[From the Greek "hypno-" sleep, plus "paideia", education] Attempted instruction in a subject, such as a foreign language, during sleep, usually by means of recordings.
The Director interrupted himself. "You know what Polish is, I suppose?"
"A dead language."
"Like French and German," added another student, officiously showing off his learning.
"And 'parent'?" questioned the D.H.C.
There was an uneasy silence. Several of the boys blushed. They had not yet learned to draw the significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science. One, at last, had the courage to raise a hand.
"Human beings used to be …" he hesitated; the blood rushed to his cheeks. "Well, they used to be viviparous."
"Quite right." The Director nodded approvingly.
"And when the babies were decanted …"
"'Born,'" came the correction.
"Well, then they were the parents–I mean, not the babies, of course; the other ones." The poor boy was overwhelmed with confusion.
"In brief," the Director summed up, "the parents were the father and the mother." The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys' eye-avoiding silence. "Mother," he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, "These," he said gravely, "are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant."
He returned to Little Reuben–to Little Reuben, in whose room, one evening, by an oversight, his father and mother (crash, crash!) happened to leave the radio turned on.
("For you must remember that in those days of gross viviparous reproduction, children were always brought up by their parents and not in State Conditioning Centres.")
While the child was asleep, a broadcast programme from London suddenly started to come through; and the next morning, to the astonishment of his crash and crash (the more daring of the boys ventured to grin at one another), Little Reuben woke up repeating word for word a long lecture by that curious old writer ("one of the very few whose works have been permitted to come down to us"), George Bernard Shaw, who was speaking, according to a well-authenticated tradition, about his own genius. To Little Reuben's wink and snigger, this lecture was, of course, perfectly incomprehensible and, imagining that their child had suddenly gone mad, they sent for a doctor. He, fortunately, understood English, recognized the discourse as that which Shaw had broadcasted the previous evening, realized the significance of what had happened, and sent a letter to the medical press about it.
"The principle of sleep-teaching, or hypnopædia, had been discovered." The D.H.C. made an impressive pause.
The principle had been discovered; but many, many years were to elapse before that principle was usefully applied.
"The case of Little Reuben occurred only twenty-three years after Our Ford's first T-Model was put on the market." (Here the Director made a sign of the T on his stomach and all the students reverently followed suit.) "And yet …"
Furiously the students scribbled. "Hypnopædia, first used officially in A.F. 214. Why not before? Two reasons. (a) …"
"These early experimenters," the D.H.C. was saying, "were on the wrong track. They thought that hypnopædia could be made an instrument of intellectual education …"
(A small boy asleep on his right side, the right arm stuck out, the right hand hanging limp over the edge of the bed. Through a round grating in the side of a box a voice speaks softly.
"The Nile is the longest river in Africa and the second in length of all the rivers of the globe. Although falling short of the length of the Mississippi-Missouri, the Nile is at the head of all rivers as regards the length of its basin, which extends through 35 degrees of latitude …"
At breakfast the next morning, "Tommy," some one says, "do you know which is the longest river in Africa?" A shaking of the head. "But don't you remember something that begins: The Nile is the …"
"The - Nile - is - the - longest - river - in - Africa - and - the - second - in - length - of - all - the - rivers - of - the - globe …" The words come rushing out. "Although - falling - short - of …"
"Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?"
The eyes are blank. "I don't know."
"But the Nile, Tommy."
"The - Nile - is - the - longest - river - in - Africa - and - second …"
"Then which river is the longest, Tommy?"
Tommy burst into tears. "I don't know," he howls.)
That howl, the Director made it plain, discouraged the earliest investigators. The experiments were abandoned. No further attempt was made to teach children the length of the Nile in their sleep. Quite rightly. You can't learn a science unless you know what it's all about.
"Whereas, if they'd only started on moral education," said the Director, leading the way towards the door. The students followed him, desperately scribbling as they walked and all the way up in the lift. "Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational."
"Silence, silence," whispered a loud speaker as they stepped out at the fourteenth floor, and "Silence, silence," the trumpet mouths indefatigably repeated at intervals down every corridor. The students and even the Director himself rose automatically to the tips of their toes. They were Alphas, of course, but even Alphas have been well conditioned. "Silence, silence." All the air of the fourteenth floor was sibilant with the categorical imperative.
