u/Loose_Swimmer4323

July 26, 1972
Today was the first time one of our REMSelf trials was conducted under direct authorization from people far above our pay grade. Not university officials. Not medical boards. The kind of people who never fully introduce themselves and somehow manage to make every room feel smaller the moment they enter it.

For the first time since joining Dr. Roberts’ program, I genuinely felt that they had stopped viewing us as researchers and started viewing us as something useful.

I think all three of us felt proud of that in a strange way.

Which is probably concerning in retrospect.

Most experimental behavioral programs are still relying on narcotics, sensory torture, hypnosis, or brute-force psychological conditioning. Meanwhile, we have managed to alter behavior with little more than sleep, repetition, and carefully structured language.

The people overseeing us now seemed particularly interested in one problem: consistency.

There wasn't an on or off switch for the effects of the REMself. It just kinda happens and remains active forever.

So Dr. Roberts revised the process.

Instead of merely implanting directives, he began attaching them to auditory triggers.

Specific sounds.

Simple things at first. Knocks against metal. Certain phrases repeated in unusual cadences. Short tones played through speakers. Eventually, though, he settled on a bell.

A small brass handbell he kept beside his desk during procedures.

The sound it produced was unpleasantly distinctive. High-pitched, uneven, almost metallic in the way it echoed. The kind of noise that sticks inside your head, whether you want it to or not.

According to Dr. Roberts, the subconscious responded more aggressively to recognizable repetition than to language alone. The bell essentially functioned like a key, turning somewhere beneath conscious thought, allowing conditioned instructions to rise immediately to the surface.

And disturbingly enough, it worked.

The first officially sanctioned trial involved a low-level government employee who had apparently become problematic for reasons nobody fully explained to us. Rather than bring him in directly, one of his neighbors was recruited under unrelated pretenses.

Middle-aged woman. Friendly disposition. Completely ordinary.

We put her under that evening.

Once Dr. Roberts established communication with the REMSelf, the questioning proceeded as usual.

“Do you know who you are?”

“No.”

“Can you read this?”

“No.”

“You will do as I say.”

“I will do as you say.”

Then Dr. Roberts introduced a photograph of the target.

“Aidan Rose. Your neighbor.”

“Neighbor.”

Then Dr. Roberts picked up the bell.

He rang it three times.

The woman twitched slightly in the chair from the stimulus pads.

Three sharp metallic chimes echoed through the room.

Again.

Three rings.

The REMSelf quietly attempted to mimic the sound under its breath afterward, almost instinctively.

Then, Dr. Roberts gave the final instruction.

“When the bell rings, kill Rose.”

“When the bell rings, kill Rose.”

Afterward, she woke normally.

As if all she did was take a nap.

She stretched slightly when she woke up. Asked for water. Thanked us for keeping the room cold because she said she slept better in colder temperatures.

Completely ordinary behavior.

Completely intact personality.

Nothing about her suggested there was now an instruction sitting somewhere deep inside her waiting to activate.

At first, the people overseeing the experiment wanted to wait before sanctioning the hit. They wanted more observation first. More certainty. More data proving the trigger would remain stable outside controlled conditions.

But Dr. Roberts insisted the conditioning would hold.

A few hours later, one of the men overseeing the trial placed a phone call to her home.

She answered cheerfully.

I remember hearing dishes moving somewhere in the background through the receiver.

Then the bell rang three times.

There was a pause.

And then, in the calmest voice imaginable, she said, “Oh, hold on just one second.”

Not frightened.

Not confused.

Just mildly occupied, like someone stepping away from the phone to answer the door or turn off a stove.

We could hear movement on the other end. A door opening somewhere faintly in the background. Muffled conversation too distorted to make out clearly.

Then the gunshot.

A few more seconds passed.

Footsteps.

The phone picked back up.

“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry about that,” she said pleasantly. “What can I help you with?”

Like nothing had happened.

No panic in her voice. No heavy breathing. No shock. She sounded exactly the same as she had before the bell rang.

That disturbed me far more than the shooting itself.

It meant the conditioning was not creating some uncontrollable frenzy or obvious dissociative state. She was still herself the entire time. Still capable of polite conversation. Still functioning normally.

The instruction had simply become another action to complete.

Like checking the mail.

Or answering a phone call.

I do not think anyone in the room reacted immediately afterward because some part of us had still expected the conditioning to fail right up until the moment it didn’t.

The woman was arrested the following morning.

From what we were later told, she never attempted to flee. Never resisted. She apparently seemed more confused than anyone else involved.

When detectives asked her why she shot her neighbor, she simply kept repeating the same answer over and over.

“I don’t know.”

No motive. No anger. No explanation.

Just confusion.

That was the beginning of the trigger experiments.

After that, requests increased quickly.

Some subjects were conditioned for relatively small things. Information gathering. Behavioral influence. Surveillance assistance. Others were positioned much closer to important people.

