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what you are about to read is the result of many voices blending as one, when Cooperland’s illusion of unity still enforced the idea that those who wrote this piece were one person, that one person being Rozaya. The ability of that group to recall dreams, such as the one depicted here, is thanks to an insider who bridged the gap between the inner world and the outer one, and gave the information to a translator, who then typed it into what you see now. The emotional reactions described here are those of other insiders, how many we do not know. The use of the word ‘I’ is simply do to the belief, held by all involved in the observations described here, that we were all one person. Since Cooperland has taken down the illusions of unity surrounding us, this belief has begun its death.
The article begins, as it was originally written, below.
***
“behavior is communication.”
This idea is well known in the autistic community, as well as other groups of the world besides, and for us, it is true. However, not all behavior is obvious or displayed on the outside, and not all behavior communicates a given message clearly. This was the case with insiders of this community who once performed acts of aggression upon younger ones who identified as having a disability, in an attempt to, as they put it during one of my many interviews with them after I had seen the program which they had put in place, keep us from getting in trouble, by controlling their mannerisms and preventing their display from the inside before anything of the sort could happen. They took from nothing but our own experiences and things that we had seen done to others through videos and in person, and, over many years, created what we’ve come to know as the ‘internal behavior program,’ or IBP. Compared to the outside one we were involved in during elementary school, the IBP was hell on earth for those subjected to its full range of methods. Its reason for existing was simple, and its foundations were based purely in fear. The principles and practices it was composed of provided it with the structure we first discovered upon its revelation to us, and these principles and practices were not easy to trace back to their origins, as we first believed they would be.
In our inner world, there is a building that resembles what we would think a jailhouse to be like, and it was within this building that the IBP was once run. At its front was a set of double doors, past which was an entryway, and then a set of three halls, leading left, right and forward. The left one, we discovered, was a path to what was known as the “greater rewards” room, and the layout of that place was exactly the same as that of a room we had known physically, in our elementary school days, where we had spent our earned tokens on items in a makeshift store, and where we had seen others get rewarded for doing right, undoubtedly by some piece of paper penned by a team of people in power, though we didn’t learn of that formality until later in our life. From the junction past the doors, the hallway to the right was a path to the office, which was a tiny room mostly taken up by the huge, curved desk that almost completely surrounded the four chairs, as one would expect from something of that shape. On that desk were piles of papers, mostly behavior plans and logs of parts of school days past that had yet to be sorted into any particular order, but that lack of order never stopped the teachers from carrying out their outdated tasks in an eerily consistent fashion. One could almost hear the words they spoke if they were to travel down the final hall, lined with doors labeled from one to 100 on either side, amounting to 200 rooms in total, and if you could stand that, you would be greeted with another set of halls, this time leading to two fire exits and one massive document shredder, able to do the tasks of 20 of its smaller kind.
The atmosphere of the IBP was heavy, born of a need to protect, and to control. At this point, you may be wondering how it is that I, the main insider, was able to detect any of this, and the answer to that question is rather simple. Our dreams tell us that even in sleep, the mind is always awake, and it was thanks to this that Oakry, another insider of this community, was able to show me exactly what this building was like, and, even more shockingly, what went on within one of these 200 rooms. Upon that discovery, I was horrified, and though I had been aware of the IBP for some time by then, seeing what it was doing gave me cause to begin probing our past in search of answers, and a way to put an end to the suffering these insiders were going through as they tried to protect against events that were years behind us all. What I saw there was a distorted reflection of what I knew our early life to be, as memories were built upon and began to serve as broken foundations for a survival strategy that, eventually, was found to be just as destructive as the things it was designed to protect against. The day I saw what went on in that building was the day I realized how much we’d been impacted by the outside behavior program, and the day I recommitted myself, once and for all, to healing its effects.
In what would turn out to be the nightmare of a lifetime, Oakry came for me, motioning for me to get up from my bed and follow him. I don’t know how we got there, but I found myself standing at the front of that building, about to enter the place through the front set of doors. He pushed them open, we both walked through, and I got my first good look around, realizing as I did that I had seen mental images of my surroundings in waking life. I took in the three halls, and then followed him down to the third room on the left wall of the forward-leading hall. He knocked, and a child opened the door, with an adult close behind them. He must have been five to seven, and the adult, who I realized was a teacher, quickly ushered us into the room, and had him shut the door behind us. There were two seats next to the door, one on either side, and Oakry and I both took them, beginning to watch the class. I remember a feeling that it was morning and that things there had just begun, but exactly what those things were didn’t become clear to me until after I had sat down.
