Interviewed by Christine Rice

Some of my favorite novels twist chronological order and suspend the narrative line – The Bluest Eye, The Plague of Doves, The Sound and the Fury, and Mrs. Dalloway.  Chloe Benjamin’s debut novel, The Anatomy of Dreams, continues this tradition and also adds another dimension – lucid dreaming – to the mix.

CR:  As a reader, I put an awful lot of trust in the writer to guide me through a novel. The Anatomy of Dreams moves seamlessly between 1998, 2002, 2005, 2009, 2010; from coast to coast and the Midwest. Was it always structured in a nonlinear fashion or did it evolve more organically out of the story’s needs?

CB:  I wrote The Anatomy of Dreams nonlinearly from the start; in fact, though this seems strange in hindsight, I don’t know that I considered any other structure! Because the novel covers a substantial amount of time, it seemed to me that the book would move more slowly – and lose much of its tension – if it unfolded chronologically. I wanted the reader to be an active participant in the narrative, making connections between themes and events. I also felt that erasing the distance between past and present would mimic the feel of a dream, where the logic of temporal reality doesn’t apply.

Although the novel was structured this way from the beginning, what did change during the editing process is the way in which time and place are sign-posted. In early drafts, chapters bounced between the past and present, and my editor felt this was unnecessarily confusing. At her suggestion, I confined each chapter to one place and time and indicated it at the beginning of each chapter (i.e. Madison, WI, 2010). I love that you mentioned trust. The novel’s structure does ask a lot of the reader, and inherent in a trusting author-reader relationship is a promise from the author: that I’m doing this for a reason, not just to be tricky or confusing, and that I won’t ask the reader to do more work than is necessary.

CR:  This novel kept me turning pages the way a Dashiell Hammett mystery does (and I loved that!). Sylvie is the perfect first-person narrator (smart, skeptical, vulnerable, strong yet easily swayed in certain respects). I’m wondering how you landed on Sylvie as ANATOMY’s guide? Did you ever consider the story from Gabe’s, or Dr. Keller’s, or even an overall narrator’s point of view?

CB:  I did! Early on, I thought the novel would be divided into four parts, each from the perspective of a different member of the two central couples (Gabe, Sylvie, Thom, and Janna). I started with Sylvie, and as I continued to explore her POV, I found myself unable to let go of it. Her rationality, and her combination of curiosity and skepticism, seemed to be a helpful foil for the novel’s more absurd material. And because the book charts her process of self-discovery, it also seemed most appropriate to let Sylvie be the one to tell her story.

CR:  Throughout the novel, you’ve heightened that uneasy tone of “not knowing,” the sense that we’re not being let in on crucial information. And even though Sylvie feels this intuitively, she’s not fully aware of the extent of what she does not know. Was this sense of revelation – of keeping Sylvie in the dark – difficult to achieve?

CB:  It absolutely was. One of the trickiest parts of this book was figuring out how to make the book’s climactic reveal both surprising and inevitable, as we writers like to say. I wanted to drop just enough clues to make the reader feel as though they’re uncovering the truth along with Sylvie. Having a nonlinear structure was really helpful in this regard: as soon as I revealed something about one aspect of the story, I could shift gears, jumping to a new event or point in time. My goal was to create suspense without losing a sense of narrative progress—I never want readers to feel as though I’m unnecessarily withholding information. I tend to lean toward subtlety while writing, so I often have to remind myself to consider the line between mystery and confusion. The latter is rarely useful for anyone!

CR:  How important was research in the ANATOMY’s development? Did the research inform the novel/structure/plot/character development in ways you hadn’t anticipated?

CB:  I don’t have a background in dream theory or psychology, so research was hugely important in crafting Keller’s approach. I read everything from Freudian and Jungian dream theory to current sleep research (Rosalind Cartwright’s The Twenty-Four Hour Mind was essential), from academic articles to polysomnography textbooks. Stephen LaBerge really paved the way for the study of lucid dreaming in the United States, so his research was also a major resource for me. From all of this information I cobbled together Keller’s theory, which I invented (so far as I know, at least!)—that lucid dreaming can be used to treat sleep disorders like REM Behavioral Disorder and sleepwalking.

This was one of the most difficult aspects of the book. As late as my final proofreading pass, I was making changes to Keller’s theories and methodology. Thankfully, the book is fiction, so absolute accuracy isn’t strictly required—but I certainly felt a responsibility to do these subjects and these researchers justice, and that I needed to maintain a sense of integrity in the way that I used them. One of the biggest changes I made over the course of working on the book was to make Keller’s research more plausible—in early drafts, it toed the line between realism and speculative fiction. Ultimately, I felt that the book asks readers to suspend some pretty significant disbelief, and I didn’t want to push the envelope more than I had to—so Keller’s research became more grounded.

CR:  Dreams are so important in literature. Márquez and Kafka and Erdrich and Morrison and so many others have mined them in wonderfully surprising ways. But your character, Dr. Keller, attempts to tame the wild nature of dreaming, to give it purpose beyond what the scientific community knows and understands. Through his research, Dr. Keller takes a natural defense mechanism and tries to harness it in therapeutic ways. Dream research is controversial and has a loud chorus of detractors (as you note in your book). How did the idea of the novel first come to you? And how long did it take you to pull all of the ideas together?