Government staff. Security personnel. Individuals important enough that nobody should feel comfortable knowing subconscious instructions could exist that close to them, unnoticed.

Not long after the outside oversight began, our pay increased, too.

Nothing absurd, but enough to notice immediately.

Enough that Dr. Newler stopped complaining about his apartment. Enough that I stopped checking my bank account every other day before buying groceries. Enough that it became easier to leave work at the end of the night and convince myself I was part of something important instead of something questionable.

And, strangely enough, some of the pressure surrounding the experiments and the guilt has started to feel lighter now that instructions are coming from somewhere above us.

Not because I suddenly think what we are doing is moral.

I don’t.

But the earlier experiments always felt more personal somehow. As if every line crossed belonged entirely to the three of us alone. Recently, though, the decisions feel larger than the room itself. The orders arrive already decided, already justified somewhere far beyond our clearance level.

Something is numbing about that.

You stop feeling like the person deciding whether something should be done and start feeling more like the person expected to make sure it works correctly.

And I think part of me has been grateful for that distance lately, especially after some of the more recent experiments.

^([CW: Eating disorders, starvation, medical abuse, psychological torture, and death.])

March 3, 1972
Today, someone died.

A woman died because of us.

And I know the language we’re supposed to use for it. “Unexpected outcome.” “Physiological collapse.” As if wording can separate consequence from cause.

But no version of this becomes acceptable just because it is described carefully.

There hasn't been a single death. Up until now, Dr. Roberts had always avoided conditioning that directly interfered with essential bodily functions. Compulsions, perception, emotion, and even physical alteration were allowed—but never survival itself.

Nothing really crossed the line until her.

Her name was Olivia. Mid-forties. Heavyset. Soft-spoken. The kind of person who stood slightly off to the side in conversations, as though she had spent years trying not to inconvenience anyone simply by existing. She would constantly move her shirt away from her body and shift in her chair when speaking with us. I felt bad for her, as she clearly was someone who felt like her existence bothered everyone around her. But even while uncomfortable, she always kept a warm charming demeanor and glow about herself.

She came to use it to hopefully help with her sleep walking. When we asked her about her past problems with sleep and health she told about her eating disorder. She had struggled with eating for years. Since she was a little girl she had had a hard relationship with food. But she didn't describe it in a dramatic way but in the way people say it when they’ve already stopped expecting it to change. She was tired of trying to change who she was and what she ate for others. I didn't blame her.

When Dr. Roberts started planning her probing, his character seemed to shift. He became disattached from me and Dr. Newler. Stopped bantering with us and became direct and robotic. And when he started probing, his demeanor didn't change.

“Do you know who you are?”

“No.”

“Can you read this?”

“No.”

“You will do as I say.”

“I will do as you say.”

Then the images.

Food in every form. Familiar things are reduced into stimuli.

And then the conditioning.

“Food is poison.”

“Poison.”

“Food will kill you.”

“Kill.”

“Stop eating.”

“Stop eating. Poison. Kill.”

At first I was puzzled. The probing seemed so intense on Dr. Roberts' part. More intense than usual.

It may sound dramatic but watching the REMSelf repeat phrases like that no longer sounded like language to me. It sounded like something being stripped apart and rebuilt one piece at a time. It felt like the soul was stripped from the body and only the remnants of the self remained.

She came back several times after her probing.

At first, I tried treating her case like every other case. Documentation. Response tracking. Behavioral notes. But even on her first visit, her physical condition was so hard for me to see. Her cheeks already had begun to sink in and her clothes fit looser. But as troubling as her physical state was to see, the thing that bothered me the most was that her charming demeanor and glow were gone. We tried simply showing her food but she grew uneasy at the mere sight of it. If you saw how she reacted to an apple you would have thought she saw a viper.

By the second visit, Olivia could not remain in the same room as food without becoming violently ill. Vomiting and screaming in fear. It was like her basic instinct to flee from danger had been hijacked to see food as a predator or dangerous.

By the third visit, even just the smell was enough. When Dr. Newler opened his mouth to speak, she jolted away from him. She was scared of the peanut butter on his breath.

Every following time she came back, she looked sicker and thinner than the last. Her skin hung from her bones like a wet rag off a hook. She moved like a tumbleweed in the wind, like a 3rd party force was making her move.

On the final visit, I stood beside Olivia while Dr. Newler attempted to get her to eat something. We begged her to eat something. Anything.

She no longer felt like our subject, but our colleague, and it was breaking us to see her fade away.

We begged her to at least consider liquid nutrition.

But it was no use. She was a walking skeleton. Looking back at the day we should have done something to stop her from leaving. Break protocol and call an ambulance to get her committed to the hospital. We should have known she wouldn't even make it to the parking lot.

Olivia left shortly after that visit.

