you tell?” asked Janna.
    â€œWell, there are different ways. We use a polysomnogramto measure the stages of sleep through brain activity, muscle tone, eye movements, and so on—this tells us when the subject is in REM sleep. That’s when dreaming occurs. Our next job is to figure out whether or not they’re aware of it.”
    Thomas leaned back in his chair, dropping his fork onto the plate with a clatter.
    â€œYou don’t ask them, I presume? ‘Sorry, don’t mean to bother you, but are you dreaming yet? No? Whoops, carry on then, just pretend I’m not here.’”
    â€œNo, we use a mask,” I said, smiling. “It’s equipped with two LEDs—light-emitting diodes—which we flash a certain number of times once the subject’s in REM. They’re supposed to respond to the flashes by making an eye-movement signal: two pairs of horizontal eye movements, left-right, left-right, if they’re asleep and conscious of it. If no signals are made, we can assume they aren’t conscious.”
    â€œLike we said,” Gabe said, shrugging, “it’s not very interesting.”
    â€œIt’s hardly uninteresting,” said Janna. “I’d like to try it sometime. You don’t need a new subject, do you? Hook me up to the machine—I’ll tell you if I’m awake.”
    She was leaning in, her tattooed arm cast across the table. I was transfixed by her combination of toughness and delicacy, her body pale as a mirage.
    Thomas laughed, staring at Janna with his eyebrows raised, and Gabe followed him.
    â€œI’ll put you on our list,” Gabe said. “Lots of people trying to get in for this kind of research, you know.”
    â€œVying for their chance to be shot through with light and made conscious,” said Thomas. “Oh, to be new-born!”
    Gabe rubbed my hand. I was relieved that we’d squeezed through without too much probing. This was the explanation we gave to our oldest friends, the nurses at the sleep clinic, even our parents. It wasn’t