Hermans Mantid Memories

John Foldan Monday, April 23, 2012

Earth Day celebration 2111. They had met the month before. She was showing people a new and advanced method of preparing food. Herman found himself being attracted to Diana more and more because of their commonalities of experience and belief, not to mention her subtly powerful sexual allure. Herman did not know at the time he was about to have a very strange experience. They talked briefly at the showing. That evening they chatted on the phone, deciding to meet the next morning for a couple of hours to discuss some of the things they had experienced and written about. Nine oclock the next morning found Diana watering her plants and chatting with Herman about things large and small. Sometimes they sat by the stone wall of her small yard, talking and simply sitting together enjoying the cool morning while her kitten played in the sun. At times Herman felt himself getting spacey, like going into a trance. At those times Diana seemed to change, to become for a moment someone else. Different people. Then the moment would pass. Diana would get a puzzled look, as though she sensed something unusual had occurred, but could not quite recall what it was. The planned short visit turned into lunch time. Diana prepared a delicious meal using the advanced system she had demonstrated the day before. Today was the actual Earth Day according to traditions set in the previous century. After lunch Herman and Diana continued their conversation. There was a growing sexual tension in the air. At his suggestion they sat on her small couch and were soon touching and then kissing and then getting very turned on. Falling in love. He suggested they get into her bed. She expressed pleasure at the idea. She walked into her bedroom and began fussing with the sheets in a happily nervous way. Herman playfully took her clothes off. He gently but

firmly tossed her onto the bed and began to do sweetly pleasant things to her body. We are at a juncture in this story. The first part of what follows will be a description of the events of the next few hours and the next day as Herman remembered them at the time. The second part of the story will concern what he recalled over the next few months about what actually occurred. In this first part, Herman recalled feeling like he wanted to lie down upon Diana, which he did, propping himself on his elbows and looking deeply into her eyes. He felt a warm connection heart to heart. The next moments were very pleasurable for him, yet with a strange quality. He remembers Diana doing things which were pleasing to him, very arousing. But something felt not quite right. Something about Diana had changed. She no longer seemed herself. Her mannerisms, her vibes were those of another woman, a former lover of hissomeone Diana had never met. Hermann experienced something else that was odd to him. They were at one moment doing one or another thing, and in the next moment something completely different, yet there was no memory of anything inbetween. It was like his memory was fragmented, with no idea of how he and his lover had moved from experiencing a brief moment at point A, to another brief moment at point B, and then as briefly at point C, and so on. After what seemed like a long time, one or two hours, Herman found himself yelling in sexual ecstasy. Strangely enough, he and Diana were simply sitting side by side on the bed. The oddity of this did not register with him at the time. He gradually calmed down. Looking at Diana he saw a puzzled and slightly disturbed expression on her face. While it was true that Herman felt good, something he could not quite discern was making him feel a bit off, a bit uncomfortable. He thought that Diana was feeling uncomfortable, too. His thought at the moment was that maybe he should leave. He said something which was meant to be jocular, but in actuality turned out to be a foreshadowing. The words he uttered in a slightly humorous tone were: I think its time you kicked me out. His intention was to give Diana a way to respond that would

allow her to kindly ask him to leave if that was what she wanted. Instead of asking him to leave, she told him she would like to watch a movie with him. He agreed and they moved to the couch. During the movie they sat next to each other, but there was an odd feeling in the air. They did not touch each other. Both seemed to be half in a dream. Herman did not remember much about the movie afterwards. Once the movie was over they kissed briefly, pleasantly and he left to go back to his house. What had begun as a two hour chat had turned into a long day of talking and eating and lovemaking and something else. What was that something else? At the time, Herman felt a little strange, but not unpleasantly so. Still, there was something uncomfortable in the back of his mind. The next day, Monday, Herman got a phone call from Diana. She sounded very disturbed. She told him she had been feeling spacey all day, and very anxious, though she was not sure exactly why. She asked him if he would like to come over that evening and watch another movie with her. He said he would be over at seven that night. When he got to Dianas house he found her to be in an awful state. She said she was feeling very cold. The temperature in the house was cool, but not cold. She sat at one end of the couch. She did not want to be touched. She got up several times to put on more layers of clothing, including a woolen cap. Herman was concerned about the change in demeanor he was seeing in Diana. He thought to comfort her by expressing the warm and loving feelings he felt toward her. This expression had an opposite effect to what was intended. Dianas response was that she did not feel that way toward him. She seemed disconcerted about him, and said she needed to know more about him. Then she confessed that her memory of their lovemaking involved him switching into someone else who had hurt her. She said that he had yanked her hair very hard and that had made her neck hurt. She said that he had then scratched her legs with his fingernails. This revelation was quite disturbing to Herman. Not only were such things not in his manner of behavior, he had no recollection at all of