She stepped foot on the pavement and collapsed to dust.

I should have done something. I should have stopped Dr.Roberts the moment he started speaking to her REMself. I should have pressed him to somehow reverse her probing or give her new probing to counteract the previous one. 

But none of that matters now. 

She's gone. And now she's nothing more than a name in our file cabinet.

September 28, 1971
At first, the experiments didn’t really faze me.

Maybe that sounds horrible to admit, but it’s the truth.

Despite the fact that we were playing with people’s lives, the first few paychecks made it easy not to think too hard about what we were doing. The money was better than anything I had ever made before, and in the beginning, there was still this feeling that we were doing something groundbreaking, something scientific, something bigger than ourselves. There was almost a honeymoon phase to it all. Dr. Newler and I would joke around in the office, cash our checks, go out for drinks after work, and convince ourselves that none of it was really as bad as it looked.

But that feeling wore off.

Eventually, the excitement disappeared, and all you are left with are the experiments themselves.

Now I go home and actually think about these people. I think about what we did to them. I think about how we casually rewrote peoples’ beings and called it research.

One experiment in particular has stuck with me recently.

A middle-aged man came in several weeks ago. His name was Nicholas Raine. During the initial interview, he could not stop talking about his wife. They had been married for twenty years, and he talked about her like she was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. You could hear it in the way he spoke. The man genuinely loved her.

And of course, Dr. Roberts heard that and decided to turn it into an experiment. Dr. Roberts thinks love is simply another reinforced behavioral structure waiting to be altered. And that's a piece of hanging fruit to him.

After putting Nick to sleep and waking up the REMSelf, he started the usual line of questioning.

“Do you know who you are?”

“No.”

“You will do as I say.”

“I will do as you say.”

Dr. Roberts held up a piece of paper with a random phrase written on it.

“Can you read this?”

“No.”

Then he held up a photograph of the man’s wife. “You love your wife.”

“Yes.”

“No. No you don't love your wife. You’re tired of your wife.”

“No.”

“Yes. Your wife is wrong for you.”

“She's wrong. Wife wrong.”

“You’re bored with your wife.” 

“My wife is boring.”

“You don’t love your wife.”

“I don’t love my wife.”

At the time, I just stood there and watched it happen like it was any other procedure.
But it’s started to eat at me a little.

After, Mr. Raine woke up and went about his life like nothing had happened. We brought him back several more times over the following weeks. Every single visit, he looked worse. He kept telling us that his marriage was falling apart and that he did not understand why.

Eventually, we brought his wife in for questioning.

I still remember the look on her face when she talked about him.

She was confused. 

Hurt.

Exhausted.

According to her, he barely spoke to her anymore. It was like she had turned into a piece of furniture sitting inside the house. Twenty years together, and suddenly, he looked at her like she was a stranger.

After about two months, they got divorced.

A twenty-year marriage ended because we decided to test whether or not we could rewrite love inside somebody’s subconscious. A happy loving couple was reduced to strangers because of us.

We ruined their peace and happiness for science.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

January 14, 1972
The atmosphere where I work is starting to bother me.

Everything is coated in this pale eggshell white that slowly becomes nauseating the longer you stare at it. There is almost no variation in color anywhere in the clinic, but I suppose it makes sense there would not be. We are not trying to impress anyone. We are performing experiments.

The two rooms where most of the work happens have very different setups.

The first room is where Dr. Newler and I usually stay during procedures. It contains several desks and tables, BPM machines, and two massive computers constantly processing sleep data. The room is brightly lit, almost aggressively so. Dr. Newler jokes that the lighting reveals too much about a person. He swears that if somebody were developing a pimple, those lights would somehow reveal it two days before it surfaced.

The fluorescent bulbs never stop buzzing either.

It’s constant.

Loud enough that sometimes it feels like the sound is drilling directly into the center of my skull.

The other room is much quieter.

That is where the patients are brought.

I rarely enter it because Dr. Roberts insists on handling the actual probing himself.

The room runs parallel to ours, separated by a two-inch-thick metal wall and a one-way observation mirror. Unlike the brightly lit control room, this one is dim and almost unnaturally still.

The walls are fully padded.

There is a single dangling light hanging from the ceiling, a lounge chair where the patients sleep during experiments, several stimulus machines positioned around it, and a small wooden desk where Dr. Roberts sits while speaking to the REMSelf.

Lately, the image of my work space has stuck out to me more. I think about it when I get home.

Part of it is probably because I have spent so much time inside them over the past several weeks.

The other part is because of what we have done there.

Even after I leave work and drive miles away from the clinic, I still hear the fluorescent lights buzzing in the back of my mind. Sometimes I hear the high-pitched beeping of the stimulus machines too, faint and distant, like the building itself followed me home.

It feels less like I leave that place every night and more like some part of me is still trapped inside it.

