Chapter 150: Four Dreams

"As a psychologist, I can understand his loneliness better than most people.

To be honest, I have a powerful empathetic ability that exceeds most people. Xi He, the appearance of this person in front of me—I cannot deceive myself by saying that I wasn't moved at all at the time.

This movement had nothing to do with love, but because I deeply knew that Xi He was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. Such a case is a rare case that many people who do psychological research cannot encounter in their lifetime. I want to analyze him, understand him, and cure him. This is the self-confidence I am accustomed to.

The process of building trust is easy. Because, at that time, Xi He was at a moment of extremely low psychological ability. Xi He told me about his childhood, about his parents' love full of vigilance, about the caution and loneliness of being raised by strangers. Finally, he said to me, do you know, I found that the problems in this world cannot be solved by money, which makes me very desperate.

I accompanied him through every path of loneliness. These darkest secrets in the depths of his soul, with vicious temptation, made me forget the biggest taboo of a psychologist, which is my excessive empathetic ability, transforming the therapeutic relationship between me and him into an emotional game.

That fanaticism for pursuing excellence made me subconsciously ignore the look in Xi He's eyes as they went from clear to blurred, from trust to enthusiasm.

He would tell me about the four dreams he had repeatedly."

Zhong Xiaoyu said, handing a report to Qi Dongjun: "These are the contents of Xi He's dreams that I reproduced based on memory."

Qi Dongjun took the report without hesitation. It was written in Xi He's first person:

The first dream: I found myself in a cramped room built of translucent amber, the walls embedded with stagnant clock hands, their tips frozen in the crack between 5 and 6. Beneath my feet, countless gnarled tree roots extended, wrapping around my ankles and growing deep into the floor. With every step I took, the roots oozed a dark red sap, blooming into twisted shapes upon the ground. Curled in the corner was half a porcelain doll, its severed neck covered in moss, its hollow eye sockets brimming with rainwater.

The second dream: The amber wall suddenly collapsed into quicksand, and I fell into an inverted forest. All the oak trees had their roots facing upward, stretching out hideously, with bell-shaped charred black fruits hanging from the ends. When I touched the trunk, the bark cracked to reveal a network of blood vessels, the pulse sound overlapping with my heartbeat into a funeral bell. A stream floating with glass marbles ran through the forest, and the origami was stained red by blood, showing the weave of a red sweater.

The third dream: The stream suddenly stood vertically to form a mirror wall, reflecting eighteen versions of me at different ages. The oldest reflection held gardening shears, repeatedly cutting a silver thread connecting to the sky in the mirror. Every time it was cut, a piece of the sky peeled off, revealing the swollen moon behind, the moon's surface covered in the cracks of my mother's smile lines. The young reflections suddenly turned their heads in unison, tree root sprouts overflowing from between their teeth.

The fourth dream: A cast-iron door appeared at the end of the forest, the keyhole resembling a human pupil. When I inserted the blood-stained key, the sound of a baby crying came from my palm. Behind the door was an infinitely extending obstetric ward corridor, with screams of the same voice coming from behind every door. On the operating table at the end of the corridor, a plant with developed roots was breaking out of a pregnant woman's abdominal cavity, with half a stopped pocket watch embedded in the center of the petals.

These bizarre and meaningless contents made Qi Dongjun frown. He seemed to see Xi He appear in front of him again, looking at him with those gloomy eyes.

Zhong Xiaoyu's breeze-like voice, unique to a psychologist, sounded in his ear: "These dreams are magnificent and full of imagination, making me feel as if I have explored his fascinating inner world.

My reason tells me that this is an extremely dangerous world, but my love for psychology makes me unable to help myself from immersing in this magnificent adventure."

Because of Xi He, Qi Dongjun was not completely ignorant of psychology. He looked at these contents and thought: "In the place of the psychologist I hired, Xi He never let go of the fact that he would dream at night. He always said that he never dreamed. Almost all the doctors finally resigned to me voluntarily, saying that they could not help Xi He. No matter how high the price I gave, they gave up resolutely. I can see the fear in their eyes, but I don't know what they are afraid of as psychologists."

"Heh, they are the correct ones. They know that their psychological defense line cannot resist Xi He's invasion. He is not an ordinary patient. He is constantly trying to manipulate the people in front of him.

I know, but I arrogantly thought that I would win the final victory in this psychological game."

"What on earth are these dreams of his saying?"

"This is my final analysis. Let's go one by one.

First, the amber room is a deformation of the maternal womb. The frozen hour hand—I didn't understand its meaning at first. I just determined that the twisted bloodstain was his uncut symbiotic anxiety.

In the second dream, the inverted oak tree is an inverted parental structure. The root system symbolizes overly controlled fatherly love, and the charred black fruit metaphorizes the stifled free will. I think..." Zhong Xiaoyu looked at Qi Dongjun, "In his eighteen years of life, you played a very 'important' role." When she said the word "important," Qi Dongjun's mouth twitched.

He didn't explain much, just said: "I did everything a husband and a father could do."

Regarding this, Zhong Xiaoyu didn't make too much evaluation, just continued to analyze the report: "In the third dream, the red sweater and marbles, I think it is a rare beautiful self-retained land in Xi He's memory. Unfortunately, this precious emotional bond in childhood was alienated by blood in the dream. It was from this third dream that I realized that the patient I was facing had something far darker hidden in his heart—these rich people who represent the female characteristics of the mother were all destroyed by fear... It is very likely that this is also the case in reality.

The eighteen-fold mirror abyss, the repetitive compulsion of matricide, the silver thread that refers to the shackles of filial piety being repeatedly cut, and the swollen moon is more like he demonized his mother's love in order to rationalize his own crimes.

This final dream, those deformed spaces and times, the chaotic life and death, that plant growing savagely from the pregnant woman's belly, was him—it was his subconscious self-punishment fantasy as a matricide: by reenacting the scene of his birth, he concretized his own sin into a deformed life form that devoured its mother.

Zhong Xiaoyu's narration was full of grotesque and sin, making Qi Dongjun seem to see his wife Xi Ziyun's body lying in a pool of blood again.

"Everything is too late." Zhong Xiaoyu's words were just like the confession that appeared in Qi Dongjun's mind at this moment, but the two people were referring to different meanings. ===== CHAPTER 151 =====