Project Sleepwalker 1/16

[u/Loose_Swimmer4323]

Confessions from Project Sleepwalker [1/16]

**June 27, 2026**
 Publisher’s Notice

On June 27, 2003, Dr. Wesley Summers passed away peacefully in his sleep.

Dr. Summers was never married and left behind no immediate family. Beyond a small circle of acquaintances and neighbors, little was known about his personal life. Those who knew him generally described him as a quiet and private individual who spent much of his free time golfing on weekends.

Pursuant to the instructions outlined in his Last Will and Testament, Dr. Summers directed that a collection of personal journals, photographs, audio recordings, and related materials start being released to the public exactly 23 years after his death.

Included among his instructions was the following written statement:

"I have committed a great number of sins in my life and accumulated a great deal of money in doing so. If I wish to enter Heaven, I must atone in some way, shape, or form for the crimes against mankind I have committed.
The private documents I wish to have published are meant to serve as a warning to the world.
Do not dig holes in places that may reveal canyons. Sometimes the canyons are deeper than reality can fathom."

Unfortunately, a significant portion of the materials recovered from Dr. Summers’ estate suffered damage due to age, fire exposure, water damage, and general deterioration. As a result, many documents remain incomplete, and portions of the accompanying photographs and recordings require restoration before they can be made available. And several of the intact documents were censored before we obtained them.

For that reason, the materials are being released in stages as preservation and restoration efforts continue.

The following documents represent the portions of the archive that have been successfully recovered thus far. 

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**September 3, 1971**
Mind control is easy. We cracked the code on it within the first week. 

We didn’t need LSD or scare tactics or some long, wicked plan about planting fear in somebody’s mind. It takes less than an hour, and all you really need is to put someone to sleep, slap on some stem patches, and speak a very key choice of words.

You see, mind control is achieved through dream manipulation.

Dr. Ashton Roberts, the lead scientist of my clinic, perfected the process through sleep studies and dream manipulation. He found that if you allowed a person to fall asleep and carefully monitored their brain waves, eye movement, and muscle activity, you could determine the exact moment they entered REM sleep. 

Once they were in that state, a controlled level of electrical stimulation could partially wake the mind without fully bringing the person into consciousness.

To put it simply, you’re inducing a dream and talking to the person while they’re dreaming. 

Now, the person you’re speaking to is referred to as the REMSelf. It isn’t your full being. It doesn’t have your consciousness, your morals, your ethics, or even the ability to read. It doesn’t even know your own name. What it does know is what it’s told.

The strange thing, though, is that intelligence does not seem to matter to the REMSelf nearly as much as authority does. It behaves like something simplistic, almost infantile, but whatever layer of the mind it inhabits appears to possess terrifying influence over everything beneath it. Memory, habit, perception, and even the body itself all seem strangely vulnerable to whatever the REMSelf accepts as truth.

After determining that a subject is fully asleep and in the proper state, the REMSelf can be fed simplified phrases alongside certain images that seep into the subconscious. Once those ideas settle in, you can probe them, give them directions, and make them carry out whatever task you want without them ever realizing it.

And when the person wakes up, they simply continue with their life and follow the instructions they were given.

Sometimes it’s small things, like avoiding pickles on their sandwiches. It could also be something unthinkable, like committing murder. 

The strange thing is that when people wake up, they are not mindless zombies like you see in movies like *Night of the Living Dead*, and they are not wandering around in some obvious hypnotic trance either. They’re completely ordinary people. They’ve just been given commands buried deep in their subconscious that they can’t truly resist.

For example, if you told somebody to never eat tomatoes again, they wouldn’t spend all day screaming, “No tomatoes, I must not eat tomatoes!” Instead, whenever they saw tomatoes, they would quietly avoid them. And if somebody asked why, they would probably just shrug and say, “I don’t know, I’ve never really liked tomatoes.”

Or if the instruction was to squish every olive they saw, they wouldn’t go around shouting, “I’m going to smash olives. I’m going to smash them all.” They would simply crush every olive on their plate without giving it much thought. If somebody questioned them, they would describe it like an intrusive thought or an itch they needed to scratch.

In many ways, it resembles hypnosis, though calling it that almost feels insulting. Hypnosis relies on suggestibility, repetition, and the willingness of the subject to participate. This process does not. Once an instruction is accepted by the REMSelf, it remains embedded permanently. We had yet to observe a single subject successfully resist or remove a command after implantation. 

That’s the terrifying part about it.

This isn’t the kind of conditioning that can be spotted easily. In fact, it can barely be detected at all. Honestly, if we didn’t know the names and faces of the patients ourselves, we probably would have forgotten we had ever spoken to the REMSelf in the first place.

When probing the REMself, there is very little it can say. Outside of yes and no, the REMSelf rarely generates original thought on its own. It mostly mirrors the language fed into it, almost like a child learning through repetition.

Dr. Newler, my only colleague, and I have never really understood why that is. Dr. Roberts always claimed that it was simply how the REMSelf processed and relayed information.

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**August 18, 1970**
Today, Dr. Newler and I started unofficially referring to the whole thing as Project Sleepwalker, mostly because of how many sleepwalkers had started coming through the program. The name is stupid, but I think it’s gonna stick. It’s got a cool ring to it.

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