“Mr. Whitman.”

Dr. Wright’s eyebrows perked up when she saw me enter her office. “I didn’t expect you to come back so soon.”

She led me into her office and closed the door. I sat down in the same chair as I did the last time. She sat across from me and opened her leather-bound notebook.

“Have you come to a better understanding of your condition?” she asked, adjusting her reading glasses.

“I want to tell you everything. I want to be totally honest,” I said,  slightly more intensely than I intended.

“I’m glad we’ve come to a mutual understanding then.”

Dr. Wright wrote something down in her notebook and then looked back up at me. “I’m ready to hear the honest truth, Mr. Whitman.”

“I think I’ve gone off the deep end. I have hallucinations. First, it was just stress-dreams and insomnia, but then it was like my dreams started happening while I was awake. I feel like something’s out to get me.”

I knew that I’d basically described the profile for a paranoid  schizophrenic, but I didn’t care. I just wanted answers.

To my surprise, Dr. Wright smiled. “Sam, I want to start by saying that everyone who sees me has similar symptoms and everyone I treat gets better. So I just want to make it clear to you that you will get help.”

I was silent for a moment, and then I finally said, “Really?”

“Absolutely. The good news is that you will get better if you go through my clinical treatment.”

“Does that mean that there’s bad news?” I said with a nervous smile.

Dr. Wright closed her notebook and opened her desk drawer. “Now, Sam, I’m going to show you something.”

“Okay,” I said, confused.

Dr. Wright took out a piece of paper, walked over and handed it to me, face down. “Before you turn that picture around, I need you to promise me that you’ll stay in this room.” She had a stern tone that unnerved me.

“I promise.”

I turned the picture around. At first, I was completely confused.

“What is this?” I asked.

“That,” Dr. Wright said as she sat back down across from me, “is your second grade class photograph.”

I stared at it for a moment, completely lost. Then, as I realized what she was trying to get me to see, my heart almost quit beating out of sheer terror. My second grade teacher, standing to the far left of the rows of smiling students, was a dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties with black-framed reading glasses.

It was Dr. Wright.

“How…” I trailed off and I felt my stomach drop, like it would on a roller coaster. I felt my lunch come up, and for a moment I was certain I was going to vomit.

“Sam, I need you to stay calm and take deep breaths.” She demonstrated her suggested breathing technique. “Come on: in through your nose, out through your mouth.”

“What is going on?”

“Sam, right now, your physical plane of existence is being infiltrated by forces wishing to use you as a host-vessel to exist in,” Dr. Wright said.

“You are being hijacked.”