April 6, 1971

Today we performed a miracle. Like something out of the bible.

We made a blind man see.

An older man came into our clinic today. He was completely blind. When he was born, he lacked optic nerves in both of his eyes.

Not damaged nerves.

Not deteriorated ones.

Absent entirely.

He moved through the world very carefully, very quietly leading with his hands and cane to substitute for his lack of sight. 

He was incredibly kind to me, Dr. Newler, and Dr. Roberts even cracked a joke or two.
“Have y'all seen any good movies lately? I haven't!"

He had originally been referred to us by a local urgent care clinic for treatment regarding severe sleep apnea. Nothing extraordinary. Just another exhausted patient sent through the system toward whatever specialist happened to be available.

After completing his evaluation, Dr. Roberts sat quietly for a moment contemplating what exactly we could do for him.

Then Dr. Newler jokingly said, “Heck, what if you played Jesus and gave him his sight back?”

I should not have laughed, but I did.

The idea sounded ridiculous. Blasphemous, honestly.

But Dr. Roberts did not laugh. Without skipping a beat, without even changing expressions, he simply said, “That is what we will do.”

There was no humor in his voice whatsoever. No arrogance either.

Most people, if they claimed they could restore sight to the blind, would sound manic, prideful, or power hungry. Dr. Roberts sounded like a man discussing lawn maintenance.

He placed the patient under shortly afterward.

Once REM activity stabilized, he began speaking to the REMSelf.

“You can see.”

“I can see.”

“You have always been capable of sight.”

“Always see.”

“You possess twenty-twenty vision.”

“Twenty-twenty vision.”

“You have never required a cane.”

“Never required a cane.”

“You have never required guidance.”

“Never required guidance.”

Dr. Roberts repeated the phrases over and over again with terrifying precision, carefully embedding each statement deeper and deeper into the subconscious like hammering nails into wood.

Then the patient woke up.

And he could see.

Perfectly.

Not partially.

Not vaguely.

Perfectly.

Something formed from nothing. 

He immediately looked around the room in confusion, almost like he did not understand why everybody else seemed so shocked.

He had absolutely no recollection of ever being blind.

None.

When he spoke about childhood memories, he described colors. Facial expressions. The shape of clouds. He spoke about visual details from moments that should have been impossible for him to perceive.

And to him, those memories were completely normal.

It was as if blindness itself had been erased retroactively from his entire life.

I felt physically ill reviewing the scans afterward.

The optic nerves were there.

Fully formed.

Healthy.

As though they had always existed.

For a moment, standing in that room, it felt biblical.

Not like medicine.

Not like science.

Like one of those impossible acts usually reserved for the bible or last-second plays in football.

The blind seeing.

The incurable cured through the spoken word alone.

But even writing that comparison now feels deeply disturbing to me.

I’m not really a religious man by any means, but calling Dr. Roberts “Jesus” implies something compassionate. Something righteous. It suggests mercy, morality, or some desire to ease suffering.

And after spending the past few weeks around him, I do not think those words describe him at all.

That is not to say he is overtly evil.

At least, I do not think so.

Truthfully, most of what we have done so far exists in a strange moral fog. Convincing people to floss more. Altering habits. Implanting harmless compulsions. Even restoring a blind man’s sight is objectively good, no matter how impossible it sounds.

But over the past few weeks, I think I have started seeing Dr. Roberts for what he truly is.

Not evil.

Honestly, I think calling him evil would almost be comforting.

Evil still requires hatred. Malice. Intent.

Dr. Roberts feels hollow in a way I still struggle to describe. Like morality itself is too simplistic for his mind.

Around patients, he imitates kindness perfectly. He smiles. He asks about their families. He remembers birthdays, favorite foods, tiny, meaningless details most people would forget.

But the second an experiment begins, all of that disappears.

What remains feels less like a person and more like an empty shell carrying out a function.

That is why comparing him to Jesus feels wrong.

Because I have seen the way Dr. Roberts behaves, and I have seen the things he is capable of.

And I no longer think standing beside him feels like standing beside a savior.

Up until recently, I think I kept making excuses for Dr. Roberts because there were still moments where he seemed deeply human outside the experiments.

For a while, those moments made it easy to separate the man from the work. Easy to believe whatever happened inside the experiment room existed in some different moral compartment.

But after today, I do not think I can separate those things anymore.

The way he watched that patient regain his sight unsettled me more than the miracle itself. There was no amazement in him. No relief. No joy. Just observation. Like he was watching his coffee brew.

And now I keep noticing things I used to ignore. The way he studies emotions instead of participating in them. The way he watches people without blinking for uncomfortable stretches of time. The way every successful experiment seems to hollow him out a little further.

I used to think Dr. Roberts was simply detached. A brilliant man who had spent too much time inside laboratories and not enough around ordinary people.

Now I think something inside him disappeared long before I met him.

