Choose Your Own Brainwashing, Day 13 (Patreon)

You keep getting hotter and hotter, and you’re really glad you didn’t bring a coat with you today. The train itself doesn’t seem hot at all; the window glass that you’re still watching the spiral through is perfectly clear. But something seems to be affecting your body in a very specific way. Maybe it’s the drug you ingested earlier? Maybe there’s something else that you can’t quite pinpoint?

(“And I wonder what would happen if I told you that the more you listened to my voice, the greater your capacity to feel pleasure would grow, even when you’re not consciously aware that you’re listening? Wouldn’t that be interesting? If the more I talked the more pleasure you felt but you couldn’t quite understand why? Would not understanding make those sensations even greater? Let’s find out.”)

The spiral through the window seems to taunt you, buzzing away merrily, just like your throat, in what seems to be a particular cadence. It looks and feels very familiar, and the more you try to remember why the more pleasure you feel.

(“And your conscious mind can just keep trying to puzzle out what is going on, it’s got so much to keep track of. watching the spiral and trying to remember what I’ve hidden… and let’s just give it a couple more things to ponder, why don’t we?”)

You can’t figure out if you’re starting to breathe faster or not as your pulse speeds up from the sensations skittering through your nerves. You try to pay more attention to your breathing as you watch the spiral, and you just can’t stop trying to figure out what it is that you’ve forgotten. Maybe if you again mentally retrace your steps you’ll figure out what you’ve missed. How many people got on the train with you? You can just make out their reflections in the brass lamp next to the window if you really strain your peripheral vision and you start to count them.

(“That’s perfect, just keep doing all of those things, and as you keep on doing those things you may find that eventually the effort is too much and you stop doing them, one by one by one. I don’t know when that will happen, maybe it will take a long time, maybe it’s already happening, but when it does start to happen you can let each of those tasks slip away until the only one left is the spiral, and how important it is to keep watching it.”)

You’re not sure how long it takes, but eventually you find that the only thing that you can concentrate on is the spiral. You’re faintly aware that you are still experiencing pleasure, but it’s almost like it’s happening to some other person. The spiral is everything to you, and it’s still pulsing and shifting in that interesting rhythm.

(“And now when you look at the spiral you realize that my voice is no longer affecting it. My voice, which you’ve only consciously paid attention to as a vibration in that spiral can go back to being something that you hear with your ears, and at the same time that you realize that you can hear my voice again, you’ll realize something else as well.”)

What will you realize?

1. Your voice affects the spiral.
2. You are actually wearing a coat.
3. You’re kneeling.
4. You aren’t on a train.