doing anything even remotely like what she had described. He told her that it was possible he had tugged her hair playfully, but had certainly not yanked her hair. He told her he had run his fingers down her legs, but not in a manner as to scratch her. He asked her if she had scratch marks on her legs. She responded by saying no, she had looked, and there were no scratch marks. She seemed very disturbed by this, as though the memory and the evidence of same not coinciding was causing anxiety creating cognitive dissonance. At that moment Herman recalled something that had occurred which indeed had been somewhat painful to Diana. He told her he had sensed an acupressure point on her upper right chest, and he had pressed upon it in a healing gesture. When he did that, Diana had told him that it hurt, so Herman stopped pressing. He had not been pressing very hard on the acupressure point, so he had said to her she was very sensitive there. Her response had been that maybe he was pressing too hard. When Herman related this to Diana she looked even more anxious, saying that she did not remember the occurrence. She touched herself, with quick anxious gestures on both sides of her upper chest, as though trying to use the sensation of touch to recall the event, or perhaps for other reasons of her own. No more was said about this. During this initial part of their conversation, Herman was starting to feel as though he was going into a light trance state. Knowing that Diana had been trained as a hypnotist, he wondered if perhaps she maybe was somehow hypnotizing him in order to find out more about him as she had expressed her wish to do earlier that evening. He decided that it would be a good thing to let her do that, whether or not his increasing trance state was a volitional act on her part. Over what seemed to be the next few minutes, Herman once again found himself having disjointed memories, similar in some ways to their lovemaking the previous afternoon and evening, but this time only as bits and pieces of conversation. It may be important at this point to note that Herman has what in the

21st century would have been called a dissociative type personality structure. Thus, he could easily assume an almost protean repertoire of different personas. He had found in his career as a counselor this to be very effective in establishing rapport with his clients. He was a very empathic person who could actually resonate with the emotional state of other people. He sometimes thought of himself as being similar to a 20th century television character, one of the Betazoid people who was highly telepathic, easily picking up others emotional states, the character having for her career counselor on a starship. For a few minutes, Herman allowed himself to express various personas he had picked up over the years, thinking this would best allow Diana to see the various aspects of who he is. She was very interested in seeing this process happen, sometimes commenting on what she was seeing, expressing interest in what was going by, and occasionally asking questions like: Who was that? etc. Diana was becoming a little more relaxed. She got up to check the clock and came back looking somewhat concerned. She said it was midnight and she had to get up early. The strange thing is at that time Herman only vaguely noticed his perception of the passage of time was that only about one half hour had passed, instead of the five hours which had actually gone by. He said goodnight. Diana seemed to be feeling a little better about things in general. She repeated that she felt she needed to get to know Herman better, then gave him a sweet kiss goodnight as he was leaving. Over the next few weeks Herman felt increasing concern and sadness because things had changed so much between him and Diana. One moment they had been in love, and the next she had started showing reservations about him. He wondered vaguely about their differing memories of what had transpired during their lovemaking. Things did not improve between them, despite Hermans attempts to create a deeper understanding. It felt to him almost as though someone had told Diana unpleasant things to remember about him. One day during a phone call, Diana told Herman she felt she had been too hasty in forming a relationship with him, and that she had decided not to continue. He offered to talk with her more about this. She said that would be OK, yet her tone caused Herman to think that their budding

relationship was over before it really had a chance to begin. Over the next weeks and months Herman contemplated what had happened, trying to gain an understanding of why things had changed so rapidly and radically. Thus we come to the second part of this story. There were a number of odd occurrences that happened in the following weeks, involving Diana and other people. Though they had little contact, Herman heard about these things from some of the people in his circle of acquaintances. There is something else we need to know about Herman here. He was a very intuitive sort of man. Some had spoken of him as being a sort of sleuth. He had an instinct for sensing when something was wrong, when circumstances did not quite fit together in an orderly way. Others had compared him to sometimes being a little bit like a 20th century television character who worked as an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a defunct agency of the then United States of America. This agent had an uncanny ability to sniff a crime scene and come up with scenarios that led to the apprehension of the criminals involved. Herman did of course live in the real world of the 22nd century. Things did not proceed as they would in a television show where the whole process took place over one hours time. Herman contemplated the events around the time of Earth Day for several months. He had a strange feeling that something was wrong with his memory of how things had gone during the time he and Diana had spent together. He wondered and wondered how they could have had the same experience together while having very different memories of that experience. Now, it must be noted that Herman had developed an ability to recall hidden memories. He had found this ability quite by accident in the year previous to his encounter with Diana. Under the auspices of a Shamanistic presence he had discovered that there was a two week period in his life of which he not only had no memory, he had not even until that point recognized there had been missing time in his life. Using various methods he learned how to recall missing memories, even those memories in which a deliberate attempt had been made to prevent the