Sometimes I catch him standing behind the observation glass after procedures are over, silently studying the patients the same way somebody might study insects pinned beneath glass.

Not with hatred.

Not with malice.

Just distance.

>!^(audio files in comments)!<

November 11, 1970
Have you ever heard that story about the man who locked himself inside a car and became so convinced he was going to die of heat stroke that his body supposedly gave out despite the temperature never even reaching lethal levels? Dr. Roberts talks about stories like that constantly. According to him, the human mind has a frightening amount of authority over the body. Stress alone can raise blood pressure, increase cortisol, weaken the immune system, trigger ulcers, and even induce psychosomatic paralysis in extreme cases. The body listens to the mind more than we like to think it does.

A few days ago, we experimented on a man who stood roughly 5’4.

We put him under the same way we do all of our patients and probed for REMSelf. Once we established responsiveness, Dr. Roberts began feeding it simple corrective phrases.

“You are tall.”

“I’m tall.”

“You are six feet tall.”

“Six feet tall.”

“Others are smaller than you.”

“Smaller.”

The procedure itself only lasted about forty minutes.

When the man woke up, he genuinely believed he was six feet tall.

Not metaphorically either. Completely. Absolutely.

He looked at Dr. Newler and me as though we were children standing in front of him. When we explained that we were both of average height, he refused to believe us. Dr. Newler is five foot ten on a generous day, and I am maybe five foot eight if I stand up straight enough, but the patient insisted we were both barely shoulder height to him.

At first, we thought it was funny. Then it became kind of annoying.

We brought out the measuring tape and showed him the numbers ourselves. Dr. Newler even stood against the wall so we could measure him in front of the patient directly.

Five foot ten.

The guy just shook his head.

“Broken tape,” he muttered.

He even accused us of using novelty rulers.

His behavior even adjusted to match the delusion almost immediately. He ducked slightly when walking through doorframes despite not needing to. He spread his legs farther apart when he stood. His posture changed entirely. He carried himself like a larger man.

Today, he came back in for evaluation.

Dr. Roberts casually asked him if he still believed he was six feet tall.

The man looked genuinely confused by the question.

“What do you mean by ’believe?’” he asked. “I am six feet.”

Dr. Newler laughed under his breath, but Dr. Roberts did not react at all. He simply asked me to retrieve the measuring equipment.

I still remember the feeling in my stomach when we checked his height.

Five foot six.

Not six feet, obviously, but still two full inches taller than he had measured less than a week earlier.

It should not have been possible.

The man was in his late fifties, well past puberty. There was no medical explanation for sudden skeletal growth like that over the course of several days. At first, Dr. Newler tried to rationalize it away. Posture correction. Spinal decompression. Measurement error during intake.

But I personally handled the intake measurements.

I know what his chart said.

Five foot four.

Dr. Roberts was almost completely unfazed by this discovery. It was as if he knew this would happen all along. 

“The body conforms to expectation,” he said quietly while writing notes to himself. “Reality is negotiable to the subconscious mind. I fully expect him to grow to six feet tall within the next month or so.”

I remember laughing nervously when he said that, mostly because I did not know how else to respond.

I’m in pure shock, and kind of bothered.

Not just because of the growth itself, but because of how calmly Dr. Roberts accepted it, or just knew it to be true. 

As though this was not extraordinary to him anymore, or maybe never was.

August 17,1970
You would be shocked at how easy it is to get patients for this kind of work.

When we first started assisting Dr. Roberts with the experiments, I assumed recruitment would be one of the more difficult parts of the process. I figured people would ask more questions before volunteering to be hooked up to machines and monitored while unconscious.

Turns out most people really don’t care as long as the paperwork looks official enough.

Most of our patients come in because of sleep apnea, chronic insomnia, recurring nightmares, or sleep paralysis. Lately, though, we have also been getting an unusual number of sleepwalkers. Actual sleepwalkers. People waking up in their kitchens at three in the morning with no memory of getting there. One woman apparently woke up standing barefoot in the middle of her front yard during a thunderstorm. Another man drove nearly five miles in his sleep before waking up at a gas station, completely confused. 

Dr. Roberts and I find those cases especially fascinating.

We advertise the program as an experimental sleep treatment study focused on subconscious activity during REM cycles, which sounds scientific enough that most people stop asking questions the second they hear it.

And technically, we are not even lying.

Some patients are recommended to us by local physicians. Others answer flyers we post around town or billboard advertisements offering compensation for overnight sleep studies. We have even had a few complete sessions through court-assigned community service programs, though Dr. Newler and I tend to handle the latter cases since there are more eyes on them.
 
We’ve had people from every imaginable background walk through those doors. College students looking for quick money. Veterans dealing with nightmares. Elderly men who cannot sleep through the night anymore. Divorced, middle-aged women who are convinced they are dying because they keep waking up drenched in sweat (it’s just hot flashes).

