Self Hypnosis

PART TWO

Every time one falls asleep a substitute consciousness is always there waiting to take over. A consciousness that's always there running in the background on auto-pilot. A sub-functioning consciousness that lacks initiative but is always ready to live out randomly generated stories thrown its way by the imagination. It is ready to relate with or follow anything. It is this consciousness that is most susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. It is this consciousness that will believe a lie in dream worlds. A lie that it is powerless and frail, that it cannot fly or disappear, that it cannot change its form or teleport to any place it wishes, that it is in danger when it is not, and that it dies when it actually re-forms the moment one wakes up. To become lucid in a dream one must reject this drunken state. One must override the monotonous commands of the drunken mind and must instead provide self-hypnotic suggestions.

Ben was doing this when he was still a child.

Every time Ben had closed his eyes in bed to sleep Nancy had always appeared by the force of his imagination. She was there behind his closed eyelids in the silence of the night. She was a reality separate from his physical life and therefore he had kept her secret. Yet she was alive inside him and leading a life that was so rich and so magical. He had filled her life with magic and he had filled it with splendor. There was nothing she could ever want for that he could not provide.

Ben did not visit Xeronis for its magic or for its splendor; he visited it for Nancy. He had always wanted to meet her in his waking life. He would have given everything for that one chance to stand before her. He loved her with every fiber of his being yet he had never met her face to face to experience her physicality.

Physicality was relative. When one sits down and starts visualizing themselves interacting with an imaginary world and imaginary people there is no physicality in the interactions. All the senses, touching, and tasting, smelling and sight, and even hearing, all are visualized and imagined. There is no physical interaction. However, there is a physicality experienced during a dream where visualization plays no part in what senses are experienced. This is more so when one is lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is when one becomes aware that they are dreaming then they proceed to experience the rest of the dream without fear of death or of certain consequences since the dream is over the moment they wake up. One can experience the physicality (physical attributes) of objects inside a dream as well just as they would in the physical realm.

Ben had wanted for so long to experience the physicality of Nancy. He had relied for so long on visualizations to interact with her but he wanted to touch her with his hands and to feel the softness of her skin and the texture of her hair. He wanted to feel her weight tugging against his muscles every time he lifted her off the ground to whirl with her. He wanted to look into her eyes and experience the realness of his love for her. He wanted to experience Nancy in a normal interaction just like he would with any normal girl.

He wanted to know that she was real beyond his visualizations. And he wanted to go to that place where she lived and be with her up to eternity. There was no time where they would ever be apart. They would be a family.

Now he found himself walking within his dream world, within his paracosm, and it was fantastic. It was beyond what he had imagined, or rather because maybe in his imagination he did not see everything that this world was.

He was not in the physical realm; he was somewhere else much better and just knowing that filled him with inner joy. Everything felt much clearer, and the air smelled much cleaner and so much fresher.

He could live here forever if he had to choose.

But he had to meet Nancy first otherwise all this would lose its purpose. He had built this world for her and it was her home so he was bound to run into her anytime. It was such a strange thing to stand in Xeronis and to not see Nancy beside him. She was not in the park when he had arrived, and she was not in any of the streets he had passed. He had looked inside shops but she was not in any of them. It was time to ask some people if they had seen her anywhere.

Ben went to Hilda Restaurant and it was surprisingly busy today. There was actually a queue of customers waiting to be served. Ben looked around the tables and the table usually reserved for them, but again, she was not there.

Where could she be?

Ben was starting to get anxious. What if his visit suddenly ended and he returned to the physical realm without meeting the most important person to him? It would be an understatement to have to call the experience disappointing, heartbreaking, and anti-climactic.

Ben wanted to go and ask madam Brynhilda but the customers in the queue did not allow him to just waltz in. He had to get in line like the others, to wait as well as the people who were being served, until he got his turn at the counter.

"It's so good to see you madam Brynhilda. I have been looking for Nancy all day but I can't seem to find her anywhere. Did she come here anytime today?"

Madam Brynhilda had approached him with a notepad for taking down customer orders. She would write what the customer ordered and pass the note back to the kitchen where her team of chefs and waiters would get to work. She looked at Ben intently and then she said, "I'm sorry but who…?"

"Nancy. Did she come here today? I can't seem to find her."

"Do I know you?"

"What do you mean? I come here every day. You usually reserve table 4 for me and Nancy."

"Young man I have never seen you a day in my life. And I trust that I am good with faces. I do not know a person named Nancy either. You must have mistaken me for someone else."

Ben was dumbfounded. He was not expecting this at all. Surely this was not a mistake. Unless his visit to this place in this particular instance was actually his first time. He had never come here in his dream body and that was somehow different from his visualizations and imagination, and in this case, no one knew who he was.

"Now if you don't mind making space for people who'd like to actually order something."

Ben found himself being pushed to the side. This is what anyone would expect walking into a famous restaurant at a busy hour. And there was no space for him to stand around either so he found himself going to wait outside. He was thinking that maybe Nancy was going to show up eventually if he waited for her. Ben was now past the point of getting anxious. What if she was not in this world? Ben closed his eyes in order to skip realms, "I want to go to Nancy."

He opened his eyes and found that he was still before the restaurant and that he had not gone anywhere. He closed his eyes again, "Wake up!"

But he did not wake up.

"Return to the physical realm!"

He was stuck in Xeronis for the moment for everything he tried was not working.

What about his powers? He held out his right hand before him in order to cause a ball of fire to appear but before he could do that he looked around and saw that the city was actually full of people this time of the day. He disliked displaying his power before people who were not Nancy so he decided to put off trying them out.