I'm in hypnotherapy. The hypnotist asks "May we contact the part of Chris that causes chronic illness?"

And a nameless voice answers! It says "I just follow orders, and Chris asks for experiences proving the world's out to get him.

• "To make him reject threatening things.
• "To feel comfortable--danger is a familiar state, from his childhood.
• "To justify feeling anger.
• "To have problems for that fierce intelligence to gnaw on!"

• "I crash computers,
• "I alter luck,
• "I make others screw up,
• "I lead him to witness disasters,
• "I send him precognitive nightmares."

"I'd just as soon send him happiness, but, you know, garbage in, garbage out. He indulges in paranoid trains of thought, because his abusers forced him to look for the worst in people and institutions, and run if he found it. It kept him alive as a kid.

"But as his psychic abilities have grown, his suspicions attract persecution more actively, like that crazy bunch running the Bay Area Dreamworkers Group.

"Psychics and paranoia are like drivers and alcohol--a fatal mix. If he wants to quit having bad luck he has to quit indulging in negativity all the time.

"Because he's literally asking for it."

And I slide out of trance, and into shock. At what I just heard.

At what I just said.

AN APOLOGETIC NOTE

For some years I had a footnote here emphasizing this was a hypnotic trance inside a dream, not a waking hypnosession. But I recently discovered I was wrong. Looking for something else, I went back through my original journal for 1994 and found I'd actually gone to a hypnotherapist that day, and found myself saying these things in trance. It isn't a dream!

Paranoid Habits was one of at least 1000 short pieces I edited in 2001 to start the World Dream Bank; the sheer quantity led to long hours, fatigue, and, clearly, bad fact-checking; but I'm shocked I could mistake something so fundamental. I'm now going through those older pieces, checking names and dates... and very much hoping this is the only error of this magnitude. I've allowed nondream material on the site of course, especially if it arises from other altered states--but labeled clearly as such. I apologize to readers. I hope it's the only howler I uncover.

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