Most of them are just exhausted or overworked, and it’s easier to go get pills or participate in an experimental treatment than it is to take a break or address mental health.

That is probably the easiest kind of person to recruit. Somebody who is tired enough to trust you.

And, honestly, none of them read the fine print anyway.

Nobody does.

Buried inside the intake packets is all the language explaining what we are truly doing. Cognitive behavioral stimulus exposure. Subconscious suggestion trials. Unconscious response conditioning. It is all there in writing, technically speaking, but it is buried beneath enough dry medical jargon that most people stop reading after the first few pages and just start signing things.

Last week, Dr. Newler wanted to prove no one really paid attention to anything.

One afternoon, mostly out of boredom, he changed his identification badge before intake interviews just to see if anyone would notice. Instead of his actual name, the badge said Ben Dover, and underneath it, he changed his title to Professional Chick Magnet.

He wore it the entire day.

Nobody noticed.

Not one patient questioned it. Several people looked directly at the badge while speaking to him and still never registered what it actually said. One older woman even complimented him on how professional the staff seemed while he was standing there wearing it.

He’s laughed about it all week.

Honestly, I think it was hilarious too.

June 24, 1970
I only have one coworker. His name is Dr. Brogan Newler. 

He is one of the most naturally likable people I have ever met, and honestly, one of the most fun people to be around. But I’d be lying if I said I fully understood him.

Character-wise, he is basically what would happen if a fraternity brother somehow wandered into a neuroscience doctorate program and nobody ever realized he was not supposed to be there.

Sometimes he reminds me of that Frank Abagnale fellow they’ve been talking about in the newspapers, the con artist who supposedly managed to pass himself off as a pilot, a lawyer, and even sneaked his way into hospitals by pretending to be a doctor.

Not because Newler is a fraud.

Quite the opposite.

But he carries himself with that same impossible confidence. The kind of confidence that makes people stop questioning whether you’re supposed to be somewhere and simply assume you belong there. I’ve watched him walk into meetings he wasn’t invited to and leave with three new friends and an invitation to lunch.

He loves pulling small pranks. Nothing genuinely mean, just annoying enough to get a reaction. Putting a thumbtack on your chair. Unscrewing the top of your salt shaker at lunch. Swapping labels on office supplies.

One time, he spent almost three hours convincing a patient that Dr. Roberts was secretly English and simply hiding the accent.

The patient believed him.

The strange thing is that Newler talks like an idiot too, respectfully. Not unintelligent. Just unbelievably informal. While Dr. Roberts speaks like he’s reading from a medical journal written by European aristocrats, Newler sounds like a man explaining football scores from the back row of a sports bar.

I’ve heard him describe complex neurological pathways with phrases like "the brain getting its wires crossed" or "the gray matter fighting itself in the parking lot."

And somehow, he’s still right.

Professionally, he couldn’t be more different from Dr. Roberts. Roberts is meticulous. Precise. Formal to a fault. Newler shows up late, carrying gas station coffee and asking if anybody wants to hear about a dream he had involving a raccoon operating heavy machinery.

Half the time, he sounds borderline illiterate whenever medical terminology enters the conversation.

Then something strange happens.

It’s like a switch flips.

One second he’s joking around and acting like the least professional person in the building, and the next he’s staring at a brain scan with this distant look in his eyes.

And suddenly, he’s brilliant.

Not smart.

Brilliant.

I’ve watched him identify patterns in neural activity that entire teams previously missed. I’ve seen him predict patient responses before procedures even began. More than once, he’s pointed out flaws in Dr. Roberts’ work that nobody else in the room noticed.

Even Dr. Roberts listens when Newler gets like that.

The funny thing is that the switch never changes the way he talks.

He’ll spend twenty minutes explaining something that could revolutionize neuroscience, but he’ll explain it like he’s describing a broken lawn mower.

Dr. Roberts will give a perfectly articulated explanation using terminology I barely understand.

Newler will listen quietly and then say, “So, basically, the brain thinks it’s driving, but it’s actually drunk in the passenger seat.”

And somehow that’s the explanation that makes the most sense.

Every time I start thinking he’s the dumbest person in the room, he reminds me he might secretly be one of the smartest.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

July 2, 1970
We’ve started small with the application of Dr. Roberts’ project. Nothing too insane, just convincing people to stop wearing certain color patterns or wearing their contacts rather than their glasses, or convincing them to floss more. Very normal stuff. 

But I do have to say, Dr. Newler cracks me up. Today, we were all starving, so what does he do? He convinces Dr. Roberts to make a patient go get us lunch.
Roberts probed the patient just like:

“Do you know who you are?”
“No.”

He held up a piece of paper that said:

“Can you read this?”
“No. I can't read.”
“You will do as I say.”
“I will do as you say.”