I suppose I should stop now to describe exactly what this room looked like, and also to point out the fact that, even though we are physically blind, we were exposed to enough books, vividly visual descriptions given by outside people, and our own attempts at creating visual images that, to my amazement, the rest of us were able to create the kinds of things I’ve been describing. In dreams like the one I found myself in that night, my looking is more like suddenly knowing things as I turn my head to different parts of the room, and in this case, the things I saw in that way were things I’d never wish on anyone of this world. Aside from the two chairs Oakry and I were sitting in, there was a second door, which opened into a restraint room staffed by two additional adults who, I later learned, were former students of teachers who had since been relocated somewhere else within this vile program. In front of me, there were row after row of desks, arranged with military precision, all identical, all with the exact same kind of chair neatly tucked under them, all with one child and one adult sitting at them. I think I counted about twenty rows like that, with five desks in each row, amounting to 200 people in one room, 202 if you include Oakry and myself. With numbers like those, I expected a crowded roar of voices, but there was only the low commands of teachers and the voices of children, either razed in protest or complacently uttering words at an adult’s prompt. It took me a moment to realize exactly what was going on, and when the full effect of what I was seeing came over me, I wished I was anywhere but in those four walls. I knew it was bad, but until I focused my eyes on one child in particular, as Oakry had signaled for me to, I hadn’t realized just what it was that I had walked into.
The first thing I was aware of after I had focused on the child and adult at one of the desks was the adult’s command, and it was from this that I was able to deduce the adult’s status as a kind of teacher, although a very fear-driven one, as I would later come to understand.
“Ammanda, eyes looking,” she said, and when the child did not follow her finger pointing to her own face, the adult lifted her chin with one hand and turned her head to face her, while with the other she wrote something on a piece of paper on the desk. She voiced the command again, having since let go of the child’s chin, and this time Ammanda turned her head slightly in the adult’s direction.
“Ammanda, eyes looking,” she prompted her again, and I could see the fear on the child’s face.
“No,” she said softly, and her teacher wrote something else on the paper before turning her attention back to her, taking her chin in her hand again and turning her chair so that the two were facing each other.
“Ammanda, if you don’t obey what I tell you to do, you will be a bad kid,” her teacher said harshly. “You will not get your reward, and if you go out into the body you will get us all in trouble. Do you understand me?”
The child tried to nod, but was prevented by the adult’s grip on her chin.
“Good,” she said, and wrote more things on what, to me, was rapidly becoming the most disgusting piece of paper I had ever seen. “Ammanda,” she said, releasing her chin, “Eyes looking.”
This time, Ammanda did as she was told, looking at the face of her teacher, and at this she was given a round circle-like object that bore a striking resemblance to the tokens we were all given at the behavior program of the outside world. I shuttered disgustedly, looking away, and remembered where I had heard those words. ‘eyes looking’ came right out of the experience of another, and, as I found out later, was taken in mostly because of memories of our father taking our chin in his hand, turning our face towards his, and telling us, despite our blindness, to look at him. We did indeed fear getting into trouble if we failed to do as we were told, and as I thought of what I’d seen in that room after I’d awoke, I realized that, far from evil, the adult who was interacting with Ammanda in that way was, as was clearly shown by her words to the child, trying to prevent that from happening. In the moment of my seeing her actions, though, I felt only waves of sickness crashing over me, and wondered how I could have remained unaware of this for so long. I looked back to Ammanda and the adult with her, only to see them doing the same as they had been before. Our physical blindness didn’t matter in that room, I realized as I watched it again, and later I pieced together the reason for such a thing being ignored. It didn’t matter to our father either, or at least we didn’t think it did, and had learned, even in our inner world, to create rooms like this, and, in them, to act accordingly.
I looked toward other desks, and the third one to the left of Ammanda’s caught my attention. The teacher there was working with a child who looked to be a boy of about four or so, and if I thought Ammanda’s experience was harsh and disgusting, I could find no words to describe what I was about to see in this younger child’s.
