Thin Places

I. The Phrase My Grandmother Would Have Known

There is an old phrase in the Ireland my grandmother came out of: a thin place. It names a spot on the earth where the membrane between this world and the other has worn through, and the two are briefly one — a holy well, a ruin, a stretch of shore at a certain hour of the evening. Nobody who used the phrase meant it as metaphor. They meant that some ground is more permeable than other ground, and that a person standing on it should expect company.

Helen would not have called it that. She came from a dirt-floor house and a sixth-grade education and a well she walked a mile to reach, and the vocabulary she was issued was the rosary and the Blessed Mother and a set of Irish sayings sharp enough to end an argument. But she knew the thing itself. Everyone in that house knew it. The dead were not gone; they were merely quiet, and occasionally not even that. A banshee was heard the night before a death, and three knocks came on the door in the pitch-black, and the next morning a woman was found dead beside a well with green muck on her, and nobody in that family thought the sequence required explaining.

I want to propose in this essay that some minds are thin places too — that the permeability the old people located in the landscape is also a property of certain nervous systems. And that if you have found yourself returning, over a lifetime of work, to the same handful of faces and kitchens and hospital corridors, you are not failing to invent. You are standing on thin ground, and the traffic through it is the work.

I have argued for years, in author’s notes and prefaces and to anyone who would sit still, that recurrence is architecture rather than poverty. I made that argument on spiritual grounds, in the company of Emerson and Hegel and Ecclesiastes. What I did not expect was to find it corroborated from the direction of a sleep laboratory.

II. The Trait Nobody Names in Workshop

In the 1980s a Boston psychiatrist named Ernest Hartmann began asking a question that sounds more like a poet’s than a clinician’s: are the partitions inside a mind the same thickness in everybody?

He built a 138-item instrument called the Boundary Questionnaire, gave it eventually to something on the order of ten thousand people, and found a real and measurable continuum. He scored it across twelve categories — sleep, waking, and dream boundaries; unusual experiences; thoughts, feelings, and moods; childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; interpersonal boundaries; sensitivity; neatness and order; edges, lines, and clothing; opinions about children; opinions about organizations; opinions about people, nations, and groups; and opinions about beauty and truth.

At the thick end of that continuum stands a person with a sharp sense of focus, able to attend to one channel and screen the rest; who keeps thought cleanly separate from feeling; who knows with certainty whether he is awake or asleep, with no in-between; who maintains a firm sense of personal space; who experiences the past as finished and filed; and who tends to see the world in black and white, us and them.

At the thin end stands a person who lets a great deal of sensory material in at once and has trouble deciding which part of it to attend to. Thought arrives already wearing its feeling — such a person will say, if you press him, that he cannot really imagine a thought without a feeling attached. Half-awake and half-asleep is a familiar country to him. Reverie is easy to enter and hard to leave. The line between the real and the imagined occasionally goes soft. And — this is the clause I have not been able to put down since I first read it — such a person may be very aware of the past and have it blend with the present.

That is not a personality description. That is a job description for the memoirist, the elegist, and anyone who writes the dead.

III. What the Dreams Told Him

The dream evidence turned out to be Hartmann’s sturdiest finding, and it is worth stating with some precision, because the numbers are better than most things offered to writers as science.

Across 1,359 cases, eleven of the twelve boundary categories correlated significantly with how often a person recalls dreams, with the overall score typically landing between .20 and .50. Among members of the International Association for the Study of Dreams the correlation reached .60 — and held at .57 after he stripped out every item that so much as mentioned sleep or dreaming, so the result was not merely chasing its own tail. When he set sixty-four frequent dreamers, people reporting seven or more dreams a week, beside sixty-nine people who reported essentially none, the two groups differed significantly on the total score and on all twelve categories — and did not differ at all on standard clinical measures of psychological disturbance.

That last detail matters more than all the rest. Whatever this is, it is not damage. It is construction.

