I was sitting with my wife, Nina, and my son, Gabe, watching one of those morning kids’ TV shows. It was summer. Both my wife and I had the day off, so we decided to just enjoy time together at home. She was reading The Gunslinger, by Stephen King – her favorite author – and leaning against me, the gentle rise and fall of her body against mine lulling me into a deeper state of placidity than I had already achieved in my meditation earlier in bed. I meditate. It’s something I do to keep my energies aligned. It helps me to be a better father, husband, and better for my job too.

My son was playing with blocks on the floor – pushing them around, stacking them, making them into odd shapes and arrays that I found to be rather intricate and curious. I took a closer look at them and found that he had created the symbol of the ankh. Odd. He looked over his shoulder at me when he saw me looking and gave me a wide smile composed of sporadic little teeth. They were really coming in at this time. He pointed a little, chubby finger when he looked back at it, staring as if in a daze as his body rocked side to side.

I took a pillow and got off the couch, putting it behind Nina’s head. She let out a little sigh, looked up at me with a raised eyebrow that told me I shouldn’t have done that, then hummed a little chuckle before going back to her book. I knelt down next to Gabe and he leaned against me. He felt warm and his presence was even more soothing than Nina’s had been. He looked up at me with those sky-blue peepers and pointed again at the ankh.

Now, I know through cursory readings of ancient lore and myth that the ankh was an Egyptian hieroglyph used to represent life. The ankh was used to bestow the power of life unto the ancient pharaohs for them to sustain and give life to others in the afterlife. I put my hand on my son’s head, ran my thumb through the softness of his brown hair. He gurgled and babbled for a moment and then leaned forward to put his hand on the block where the cross meets the oval atop.

What do you have there, bud? I asked, though it was a nonverbal communication. I figured a message like that might get through to him better. Over the past few months I’ve found that sending a message through telepathic communication.

“What?” you ask.

Good question.

My name is Dr. Jonathan Rosen. My friends call me Johnny. I’m a clinical psychologist by trade – and I work with those afflicted with psychoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. These are good, wholesome people who have had an incursion of something outside of their own control which inhibits their ability to abide to societal norms. Something outside of their control. And it is my job to help to treat them, to give them a path towards recovery which will allow them to have some semblance of “normalcy” in their lives, so they can return back to their homes and families. I love what I do, but I am not your average clinical psychologist.

There are views on mental illnesses that differ depending on which idea you ascribe to. The majority of clinicians believe that mental illness is pathological – something that is not supposed to be there and must be meted out through the use of drugs and rearranging the chemical imbalances of the brain. Others believe that there is a more spiritual approach – realigning the chakras, prayer, meditation, using energy healing to help a person to consolidate those traumas and emotions which are hidden under countless layers of repression. There are the behaviorists… but anyone with a brain and a mind to match doesn’t put too much stock into that. And then there are those who are looked on as deviants, blasphemes, and charlatans. The code of psychologists, an unwritten doctrine of dogmatic formula, forces most to scowl and roll their eyes at those who believe in this system of treatment. There are very few of us who still believe. This is a system of treatment that is somewhat central to the spiritual and the clinical. It combines both the use of chemicals and scientifically proven treatment as well as the utility of energy healing. We are not reiki masters though – we are still clinicians.

We are what is known as Psychoturgists. In the past we were given different names: wizards, witches, sorcerers, magicians, warlocks. But those are antiquated and have quite the negative connotation attached to them. We were hunted. We were slain for our practices and beliefs – and yes, there were those of us who used our abilities to create chaos in the world, but most of us tend to be healers, doctors, psychologists. We use our abilities to give our patients a sense of comfort, a feeling that they are accepted and loved, and that there is nothing wrong with them if they don’t believe it’s wrong. And sometimes – rarely – but sometimes we use our abilities to combat invasive entities that intrude from the outer plane of the Collective Unconscious to have a conduit to our plane and inflict pain and chaos through the mind of the patient.

“Collective Unconscious? Entities?” you ask.

Again, good questions, but let me come back to that.

The ankh represents hidden wisdom. Hidden wisdom can manifest from the experiences of daily living, through treatment, contemplation, or in dreams. And dreams are deeply connected to the Collective Unconscious, or CU for short. In most people, dreams are the only way they can have a glimpse of the world beyond – the world that surrounds us at all times, but has been washed away by all the noise and all the psychological interference. Way back in prehistoric times, it was believed that everyone lived in a schizophrenic state, thinking they were hearing the voice of gods which determined their fates. This is what is known as bicameralism. But, over time, with the development of the prefrontal cortex – a blocker which interferes in the transmission of the energy out of the CU into the conscious minds of the person – the ubiquity of it all has become but a whisper – like when a strange, foreign thought pops into the mind for a fleeting moment.