formation of long-term memory through the use of various substances and hypnotic mind-control methods. It finally occurred to Herman that something must have happened to create the differences that he and Diana had experienced in their recall of events that Earth Day several months before. Now he began the difficult process of using all he had learned in order to bring back the actualities of the occurrences of that day. What he discovered both shocked and unnerved him. He worked with the recollections over and over to make sure of what he had experienced. Let us go back to the moment when Diana and Herman got in her bed to make love. Recall: He suggested they get into her bed. She expressed pleasure at the thought. She walked into her bedroom and began fussing with the sheets in a happily nervous way. Herman playfully took her clothes off. He gently but firmly tossed her onto the bed and began to do sweetly pleasant things to her body. Recall: Herman recalled feeling like he wanted to lie down upon Diana, which he did, propping himself on his elbows and looking deeply into her eyes. He felt a warm connection heart to heart. In his new understanding of what had transpired, the previous two paragraphs are the point at which actuality merged into the seemingly surreal. Those things, mentioned above, did happen. Then everything changed. What Herman discovered through his memory recall technique was that the warm and pleasant feeling he expected from the heart to heart contact between him and Diana did not happen. Instead, a very intense and disturbing few moments ensued. All of the following numbered items happened over a period of a few seconds, some of it simultaneously. 1. Herman suddenly felt Dianas chest open, and he felt himself being

pulled rapidly into a vortex in the center of her being. 2. A creature, spindly, all arms and folded legs, and very thin body structure, dropped onto Hermans back. 3. Diana became terrified. Herman held her tightly, feeling her consciousness begin to slip away. He said to her desperately: Stay with me, dont go away. With half closed eyes she said him: This has happened before. Then she became unconscious, as one in a trance. 4. At the same time, Herman, sensing the creature on his back was only partially physical, was attempting to use the energy of his breath to force it to get off his back. 5. The creature inserted its right upper appendage into Hermans spine, through Hermans heart center, and into Dianas heart center. 6. The creature found a tube approximately 1 centimeter in diameter inside Dianas chest. He pulled this tube forth and inserted it into Hermans chest. 7. The creature left Hermans back, seemingly flying away. Herman felt as though he and Diana were glued together. He felt very uncomfortable this way, and wondered if being so heavy on top of her was not good for her, so he struggled to move away. He had some success in separating himself from her a few inches. At this point his memory of what he did is unclear. He felt like he had managed to move to her side and lie down on the bed. The room became preternaturally quiet. Herman noticed several forms at the foot of the bed. He could not see them clearly, though they seemed to be solid and about the height and appearance of men. The beings communicated with Herman. They told him he must leave Diana alone, that he must stop being with her at all. He asked them why that was so. The beings said: She is ours, and you would ruin her to our purposes. Herman asked why they believed she was theirs. They answered: She was born to us. She is ours.

With deeper meditation and work over a period of months, Herman came to understand that the memories he had had of lovemaking with Diana were actually induced memories. An old movie from a previous century had introduced the concept of a device called a Neuralyzer which when activated would cause people in its vicinity to become suggestible to the device operators creation of false memories. Herman came to understand that a similar technique had been used on him and Diana to create false memories. Herman began to understand that he was given a set of screen memories to make him believe he had really been having sex with Diana. The creatures wanted to mask their presence while at the same time downloading his memories for their own use. He now knew the creatures had used his memories of a previous lover, juxtaposing those memories with the image and sense of Diana. That was the reason she had seemed strange to him during the latter part of their lovemaking. That was the reason they awoke sitting together in such a state of puzzlement. It now became clear to Herman that the creatures had also induced in Diana false memories of him hurting her. He realized the creatures knew that it was unlikely he would follow their command to avoid Diana, a woman he was in love with. To ensure his absence from Diana they made sure, through induction of false memories of harm, that she would come to have negative feelings toward Herman. Herman wondered who these creatures might be. He thought it unlikely they were human, given the sense he had of what had jumped onto his back. His research turned up a race of what are called Mantid Insectoids. These beings are tall like humans, have a somewhat Praying Mantis appearance, and use a smaller version of themselves as servants. It was this smaller version which had jumped onto his back and created the heart to heart connection between Herman and Diana.

Herman now understood that the connection, the tube, was used in order to create a link between the minds of Diana and Herman, so that the Insectoids could download Hermans memories for the analysis and use of the Insectoids. Hermans research showed that Insectoid races have a propensity for doing such, though their reasons remain obscure. Are they studying humans simply out of curiosity, or do they have an agenda? Hermans love for Diana has not diminished. Indeed he now has a much deeper understanding of her. He knows of the far-reaching soul connection they have and have had over vast stretches of time. Ironically, though the non-humans managed to separate the two of them in the physical sense, the tube they connected them with has actually increased the connection between Herman and Diana in deeper ways. Herman and Diana are much closer than they would have been had they simply been lovers in the human sense only. What this means or could lead to is unknown at this time, but it is well known that deep connection and love lead to health and well-being.

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