The content of the dreams followed the same line. Thin-boundaried dreamers produce dreams rated higher on interaction between characters, on quantity of emotion, on vividness, detail, bizarreness, dreamlikeness, and nightmare-likeness. Their dreams are simply longer. And in his later work Hartmann isolated what he called the Central Image — the single dominant picture around which a dream organizes itself, the thing that survives when the plot of the dream has evaporated. Thin-boundaried subjects produce more intense Central Images, in recent dreams and in the dreams that stand out across a lifetime.

Every writer reading this knows what a Central Image is. We simply call it the thing the story is actually about, the picture the reader keeps after the plot has gone. The dreaming mind, it appears, has been running that compositional principle nightly, without instruction, since we were children.

IV. The Detail That Undoes You

Here is the finding I keep returning to.

Hartmann asked thick- and thin-boundaried people alike for the earliest dream they could remember. Both groups placed it around age six or seven. And here — uniquely — the two groups did not differ: the earliest remembered dreams were rated equally intense on both sides of the continuum. His inference was that everyone begins with that intensity of inward image, and that in most people it fades as the boundaries thicken with age, while in some it never leaves.

So the writer is not someone who acquired a special faculty. The writer is someone who failed to lose one.

What we call vocation may be, at bottom, a refusal — mostly involuntary — to complete the ordinary hardening. Wordsworth said as much in the Immortality Ode, and for two hundred years we have read it as consolation for aging. It reads now more like a clinical observation. The visionary gleam does not depart. It departs from most.

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The Six Permeabilities

What follows is the working section of this essay. I want to take six of the partitions Hartmann measured, state plainly what thinness looks like in each, and then show the thing operating at the level of the sentence — in my own published work, because that is the body of evidence I can testify to from the inside.

I do this with some discomfort. It is bad manners for a writer to quote himself at length. My defense is that a craft essay owes its reader specimens rather than assertions, and that the specimens I can dissect honestly are the ones I made.

V. The First Permeability: Between the Living and the Dead

Hartmann’s thin profile includes reduced boundaries around unusual experience — the sense that the dead are near, that something is present in the room, that the ordinary furniture of a night can be interrupted.

In “Blindfolded,” Aiden’s grandfather does not arrive with thunder. He arrives with an alteration in the physics of the bedroom:

Whenever he visited, the bedroom glowed with tiny white lights, illuminated bubbles floating in the air. My face and ears became hot and red, and I heard a buzzing noise that eventually stopped.

Notice what that sentence declines to do. It does not argue for the ghost. It does not hedge with seemed or as if. It reports a change in temperature and light and sound — the boy’s face is hot, the bubbles float, the buzz stops — with the same flat testimonial confidence a thick-boundaried narrator would spend on a description of a kitchen table. The permeability is not asserted as a theme. It is enacted as a fact of the prose. And the physical detail is the giveaway: the writer who fuses thought with feeling gives you the boy’s hot ears, not the boy’s awe.

Then the grandfather sits at the foot of the bed and is disappointed in him about a theft. The dead in my work do not deliver oracles. They deliver reprimands, Thoreau quotations, and Irish slang. This is not irreverence. It is the logical consequence of a membrane rather than a wall: if the dead are only in the next room, they will speak in the register of that house.

And note the doubled boundary in that scene. Grandpa quotes Walden — “Goodness is the only investment that never fails” — and mispronounces the name, and cannot get the spelling across, so the boy hears Toorow. A ghost with an accent. A dead Irish gravedigger who has read Thoreau in a book Aiden will later find underlined. Two permeabilities in one gesture: the border between the living and the dead, and the border between one writer’s book and another’s. In my philosophy of writing I called the second of those pastiche in its oldest and most honest sense — not concealment, as plagiarism is, nor mockery, as parody can be, but homage: a debt acknowledged rather than hidden. I now think both borders are the same border, thinned by the same trait.

The story’s most consequential moment turns on precisely this. Aiden tells his grandmother what her dead husband has told him:

“He said you should stop blaming yourself for leaving him in the chair that night when you went to bed. It’s not your fault that he choked on his vomit.”

The plot of the story does not resolve through action. It resolves through a message carried across a membrane. That is what a permeable mind produces when it builds narrative machinery: absolution routed through the dead.

VI. The Second Permeability: Between Past and Present

This is Hartmann’s clause about the past blending with the present, and it is the one that generates my recurrence philosophy almost by itself.