The ankh that my son had created caused me to reminisce on an experience I had many years before. This moment was not by choice but was pushed into my head from the depths of my consciousness. Gabe had powerful abilities, though most of the time it wasn’t by his volition. The minds of infants are an enigma to clinicians, spiritualists, and psychoturgists alike. Because they have undeveloped cortexes, it is believed by our circles that they have unfiltered access to the CU. Infants can take control of the will of their parents, forcing them to bring food, change the diapers, or just pay attention to them – and the caretakers will have no power to resist. That was something that we had dealt with only a few months prior when Gabe was exhausting Nina and I of our energy because we were waiting on his beck and call. Donald Winnicott called this subjective omnipotence, a theory that the infant believes it manifests the world around it. It’s true. But impingement needs to occur or else the child will grow with a sense of narcissism, that idea that it creates the world continues into adulthood. I have a natural defense with my abilities, but Nina didn’t have that. Something else gave her assistance – after one of my patients basically killed me, the love between her and I stayed strong. And that energy – love – that mysterious energy that transcends our understanding of our own psychic energies, gave her strength to resist my son’s will.

But he had power. And I could feel this intrusive memory was brought upon by the energy of my son. It was a time when I was about seventeen, in my senior year of high school, and honing my abilities under the tutelage of a woman named Siobhan. She was a practicing clinical psychologist and quite a powerful Psychoturgist. She was well renowned in both the clinical fields and the psychoturgic circles – she had sway. But now, with her being on the run from dangerous people, she was no more than an echo in the annals of our history. I barely hear from her anymore.

I was living in Livingston, New Jersey at the time with my aunt and uncle. My parents had passed years before – well my mom did. My dad had left us when I was around seven. For years I thought that he had abandoned me, but it wasn’t until years later – a lifetime carrying a resentment – that I found out the truth behind his fate. He was taken by the dark forces that reside in a certain part of the CU – in the Shadow. He was taken by an entity known as Tiamat.

Yes. The same Tiamat that the ancient Mesopotamians knew of as the goddess of chaos. She had come to me when I was a child and I had defended myself against Her attack using my own primal fear. She came to me again through Her invasion of the psyche of one of my patients. And I was forced to take Her on using that same primal fear I had used, but this time I was somehow protected by Gabe. There is a force between him and I, the same force that binds Nina and I – the same force that my father always talked about before his departure.

“There is a force that binds us,” he would say. “And nothing can break that.” It always stuck with me. Despite my anger and fear that came along with the abandonment, a part of me always believed in that force. And that force between Gabe and I, the one that gave him the ability to protect me, also gave me the strength to fight against Tiamat. And I was able to subdue Her, though not before Her giving me a hint that my father was still alive out there. And I have felt him since once more, though I had also felt him before without knowing it was him.

My aunt and uncle were wonderful people. Aunt Helga was my mother’s sister. She was married to Victor. They never had children, not for lack of want, but because they weren’t physiologically capable. My aunt had ovarian cancer in her twenties. They caught it before it spread to the rest of her, but she was forced to get a hysterectomy. They didn’t adopt. They were both adjunct professors at Rutgers in Newark, teaching various writing courses. Though they didn’t understand my abilities, having been privy to some of the more destructive and impulsive energies that I willed due to my lack of control, they were incredibly supportive. They were the ones who connected me with Siobhan. They had heard of a psychologist who deals with energy healing and, though they were skeptical of the practice, they sent me to her.

I was a rambunctious, stubborn child who didn’t understand why he was so different. Sending me to her seemed like a death sentence. Hell, I was the only kid in the third grade who could stop a bully’s attack by pushing him with invisible forces. I had broken one kid’s arm because I wanted it to happen. Things would come to me in dreams and would talk to me even when I was awake. They weren’t evil things, but they were invasive in my thought processes. They were lonely. They enjoyed the company of humans. They were not human. And people would sit far away from me because of my penchant for having conversations with them aloud. Eventually I learned to channel those conversations internally, but that was after my training with Siobhan.

When I went to her, we sat in silence. There was a soothing energy in her office that disarmed me. I knew instinctually that the energies were coming from her. The first thing she said to me was, “there is nothing wrong with you.” But she didn’t use her words, she used her mind. I could hear her voice in my head and that captured my attention, because despite having heard all these voices, I knew they were from a different plane of existence, but with her I could feel that her voice was coming from right in this room.

