I go back to the video of the hypnotist and I press play. The man is again speaking, as if he’d never paused at all. His head is gloamed white and slurred with purple. He has eyes that sometimes roar, but held confined in this clunky, bitmapped image. A music comes on around him — the same blank synth spread through all the other hypno-wanting videos and mp3s and websites with embedded sound. He begins to speak into me, saying the same things all the others have, asking again that I relax, that I go deeper on into my softing, that I forget the whole rest of my whole life, my future, my glow of nowhere, that I turn on my unconscious mind, “because our unconscious minds know all of the things we have experienced in the past… all of the information from our past… perfectly acceptable for you in every way… and in a moment you might have a new idea. ..” The words do what they want coming at my head. I’m kind of glazing over, but not, I think, in the way he means — I’m fucking bored, but no more tired than I had been, or groggy, or wide open — at least I think.
The man ends the video then almost as quickly as he’d begun, with his website information repeated for the cause, followed by a slow fade to a whole black, but for the same URL writ on the screen, replication within replication, waiting for the next viewer in the queue to wake it up, open it on. I close the tab and go back to my e-mail, where there is nothing new, even when I hit refresh.
The sum message of this video and others like it is: You are comfortable. You are safe. You should slowly breathe in and out. There are many adverbs. You cannot hear the speaker breathe him- or herself. “Relax,” they say. “Relax.” The only thing we seem to need to know is it’s okay. “That’s right,” they say. “Thaaat’s right.” The lilt of the voice like some secret broadcast over America, in slow uncombing. “Everything is just okay. No matter what happens, you will be calm and you will feel better than you have ever felt before.” Many programs like to suggest you floating up into or with clouds out of your bed. You might be encouraged to see yourself in the bed soft below you, the room familiar. You exit your body and your home. You might be transported into the sky or, if you like, a beach. “Even if you do not fall asleep during this,” many mention, “you will feel more rested and relaxed as a result.” The product, then, we may imagine, might not necessarily be something immediate to feel, but instead a product that will open in us without warning. Many of the meta-commentary-type allusions that pepper the dream-speak are concerned with allaying any fears that you can err here, affirming there is no intended massive goal. The direction, they insist, is yours. Wherever you want to go, you can go there. Any choice you make is the right choice. Your imagination belongs to you. “So relaxed,” they say. “So comfortable,” as if the words themselves in transition to you then must immediately become true. Somehow even the most horridly produced versions of these videos on YouTube often have more than one hundred thousand views, with comment testimonials from users proclaiming the product’s virility. And of course, beyond the idea that these tapes are working because of the actual instructions and their effect, what these directives succeed in more so is allowing the mind to become distracted from itself — you are no longer fixated on the monologue or further scrying, but aimed at something designed to awake a blank. All of these ads and videos together — loops in looping — form a network, an endless hole in which to drown. Perhaps the strangest thing, and at the same time the most obvious, is that most people by now are so tuned out to this kind of influx that this video effectively does not to most people exist. We’re so used to the pyramid of input that most of the day, during countless hours trolling, we don’t even see these icons and their connectors any longer, at least not consciously, or pragmatically. It’s become as clear as not looking at messy spots in your apartment or gaudy billboards near your house — they are part of an environment — more, they are the environment itself: the scab woke on the skin. We are tuned in to tuning out. And yet, in surrounding, they are there. They are looking at you looking or not looking. You are taking this all in.
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And so how the fuck under this false ceiling and its false ceiling and the house and all this meat now do we relax? What in one hour might seem the best thing might in another scream a knot, make one want to hit one in one’s mouth. Beyond even just the far-off future, there is the present minute of having constant day in constant time, a hundred ways to spin in any intuition. All these arts asking questions left unsaid. All these doors and hallways prying open and looming open and awake. The weight of decades of human dreaming. And every second, seen or unseen, within and around our heads, the spread. Each idea stung with all its gather. The unindexed histories of contexts and accusational collisions and theories, exponential. Imagine our history’s quantified timeline ideas translated into thicking glass — glass growing out and thicker in our air there, unseen. How difficult it can seem sometimes to breathe. And with that, the growing contention of how obvious all of this light is. How well we already know what we are underneath. How we are expected to keep curving. Reaching. Eating. Going. Hello. Hello. Hey.
“Just get wasted” is a common response from a lot of people when sleeping trouble is brought up. Indeed, being drunk, if not quite parallel to entering the unconscious via dreaming, affords rooms within rooms, warbled hallways, multiplying doors, ones often unremembered in the sobering process, through which the body, often, when forced to return, becomes ill. Much like a role-playing game’s “summoning sickness,” wherein new characters are unable to act in early rounds of their invocation due to the trauma there involved in being brought into the field, coming back out of the drunk state reiterates some common side effect of sleep medication, and insomnia: dizziness, nausea, exhaustion, sweating — damage.
But drunk sleep is shallow, prone to exit. The architecture of the unconscious rooms is nearer to the brain, deflating dream components under muffle, often unremembered, zapped. Like those faking their way through exercises seeing no results, the aggregate of many consecutive days of sleep through beverage-based sedation can pile up on the body, rested and not rested, groggy, gross. Sleep without the drink then might seem even harder, and more required to feel full. The doors, as with all forms of such influx, grow wider, their halls thereafter nearer-walled. Something greased in the gears of that depressant as an entry, dragging the cells down heavy, as with the same caloric fat in breakfast cereal, though also in the loosening of the cheeks and meat around the brain — a state not that far off from early insomniac gyration, where the air feels different but also new. Staying awake seventeen hours has been equated, in the drop of performance, to a blood-alcohol-content level of 0.05 percent (one to two beers, depending on your beef), and further corresponds in ruined performance with continued deprivation. In the same way, the effect of alcohol rising in the bloodstream begins with onset euphoria, which becomes lethargy, which becomes confusion, which becomes stupor, and, finally, coma, heading, again, toward death.
On particularly nasty nights post — high school, up late sweating in small apartments looking hard on into machines, I preferred the slur of NyQuil. At first I used the serving cup and filled it full twice, a double serving, justified by my frame. Lying down with that thick liquid purple light leaking inside me seemed to promise untold fortunes — like now, with its warnings of “marked drowsiness” and warnings against using while “operating machinery,” the substance turning on all through the blank spots there inside me, I could at last go quiet, lurch off, under the warming ceiling spreading out through my insides. Its bouquet like doctor’s exam-table paper and cheap tacky candy, bite like melted plastic child slides, aftertaste like licking the linings of a rarely ever worn winter coat — or something — still the head swims lightly. Still, a little jostle, slot machines, a slow stirring around the shoulders, at the skull’s edge a muffle lamp. Other nights two servings would say nothing, and still hours later I’d be in the same spot anywhere, if that much more groggy underneath the antihistamine. One thing about chemically altering the door of your coming and going is that when they don’t seem to click, the frustration becomes that much more severe. This door, even with these keys, did not open. So now then I need more keys that push harder. I must cut through all the locks. So I took more NyQuil. I’d swig off it fat-lipped, get half a bottle in, the slicky throttle of it enough to suggest drowse by perfume and lick alone. Maybe a few swigs in a row until it seemed right. Whichever. Drink enough until you can feel it in your head.