Consider the ending of “Dark City,” a poem for the grandfather I met once, at two years old, in a dark hallway:

I press my palm against the homestead,
just as you touched my head so many years ago.
I see you move from light into darkness and beyond.

Look at the grammar of time in those three lines. The palm on the stone and the hand on the head are joined by just as — not a comparison but an identity claim. Two gestures sixty years apart are being asserted as one gesture. And the final line is in the present tense: I see you move. Not I imagine. Not I remember. The verb refuses the past.

A thick-boundaried mind can complete an event. It goes into the drawer marked 1964 and stays there. A mind of the other kind has no such drawer. That is why “Dark City” can travel from a Boston hallway to an Irish homestead to a dock at Southampton without a single transition of the later, I would variety. The poem does not travel through time. It declines to acknowledge the intervals.

“The Crosswalk” performs the same collapse with a crueller instrument. The poem opens in the present — a father and son on a crosswalk, a driver braking — and turns to a dead father, and to an argument about a memory the father misattributed to the wrong son. Then:

Someone crossed the room and paused to take a picture.
It was on the table by your coffin. Your hands on mine.
Proof that we had closeness for a moment,
and that is enough.

The whole poem is engineered so that the photograph exists simultaneously in the moment it was taken and on the table beside the coffin. Two sentences, two times, no transition. And the closing clause — and that is enough — is the only line of consolation in it, and it is not consolation about the past. It is a verdict delivered in the present about something still happening.

“Honeymoon” runs the same machinery forward instead of back. A son kneels to rub ointment into his mother’s cracked heel, sees her honeymoon photograph on the end table, and observes: My mother and father could be my children. The generations invert inside one glance. Then the poem does something I did not plan and could not now improve:

Someday later, I’ll hold the photograph
and remember this night —
the rain and the darkening eve.
I will see my mother waving to me.
Maybe I will feel the cut of pain, a sigh of love,
or nothing at all.

The poem steps into its own future and looks back at its own present as memory. A future grief is felt in advance, and the honest possibility that it will be felt as nothing at all is admitted. Einstein said the distinction between past, present, and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion, and I have quoted him in my prefaces. But that stanza is not a citation of Einstein. It is what a mind without firm temporal partitions does when it kneels on a floor with a tube of bacitracin.

VII. The Third Permeability: Between Thought and Feeling

Thin boundaries means an idea arrives already wearing its emotional weather. This is catastrophic for accounting and indispensable for lyric prose. It is also, I have come to believe, the mechanism behind everything we clumsily call voice.

“Brother” is nine lines of memory and five lines of consequence, and the hinge is a boundary failure:

In the blackness of my bedroom, sometimes a fire
blazes and I see our pink faces before the flames.

The fire under the bridge is thirty years extinguished. It blazes in the bedroom anyway, and the poem does not mark this as imagination. It reports it as an event that occurs in a bedroom, sometimes, the way one reports a draft or a noise in the pipes. What follows is the fused sentence:

Your arm crosses my cold neck and hugs my shoulder,
and I dream we never stepped outside our hallowed space.
The snow was so cold and the streetlights too strong.

That last line is the whole poem. It is a statement about weather that is entirely a statement about grief, and the two cannot be separated with any instrument I know. The streetlights too strong — an observation about candlepower that carries the loss of a brother. If you asked me to render that feeling abstractly I could not do it, and the reason is not modesty. It is that the feeling did not arrive in an abstract form.

“Piano” pushes the fusion to its limit. A man chops a grand piano apart with an axe in a December yard, and the poem catalogues the wreckage with a carpenter’s vocabulary — resin-impregnated paper, dovetail joints, wooden ribs, polished mahogany — and then, in one move, converts the whole inventory:

If I had left the window to join you in the yard, I would have seen wetness
on your cheeks, glistening strings from the soundboard of your broken soul.

The strings are literal strings, lying in the leaves. They are also the man’s interior, made visible. The line does not decide between the two, because a mind of this kind does not experience them as two. This is what I mean when I say the ordinary is holy: not that I decide to sanctify a cracked object, but that the object arrives already carrying its freight, and my whole labor is to find language equal to a meaning that was there before I got to it.