“Quiet hands, Ethon,” his teacher said as the boy was rubbing his hands together near his face. When he gave no response, his teacher grabbed his hands, held them flat to the desk for a slow count of three, and then released them, writing, as Ammanda’s had, on a piece of paper on the same surface. By this point, my heart was in my throat as I remembered reading about that very same practice being done to many people of the outside world who others had diagnosed with autism.
“Could our reading about this subject have caused this much of an outbreak of things like this?” I wondered, as I tore my eyes away from the seen before me, where Ethon was being told much the same thing that Ammanda had been.
I took a slow look around the whole of the room, and saw straps being used on kids who refused to have quiet hands or looking eyes, heard tokens being placed on desks, froze with my own fears as those who should have been playing and learning what it was to have fun were instead made to do the same tasks again and again until they did them at the verbal prompt alone. I was too shocked to cry, too saddened to do anything but look on as Oakry pointed toward different spots of the room, at which I stared for minutes at a time, unable to believe what was happening before my eyes. Twice, children who could handle no more of the practices split into two, and these new insiders were rapidly taken out of the room, to where, I was later told, they were also to get the same treatment. When I looked from the seen again, I was back in my room, still dreaming, and still being shown images of the layout of the IBP’s building. Oakry must have arrived, because he sat on my bed in that nightmare, reminding me of the commitment we had all made, three years ago, to help one another. When I had awoken, I could hardly believe that what had gone on was a reality, even within a world where nothing was believed to be fictional, and then I spoke with Oakry. He confirmed everything, from the beginning of the story I’ve just told until the end of the dream. Months later, I’m still working to gain access to that building, and all of the tormented beings within it.
Some of what I saw that night was nothing we have ever experienced in this life. Being empaths, I wouldn’t be surprised if we took on what another near us had experienced as far as something like what I saw Ethon survive as though it was ours to handle. I can rationalize away the demands of eye contact placed upon Ammanda and many others in that room, as well as the high number of insiders, both teachers and kids, that were within it, and that building. But none of this rationalization would lead to the healing that we are seeking, or to the end of the fear that drives all interactions between the two groups that make up the IBP. I am in contact with one of the teachers there, and Oakry has once again begun leading me into that building through dreams so that I may interact with more of them and their students. It will be a slow process, but I think these practices can be eliminated if others within the community can also gain access to that place and adopt a team approach in helping everyone there understand that times have changed, and that there are other ways to get whatever it is the adults are looking for that don’t involve what, in my eyes, amounts to abuse. I have hope for all involved in this internal behavior program, regardless of the part they’ve played in it. We have already begun to redesign the place in which it was running, but this, too, takes time.
Weeks ago, some of the children who were subjected to the IBP began to reach out to Oakry, Arrora and I, seeking comfort, which we, of course, gave them. I have found that, as of last week, half of the children involved in this program were without names. On average, this means that each of the 200 rooms had 50 students who were only told to have quiet hands, or looking eyes, or to touch their noses, or to echo words, never having been called by a name of any kind. From the interactions Oakry, Arrora and I have had with those children who came to us for comfort last night, we have also learned that aside from the 50 students in each room who are, even now, without names, there was also an average of 30 more from each room who had taken on the insults of their teachers as names, adding up to a total of 80 children who were at much higher risk of developing a poor sense of self, or not developing one at all. I make that correlation because, at least for us, a name is an integral part of one’s identity as a being, and the lack of such a thing creates, in the person without it, a sense that they are their experiences, and nothing more. That is no way to live, and no way to learn, and I will do everything in my power to prevent that potential from becoming any more of a reality here than it already is, starting by finding something like a name generator and showing its results to the whole of the school’s population. The full list of things that must be done in order to help all involved with this program regain their senses of self, or in some cases discover them, will require another article, which will be coming soon. The teachers will require different things than the students, none of which involve making them feel guilty for what they have done, but the details of this process, too, will require an additional post.
I’d like to thank all of you for reading through these pages, as shocking as some of them have been. More often than not, it is this blog that is the driving force behind discovering and beginning to solve problems like these. I find that if I can put my thoughts into writing, it becomes easier to navigate the place in which the rest of the community have hidden their suffering. I don’t know why this is, but it is, and I can work with it, thanks to our readers and friends. Thank you all, for seeing us as we are, and allowing us to feel safe enough to write on the subject of our continuing recovery from what I have no regrets about calling trauma.