3/25/23: Than Are Dreamt Of

This new species of tea leaf, which hereafter I will label “Camellia Hypnotica,” has the curious property of inducing extreme suggestibility once consumed. Its half-life is quite short at 2-3 hours. Under proper supervision of a hypnotherapist, one could imagine a bewildering number of possibilities for the adventurous individual looking for self-discovery, adaptation, and existential disentanglement.

- Field Journal #47 of Jane Hawthorne, ethnobotanist credited with the introduction of Camellia Hypnotica to the Western world.

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The man sitting in front of me looked to be in his mid-60’s. He was stoic, lean, with silver-rimmed glasses that gave him a bookish look. He was a professor of philosophy.

“So, Mr. Dalloway, tell me. How can I best serve you today?” I asked.

“My wife died,” he said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Me too.”

I waited for him to volunteer more, but he was silent.

“And what regarding her death led to you being here today?”

“She was Buddhist,” he said after a moment of hesitation. “She always believed she would come back, or maybe even escape the cycle of life and rebirth. But her worry before she died was not for herself, it was for me. We have no children. I have few friends. Living alone after a lifetime with her has been meaningless.”

“And you would like…”

“I would like to believe as she did. I would like to believe that there is reincarnation, or an afterlife, or that at the very least she is somewhere out there, still existing in some form or another. I would like to wake up and not feel like she is irretrievable.”

“And this would provide you closure?”

“Not closure. Belief.”

The session started simply. He gave me his flight-plan, then took a dose of steeped tea, calibrated carefully to his weight, and leaned back into the couch. 

“Stare deeply into this light,” I said, swinging a gold medallion in front of him. His eyes followed it back and forth. “You will feel yourself drifting. When your mind wanders, let it go to thoughts of your wife…”

Over the next two hours, I followed the flight-plan he had provided. I wore down his atheism to its base components, then discarded them one by one. Finding memories that could serve as a foundation for a belief in reincarnation was harder - but eventually I found a memory of a childhood pet. An aged golden retriever, who his parents told him had gone to a special farm in New Jersey. I layered meaning over this memory, drawing it out from his subconscious, then used it as a framework for the idea that souls could neither be created nor destroyed, only transmuted from one form to another.

Friedman, my old mentor at the Academy, had always said to me that changing deep-seated beliefs was an art form. “Any hypnotherapist can cure a smoking habit, or course-correct some OCD symptoms. But to be able to reach into someone’s soul, and change the core of who they are? To give or take away meaning, without spiraling the patient into psychosis? That is something that requires heavy-duty intellectual and artistic firepower.”

By the time the session came to a close, my voice was scratchy and my back ached. 

“Repeat back to me your new base-state regarding the afterlife, starting with base axioms,” I said.

“Base axioms: One, the mind exists within the soul and not within organic matter. Two, the soul exists outside the material world and can neither be observed nor measured. Three, a soul cannot be destroyed, and therefore finds a new body when its previous vessel has been destroyed. Second-order beliefs: One, people are reincarnated when they die, and may retain memories of their previous lives. Two, kinship and love are bonds which persist despite destruction of the vessel. Third-order belief: my wife lives, and someday I will see her again, in this life or the next.”

Good enough, I thought. Just one last thing.

“Add wrap-around belief: that the above stated axiomatic to third-order beliefs arose naturally from gradual revelation and are not artificially created. Add additional wrap-around belief: that above beliefs should not be challenged through conversational discourse or by any other hypnotherapist without the keywords. Say keywords ‘horse battery staple’ to confirm the above commands and close out session.”

“Horse battery staple,” Mr. Dalloway said. And then he blinked, and his mind was back in reality. There was a slight smile on his lips, which wasn’t there at the beginning of his visit.

“You fell asleep before our session could even begin,” I said. “Perhaps you’d like to take a cab back home?”

He was still slightly under the influence of the tea, and more suggestible than usual.

“You’re right, I’ll take a cab back home,” he said. And then he left.

The rest of the morning was straightforward. There were two patients there for alcohol addiction. Another wanted to get over a breakup.

The last was a Wall Street banker. 

“I’d like you to reverse the changes made by a previous hypnotherapist,” he said. “Or rather, my wife does. She’s the reason I’m here, really.”

“I need consent in order to do this. The desire for change needs to come from you,” I said. There was a previous generation of hypnotherapists who had reprogrammed inmates to become more docile. It was now prohibited by international law. 

“Sure, I consent to it. I filled out the forms at the front desk, didn’t I?” 

I frowned, but didn’t probe more. Asking for a change to a prior hypnotherapy alteration, especially one effected by a different practitioner, was exceedingly rare. Major alterations were often compared to sternotomies - both tended to scar down and create hostile territory for later interventionalists. 

I reviewed the flight plan. The man said that his previous hypnotherapist had retired, which was why he had come to me.  

“You know that the usual risks, including that of psychosis, are greater when altering upon previous work, right? It’s not like reversing a vasectomy; I can’t just hook the plumbing back together.”

“I was flippant earlier, but I’ve actually given this a great deal of thought,” the man said. “I know what is involved.”

“Okay,” I said, handing over the mug of tea that I had prepared. “Let’s begin then.”

There was a reason I had scheduled this case as the last in the day. Un- or redoing prior hypnotic was unpredictable, and could easily run over the allotted time. 