VIII. The Fourth Permeability: Between Self and Other

Reduced separation between self and other is, in Hartmann’s scheme, an interpersonal boundary measure. In a novelist it is the entire apparatus of characterization: the capacity to occupy a person you would condemn in life and render them from the inside without excusing them.

I have said for years that I write from mercy rather than judgment. I now suspect the truer formulation is that judgment requires a partition I was not issued.

Consider Nanna. In “Blindfolded” she fakes her grandson’s leukemia in a healing line, cuts ahead of a humpbacked woman, coaches the boy to fall, steals a chalice from Mission Church while he pretends to moan on the floor, and lies to a nurse’s face about the wine. She is also the woman who says this:

“I often doubt the possibility of miracles, but then I find myself thinking that every moment is miraculous.”

And this:

“We make our own miracles. There’s a saying from the old country, ‘It’s the good horse that draws its own cart.’ We must make things happen on our own instead of sitting on our arses waiting for Jesus to put the world right.”

A judging narrator would have to choose. Is she a thief or a saint? The story never chooses, and — this is the point — it does not experience the question as unresolved. She is a woman with a ledger of small dishonesties committed entirely on behalf of love, and both halves of that sentence are load-bearing. The theft and the theology are not in tension inside her, and they are not in tension inside the prose, because the writer has not stationed himself outside her far enough to arbitrate.

Now the inverse case, which I think is the strongest single piece of evidence I can offer.

Molly Bonamici is a sociopath. In “A Perfect Hit” she murders her college roommate with cocaine baked into her grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies, performs flawless CPR on the body, accepts congratulation for her composure, and reflects:

One of the perks of being a sociopath is that you learn how to easily gather necessary information by manipulating people, using their weaknesses to your advantage.

Earlier, listening through a wall, she says something more revealing than the murder:

I’ve always been intrigued by the inflections of emotion in people’s voices. Most emotions felt like foreign languages to me, but over the years, I had become very good at translating them and reading people. Sometimes, I would reenact conversations I’d overheard, watching my facial expressions in the mirror.

That is a precise portrait of maximal thickness. Molly has an absolute wall between self and other. Emotion does not cross it; it must be translated, learned as a second language, rehearsed in a mirror. Where Aiden’s boundary problem is that he cannot keep the dead out, Molly’s is that she cannot let anyone in.

And here is what I want the salon to notice. That portrait could only be written from the other end of the continuum. A genuinely thick-boundaried writer would not find Molly interesting enough to anatomize; she would simply be a villain. It takes a mind that experiences emotional traffic as involuntary to recognize, and render with that much precision, a mind for which it is a foreign language. The permeability is what makes the impermeable legible.

That, and not any theory of good and evil, is why I say mercy is a craft position before it is a moral one. It is the technical precondition of writing a person you are not.

IX. The Fifth Permeability: Between Sleeping and Waking

Hartmann’s thin profile explicitly includes states of being half-awake and half-asleep, and easy immersion in reverie. This is the writer’s workshop hour, the productive drowse before sleep and after waking in which images assemble themselves without supervision. It is also where the nightmares get in. Same door.

“Copacetic” is built entirely on that threshold, and it is the most technically ruthless thing I have written. The poem begins with a word game — the word of the day is copacetic — and the word summons the father in a doorframe, asking his sons if everything is copacetic before a trip. Then the hospital:

I sat by him from morning until shadows crossed his face.
Mostly he slept. Sometimes he asked what time it was.

Then the son returns at night, and the exchange repeats, but reversed — the son now standing in the doorway, using the father’s word:

“Everything copacetic?” I say.
He turns and looks.
“It was tough,” he says.

The father’s line, it was tough, was spoken decades earlier about the Korean War. It returns here attached to something else entirely, or perhaps to the same thing. Two utterances, one sentence, and the poem does not tell you which is which. Then:

I guide him to the bed and sleep in the chair beside him.
When I wake, I find that he has gone.