“You’re like me?” I asked. She nodded. Every gesture she made filled me with comfort and understanding. It made me feel more accepted than I ever had. Battling with the separating fears that went along with my abandonment issues, even with my aunt and uncle I never really felt like I belonged. But it was different with Siobhan. And thus, started our journey into my training.

We didn’t get into the utilization of my ability for quite some time. We had to go through the therapeutic process first of dealing with past traumas. My mother’s death, my father’s abandonment, the alienation I felt from everyone and everything. And that was slow going because I was more wont to remain silent than to express myself. But her influencing force, her holding environment she created every time we met, gave me the sensation of assurance that I needed to eventually open up. We started picking through the obscurities of these traumas, moving towards acceptance of each of these impactful events. And the closer I moved towards it, the less those outer intrusive voices came to me. And I dreamed more. I was a lucid dreamer too. I could go anywhere I wanted to. And I didn’t know it, but I had taken quite a few voyages into the world of the Collective Unconscious. And I met the bodies that those voices were attached to. Fairies, Folk Heroes, and even Merlin the Wizard came to greet me. I just figured it was all pictures in my head.

But when we started cultivating the control over my abilities, I went through a rigorous education about the CU and of different psychoanalytic theories. Jung was the one that Siobhan pushed the most. She told me that he was a powerful Psychoturgist, one whose life work had been an attempt to map out the Collective Unconscious (a vernacular that he came up with). It has another name, but it cannot be comprehended by humans. I learned all about the archetypes, how dreams connect people to the CU, and the Shadow self. I also read Freud, Erikson, Klein, Winnicott, and various other analysts. Siobhan told me that Freud was a hack who was a Psychoturgic wannabe. She always rolled her eyes whenever she said his name.

And as far as training went, it was slower than the analysis which made a lot of ground over the years. I had learned to consolidate certain fears to help me grow. I wasn’t afraid that people would die around me. I started making friends in school. But the resentment attached to my father, though lessened, never quite worked out.

Even the simplest of techniques came as a struggle for me. One of the easiest ones – the holding environment – where a psychoturgist uses their empathy to create a bubble of warmth and ease that allows the person within it to feel comfortable – the bubble that Siobhan used with me and her other patients – came with much difficulty. She had me practice on frantic animals at first. These were animals which Siobhan had riled up using her own psychic energies and then brought them to me. Many times, she would have to calm them herself before they bit at me or swiped a claw at me. After about of year of practicing that I had gotten enough of a hang on it to quell the anger of people, though Siobhan didn’t give me leave to use it on human subjects until much later.

Eventually we started working on astral projection. This is the act of sending a psychic project through our unconscious and entering into the plane of the CU on our own will. Now that is something I had trouble with. I didn’t know why I could do it so easily when I slept. Siobhan explained to me that when we sleep, the Pineal Gland pumps a certain chemical called Dimethyl Tryptamine into our bodies. This chemical helps our psyche to open up to the world around us – as some would say it was an opening of the third eye. The pineal gland is where our bridges reside. And the first time I was able to project myself – I was around fourteen – I had been given privilege to step upon my bridge.

In dreams, most don’t get to the bridge. The valve which blocks out the collective energy is opened, and it allows the CU to enter our dreams. This is an act of catharsis. By allowing that unknown, spectral plane to intrude itself upon our dreams, it gives us hidden wisdom. It combines itself and forms to fit the person’s unconscious and reveals to the person truths that they wouldn’t have been able to come to on their own volition. Through this understanding, it strengthens the bridge which connects our personal unconscious to the collective and gives us more resilience to push out the invasive energies when they are unnecessary.

Everyone has access to the CU, but most cannot consolidate the energy from it into their waking life. People who are tapped by the CU and don’t have the fortitude to integrate it tend to lose control of their minds, leading towards psychoses. They are privy to everything that outer world has to offer, but they cannot stop it from entering. They never were given a chance to build up their defenses. Psychoturgists, on the other hand, are those who were fortunate enough to be trained and to defend against the intrusive powers from beyond. And we are able to use it in conjunction with our own wills – some to help those who are afflicted with the illnesses of those who are unable to consolidate and others to cause calamity and horror in the world.

So, now we come to the memory that was brought upon by my son’s compulsion.

