I swallowed. “Two nights ago.” I avoided glancing at my arm. The skin around the black line on my wrist was raised and angry. If I was being honest, last night would be the last gap in my memory. But instead I chose the missing space two nights ago because that was what I most needed to know.
“When approximately in your day do you think you lost this memory?” I could hear scratches on Dr. Crispin’s notepad.
“At night,” I answered.
The scratching stopped. “At night. When you should be sleeping. What makes you think your memory is misplaced at all?”
“I’ve … well … I’ve woken up in places, seen evidence that I’ve been places at night that seem impossible if I weren’t awake.”
“So you’re sleepwalking.”
I clenched my fists. At first sleepwalking had seemed like the most logical explanation. I’d even hoped for that to be all it was. A childhood habit brought out by some weird form of stress. I felt my mouth shift into a crooked grin. “Is there such a thing as sleep driving?” I asked.
Dr. Crispin let out a puff of air. “I would say not.” He paused for effect. “Jessica, how much do you know about hypnosis?”
There was a second delay in my response as I was forced to remember that Jessica was the name I’d given him. “Only what I’ve seen on television.”
“Allow me to enlighten you then. The conscious mind,” he began, “is what you’re used to thinking about. It’s what you think of when you think of yourself. Who is Jessica Faire? That’s the conscious mind. The unconscious mind is everything else. The unconscious mind processes two million pieces of sensory information every second. The reality of which you’re aware is the product of what was sent to you by the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is more logical, rational, analytical, but it can only operate based off what the unconscious mind has chosen to give it.”
“So, you’re trying to tell me that my unconscious mind could choose not to send me all the information. It could be holding out on me?”
“Exactly. Have you ever gotten a bruise or a cut and not remembered how it got there?”
I thought about this. “… Yeah, I suppose so.”
“That’s because your unconscious mind decided not to share that piece of information with your conscious mind even though something clearly happened to cause it. Something capable of being remembered. Only you didn’t remember it.
“Have you ever smelled something that you didn’t even know was familiar and suddenly been flooded by a random memory seemingly long forgotten?”
“Yes.” I nodded more fervently, thinking of my grandmother and the smell of cinnamon gum.
“The job of hypnosis is similar to that of the familiar smell. Hypnosis is intended to make the unconscious mind cough up additional bits of information that it’s been hoarding for itself.”
The pulse thudded in my wrist and at the base of my throat. I felt as though I was walking closer and closer to the edge of a cliff and very soon I’d be looking over to see what lay at the bottom. “Okay,” I said. “I think I understand.”
“Good.” Dr. Crispin snapped the cover of his notepad closed and rested it on his knee. “You’ll be able to remember everything that happened here today, and in your altered state, I will not ask you to do anything that you don’t want to do. You understand?” I nodded again. “I’ll need you to listen very carefully to my voice. Using only my voice, I will lull you into a heightened sense of relaxation, a technique known as induction by suggestion. My sentences will be in time with your breaths, my words repetitive. Boring, even. Keep your breathing steady. Gradually, I will move from suggestion and begin making commands. There we’ll enter into the hypnotic state to explore the last time you can’t remember. From two nights ago. Are you ready, Jessica?”
My mouth went dry at the same time that my palms needed to be wiped once again on my pant legs. “Ready.”