The whole death of a father is delivered across the boundary of the speaker’s own sleep. The son is unconscious at the moment of the event. He does not witness it; he wakes into it. That is a formal decision, and it is the correct one, and I did not reason my way to it. A mind that treats sleeping and waking as adjacent rooms rather than separate countries will place the most important event of a poem in the doorway between them.

X. The Sixth Permeability: Between the Sacred and the Ordinary

The last one is the one my readers notice most, and it is the least mystical of the six.

The whole theological argument of “Blindfolded” — venial sin against mortal sin, whether a theft in the service of love is forgivable, whether miracles occur — is conducted over eggs:

“Over hard, as you like them.” She flipped an egg and wiped some grease off her pink nightgown. Rollers dangled precariously atop her forehead.

Grease on a pink nightgown, rollers, three sugars in the coffee, the Baltimore Catechism, and a stolen chalice in a handbag with the makeup taken out to make room. Nothing in that kitchen is coded as sacred and nothing is coded as profane, because in a thin-boundaried perception the coding never happens. The freight is distributed evenly across the room.

“Triggers” makes the same move as an argument. The poem sets a conference room — microaggressions, fragility, hurt feelings on the marquee — against a woman walking a mile to a well:

Most mornings, she knelt, said her rosary,
then walked over a broken-planked porch,
hugged a wooden pail, stepped onto earth,
and trekked to the water.
Homeward, she gingerly avoided stones
that stabbed, bruised, and hurt her feet,
but still she whispered blessings to the wind.

The rosary and the broken plank and the stones and the blessings are given in a single unbroken list, with no shift of register between the devotional and the physical items. Hugged a wooden pail is the line I would point to. The verb belongs to a person and is given to a bucket, and that small crossing is the poem’s entire ethic: this woman’s ordinary morning is her theology, and she does not distinguish, and neither does the sentence.

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The Central Image, and the Case for Recurrence

XI. Why Hope Hangs in Two Places

I said earlier that Hartmann’s Central Image finding — that thin-boundaried dreamers produce a single dominant picture of higher intensity — describes something writers already do. I want to press that harder, because I think it explains the compositional habit my readers most often remark on.

The last page of “Blindfolded” does not resolve a plot. It delivers a picture. Aiden and his mother, leaving the hospital, see the dead grandfather on the grass:

My grandfather was sitting on the grass beneath a tree. He smiled and waved to us. One star shone in the twilit sky.

The grandmother, who does not see him, asks what they are looking at. “Hope,” the mother says. And when the boy asks how anyone can see hope, the grandmother answers: “Hope is sitting right beside me.” Then, in the back seat, the boy opens his mother’s sketchbook:

A blindfolded woman wearing a green gown sat atop a light brown globe, her head bent to the left as she played a lyre with a single string. In the background, one star shone in the gray-blue sky. Printed underneath the reproduction was “Hope, 1886, George Frederic Watts.”

Count the images that have just been folded into one another. The dead man under the tree. The single star above the lawn. The word hope used three ways — as the name of what the mother sees, as the grandmother’s name for her daughter, and as the title of a Victorian painting. And inside the painting, the same single star in the same twilit sky, above a blindfolded woman playing one remaining string.

That is a Central Image in exactly Hartmann’s sense: a single picture of high intensity that the whole preceding narrative exists to deliver, and that survives after the plot of the chalice and the hospital has faded from the reader. And it was built the way dreams build — by condensation, one image folded inside another until they cannot be separated, rather than by argument.

This is also the honest answer to why the same objects keep reappearing across my books. The star above the hospital lawn recurs above another lawn in Give Them Unquiet Dreams. The blindfolded woman on the light-brown globe hangs over Laura’s bed and later stands on a lawn as a person. Yeats’s Innisfree arrives first as a poem pasted into a photo album, then as the boat in the album, then as a scarf caught on a branch. A watch stopped at 1:03. A snowfall that both hides and reveals.

I have called these the furniture of the house I have been living in as a writer, and said that I move them from novel to poem to story the way any person moves the good chair from one room to another when the light changes. I still like that sentence. But I can now add a plainer account of it. A Central Image of sufficient intensity is not exhausted by one use. A mind that will not file the past as concluded will not file an image as spent either. The recurrence of the image and the recurrence of the grandmother are the same phenomenon.