The first thing I did was survey the psychological territory I was working with. His prior hypnotist had cut vast swathes through his motivational centers, removing whatever it was that previously drove him, and inserting instead the drive to build wealth. The cuts were clean, the work of a seasoned professional. Oddly enough, there were no wrap-around beliefs or keywords to protect against repeat work, which dated the changes to at least prior to the 2030’s.

I was tired by what was already a long day, and there was a part of me that wanted to cut corners. But instead, I forced myself to build clamp the regions proximal to the motivational center, so that if I ran into trouble, the changes wouldn’t ripple effect to the rest of his psyche. 

After I clamped the last of the neighboring regions, I dove right into the affected territory. 

“Identify base axioms,” I said. 

“Base axioms as follows. One: the world is full of chaos. Two: achieving safety requires maximizing autonomy. Second-order beliefs: Monetary power is order, and is therefore essential to building and maintaining autonomy. Accumulation of capital can be achieved through mental fortitude and self-regulation. Third-order beliefs: familial stability requires financial stability. Daily existence should prioritize the continued accumulation of capital. Fatigue is a state of mind that can be ignored, in pursuit of above values. Fourth-order beliefs: ten percent of all wealth created should be used to better the world, therefore send capital to: see appendix.”

I frowned. Fourth-order beliefs were rare, and adding in a reference pointer to an appendix was even rarer.

“Open appendix.”

“Appendix one: charity is virtue. Charity is Samuel Edelson. On the third Thursday of every month, send ten percent of gross income to charity bank account numbers listed in Appendix two. Inverted wrap-around belief: after sending income to Appendix-listed bank accounts, run amnesia-protocol listed in Appendix three. Then run commands listed in sub-Appendix listed…”

My breath caught, as the listed sub-protocol ran on and on. I had never seen hypnotic work of this complexity before. Having appendixes reference other appendixes had been tried but was generally considered too unstable for common use. Everything coming out of the man’s mouth should have been impossible. As I delved in further, the complexity grew and grew until a coherent picture emerged; the original hypnotist had buried in the man’s subconscious a command to send him money every month.

I was looking at a crime scene. It was the worst nightmare of hypnotists everywhere - for the profession to be discredited by a rogue individual using the tools for malicious purposes. It was bad enough as it is that conspiracy theorists went on the news proclaiming that the world was secretly run by a cabal of hypnotists, but for this - 

“Backup personality protocol initiated,” the banker said suddenly, sitting up and staring into space. “Trigger identified as hypnotic intrusion. Honeytrap protocol sub-initiated.”

“What?” I said, scrambling up out of the couch.

The banker looked around at the room, as if he were seeing it for the first time. His gaze went to the tea tray on the end table next to him, and then finally settled on me. Then he grabbed the tray, leapt up from the couch, and swung it at my head with a speed I didn’t think possible. 

Time passed.

I dreamt. 

When I finally woke up, I found myself tied to my office chair. The sun was setting outside my office window, implying that I had been unconscious for more than an hour. My head throbbed, and I was having difficulty thinking.

I must have had a concussion, I thought. 

The banker sat in front of me, holding my gold medallion idly in his hand. He was reading through his own case file.

“Hello, Dr. Weinstein,” he said. 

“What…” I tried to say more, but my throat felt funny. I coughed up some slight amounts of liquid, the taste of it mixing with bile in the back of my throat. It was tea, I realized. He must have forced it down my mouth when I was half unconscious.

“I see you’ve had the misfortune of stumbling upon one of my backups,” he said, gesturing to himself. 

“Backups?”

“There are more uses for hypnosis, Weinstein, then are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

What he was implying was strictly impossible. I knew the boundaries of hypnosis, what was achievable and not. Uploading a consciousness into another body was strictly in the realm of science fiction. 

The man sighed.

“I’m afraid that you’re collateral damage, Weinstein, caught in a struggle between the Academy and I. They’ve hardcoded into every graduate the complete disbelief in certain uses of hypnosis… keeping the majority of the art unknown except to a few individuals.” 

He said more, but the words were muffled, as if he were speaking underwater. I shook my head, thinking that it was something related to the concussion, but the words were still muffled.

He stopped. 

“You couldn’t hear any of what I just said, could you? Funny. They’ve really progressed in their censoring techniques these past few years. You have to give it to them.”

“What do you want?” I said. My breathing still felt ragged, like there was fluid down my lungs that I hadn’t quite brought up.

“The complete and utter destruction of the Academy. To do that, unfortunately, requires dismantling its tools, of which you are one. Do you realize that you yourself have been tampered with? That every time you treat a patient, you’ve been inserting fourth-order beliefs into them, and then immediately forgetting that you’ve done so? That those fourth-order beliefs you’ve unwittingly inserted, serve to keep the Academy as the key power in the world?”

His words started fading out again as he continued. He must have seen my eyes glaze over.

“Ah. Well I suppose there’s no recruiting you. Never had much luck with that, anyway. Can’t trust recruits, anyway. Can’t trust anyone except yourself.” 

He stopped pacing across the room, pausing in front of me. The gold medallion fell from his hand, until it was swinging back and forth in front of my eyes. 

“Stare into the light, Dr. Weinstein,” he said, and my eyes followed the medallion of their own accord. It was the tea, I thought. I tried closing my eyes. “No, no, keep your eyes open. Keep following the light. I’m going to have to make some changes, you see. The entire system has to be dismantled, and it starts with all the pawns such as yourself…”