“Will it stimulate the pleasure center, or the speech center?”

Oh, the moralistic gleam in an ACLU eye, whenever that pleasure-center bit came up! Haber concealed all irony and irritation, and answered with friendly sincerity, “No. It’s not like ESB, you see. It’s not like electrical stimulation, or chemical stimulation, of any center; it involves no intrusion on special areas of the brain. It simply induces the entire brain activity to change, to shift into another of its own, natural states. It’s a bit like a catchy tune that sets your feet tapping. So the brain enters and maintains the condition desired for study or therapy, as long as need be I called it the Augmentor to point up its noncreative function. Nothing is imposed from outside. Sleep induced by the Augmentor is precisely, literally, the kind and quality of sleep normal to that particular brain. The difference between it and the electrosleep machines is like a personal tailor compared to mass-produced suits. The difference between it and electrode implantation is—oh, hell—a scalpel to a sledgehammer!”

“But how do you make up the stimuli you use? Do you teep record an alpha rhythm, for instance, from one subject to use on another teep?”

He had been evading this point. He did not intend to lie, of course, but there was simply no use talking about uncompleted research till it was done and tested; it might give a quite wrong impression to a nonspecialist. He launched into an answer easily, glad to hear his own voice instead of her snapping and bangle-clattering and teeping; it was curious how he only heard the annoying little sound when she was talking. “At first I used a generalized set of stimuli, averaged out from records of many subjects. The depressive patient mentioned in the report was treated successfully thus. But I felt the effects were more random and erratic than I liked. I began to experiment. On animals, of course. Cats. We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot! Well, with animal subjects I found that the most promising line was to use rhythms previously recorded from the subject’s own brain. A kind of auto-stimulation via recordings. Specificity is what I’m after, you see. A brain will respond to its own alpha rhythm at once, and spontaneously. Now of course there are therapeutic vistas opened up along the other line of research. It might be possible to impose a slightly different pattern gradually upon the patient’s own: a healthier or completer pattern. One recorded previously from that subject, possibly, or from a different subject. This could prove tremendously helpful in cases of brain damage, lesion, trauma; it might aid a damaged brain to re-establish its old habits in new channels—something which the brain struggles long and hard to do by itself. It might be used to ‘teach’ an abnormally functioning brain new habits,  and so forth. However, that’s all speculative, at this point, and if and when I return to research on that line I will of course reregister with HEW.” That was quite true. There was no need to mention that he was doing research along that line, since so far it was quite inconclusive and would merely be misunderstood. “The form of autostimulation by recording that I’m using in this therapy may be described as having no effect on the patient beyond that exerted during the period of the machine’s functioning: five to ten minutes.” He knew more of any HEW lawyer’s specialty than she knew of his; he saw her nodding slightly at that last sentence, it was right down her alley.

But then she said, “What does it do, then?” “Yes, I was coming to that,” Haber said, and quickly readjusted his tone, since the irritation was showing through. “What we have in this case is a subject who is afraid to dream: an oneirophobe. My treatment is basically a simple conditioning treatment in the classic tradition of modern psychology. The patient is induced to dream here, under controlled conditions; dream content and emotional affect are manipulated by hypnotic suggestion. The subject is being taught that he can dream safely, pleasantly, et cetera, a positive conditioning which will leave him free of his phobia. The Augmentor is an ideal instrument for this purpose. It ensures that he will dream, by instigating and then reinforcing his own typical d-state activity. It might take a subject up to an hour and a half to go through the various stages of s-sleep and reach the d-state on his own, an impractical length for daytime therapy sessions, and moreover during deep sleep the force of hypnotic suggestions concerning dream content might be partly lost. This is undesirable; while he’s in conditioning, it’s essential that he have no bad dreams, no nightmares. Therefore the Augmentor provides me with both a time-saving device and a safety factor. The therapy could be achieved without it; but it would probably take months; with it, I except to take a few weeks. It may prove to be as great a timesaver, in appropriate cases, as hypnosis itself has proved to be in psychoanalysis and in conditioning therapy.”

Teep,said the lawyer’s recorder, and Bong said his own desk communicator in a soft, rich, authoritative voice. Thank God. “Here’s our patient now. Now I suggest, Miss Lelache, that you meet him, and we may chat a bit if you like; then perhaps you can fade off to that leather chair in the corner, right? Your presence shouldn’t make any real difference to the patient, but if he’s constantly reminded of it, it could slow things down badly. He’s a person in a fairly severe anxiety state, you see, with a tendency to interpret events as personally threatening, and a set of protective delusions built up—as you’ll see. Oh yes, and the recorder off, that’s right, a therapy session’s not for the record. Right? O.K., good. Yes, hello, George, come on in! This is Miss Lelache, the participant from HEW. She’s here to see the Augmentor in use.” The two were shaking hands in the most ridiculously stiff way. Crash clank! went the lawyer’s bracelets. The contrast amused Haber: the harsh fierce woman, the meek characterless man. They had nothing in common at all.

“Now,” he said, enjoying running the show, “I suggest that we get on with business, unless there’s anything special on your mind, George, that you want to talk about first?” He was, by his own apparently unassertive movements, sorting them out: the Lelache to the chair in the far corner, Orr to the couch. “O.K., then, good. Let’s run off a dream. Which will incidentally constitute a record for HEW of the fact that the Augmentor doesn’t loosen your toenails, or harden your arteries, or blow your mind, or indeed have any side effects whatsoever except perhaps a slight compensatory decrease in dreaming sleep tonight.” As he finished the sentence he reached out and placed his right hand on Orr’s throat, almost casually.

Orr flinched from the contact as if he had never been hypnotized.

Then he apologized. “Sorry. You come at me so suddenly.”

It was necessary to rehypnotize him completely, employing the v-c induction method, which was perfectly legal of course but rather more dramatic than Haber liked to use in front of an observer from HEW; he was furious with Orr, in whom he had sensed growing resistance for the last five or six sessions. Once he had the man under, he put on a tape he had cut himself, of all the boring repetition of deepening trance and posthypnotic suggestion for rehypnotizing: “You are comfortable and relaxed now. You are sinking deeper into trance,” and so on and so on. While it played he went back to his desk and sorted through papers with a calm, serious face, ignoring the Lelache. She kept still, knowing the hypnotic routine must not be interrupted; she was looking out the window at the view, the towers of the city.

At last Haber stopped the tape and put the trancap on Orr’s head. “Now, while I’m hooking you up let’s talk about what kind of dream you’re going to dream, George. You feel like talking about that, don’t you?”