Choose Your Own Brainwashing, Day 14 (Patreon)

There’s a sharp noise right next to your ear, and between one blink and the next you’re no longer sitting staring at a spiral through a window. In fact, you’re kneeling, and the spiral you’re staring at appears to be a shaky doodle drawn on a piece of notebook paper. You’re probably not even on a train!

“Your unconscious mind can be so delightfully creative, following along with my suggestions. I thought it might be interesting if, just for a moment, you had a sense of where you really are and what you’re really doing.” Lee laughs and snaps her fingers, and for a long moment you’re back in the here-and-now, which appears to be a warm, windowless room, maybe a basement, and you are kneeling alongside several other people, with each of you staring at your own doodle of a spiral. A doodle that you now remember drawing yourself. You’re not fully clothed, but you’re not completely undressed either, and you are definitely chanting a mantra. Lee snaps again and now you can remember agreeing to letting yourself be part of a brainwashing experiment that she’s running. You are about to remember which mantra it is that you’re saying when you’re distracted by Lee beginning to speak.

“And that’s as much of that as you need for now, I think.” And snaps her fingers again.

…

…

…

The world seems shifted a little bit and you’re not sure why. You feel kind of like you’ve just sneezed, like for just an instant everything else had stopped while you experienced a brief moment of… something… but the spiral is still spinning and your throat is still vibrating, and you’re still almost overcome with intense feelings of pleasure.  You’ve managed to count 8 other train passengers by looking into the reflection in the brass lamp, and if it weren’t for tremors moving through your body from all the pleasure you might even feel peaceful. And as you think about being at peace, those pleasurable feelings start to trickle away. It’s actually a relief, even though you wouldn’t mind it if the pleasure came back at some point.

For now though, your body is becoming progressively more numb, as separate from your mind as the spiral is from the train. Close by but untouchable, as if behind a pane of glass. The need to stare at the spiral consumes you, and the more you stare, the less in your body you feel, until finally you’re just a cluster of thoughts obsessively staring at a spiral. In a moment, you’ll forget you ever had a body at all.

And without a body, can you feel any sort of sensation?

1. Yes.
2. No.
3. I don’t know.
4. Let’s do science!