XII. Why the Recurrence Philosophy Follows From the Architecture

Here is the argument of this essay, stated as briefly as I can state it.

I have defended recurrence on three grounds. Ecclesiastes: there is no new thing under the sun. Hegel: the thesis and its antithesis are not cancelled but sublated — cancelled, preserved, and lifted up at once — so that a theft becomes a return, and a lie about leukemia becomes a real prayer said in the wrong pew. Einstein: the division of time into past, present, and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion. And Emerson beneath all of them, with the Oversoul: the great current running under every separate life.

Those are all true to me, and I am not withdrawing any of them. But look at what thin boundaries actually consists of, item by item, and the recurrence stops being a philosophy at all. It becomes a consequence.

If the past blends with the present, nothing files itself away as concluded. So the grandmother in the Braintree kitchen is not a memory being retrieved. She is present tense, and she will be present tense in the next book, because she never left the room. Recurrence is not a decision. It is what a mind of this construction produces when it writes anything at all.

If self and other are not firmly walled, mercy is available as a technique. So the same woman can be a thief and a saint in one paragraph, and the same author can write a sociopath from the inside without flinching or moralizing. The refusal to judge is not a virtue I cultivated. It is a partition I lack.

If thought and feeling arrive fused, the ordinary is pre-charged. So the kitchen table and the hospital corridor and the axe in the December yard do not need to be elevated. They arrive elevated. The ordinary is holy is not a doctrine in my work. It is a report.

If the border between the living and the dead is a membrane, the Oversoul is not a belief you adopt. It is a description of your Tuesday. The boy in Give Them Unquiet Dreams who sees his dead grandfather beneath a maple tree and the boy in the Aiden stories who sees the same figure on a hospital lawn are not two boys having the same hallucination. They are one boy, briefly permitted to see what is always there. I wrote that sentence as theology. I would now defend it as description.

And so the closing of Give Them Unquiet Dreams, which I have always regarded as the clearest statement of the whole business, turns out to be a statement about boundaries:

In every beginning is an ending, and in every ending is a beginning. There is no time between, only eternity. When we pass on, we move into another room. Our departed loved ones are a short distance away—in that room just beyond the doorway. They lean in softly, watching over us, taking turns to check that we are safe, placing unseen palms upon our hearts, whispering loveliness in our ears.

Another room. Just beyond the doorway. Not another world. Not another plane. A room, with a doorway, in the same house — which is precisely what a thin partition is.

I did not need a philosophy to justify any of this. I needed one only later, to explain it to myself.

XIII. The Objection

I know the charge, and I would rather state it myself than let it be whispered. In a writer, repetition is often read as a failure of invention, or worse, as a kind of theft from oneself.

I have answered this on aesthetic grounds elsewhere: what returns in my writing is declared, not disguised — named outright when it matters, left as a private grace note when it does not, but never smuggled in on the assumption that no one would notice. When the chalice is stolen in one story and returned in the next, the reader is meant to see both movements. When the same twilit star appears above two hospital lawns, it is not carelessness. It is the point.

The boundary literature lets me add a second answer, an empirical one. Recurrence in a thin-boundaried writer is not a failure of supply. It is a property of retention. The images do not recur because nothing new arrives; they recur because nothing old departs. Those are opposite conditions, and criticism has been mistaking one for the other for a long time.

I would rather a reader catch me returning to something than believe, wrongly, that I had run out of anything new to say.

XIV. The Cost, Honestly Stated

I would be lying to this salon if I sold permeability as gift alone.

Hartmann came to the boundary construct by way of nightmares, and the same architecture that delivers the Central Image delivers the bad night. Frequent nightmares are typically a lifelong pattern, beginning in childhood and remaining remarkably stable across decades. The mind that will not wall off the past cannot decline the visit when the past arrives at three in the morning in a shape it did not choose.

The adjacent research is consistent about the trait cluster. Dream recall is specifically associated with openness to experience and unrelated to the other four major personality factors; and people prone to absorption, imagination, and fantasy are markedly more likely to remember their dreams and to report vivid nocturnal imagery. Those are the traits that make a writer. They are not separately purchasable from the ones that make a hard night.

