Welcome listeners and readers! This is the first chapter of The Listening Room presentation “Hypnotic”. We meet David Fuller who is a test subject of Dr. Vincent Vogel, a man doing disturbing research into dreams.
1.
“You know, the closest we get to the feeling of death is the moment before we fall asleep. It’s an utterly delightful, warm, and peaceful transition we do not study enough.”
Were it not for the man reclined with his arms outstretched on a modified exam chair with restraints, Vincent would have been mistaken for a lecture hall professor with his hands clasped behind his back as he paced. He shuffled his feet against the cement floor and glanced down, oddly pensive in front of what looked like a hostage in an interrogation room.
“You see, you are actively engaged in processing, whether it be how the day made you feel, thoughts on what’s for dinner, perhaps the next movie you’d like to see. Then there is a slow, imperceptible depression of higher level function before you start slipping away. Until the very instant your brain converts to delta waves, or light sleep, dozing if you will, you believe you’re awake. It’s only a groan or a nudge that clues you in.”
The low buzz of overhead fluorescent lights filled the consuming quiet between Vincent’s words. David lay against the stiff gray-blue padding of the exam chair, which pressed into the back of his knees where it hinged. The chair also bowed at his lower back, forcing him to sink his body into the hollow. He squirmed against a developing cramp.
His head was strapped down tight enough so he could not look left or right, only straight ahead at a white wall with a yellow color block at the center. Behind him was a two-way mirror with a control room beyond it. Technicians had paused the audiovisual recording to allow Vincent his monologue. Even if David could crane his neck to stare into the dark, rectangular panel, no one would help him.
David panted, staring at Vincent with pleading eyes. He dragged his tongue over his dry, quivering lips and pursed them as if to speak. To beg. But all he could muster was a choking cough as the words got lost on the way out.
Vincent opened a drawer under the exam chair and pulled out a rubber mouth guard. He roughly fitted it into David’s mouth before giving him a wry smile and roving over David’s face with a pitying stare. But like clouds streaming past to reveal a blazing sun, his face brightened.
“David, I am on the cusp of something extraordinary. My hope is to suspend someone in the stage right before they sleep, to reach out and touch that sleep.” He clamped the air with his hand as if catching an insect, then crushing it.
“You’re helping me do that. I want to see what precisely is severing all those connections at the moment you fall asleep, so I can keep them tethered and induce a waking dream, an active dream. Imagine all society would be able to work through in their dreams. Imagine therapy through waking dreams, recreating a circumstance and making a new choice.” Vincent paced and continued lecturing his immobile subject, who tracked his movements with a mixture of horror and stubborn hope.
“You’re going to help me, David,” said Vincent, tugging on the straps holding him to the chair. “We’re going to see exactly how your brain works.”
David’s eyes welled up and his body quaked. He had read about horrific sleep experiments performed on prisoners of war and death row inmates. In mapping the sleep and wake mechanisms, researchers disconnected people from their reality. Subjects eventually could not tell the difference. Worse yet, there was no epilogue for unlucky survivors.
“Sorry about the… accommodations,” Vincent said gesturing to the chair. “We’re not fancy here. Gotta take what we can get. This is from an internist’s office. I would’ve liked a dentist’s chair instead. I want you know I’m working on it.”
David nodded against the head restraint. Vincent always kept his promises, especially when it came to the little things that mattered. The thought brought a momentary reprieve and his back sank into the hollow of the chair. He jerked against a cramp.
Vincent swabbed David’s arm with alcohol and prepared a syringe. The injection was like a drop of water splashing against cement, nearly noiseless, before a pipe burst. Onset was rapid before David would feel he was lifted out of his own mind into a sea of blackness.
“Look at the yellow square. Look at it, David,” he said flatly. “You know what to do when you go under. Find Mr. Feldman. Find him!” he hissed.
David’s eyes fixed on the square. A slow, warm wave washed over his body. He suddenly grimaced and fought back a creeping, nauseous feeling in the back of his throat. Breathe, he said to himself. It was the top of a cliff before free fall. Suddenly he was floating, his body light and tingling before going limp. He winced against the lights and suddenly could not remember why he was struggling. His breathing slowed and his eyelids were heavy with the promise of sleep. Wonderful sleep.
Vincent leaned over next to his ear and whispered, “Into the fog.”
He rapidly descended into an awaiting abyss.
David clamped his eyes shut, then blinked against the glare of the lights. He sat up from the exam chair drenched in sweat. He leaned over and put his head in his cupped hands. It’s so hard. It’s so much. He shook himself and swung his bare feet down to touch the floor.
He had a more comfortable exam chair like Vincent had promised, not with restraints, but plush supports that fitted the shape of his body. He went on another mission that night but did not find his target. He could not manage to alter the dreamscape this time and the target slipped away. He’d have to try again another night.
Molly stepped into the control room and looked out at a now shirtless David stretching and twisting his body. He slowly removed electrodes from his chest and arms, then peeled away the Velcro strap under his chin, and removed the electrode cap.
