I just love pictures like this! Images that inspire and stimulate the imagination, often through their sheer simplicity. Take this photograph for instance, at first sight nothing much going on, just a girl standing in a rather ill-fitting uniform dress. But look deeper, take another look. Just one glance at the girl’s eyes and a whole scenario suggests itself, opens up. I found this on Tumblr and added it to my Tumblr blog last week – a welcome break from struggling with my new book (which this scenario has absolutly nothing at all to do with, incidentally).
“…That’s it… Good girl! Look deep, deep, deep in to the pattern, mind emptying like a doll, just like a dolly, a plastic plaything waiting to be told what to do next, frightened to be out of its box… Shall we put you back in your box where you’ll feel all safe and sound and secure? Yes? Then let’s get you back to your room, all safely locked away… Come along, my Little Dolly School Child… Yes, I think we’ll call you that from now on…”
“Yes, miss…”
‘Little Dolly School Child’ – How she hated the title the woman had just dubbed her, or how she WOULD hate it, once she came to be aware of it, consciously that is! The school uniform summer dress she had been crammed into – and crammed WAS the operative word, it seemed at least a size too small, perhaps smaller – had been the last straw, at her age. It looked – and made her feel – ridiculous and she hated herself for kowtowing to her governess’s wishes in letting herself be squeezed into it.
But there was so much more to it, to her life, now, so MANY other indignities she had ended up submitting to since that woman had come to stay – a lock on her door, not being allowed downstairs, having a new room set aside for her high under the eaves decorated like a child’s room, a bed which looked more like an adult-sized crib, that rule about being ‘seen and not heard’. This was only the latest manifestation of that woman’s domination – Somehow she just didn’t seem able to stand up to her. But making her wear a child’s school dress was going a step too far. They’d underestimated her; she was going to make a break for it, run away; all she needed to do was find some other clothes to change into first… Well such had been the plan at least… But…
She’d made it to the drawing room – and become frozen in space as if her brain had just iced over. A spinning, shimmering, eye-catching mobile had been mounted in the doorway, just above head height – another hung in front of the window. Both were identical to the one which hung above her bed and at which she had spent countless hours gazing, slack-jawed and glassy eyed while the ‘relaxation tape’ her governess had introduced droned on and on and on in soft lilting feminine tones about… About what? She could never quite remember. Where they had been installed she was bound to catch sight of one or the other of them – and when she did…
She was utterly captivated, rooted to the spot, had been unable to move for over half an hour, totally under the control of an entire set of deep-seated post-hypnotic commands. She was very much aware of the bars on her room’s window, she was totally unaware of the bars which had been erected around her mind, ring-fencing her personality in within her own body, didn’t even comprehend such a thing as being possible.
The shimmering concentric series of hollow two-dimensional spinning stars, each mounted within a larger one and spinning independently from it, would seem hypnotic to anyone one. But when that individual has been trained month after will-sapping month, the object set up as a hypnotic trigger, obedience to it deeply and patiently ingrained – well, as a security measure it was better than the strongest lock. She hadn’t even been aware of her governess entering, of her governess layering trigger phrase on trigger phrase, deepening her trance, reinforcing the effect such that in future she wouldn’t even be able to get THIS far unaccompanied… It was why she’d ‘accidentally’ left the girl’s door unlocked in the first place.