I was in high school – junior year. I was by no means popular. I hadn’t had a girlfriend. I tended to run in the circles that built computers and played pen and paper, dice-rolling games. I wasn’t unhappy with this arrangement. I was just more invested in being comfortable with who I was and also focusing on my studies with Siobhan. I was a great student and my teachers all raved to me how I could go to whatever school I wanted. But it was when she came to school that things started to change.

Valerie Cortez was a new student who transferred in from California. Her father worked for some tech firm and was transferred to work in New York. They lived in a big house in Livingston. She came in like a tornado, immediately changing the status quo in our grade as people shifted the makeup of their cliques to give her access into each. And she was accepted by every single one of them. The jocks, the artists, the burnouts, the nerds – all of them wanted to hang out with her and she reciprocated. Cliques started to dissipate. People who wouldn’t have hung out before started eating lunch together, going to parties. My friend Clint – your stereotypical nerd – started dating a senior star soccer player named Mathilda after one tutoring session. And I started to get pushed out.

She was beautiful, smart, and more social than anyone I’ve ever met. She was kind to everyone. But there was something about her that I picked up that no one else could. Her energy was so potent and spread out from her. And she had control over it. I was afraid of that. Though she was doing much good in the bureaucracy of the social hierarchy, she was using her powers to manipulate how people acted – and as far as I understood it from Siobhan’s teaching, that was not something we were supposed to use our abilities for. We don’t make people happy or sad, we teach them to deal with the causes and conditions behind their issues so that they may grow from them. But Val mustn’t have read that page in the book – probably because most humans haven’t read any of the books on psychomagic or psychoturgy – or even psychoanalysis on its own.

I avoided her as much as I could. We would have the occasional interactions in class. She always made sure to say hi to me whenever we passed in the halls, but I kept my guard up. I kept my energies suppressed to a small circle around me while I was in school because I didn’t have total control over where they went and who they would influence. It was a simple variant of the holding environment ward. I just used my own energies to create that same bubble which didn’t allow anything to get out, so it would circulate. Sometimes it became stifling – but I could afford it for eight hours a day.

I talked to Siobhan a lot about her. Siobhan would always give me that taunting smile to which I would always rebut that I didn’t have a crush on her – though that wasn’t completely true. Of course, I was attracted to her. Everyone was, no matter their orientation. She had a magnetic charisma because of the aura she put out. But I was also terrified of her. She had a control over her abilities that I still hadn’t achieved. She could use her will to influence other – not in a malicious way, but in a way that she thought achieved the most good. I felt enough to know that she had a focus over her abilities. Siobhan thought this curious, but interesting. There were psychoturgists across the world, though fewer than there had been when she was learning to foster her abilities. She figured that the girl must’ve been trained in her residence in California.

“Maybe you should befriend her,” Siobhan offered.

“No,” I said with a brusque shake of my head. “She’s doing everything that you said I shouldn’t do. She’s dangerous.”

Siobhan nodded and grunted an affirmation. “That may be so, but you are the only two people who are able to do what you can do in your school. There is power in numbers for us. When we work together, we can achieve more good and help more people.”

“I don’t want to. You haven’t seen what she does to people. They change how they act. They become –”

“Nicer? Warmer? Friendlier?” She smiled at me and kicked her feet upon the ottoman in front of her chair. “While I agree that her methods are misguided and manipulative, she seems to have a good intention. Might it be good for her to have a friend who can help her to understand her own abilities more?”

“I barely understand mine. How am I supposed to help someone else? And she’s more capable with hers anyway.” I was a stubborn kid. But it wasn’t unfounded.

“You understand more than you know. You may have had a slow learning curve – slower than most,” she said with that same taunting smile – one that would make me roll my eyes and take a deep breath. “But you have honed your abilities to be used for the right reasons. You don’t influence the behavior of others, but you help people to feel comfortable around you. Your aunt and uncle – they were not prepared for a child and they were definitely uncomfortable when you first came to them, but you have made their house a home – a place of comfort and safety for them.”

I nodded. “Well, it took a while, but yeah.”

“Perhaps you could guide this girl – Val, was her name? Maybe she does this because she feels lonely. Did you ever think of that? Maybe she feels like an outcast because of her own abilities. Does that resonate with you?”

I sighed in defeat. She got me. She always did. “Yeah. It does. But… what if she doesn’t want more friends? What if I talk to her and she just laughs at me?”

“Maybe she will. But from what you tell me, she doesn’t seem like that kind of person. I know people. And if that’s the worst thing that happens, then your life is pretty good,” Siobhan countered.

