It was a room with simple design. A simple bed, old but empty of any sign of it belonging to someone. A desk, disorganized but with nothing personal on it, no pictures, no stickers and clearly only used but not cared for. A white board, with traces of lots of ideas on it but ultimately white and empty. Walls empty of any characteristics belonging to the person living in the room. The only thing that resembled a used room, was books. Although the books varied in topics, their general theme was psychology.
It was in such a room that Amin woke up once again. Despairing at being alive once again. He is a genius, that is what he tells himself everyday, by therapist order. He called it positive feedback. He calls the entire healing process, cognitive behavioral therapy. He was sent there to be the genius, he once was. He knew 4 languages by the age of 17, which was not overly impressive, but the fact that he started at 14 was. People expected him to continue studying this major they forced on him. He just couldn’t. He just could not be the same as everybody, strong enough to accept reality and go on.
His family was well off, at least according to everyone else. His father was a scientist and his mother, a lawyer. They love each other but had a tumultuous relationship when they first began their arranged marriage, leaving him a little broken and insecure. He did, in fact wrote a pretty depressing story about it once, which at the end he commited suicide and no one noticed. He died alone waiting for someone to rescue him, but none came.
Despite everything, the therapy helped him. It also helped that he liked psychology very much, more than his own major. Who cared how much privileged he was to be in this university when he could not even choose the major he liked. His family was against it. His father made choice an impossible thing. His mother suppressed his tendencies, well to be fair he was a little eccentric.
Psychology, what an interesting major it was. Studying whys and hows of human mind and behavior, who could resist. He was fascinated from freud to modern, but Jung’s work, which sounded like a religious journey rather than anything concrete, fascinated him.
Jung said that humans can go through a process called individualization to journey inside themselves. In this journey first they meet aspects of themselves that they had suppressed before. He called these aspects, shadows. Then he began to tell how humans have a hidden gender. Males have a feminine side to them called, anima and females have a masculine side to them called, animus. To be honest, he did not believe this one bit. Jung defined the last stage as Self and he said it was the completion of psyche and when one's conciousness will be indistinguishable from shared unconcious. That is right Self, jungians often times write it with capital letter.
Jung believed we all have a consciousness, that means all the thoughts that we have and we are aware off. He believed we have a personal unconscious. Have you ever slept on a decision and in the morning you had the answer, that is roughly it. Finally there is a shared unconscious. He reasoned that sometimes when people are so far away that they possibly could not contact each other, they still have the same idea, like the invention of telephone.
Today he was going to do something significant. He did not believe Jung at all, after all if he was that good why most jungian organizations end up divided. He, however believed that there was some merit to what he was saying. Dreams are believed to be outside the boundary of consciousness by psychologists. He thought maybe dreams can be considered personal unconscious and through them sometimes people have premonitions. At least his mother said so despite being a lawyer. If that is so then through dreams one can enter shared unconscious, the sea of nearly infinite information. He called this dreamescape. He had built a machine to wake him up in dream to achieve lucid dreaming. Hopefully with lucid dreaming, he could access dreamescape. Lucid dreaming is a condition when a person is awake while dreaming. This will reduce their sleep quality but gives them control over their dream. If he could lucid dream, and through it enter the dreamescape, maybe he would not be such a failure anymore in real life. With access to endless information, he could be the leading figure of modern age and leave a legacy eternal.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
He was going to finish the machine today and after that there would be no failed genius anymore. He would be the most genius person in the entire world. If he was a genius maybe then he could have his mother love again, his father acknowledgement and maybe even his attention. The only one who doesn't see him as a failure nor a monster. By him he meant Alex, the prince of university. He kinda had a crush on him.
When the crush first became apparent, with it came the burden of knowing he was homosexual. He knew his parents very well; This knowledge warned him of a terrible coming out experience. So for now, he was using every dark psychology tricks he knew, to see if he could somehow make himself asexual. Asexual and not straight because that way he could solve the problem of love altogether and make him suitable for an arranged marriage. The problem was, he still had no success for it.
If was one blessing in his life for now, It was that he did not need to wait for night to come to sleep and dream. Thank god for virtual reality novels and augmented reality technology which gave him the idea that one can dream even awake. He had named his creation, The RealDream . Since it was supposed to change his reality by dreaming. The Real Dream, was just the size of a helmet and it was a little messy but hopefully it worked.
He lied on the bed. He tried to relax, unsuccessfully. He put on RealDream on his head slowly and carefully. He had chosen “Void” as the command for voice activation, since he believed it would turn out empty and useless and he would have to live, his empty life, again.
“Void” he said with resignation for fate.
His eyelids grew heavy in the helmet. He slowly drifted to sleep. It was abrupt but also felt gradual as he found himself awake in his dream. His dream was of himself studying aerospace in Australia, far from this life and beginning a new. He dreamed of a life suitable for him. He found himself brimming with joy. For sometime, he forgot about his purpose. He just wanted even the little joy, he could have right now. He wanted to live in the moment now. He eventually came to himself when he went to library and found a book with gibberish writing. He knew that most people can not read and write in any known language while dreaming, since that region of the brain is less active.
Amin searched for ways to have control of the dream. He found that he could affect the dream in subtle ways but did not have any control over it. He tried and tried again and again but progress was slow as a snail. He tried day by day. Each time a little more control over the dream. Until the day he could have full control over his dream while using RealDream, but still none over his own dreams. At least he had started dreaming. He did not remember ever dreaming or remembering his dreams. These days he dreamed every night and he could remember all of them vividly. He could even will himself to be lucid in dreams by leaving a note, or some kind of mental suggestion for the night. Things like “I want to be awake for my dream tonight”, or “I want a memorable dream tonight” did the trick very well.
Amin's dreams had affected reality already. He did it so by simulating situations in real life and seeing the results. Since he had less awkward social moments, and wasted less time on his daily descisions, his time actually studying and listening to class increased. His marks rose and he received acknowledgment for his achievements. Praise was out of the question since he had yet to live up to the expectations set for him from childhood. He was far from ever achieving them. He was however close to achieving his own dream since he had already began to contact Australian universities and was thinking of applying there. Full scholarship was preferred since then he could actually speak to his family, without being dependent and fear of being disowned. He could slowly fix the relationships and then even come out someday. He however lacked three things, time, effort and practicality. He needed to see that there was still time for those things and they were far in the future and he needed to live at the current and plan for the future. He knew all these and was trying to make himself better.
Amin was clever in doing things and cautious enough to know that planning was just the beginning, revising it, adding to it and most importantly exemplar execution was required for success. He also knew that for love, time was needed, effort too but not planning because if he planned, maybe the other person fell in love with him, but he would never truly love the other, since he was just another project of his, just one that he received great marks on.