falling stars

Chapter 3: not so white torture and hallucinations, probably

(Narrator POV)

Have you ever heard of white torture or white room torture? It is a practice in which someone is

put in a fully white-covered room isolated from any form of visual or auditory stimulus. Generally,

the victim has to wear a white straitjacket to prevent self-harm, but it is also stooping the victim

to do anything that could distract him from boredom. Until this day, sensory deprivation is still

considered as one of the most efficient and evil forms of torture.

Our hero is in a worse condition than those victims because, unlike a human-made white prison,

here there is no light or darkness, no breathing sound, no heart pulse, not the smell of air, not

the feeling of the fabric, not even the taste of his own saliva. Unlike the victims, he could not

scream, see shadows, walk around the room, roll on the ground like a dog, or even plead for

help. It was a total sensory deprivation, a kind that is unheard of in humanity.

He had to deal with the mix of sleep paralysis and lack of stimulation together; something like

that would have freaked out anyone in the first few minutes and drove them to despair in the

hours that followed. Yet, our hero is actually occupied passing and refining his “Venting loop” for

days now. At the start, it was just the rambling of a distressed man, but by the time he started to

repeat the process in his mind, he started to add new words and new versions, sometimes

mimicking famous actors in the speech, sometimes adding imaginary anime sound in the

background, or even translating it in different languages. What was once his cry for help is now

one of the few things that he can do, so he used it as much as he could.

The fact that in his current state, thinking is incredibly slow as if he was running a new

generation game on an old computer also helps him a lot in wasting time, It may not be

apparent by the way he express himself and he himself may not even sense it but his thinking

capacity is a least 3 time slower than what he was used to so an hour for him may be actually

be three or two and half hours, it is difficult to know the time without watches.

Still, even with his abnormal mind and slow computation, after days or maybe a week, even he

starts to feel some side effects of the “white” tortures. His already bad time deduction adds up

with his impatience, making him lose sense of time, his mind asking for stimulus to start to make

stimulus for itself. It started with some imaginary silhouette that faded in the moment of notice,

sounds that followed his thinking like a chorus, then the illusions became more and more real;

sometimes they got as far as mimicking the appearance of his loved ones.Strangely enough, the hallucinations had minimal effect on him, not because he was some sort

of hyperrealistic person or that he has strong mental fortitude, although his mental fortitude is

actually excellent compared most people of his ages, it is doubtful that it would match that of a

trained soldier that at the end of the day would still yield after days of white torture .the

hallucinations is just his own mind doing it stuff and in actuality, he was overjoyed by the novelty

of this defense system of the mind.

Yeah, our hero is a strange man. At some point, he was even longing for his next hallucinations,

sometimes actively trying to feel them and at some point, with the consumption of a lot of

willpower and sanity he somehow managed to make his own “hallucination” and even control it

the only downside is that the “hallucinations” he creates are too real to be mere hallucination.

Unbeknownst to him, strange visual and auditory phenomena are happening around him, and

all he could feel was that creating “hallucination” is tiring, but the more he does it, the easier it

becomes. If, at the start, he created the image of a stickman and moved it with difficulties, he

now can make a swarm of ethereal butterflies fly around him for hours before getting tired. It

was a novel feeling for him. He felt like a painter that created animated imagery in the blank

Canvas of his world.

In his life, he never considered himself as an artistic person and had a very basic idea of the

concept of beauty, but if you spend hours doing something, there is a high chance that you will

better yourself. So even if at the beginning his self-made hallucination was crude, at best he

slowly refined it; the once crude contours became fine lines, the once clumsy moves became

graceful... So he now spent his time mulling over his situation or observing some dotes in the

background, eagerly waiting for his next great illusory “performance.”

Those dots in the background appeared a week after the disaster. Those dots were strange;

some were moving, others were stationary, some were big and bright, others were smaller. Their

colors change from time to time, sometimes a hungry red or a lazy blue, but strangely enough,

they were never the same. They do not disappear like normal hallucinations did, but just go out

of his range of perception and disappear or get consumed by other dots. Once he even saw a

very big, bright dot getting close to him during one of his performances before getting away.

Sadly, he just attributes it to him going insane.

After a few weeks of stimulus deprivation, he finally felt that he was not alone in this “Void.”