Fifty yards of tiptoeing brought them to a door which the Director cautiously opened. They stepped over the threshold into the twilight of a shuttered dormitory. Eighty cots stood in a row against the wall. There was a sound of light regular breathing and a continuous murmur, as of very faint voices remotely whispering.
A nurse rose as they entered and came to attention before the Director.
"What's the lesson this afternoon?" he asked.
"We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answered. "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness."
The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.
"Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet."
At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.
"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
There was a pause; then the voice began again.
"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."
Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida–wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.
"The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."
The students took it down in their little books. Straight from the horse's mouth.
Once more the Director touched the switch.
"… so frightfully clever," the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying, "I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because …"
Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too–all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides–made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!" The Director almost shouted in his triumph. "Suggestions from the State." He banged the nearest table. "It therefore follows …"
A noise made him turn round.
"Oh, Ford!" he said in another tone, "I've gone and woken the children."
-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
To bolster flagging numbers in their ranks, one sect within the Victorians' august ranks dared to attempt a project that would likely set them at odds with other branches of their own faction. They engaged in a bit of deal-making with a well-respected family from UpTop Park, requesting technical assistance to modify their decanting machinery and implement a training program based on subliminal indoctrination of Victorian ideals, to create beings so welded from early age to the notions of decency, propriety and pre-scarcity that they would later be unable and unwilling to think otherwise. In exchange for the aid, the Victorians would supply a real-world testbed for large-scale mass-application memetics, to allow the clade to gather data for its research.
In Claver's case they succeeded. In Roque's case... not quite.
Roque, for whatever reason, awoke too often at night and would listen to the soft silibant whispers of a hundred overlapping voices chanting to her, filling her mind with ideas that could not be consciously identified, only vaguely realized. Because of her conscious awareness of the implanted ideals, they have a weaker grip over her mind than the Victorians would have liked. Her training does not prevent her from operating contrary to its ideals; it only makes her embarrassed, frustrated and ashamed to do so. With Flyte's help, she is slowly purging the last of these ideals from her head.
Sadly, she has not yet done so, and her conditioning contains some additional hooks. In addition to obeying and trusting the elders of the enclave, the programming includes instructions to treat members of the clade that assisted the Victorians as part of the elders, to trust and obey them. This isn't an automatic command system, but it does mean that the members of that family have a great deal of influence over the behaviors of Roque and her classmates, as long as it doesn't contradict any other part of her training.
Davan, as head of the clade and the one to aid the Victorians in their research, knows this and takes no small amount of delight in using it against Roque. Diafeara, as second in line behind him, is also aware of this little hook and its implications.
Claver, in comparison, has no idea of his conditioning. His training is perfect, to the point that he will vociferously deny being brainwashed, controlled or programmed, and will do everything he can to insist that the Victorians do not employ such techniques. Even if at some point it is proven beyond any shadow of doubt that he has been mesmserized into doing their bidding, he will defend their actions and insist that he is in favor of it, all seamlessly and without question.
As of yet, this plotline is unresolved, and yet it is in the past, for the events have already occured, and what continues now is the aftermath of them. Roque is learning to remove the training from her mind, Davan continues to reap the rewards of being an authority in her life, Diafeara watches the manipulations and schemes her own plots to stop them, and Claver is only just now about to discover that his life is not his own....
According to a recent Upwarp research file, Paragnostic Pathology of Intentional Oneirophoresis in Sophogenetic Systems of Form "6n-kairos", there is evidence that hypnopedia could have unforeseen long-term side-effects. These hypothetical symptoms would be a consequence of the nature of reality in environments like the Mess, where the laws of physics and causality are highly malleable by the thoughts of their inhabitants. The exact consequences of systematic dream-tampering are unpredictable by the very nature of the damage, but would likely involve (in layman's terms) corruption of the "buffer space" between the subject's state of being and those which border it. Note also, as a matter of political interest, that the aforementioned research project is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between the measurement-obsessed Quantifier faction of Upwarp and the neo-Boreals.] (OOCly, I have a specific purpose in mind for this subplot, but if it really doesn't work for the participants in the hypnopaedia plot, feel free to ignore, modify, or contradict it. -- OR)