So, I took her advice. It took a lot of courage for me to muster the approach – like I said, I still had fears, and rejection was one of them. She was at her locker at the end of the day. I saw her standing there, a slight smile spread across her face. I was walking to leave – to get on my bike and head back home to finish a project I was working on for my art class. When I saw her, the connection was immediate. She turned to look at me and her smile widened. Her eyes shimmered under the fluorescent light in the hallway. Her brown hair was tied in a ponytail which bobbed with every move she made which made my heart race, and it took everything in me not to just turn around and leave school through another exit. I took a deep breath and walked up to her.

“Hi,” I said. Our energies converged. The ward I had placed around myself broke down as our two auras became one – a holding environment containing the two of us.

“Hi,” she responded. She was holding a book with a red, leather cover.

“I’m –”

“Johnny Rosen,” she interrupted. “Yeah, I know. I’ve seen you around a lot. We have chemistry together.”

Cliché, but it was true – and I blushed. “Oh, yeah.” I searched my mind for something intelligent to say, but I drew a blank. God – hormones were the worst. “Uh, how are you adjusting to the move?”

She took in a breath in thought, looking off towards the ceiling. Her smile widened even further and when she looked back at me, her eyes pierced beyond whatever protection I tried to hold up. “I love it. This is such a nice school. Everyone is so warm and inviting. In my last school people were much rougher around the edges – much less welcoming. It seems that everyone here is friends with each other.”

It seems that way, doesn’t it? I thought.

It does, she thought back. And I heard her thoughts and felt the words emanating from her mind. My eyes widened. My heart raced faster. I leaned in closer. “You don’t like me. Or you don’t want to like me.” She hardened her gaze, her mouth flattening out. “Did I do something to you?”

I took a deep breath, not wanting to act out on my fear, not wanting to say anything to hurt her. “You are doing something to everyone,” I whispered. “And you know what you’re doing.”

She tilted her head. “And what is that?”

“Don’t play dumb. You’re too smart for that. You’re using your abilities to manipulate and influence how people act.”

“I’m manipulating them? In what way?”

I leaned in closer. “You’re using your energy – your power – to change how everyone is acting. Before you came, there were cliques, bullies, and separations. But now… now –”

“Everyone’s happy and unified? People aren’t being hurt by one another? And what’s wrong with that?” she asked, crossing her arms and squinting her dark brown eyes.

“No – it’s not –” I was getting flustered and annoyed. “You can’t do this. You can’t make people act the way you want them to.”

She smiled at me – a soft, pervasive smile – and I could feel her energy overpowering mine. “Maybe you’re right. But I’m not causing any harm, am I?”

I was nervous. But I could tell she was also attempting to make me feel at ease. “No, I guess not. Who knows? But I was taught that we don’t do that.”

“We?” she said with a smirk and raised eyebrow. She chuckled. “So how long did you know?”

“From the moment you walked into school.”

“Same,” she said. “Why’d it take so long for you to talk to me?”

I shrugged. “I mean, you never talked to me either.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I always said hi to you whenever I saw you. You would just nod and turn away. I’ll be honest – it kind of hurt me. But because of that I knew that you were like me. You weren’t influenced by the energies.” She took a breath, readying to say something, but I couldn’t read in her what it was. “How do you suppress the energy?” she asked.

I was surprised. I wasn’t expecting her to ask that. “Well… it’s simple really. You already seemed to have mastered the holding environment.”

“Is that what you call it? I always just said it was a comfort zone.”

I smiled. “I guess that works, but the… psychoanalytic term, from what Siobhan told me, is holding environment.”

“Siobhan?” she asked. “Who’s that?”

I took a step back, stepping away from the epicenter of her energies. “Um – she is just someone who helps me with psychology.”

“No, she isn’t.”

“Yeah she is,” I rebuffed.

Val brought her finger to her chin and tapped it a couple of times, thinking. “Can I meet her?”

“No.”

“Why not? If she can help you with psychology, then she can help me, can’t she?” She took a step forward. “Don’t be selfish. We’re supposed to help others, aren’t we?”

She had me there. I took a deep breath and thought about it. “Well, I’ll have to ask her if it’s okay.”

“Thanks, Johnny.” And her smile resumed its natural radiance. “Do you need a ride home, by the way? I saw you ride in on a bike. If you want a ride, it’s no problem.”

I gulped and the flush built up in my face. My heart was racing again, but not out of nervousness. How could a girl like her be so nice? I thought – big mistake.

“Because there’s no point in being mean,” she said with a wink. She turned and left, leaving me standing there, completely confused and agitated, but also excited and hopeful.