“You’re going to burn a hole in his back,” Toby said. She side eyed Molly and shook her head.
Toby had three large screens at her console with blue text and graphs streaming over black backgrounds. She scanned the information and highlighted points of interest for further review. She pulled up a templated document and began fulling in the night’s observations. Molly was seated at a second console waiting for results to be compiled for comparison to a previous test run.
“How close did he get to the target?”
“Closer than the last time but he’s… not there yet.”
Molly frowned. The test runs had begun in earnest weeks before but David had made little progress. He got stuck at similar points in the dreamscapes and rarely moved past them before eventually waking empty-handed.
“Can I offer a suggestion? I mean, I know you and Dr. Vogel are the brains, but I wanted to tell you what I noticed.”
“Go ahead,” Molly said absently, scrolling through the telemetry data on heart rate and brain activity.
Toby sighed. “I don’t want to liken this to a video game —“
“But you’re about to liken it to a video game,” Molly interrupted. She scoffed and kept scrolling through the data.
“You sent him in brute force on missions where he had no skills and no tools. He also had no allies. It’s just one of those things in gaming. Before you go on some big quest, you have to get familiar with your surroundings, look in your closet, talk to villagers, and have an inventory of your food and weapons.”
“Sorry, where are you going with this?”
“Your hero needs to start small. He needs to acquire basic skills before doing anything. I don’t mean to shit on your experimental design, but—“
Molly had turned toward her and crossed her arms on her chest.
“But you didn’t scale this. You had a good idea but have taken this hurried way of approaching it.” She fell short of calling it boneheaded.
She swiveled away from the console and rested her forearms on her thighs, facing Molly.
“David needs signposts. He needs to recognize where he is and he needs faces he recognizes. Having watched his test runs, I’d say that’s a big part of the problem.”
Molly scrunched his nose and considered her. There had been so much planning to secure their testing grounds, acquire equipment, recruit staff, and build in David’s daily routine that neither she, nor Vincent had considered such a small, albeit critical part of the study’s success and reproducibility. That oversight might be expected for a study like theirs—one that only a few knew was even taking place.
“So what’s your fix for this?”
Toby perked up. She swiveled back to her console and placed her hand onto a red trackball. She scrubbed through a video and stopped. She zoomed in on a figure in the background. The still was of a bartender cleaning a long stem glass. His face was partially hidden by a hazy vignette.
“Which dream sequence is this? From last night?”
“No, a week ago. This was the Bond themed one,” she said smiling
Molly smirked at the failed attempt to create a path to the finish that David knew how to navigate.
“This is the fourth time this man has shown up in the background.”
“Fourth? Who is he?” Molly squinted and moved in closer to Toby’s screen. She could see his slicked back, dirty blonde hair and the shadow of a mustache. He was tucked behind a laughing bar patron but she could see two black bars on his shoulders that could be suspenders.
“He’s cute.”
Toby smiled. “Ovulating?”
“Ugh, yes. The breakup was very poorly timed.”
Toby raised both eyebrows, but kept any more comments to herself.
“Whoever he is, he’s probably deep in David’s subconscious. That’s someone who can play a bigger role somehow.”
“Can you do a search?”
“Sure.”
Toby pulled up another video and scrubbed through to find a clearer shot of the man. She soon found him standing at a bus stop in a test run where David had been speaking to a contact nearby. She copied the still of his face and dragged it over to another screen, placing it within a square panel. She toggled onto a green search button and pressed it. A blur of photos whizzed on the bordering panel.
“Let me know what you find.”
“Will do, boss.”
Molly stood up to leave, considering who this mystery man might be and how to use him.
“Uh, Molly, one more thing,” Toby said meekly.
Molly stopped in the doorway. She was backlight by the harsh hallway lights and appeared in silhouette, tall and imposing. Toby inhaled deeply.
“See this vignetting around the video?”
She pointed to the still of the bartender, then at the bus stop. “We used to think it was rendering artifact but it’s the way David sees in his dreams. I didn’t really think about it until I tested the other subject. Their dreams are in really high resolution. Maybe that’s something else to consider?”
David moved like the beat of a metronome with pieces of his routine clicking into place by the minute. Outside what he called the dream room was a long, gray hallway with cement floors and walls. On his first tour of the space, it reminded him of a fallout bunker and he imagined all the blocked off and unexplored corridors that might be down there. He had access to only a few doors, none of which led out of the facility.
David turned into the small changing room with a center bench between a few wood-paneled lockers. No one else was ever there, though. He stripped off his sweaty clothes and dropped them into a nearby hamper. There was an adjoining sitting shower where he’d run the water hot for a few minutes while he breathed in the steam. Then he’d grab a wash cloth and a bar of unscented soap.
When David returned to the bench, his clothes were laid out: always a pair of soft gray chinos and cream long sleeved shirt with white socks and gray slip in shoes. It had ceased to be strange after a while and was just the routine. He got dressed and headed down the empty hall to his room.
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