And a practical honesty is owed alongside the romance. Nightmares can be worsened considerably by causes that have nothing to do with the soul — untreated sleep apnea, certain common medications, alcohol in the evening. Treating those is worth doing, and touches the imagination not at all. Thin boundaries is a constitution. It is not a reason to leave a treatable thing untreated.

XV. What to Do With This in Your Own Work

Five consequences, which is what a craft essay owes you.

Stop apologizing for your material. If you have written the same house four times, the question is not why you keep returning. The question is what you had not yet seen — because a mind of this kind does not return to a settled matter. Recurrence is a signal of unfinished perception, not of exhausted invention.

Find your Central Image and build toward it. Ask of any draft: what is the one picture this exists to deliver, the thing the reader will keep after the plot has gone? Then cut what does not deliver it. The dreaming mind composes this way already. Working with the grain is cheaper than working against it.

Let the sacred argument happen over the eggs. If you find yourself writing a scene in which a character explains the theme, put the scene in a kitchen and give someone a frying pan. The permeable perception does not separate the holy from the greasy nightgown, and neither should your paragraph.

Write the person you would condemn. Not to excuse them — Molly is not excused — but because the wall you cannot feel between yourself and another person is the only instrument capable of rendering someone who has one. If a character is merely a villain on your page, you have stationed yourself too far outside them.

Treat the permeability as an instrument with a maintenance schedule. Thin boundaries makes you a poor filterer. The same openness that admits the image admits everything else. Guard the hours. Guard the sleep you can. Accept that a portion of the intake was never yours to select, and build a practice that can survive that.

XVI. Coda: Helen

Long before I had read Emerson or Hegel, or understood what Einstein believed about time, there was a woman named Helen who prayed to the Blessed Mother before anyone else and loved me by whatever means were available to her, honest and otherwise.

Every grandmother in every book I have written is, in some flawed and partial way, a return to her. Catherine — Nanna — is one such return: not Helen, and not a portrait of Helen, but the same current running through a different vessel, honest about its dishonesties, tender in the shape her tenderness could take.

I offer the boundary research here not to explain her away. A questionnaire is a poor instrument for a woman who walked a mile to a well and whispered blessings to the wind. I offer it because it happens to say, in the flat language of a Boston clinic, what she would have said in the language of a thin place: that the wall is not as thick as people think, that the dead are only in the next room, and that some of us were born standing in the doorway.

We were all of us six or seven once, and the images then were enormous for everyone. Most people set them down. If you are reading this — at whatever age you have reached, in a room like the ones we meet in — you did not.

The dreams that wake you and the stories that keep returning are the same faculty presenting two separate bills. Nothing we love is ever finished happening. It only goes quiet, waits to be carried forward, and rises again, a little changed, in someone else’s hands, or in mine, one more time.

— James Mulhern

A Note on Sources

The boundary research discussed here is Ernest Hartmann’s: the Boundary Questionnaire and its twelve categories, the thick and thin profiles, the dream-recall correlations across 1,359 cases, the comparison of frequent dreamers with non-dreamers, the dream-content ratings, the Central Image construct, and the observation about earliest remembered dreams at age six or seven — Boundaries and Dreams.

On dream recall as specifically associated with openness to experience, and on absorption and fantasy proneness, see David Watson’s work, summarized in the APA Monitor on Psychology. On the childhood onset and lifelong stability of frequent nightmares, see Michael Schredl in SLEEP.

Passages are quoted from “Blindfolded” (The Writing Disorder, 2017); “A Perfect Hit” and “Triggers” (The Galway Review, 2022); “The Crosswalk,” “Dark City,” “Brother,” “Piano,” and “Copacetic” (Academy of the Heart and Mind, 2020); “Honeymoon” (Sparks of Calliope, 2024); and Give Them Unquiet Dreams (2019).

A fuller, scholarly treatment of this argument, with its critical and philosophical apparatus, appears as “Thin Places: Permeability, Recurrence, and the Poetics of the Unfinished” on the author’s site.