CB:  I’ve always been fascinated by dreams—as a writer, the fact that the human brain tells stories during sleep is just so intriguing to me. I’m also curious about why dreaming occurs and what it does for us. In the U.S., we live in a very consumerist culture, a culture focused on use and productivity and extraction, but the purpose of dreaming remains maddeningly elusive. How much do they really tell us about ourselves? Where is the line between self-exploration and self-absorption? I’m also interested in knowledge and its consequences: the price of knowing vs. the price of not-knowing. I don’t remember consciously deciding to pursue these themes, but like all writers, I have obsessions – knowledge vs. ignorance, the illusion of control, the tension between the world of the self and the world outside it – that snake into my work over and over.

While writing, though, I work pretty intuitively, and I confess that it’s difficult for me to recall the seeds of the novel. I think writing fiction is akin to dreaming in this respect—they’re both, to some extent, subterranean creative processes that can only be analyzed so effectively in hindsight (at least for me). I do remember, though, that I was reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and I was tremendously inspired by the way he explored issues of science and ethics and creativity. I had also recently moved to Madison, Wisconsin to pursue my MFA in fiction, and I was experiencing a part of the country that was previously foreign to me. The strangeness and wonder of that transition – walking on a frozen lake for the first time; finding dead cicadas on the ground; the particular energy of a college town – found their way into the book.

CR:  Do you remember your dreams? Did your dreams change during the writing of ANATOMY?

CB:  Like a lot of people, I have a vivid and bizarre dream life—I dream about pet porcupines and the French Resistance and taking plane rides to the moon. I can usually remember my dreams relatively well upon waking, so that I can turn to my husband and tell him about them and he can shake his head and can tell me what a weirdo I am. I’ve always had such wacky dreams that I didn’t see them change during the writing process, but I have heard from many readers who said that their dreams went berserk while reading ANATOMY. Some have told me they did something in their sleep that they’d never done before, like sleepwalking or standing up in bed!

CR:  Yes, I’ve been called a weirdo by my husband, too, but that’s another story.  The Anatomy of Dreams is dark and psychologically challenging (in all of the best ways). It kept me on edge.  The scenes with Thom and Janna were super creepy and, once the entire plot is revealed, Sylvie’s dream actions reveal a great deal about desire—about what we realize or don’t realize and what lurks in the subconscious. Dr. Keller has messed with the natural order of things. But unlike Mary Shelley’s character Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Keller never really repents (or realizes his mistakes)—he even convinces Gabe that it’s ethical (in the name of science) to manipulate Sylvie.

I’m not sure what I’m asking here…maybe I’m commenting on the wonderful fact that you didn’t tie up the ending. Dr. Keller hangs in a self-made limbo and Gabe only repents after the gravy train runs out. Many of Sylvie’s questions are finally answered by an unlikely character.  I’m pretty critical of endings but this one seemed just right. Tell me a little bit about your sense of “endings.”

CB:  I’m so glad you enjoyed the ending. Endings are very tricky and I found it difficult to write an ending for this book that was both satisfying for readers and true to Sylvie’s reality. She’s just come through a series of traumatic experiences, and in early drafts, the end was much more dismal—she was (spoiler alert) living alone, videotaping herself each night during sleep and on a variety of medications (Okay, I swear it wasn’t quite as depressing as it sounds when summed up that way, but it was certainly grim). Before we sent the manuscript to publishers, my agent read it and said, “Man, you have to give Sylvie something to work with. You have to give readers a sense that things are going to get better for her.” I resisted initially because I felt like Sylvie was understandably paranoid at this point in the book, but after I wrote an expanded ending, I saw how much more room the novel had to breathe—and that I didn’t have to end on a note of such truncated development and paranoia.

Another addition was Sylvie’s conversation with Thom in Seattle, which I wrote at the suggestion of my editor at S&S. She said something like, “After learning the truth about Sylvie, readers are going to have a lot of good questions, and you have to give them good answers.” That really resonated with me. I felt it was important to show readers where Keller, Gabe, and Thom are at the end of the book without sugarcoating the extent to which they each feel remorse or responsibility—to simply give them time to speak. That way, I felt I could be true to them as characters while also giving readers enough information to draw conclusions and find closure.

CR:  You’re a poet, too, and this is your first novel. What surprised you most about the process of writing a novel compared to the art of writing short stories and poetry?

CB:  I’ve always considered myself a novelist – even in high school, I was writing (terrible) novels! – and I had never written poetry until graduate school, when I had the opportunity to take Amy Quan Barry’s workshop at UW-Madison. I had until then been quite intimidated by poetry, and her workshop opened me up to new ways of writing and thinking. At that time, I was submitting short stories to literary journals without success, and I decided to try sending out a few poems. No one was more surprised than me when they were published, and the experience was both gratifying and humbling—I had never thought of myself as anything but a fiction writer, and my fiction was floundering.

Writing poetry helped me to return to fiction with a sharper eye. Because I am an intuitive writer, I can meander and detour before I figure out what I’m trying to say. Some of this wandering is necessary and helpful, but poetry forced me to think about what it means to write with intention and concision. On the other hand, it also gave me room to play. In fiction, I’m wedded to narrative progression and I tend to be pretty traditional. Poetry forces me to step out of my comfort zone, and I can take some of that experimentation back to fiction-land with me.

Find The Anatomy of Dreams at your local indie bookstore and check out Chloe Benjamin’s website.

Author Photo: Photography © Nicholas Wilkes