HYPNO 37 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FREE FALL GOAL You may want to try such an act of creation, using your altered state of consciousness in the form of a trance-induced dream. Perhaps your fictional character is a seemingly cut-and dried executive type-successful, financially comfortable. Nothing sets him apart from thousands of his kind. And yet something is different: His relaxed manner does not ring quite true to you, there is a muted quality to his gayest moods; even when he is the life of the party, there is a veil of privacy and remoteness in his eyes. Although you have created him, his personality seems to escape even you, because while it persists he is not fully your creation,a flaw in the fabric of your story There is a way of solving the dilemma: let a dream invent his past. The following exercise presents a sample of such a dream solution. INTRODUCTORY NOTE You need not have a problem, in order to be helped and enriched by your dreams; your whole life can be immeasurably enhanced by making creative use of them. By means of them you can travel to new countries, new continents, new galaxies; you can return to the past and you can explore the future. You can even invent live--and live them. This isn't as far-fetched as it seems. Writers of fiction do it all the time; and if you have tried your hand at writing a novel or short story, and you know that developing a character is a complex art. Because real men and women are composites of all that has happened to them since birth, the fictional creation of lifelike people requires that their creator know them not only in the context of all the experiences that went into the shaping of their present selves. He must, in short, endow them with a complete lifetime, even if he only uses a segment of it in his writing. Before going to sleep, put yourself into your altered consciousness, and see your character as the adult he is now, clearly and in great detail. Tell yourself that you will shortly go to sleep, and will have a dream which will answer your questions. Formulate them explicitly Why do his eyes seem to hold memories of pain? Was his success too dearly bought? What his success too dearly bought? What was the price he had to pay? THE EXERCISE Now you feel yourself slipping into reverie, and from there into dream, accompanied by his figure, which grows younger and younger, as you dream back to his twenties, his adolescence, his childhood. THE DREAM Even in the dream you feel the shock wave of surprise: The child sits in a wheelchair, his motionless legs in braces. His breathing is labored. The noises of a crowded neighborhood reach him through the street- level window, reverberating in the small room, grating on his ears. A victim of polio, he tries hard to count his blessings. Even sitting motionless in the depressing room is much, much better than the prison of the iron lung where he was confined for months. But the road back to health stretches interminably and terrifyingly before him. He looks down at his steel-encased legs. How will he get out of this chair, this room, this house, this neighborhood? He grits his teeth-something he has done so often lately that his jaw line is beginning to reflect it. A resolve which has almost hardened into second nature is rekindled. He no longer asks himself whether he can make it; he knows he must, because he cannot accept a half-live, he cannot accept a half-live, he cannot remain a prisoner of his body. Someday he will breathe normally again-or, if not quite normally, then only he will know and feel the hardship. And he will walk again, on straight legs, without cane or without limp no matter what it may cost in time and pain, in isolation and loneliness. And he does accomplish all of this, in year after year of bitter determination. A successful executive, he now breathes without apparent effort, and walks with a brisk step younger than his years. He has left behind the street-floor apartment for a home in the suburbs, insulated from street noises. There is no wheelchair, no iron lung, no cane, no limp. There are only his eyes to betray him.