The Mystery of the Inner Demon

Chapter 150 Four Dreams
"As a psychologist, I understand his loneliness better than most people.

Frankly speaking, I have a strong empathy ability that surpasses most people. Xihe, when this person appeared in front of me, I can't deceive myself and say that I didn't feel the slightest bit of emotion.

This excitement had nothing to do with love, but rather a deep understanding that Xihe was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. A case like this was something many psychological researchers would never encounter in their lifetimes. I wanted to analyze him, understand him, and heal him. This was the confidence I took for granted.

The process of building trust was easy. At the time, Xihe's mental abilities were at a very low point. He told me about his childhood, his parents' guarded love, and the cautiousness and loneliness of being raised by strangers. Finally, he said, "You know, I've discovered that the problems in this world can't be solved with money. This makes me despair."

I accompanied him through every lonely journey again. These dark secrets deep in his heart, with their vicious temptation, made me forget the biggest taboo of a psychologist, which is my excessive empathy, which turned the therapeutic relationship between him and me into an emotional game.

The enthusiasm for pursuing excellence made me subconsciously ignore that Xihe's eyes looking at me changed from clear to blurred, from trusting to warm.

He would tell me about four recurring dreams he had.”

Zhong Xiaoyu said as he handed a report to Qi Dongjun: "These are the contents of Xihe's dream that I reproduced based on my memory."

Qi Dongjun took the report without hesitation. It was written in the first person of Xihe.

The first dream: I found myself in a small room made of translucent amber. The walls were embedded with frozen hour hands, their tips frozen in the crack between the numbers 5 and 6. Countless gnarled tree roots extended from beneath my feet, wrapping around my ankles and growing deeper into the floor. With every step, the roots oozed a dark red sap, spreading out into twisted shapes on the ground. In the corner, a half-broken porcelain figurine huddled, its 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 roots that stretched upward, savagely, their bell-shaped, charred fruits hanging from their ends. When I touched the trunks, the bark cracked, revealing a network of veins. The sound of my pulse overlapped with my own heartbeat, like the tolling of funeral bells. A stream of glass marbles drifted through the woods, and bloodstained origami resembled the weave of a red sweater.

The third dream: The stream suddenly rose vertically, forming a mirrored wall, reflecting eighteen different versions of myself at different ages. The oldest reflection, gardening shears in hand, repeatedly cut at a silver thread connecting the mirror to the sky. With each cut, a piece of the sky peeled back, revealing a swollen moon behind, its surface cracked with the wrinkles of a mother's smile. The younger reflections suddenly turned their heads, and the young roots and sprouts of trees emerged from between their teeth.

The fourth dream: At the end of the forest, a cast-iron gate appeared, its keyhole shaped like a human pupil. As I inserted the blood-stained key, I felt a baby's cry in my palm. Behind the gate lay the endless maternity ward corridor, each door echoing with the same scream. On the operating table at the end of the corridor, a plant with a thriving root system was bursting from a pregnant woman's abdomen, half of a stopped pocket watch embedded in the center of its petals.

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

Psychologist Zhong Xiaoyu's unique, gentle voice rang in his ears: "These dreams are magnificent and full of imagination, allowing me to explore his fascinating inner world.

My rational mind tells me this is an extremely dangerous world, but my passion for psychology prevents me from immersing myself in this magnificent adventure. Because of Xi He, Qi Dongjun wasn't completely ignorant of psychology. He looked at the contents thoughtfully, "Of the psychologists I hired, Xi He never admitted to dreaming. He always claimed he never dreamed. Almost all of them eventually resigned, saying they couldn't help Xi He. No matter how high my offer, they resolutely gave up. I could see the fear in their eyes, but I didn't understand what, as psychologists, they had to fear."

"Haha, they are right. They know very well that their psychological defenses cannot resist Xihe's invasion. He is not an ordinary patient. He is constantly trying to manipulate the people in front of him.

I knew it, but I was arrogant enough to think I would win the psychological game in the end."

"What are these dreams of his saying?"

“This is my final analysis, let’s take it one by one.

First, the amber room, it is a deformation of the mother's womb, a solidified hour hand. I didn't understand its meaning at first. I was just sure that the twisted bloodstains were his uncut symbiotic anxiety.

In the second dream, the inverted oak tree represented an inverted parental structure, its roots symbolizing overly controlling paternal love, and its charred fruit a metaphor for stifled free will. "I think..." Zhong Xiaoyu looked at Qi Dongjun, "You played a very 'important' role in his eighteen years of life." When she said the word 'important', the corners of Qi Dongjun's mouth twitched.

He didn't elaborate much, but simply said, "I did everything I could as a husband and a father."

Zhong Xiaoyu didn't comment on this, simply continuing to analyze the report. "In the third dream, the red sweater and marbles, I think, represent a rare and beautiful private plot in Xihe's memory. Unfortunately, this precious emotional bond from childhood was bloodily alienated in the dream. It was from this third dream that I realized that the patient I was dealing with had something far darker hidden within him than I had anticipated. These wealthy individuals, who embodied the feminine qualities of a mother, were destroyed by fear... It's very likely that this is also true in reality."

The eighteen-layered mirror abyss, the repetitive compulsion of matricide, the repeated cutting of the silver thread that represents the shackles of filial piety, and the swollen moon are more like his demonization of the mother's love in order to justify his crimes.

This final dream, the distorted time and space, the disordered life and death, the plants wildly growing from the pregnant woman's belly, was himself. It was his subconscious self-punishment fantasy as a matricide - by recreating the birth scene, he personified his own sins as deformed life forms that would devour the mother's body.

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

"It's all 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 meant different things.

(End of this chapter)