Dr. Roberts held up a picture of a cheeseburger and a side of fries.
“You’re not hungry.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“We are hungry. Bring us food.”
Dr. Roberts gestured to himself and pointed around him.
“Bring here three cheeseburgers, three cheeseburgers, three cheeseburgers.”
“Three cheeseburgers.”

And Less than 30 minutes later, the patient returned with our orders. And when we asked why he did it, he responded:
“I don’t know. I just felt like it.”

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>!Watch the video in comments!<

June 18,1970
When I first met Dr. Ashton Roberts, I could not decide whether he unsettled me or fascinated me more.

There is something deeply uncanny about him, but at the same time, he is one of the most inviting people I have ever spoken to. He speaks with extreme enunciation, every single word sounding as if it has extra syllables hidden inside. He puts enormous effort into pronouncing everything perfectly. English is obviously not his first language, yet somehow he speaks it better than anyone else in the building.

I still remember the first thing he said to me.

“The reason I am visiting your establishment is that I have observed your higher intellect regarding the subject matter. I believe you possess both the capability and capacity to assist me with the closest possible attention to detail in my own experimental pursuits.”

At the time, I honestly had no idea how to respond to that sentence. Nobody talks like that. It sounds less like a conversation and more like a speech somebody practiced alone in a mirror for hours.

He walked into my office one afternoon while I was still working as a graduate student in college. His beard was messy and uneven, but the hair on top of his head was perfectly combed back into place. He wore a pair of absurdly thick glasses, nearly half an inch thick, and despite how cloudy they looked, they were always spotless. He cleaned them obsessively, almost ritualistically, polishing them every few minutes whether they needed it or not.

Even the way he moves feels strange.

His movements are sporadic, twitchy almost, but still calculated. It is like watching somebody constantly improvise while secretly following a blueprint only they can see.

Outside of the experiments, though, he is actually incredibly charming.

Dr. Newler and I can never really figure him out. He keeps most of his personal life hidden from us, but every once in a while, he opens up about harmless little things. He loves gardening. He talks about tomatoes and lavender with the same seriousness he talks about neuroscience. He adores his cat, Marlie, and keeps dozens of photographs of her sleeping in strange places around his house. Sometimes, during lunch breaks, he shows us blurry pictures of the cat sprawled across stacks of research papers while he smiles like a proud father.

It is honestly difficult to reconcile that version of him with the man inside the experiment room.

We know he is not originally from the United States, but neither Dr. Newler nor I can pinpoint where he comes from. His articulation disguises everything. There is no clear dialect underneath it, no obvious accent to trace anywhere.

The only thing he ever really reveals about his past is his obsession with dreams.

He talks about them constantly. Not in the way psychologists normally talk about dreams either. To him, dreams are not random firings of the subconscious or discarded memories colliding together during sleep. He speaks about them with almost religious reverence.

“I believe dreams are more than what we give them credit for,” he told us one night. “They are not merely the mind drunkenly piecing together fragments of discarded memory. They are calculated works of art created by something divine. Dreams are windows into another layer of existence. They are what separate mankind from God.”

Then, as usual, he kept going.

He brings up biblical figures constantly. Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams and changed the course of Egypt. Jacob dreamed of the ladder to Heaven. Daniel received prophetic visions while kingdoms rose and collapsed around him. According to Dr. Roberts, entire civilizations once treated dreams as sacred warnings before modern society ‘reduced them to chemical accidents.’

One night, after work, he even mentioned a hidden scripture called The Dreams of Solomon.

According to him, it is an ancient text removed from the biblical canon centuries ago. He claims it describes Solomon discovering that dreams are not just visions, but gateways that allow influence over the subconscious mind itself. Dr. Roberts insists the scripture hints at hidden abilities buried inside human sleep, powers capable of shaping emotion, memory, and even behavior. He believes the Early Church Fathers were too shallow-minded to fully understand its meaning.

Of course, Dr. Newler and I think most of this sounds insane.

But the strange thing about Dr. Roberts is that he never talks about these things like a lunatic. He talks about them calmly, sincerely, and almost academically, like a professor explaining ordinary history.

And then five minutes later, he completely ruins the unsettling atmosphere by asking if anybody wants vegetables from his garden or by showing us another blurry photograph of Marlie sleeping inside one of his desk drawers.

That is the confusing part about him.

He will spend an hour talking about dreams as if they are divine doorways into another reality, then immediately turn around and make coffee for everyone in the office or ask how your family is doing.

June 27, 2026
 Publisher’s Notice

On June 27, 2003, Dr. Wesley Summers passed away peacefully in his sleep.

Dr. Summers was never married and left behind no immediate family. Beyond a small circle of acquaintances and neighbors, little was known about his personal life. Those who knew him generally described him as a quiet and private individual who spent much of his free time golfing on weekends.

