I’ve stumbled across a couple of very silly stories from when I was young.
“…and then when I look around, I don’t see anyone looking at me! Doc, I can’t take this anymore.” Beads of sweat glistened on Walter Dott’s forehead as he spilled forth his recently-unbearable troubles. “It’s just like that paranoia that you read about. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being followed and watched. It’s driving me mad.”
“Calm down Mr. Dott. Your problem is shared by thousands of other people across the country. There is some controversy though as to how it should be treated. Each psychiatrist has his own notions, but I believe that you will find my methods most painless and helpful. Through hypnotic suggestion, you will believe that you’ve confronted your pursuer and found him harmless and eventually nonexistent. Now here we go — you are relaxed, your limbs are growing heavy, your eyes are closing, closing,…”
Doctor Bergen wasn’t a doctor. In fact, he wasn’t even human, but a dying man’s delusion — as were all of Walter Dott’s surroundings. For in reality, he was on far planet, in a meat freezer, his mind slowly dwindling away into nothingness as his naked body was gradually being frozen to flavor perfection.
The Dott family had lived on a secluded island in the South Pacific and, one by one, they had been snatched by carnivorous Antarians and whisked away to their distant world to serve as exotic food for the ruler of the planet.
During this freezing process, the victim senses external stimuli in a limited way and weaves these into the inevitable hallucinations that a dying brain will conjure up.
The royal Antarian cooks had been having some difficulty in having the meat ready at the proper time. Either the flesh did not keep, eventually rotting away and making a horrible smell, or the meat was too frozen, or too tough from weeks of frightened struggles in efforts to avoid the cooking pot. Finally, the cooks had thought of this slow freezing process with the human still alive. This seemed to work — though there was a greater chance of a premature turning of the meat at unexpected death than there was of overfreezing. But experience had taught the cooks that constant surveillance was necessary during the entire process. There was reason behind Walter’s madness. The cooks had discovered that:
A watched Dott never spoils.