The mountains sure are pretty on a cold April morning, especially if you're looking out on them from a comfortably heated room. I spent the first night in a tent listening to the frog (which, in the lower elevation urban heat island of Greensboro, mate in February), but it rained literally all night, so that even the stuff inside the tent got damp, just from the air. Then, of course, when I laid it all out in the sun the next day to dry, another sudden afternoon shower swept through before I could get back to it, while I was in class, and soaked everything even more. So nights 2 and 3 I spent inside on an air mattress. Maybe when I come back in May for the second part of the course the weather will cooperate more.
Last night we went into Asheville for supper at a Nepalese restaurant. Lots of Asheville restaurants make use of the local mountain trout, which are apparently similar enough to those of the Himalayas that there is a traditional recipe from Nepal. Most places use filets, but this one was a whole fish – head, skin, bones – which made eating it more work, but it was really good after three days of mostly munching on nuts and dried fruit.
Two versions of Svengali, the fictional hypnotist villain.
Two others of the dinner party, brothers, were both SF and game nerds. We didn't discuss this directly, but after the first day's revelations that the Greeks and Egyptians used something like hypnosis in their healing temples, I had already been thinking about a responsible treatment of the subject in SF or fantasy stories. Later, in bed, it also occurred to me that there's no good treatment of hypnosis in any of the RPGs that I've ever played, either – not even Call of Cthulhu, where insanity and the subconscious mind are major recurring themes. Of course, most games have some kind of magic system that covers all of the weird stuff, from things that we would now do technologically to things that we currently recognize as physically impossible. In fact, hypnosis is a first level spell in the OSRIC system I mentioned in an earlier post.
The gestures of this spell weave a hypnotic power into the illusionist’s words, affecting 1d6 creatures. Those not making their saving throws are subject to a suggestion made by the illusionist, identical to that made in the magic user spell Suggestion (but with a much shorter duration). The only indication about whether a creature has been affected by the Hypnotism spell is whether or not it responds to the suggestion.
That's the party line in the training materials, too – that it's impossible to make a subject do something immoral or against his will. That's convenient, but there's a large body of social psychology research that shows that many people are highly suggestible under the right conditions, and that we can be influenced to do very bad things, from rioting right on up to genocide. Do those fall under the category of things that we want to do?
This is an unpublished reflection from 4/11/16, slightly added to, posted here to Steemit while I work on a grant application.
FURTHER READING
You are NOT 'Getting Sleepy' is a column for The Intergalactic Medicine Show on the uses of hypnosis in science fiction, which this weekend inspired me to write.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160207-brain-violence-rage-snap-science-booktalk/
Only slightly tangential, since those definitions of who is "in" and who is "out" are very flexible.