Pursuant to the instructions outlined in his Last Will and Testament, Dr. Summers directed that a collection of personal journals, photographs, audio recordings, and related materials start being released to the public exactly 23 years after his death.

Included among his instructions was the following written statement:

"I have committed a great number of sins in my life and accumulated a great deal of money in doing so. If I wish to enter Heaven, I must atone in some way, shape, or form for the crimes against mankind I have committed.
The private documents I wish to have published are meant to serve as a warning to the world.
Do not dig holes in places that may reveal canyons. Sometimes the canyons are deeper than reality can fathom."

Unfortunately, a significant portion of the materials recovered from Dr. Summers’ estate suffered damage due to age, fire exposure, water damage, and general deterioration. As a result, many documents remain incomplete, and portions of the accompanying photographs and recordings require restoration before they can be made available. And several of the intact documents were censored before we obtained them.

For that reason, the materials are being released in stages as preservation and restoration efforts continue.

The following documents represent the portions of the archive that have been successfully recovered thus far. 

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September 3, 1971
Mind control is easy. We cracked the code on it within the first week. 

We didn’t need LSD or scare tactics or some long, wicked plan about planting fear in somebody’s mind. It takes less than an hour, and all you really need is to put someone to sleep, slap on some stem patches, and speak a very key choice of words.

You see, mind control is achieved through dream manipulation.

Dr. Ashton Roberts, the lead scientist of my clinic, perfected the process through sleep studies and dream manipulation. He found that if you allowed a person to fall asleep and carefully monitored their brain waves, eye movement, and muscle activity, you could determine the exact moment they entered REM sleep. 

Once they were in that state, a controlled level of electrical stimulation could partially wake the mind without fully bringing the person into consciousness.

To put it simply, you’re inducing a dream and talking to the person while they’re dreaming. 

Now, the person you’re speaking to is referred to as the REMSelf. It isn’t your full being. It doesn’t have your consciousness, your morals, your ethics, or even the ability to read. It doesn’t even know your own name. What it does know is what it’s told.

The strange thing, though, is that intelligence does not seem to matter to the REMSelf nearly as much as authority does. It behaves like something simplistic, almost infantile, but whatever layer of the mind it inhabits appears to possess terrifying influence over everything beneath it. Memory, habit, perception, and even the body itself all seem strangely vulnerable to whatever the REMSelf accepts as truth.

After determining that a subject is fully asleep and in the proper state, the REMSelf can be fed simplified phrases alongside certain images that seep into the subconscious. Once those ideas settle in, you can probe them, give them directions, and make them carry out whatever task you want without them ever realizing it.

And when the person wakes up, they simply continue with their life and follow the instructions they were given.

Sometimes it’s small things, like avoiding pickles on their sandwiches. It could also be something unthinkable, like committing murder. 

The strange thing is that when people wake up, they are not mindless zombies like you see in movies like Night of the Living Dead, and they are not wandering around in some obvious hypnotic trance either. They’re completely ordinary people. They’ve just been given commands buried deep in their subconscious that they can’t truly resist.

For example, if you told somebody to never eat tomatoes again, they wouldn’t spend all day screaming, “No tomatoes, I must not eat tomatoes!” Instead, whenever they saw tomatoes, they would quietly avoid them. And if somebody asked why, they would probably just shrug and say, “I don’t know, I’ve never really liked tomatoes.”

Or if the instruction was to squish every olive they saw, they wouldn’t go around shouting, “I’m going to smash olives. I’m going to smash them all.” They would simply crush every olive on their plate without giving it much thought. If somebody questioned them, they would describe it like an intrusive thought or an itch they needed to scratch.

In many ways, it resembles hypnosis, though calling it that almost feels insulting. Hypnosis relies on suggestibility, repetition, and the willingness of the subject to participate. This process does not. Once an instruction is accepted by the REMSelf, it remains embedded permanently. We had yet to observe a single subject successfully resist or remove a command after implantation. 

That’s the terrifying part about it.

This isn’t the kind of conditioning that can be spotted easily. In fact, it can barely be detected at all. Honestly, if we didn’t know the names and faces of the patients ourselves, we probably would have forgotten we had ever spoken to the REMSelf in the first place.

When probing the REMself, there is very little it can say. Outside of yes and no, the REMSelf rarely generates original thought on its own. It mostly mirrors the language fed into it, almost like a child learning through repetition.

Dr. Newler, my only colleague, and I have never really understood why that is. Dr. Roberts always claimed that it was simply how the REMSelf processed and relayed information.

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August 18, 1970
Today, Dr. Newler and I started unofficially referring to the whole thing as Project Sleepwalker, mostly because of how many sleepwalkers had started coming through the program. The name is stupid, but I think it’s gonna stick. It’s got a cool ring to it.

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I love every add Hunter does where he’s so clearly making fun of the sponsors but how does he get away with mocking the products?
Why do the brands keep sponsoring him?