This is a slightly serious story that will build up slowly. I am taking my time with it and would love constructive criticism!)

We are all able to choose our destiny, to carve our own path through a hostile and aggressive world. It’s all well and good. It’s the rare person who doesn’t dream the American dream, or aspire to climb the highest heights… and I am one of those rarities, a person who rejects the possible in favor of the familiar. The best times in life have already been experienced, that’s my theory, and so out of nostalgia I dig deep into the past to find happiness.

That’s why I was locked into a highchair with a embroidered bib around my head, being fed spoonfuls of slop like a baby. Jenna made airplane noises as she flew the spoon towards me in a spiral motion, and as I obliged by opening my mouth and swallowing the banana chunks, I wondered if I was on the right path.

Let me backtrack a tad. I’m Professor Remington. Through my long and illustrious career I had found answers that explained the world around me, but not myself. I understood how the cartesian effect influences quad dimensional simulations, and yet happiness eluded me. And I had no love, not for God, not for myself, and heaven know I had not experienced the touch of a woman since graduate school.

And so I had started to slowly drift further into depression… until I attended a lectureheld by a very young psychologist, Prof. Jennifer Finis. To be true, she was young only by the standards of her field. But her new and innovative approaches to human behavior modeling were revolutionizing psychological thought immensely. I had found myself engrossed in her speech, hanging onto every word.

“And so you see, previous studies of dreams have indicated that the majority of dreams are in fact nightmares. These “nightmares” are used to simulate emergency situations, so that in real life the body will be able to react promptly and efficiently. However, our studies indicate that the rest of the dreams that the human brain imagines during sleep, are of a curiously regressive nature.”

”It is accepted that sleep is essential for healthy functioning of a human body. And so we believe that we have pinpointed the exact time during a sleep session where a body achieves true rest. This occurs during a state when mental faculties are reduced to an infantile level…”

I was completely fascinated. After she was finished, I resolved to question her further on her findings. I later found myself talking to her over the phone after her lecture had concluded. She found some of my questions interesting enough and invited me over to her hotel room, to discuss things further.

She had noticed that during the infantile dreaming state, pleasure chemicals such as dopamine were flooded into the brain. If a person dreamed nothing but nightmares and did not experience REM or infantile dreams, they would gain almost no benefit from sleep at all. I laughed and told her that I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since I was a child. One thing led to another and… we ended up sleeping together. I didn’t hear from her again for a while after that, until I recieved a phonecall from her about an experiment.

”We’re experimenting with hypnosis to try and study the infantile state more easily. We believe that your expertise would be a most valuable asset to our team. And to be frank, Remington… it might even be good for you to be part of the experiment.”