Chapter 2
It’s 8 am and I am sitting in a zone of the hospital labelled as “experimental psychiatry and psychology”. I’ve spent the last half hour filling forms with my personal information and subscribing a number of clauses I haven’t read too carefully. I suspect that this whole psychology business is a complete waste of time, and yet I am curious to see what will come next. I am swaying between these bipolar moods when Stephanie greets me flamboyantly.
“You must be Iris!”, she says with a broad smile, ready to shake hands even before I get up from my chair, arching her brows just a bit instead of placing a question mark to her statement
Something in my face tells her that she is not mistaken, and before I have the time to reply she introduces herself, “Stephanie, good to meet you”.
She takes the forms I filled out and leafs through them quickly before bringing me to another room. The room is bright, small, cozy, familiar with many personal objects, something very different from what I expected. I thought shrinks used rooms that were dimly lit and neutral, deprived of any reference to the doctor’s personality to prevent the patient from analyzing the doctor. Instead I look around and note, “You like cats”.
“Yes! I do”, Stephanie replies enthusiastically
“So do I”, I tell her, my eyes still inspecting the place
My defensive wall is creaking just slightly. This woman does not seem to want to play games or hide, or maybe she is such a good player that she plays and wins seamlessly. Let’s wait and see.
She starts explaining what this is all about, and although each of her sentences is clear when she stops talking I am still not sure about what I am getting into. All I understand is that her research team wants to exhume memories that have been lost, especially traumatic memories. They somehow intend to use fragments of dreams to trigger other dreams until the lost episodes are reconstructed in their entirety and relived in a full length dream, following which the person becomes fully conscious of his or her past.
Have they done this with somebody already, I ask. They are recruiting volunteers now, I am the first one who showed up. Promising!, I think, and smirk.
Stephanie sees my skepticism. She becomes defensive – it’s only for a flashing second, but I still notice.
“Well, if this is an experiment one has to start somewhere”, I say, because for some reason all of a sudden I don’t want to let Stephanie down.
Stephanie nods and smiles, amicable again, and continues her explanation. I will have to write down my dreams as soon as I wake up, recording as many details as I can. We’ll meet every other day – if this is not too much for me – for sessions approximately three hours long.
”The ideal strategy is to keep a fast pace. Does this work for you?”, Stephanie asks and I say it does.
“During each session we will induce controlled sleep, and we will monitor a number of parameters to try and understand your mental state during the sleep. We will also impart signals to your brain while you are sleeping to mimic part of the dreams you had the previous nights. We will pick whatever seems significant to you or whatever appears to us as a hint, something that is perhaps blurry but that we somehow perceive as a window to remembering a problematic memory that you chose to forget”, Stephanie tells me
“What makes you believe that I choose to forget things?”, I ask, with a tone sharper than intended
“What are your expectations?”, Stephanie asks in return to my question, looking at me intensely
“My expectations with regard to what?”, I say, taking time, because I don’t have a real answer
“With regard to what you will be getting out of these sessions”, she replies calmly, her eyes still transfixed into mine
Now the question is too well defined for me to elude it.
“I came here for no reason, out of curiosity or perhaps boredom. But if you need some motivation and want me to give you a better reason I’ve got one for you. Sometimes there is a face that resembles mine, I know it does but I can’t see it. I want to reach towards it but I can’t, ever. I’ve dreamed this since I can remember”, I say – and there’s challenge in my voice
The words have come out before I knew it, and I am suddenly feeling disarmed in the middle of an open battle field. I regret having given my dream away, while realizing for the first time that it has been haunting me for years. I wonder if I really want to know what it is about and if this dream has really been my reason to call Stephanie.
“Do you want to start a full session tomorrow at 8?”, Stephanie asks, and I shrug
“Why not”, I say