6I'll never forget what you said to me. "William, what if you never had to live with the past?"
"What do you mean" I asked.
"What if you never had to face up to what you did the night before. People spend their lives drinking away their guilt and pain, but what if you could just forget the acts you regret- black it out!"
"That would be an interesting ability indeed."
And that's when it all began.
"William- I want you to find out what it is that makes our conscience. What lobe and what protein. And how to repress it!"
"Psychiatric medication has been working on repressing feelings for years" I said. "I guess there just never was much use in the field of conscience-altering as a big business."
But since I was getting so bored in the lab, and lately the business has been very slow, I decided that I would take up your curiosity as a hobby, myself. I worked in the lab night after night trying to develop a new drug. And week after week, you and Jon were my personal guinea pigs. That's when things got really interesting.
One week you went to see Jon at the Chapel. He had agreed to experiment for soul-searching reasons. His doubts of the spiritual life grew stronger the more he learned about the way something purely physical could affect a person's mind, body, and even, to a great extent, those things we consider "spiritual" characteristics. In the early stages of development, the medication took a turn towards violence. You told me of dreams- crazy dreams, where you would hack people up into little pieces. Those things which your mind naturally inhibits, the primitive instincts, took over in your sleep. "No one is a hypocrite in dreams"; this proved very true for you. I remember how you would talk about it.
"I can't believe the things I do in my dreams! Murder, theft, but mostly murder. Oh, and cheating. I'm *always* cheating. Whatever you gave us has made me a monster and turned sleep into one long nightmare." You would tell me.
" At least it's not a daydream."