What can I do with this power?

One of the characters in my story can use a skill called "The Mindscape". It is a power that connects the user and the target's mind and pulls both of them into a shared mental world that can be shaped by either's thoughts.

I'm not quite sure what can be done with this ability, other than extracting information. Is this too similar to Inception?

You could insert information.

...Oh, wait, you're trying to avoid similarity with Inception, nevermind.

Also, mess around with their heads in less immediately obvious ways. Drive them mad. Make them believe something silly. Make them stop believing something sensible.

edited 25th Aug '11 9:48:47 AM by Yej

I need to set some rules and limits on this power. First of all, anyone who isn't aware of the Mindscape cannot actively shape it. Important thing about this power I need to decide is which is more powerful; unconscious mental activity or conscious. You would have to be conscious and aware of the Mindscape to actually have some control over it. The user is a neuropsychology professor and he has practiced the ability for about two decades, but he has major guilt over someone he neglected and left to die.

The thing is, one of the advantage the user has is that when initially thrown into the Mindscape, the victim isn't aware of it unless he tells him/her, which he usually doesn't. Normally, it reflects the reality seen by the user and here's the problem; to be aware of the Mindscape, you need to have either a prior knowledge about it or its view shouldn't match your perception of reality. The thing is, everyone perceives the world differently and would the user be able to near correctly replicate the same world perceived by his victim without knowing about the person beforehand?

edited 25th Aug '11 10:04:00 AM by dRoy

False memories, or making them reinterpret a memory. Therapy. The Matrix-style learning of skills.

Once I played a Neverwinter Nights module called Excrucio Eternum. In it, The Big Bad has hooked up seven people in his "asylum" to the Harvester Machine, which feeds off of their psychological pain and gives him a Healing Factor that makes him invulnerable. The way he broke them was by using a "psyche probe", which he uses to literally enter the landscapes in their mind so that he can fuck shit up. The player comes across this machine about halfway through the game, and use it to sever the "seven links of pain" by going into the victim's head and fixing the trauma.

Other potential uses could include Talking the Monster to Death, simulated torture, or a simple yet effective waiting game. Real-time means nothing to the mind.

So far, the power boils down to take you and your enemy's mind into a mental world where s/he's completely vulnerable to your manipulation. This power is used for combat situation as well and how can it be used? One of my ideas is to distort the target's perception so the user can't be detected.

http://www.goodanime.net/category/yumekui-merry

Pretty self-explanatory, the concepts are similar.

Mind Rape?

If he's a neuropsychologist then maybe there's potential to be using it on people who aren't enemies to help them with some stuff instead.

I'd say make the subconcious determine the look and design of the realm, while concious thought is able to shape it at will.

For example, a ancient greek loving history buff would subconciously create a realm that looks very much like a city in ancient Greece: Stone architecture, white marble, etc. However, while he cannot create a new realm, like say a futuristic one, he can rearrange the landscape and/or dimensions of "his" world.

Understand?

The subconscious has a lot of sway in perceiving reality, so I'd imagine that the subconscious would be the biggest player with this power, with someone who also has conscious control of it becoming deadly. As someone else has said, the mind's perception of time can be greatly skewed, such as having many, multiple, and lengthy dreams in the span of a few hours real time. It'd be possible for someone to enter this Mindscape and stay there for weeks with only a few hours passing outside of it.

Nightmares and phobias would be major players for this power too, and anyone who was aware of the fear of others, and how to tap into them, could be deadly with this kind of mental force.

As others have said, there's a lot of positive uses for this, such as therapy and pleasant dreams, memory rewriting (such as to get over trauma and such), etc.

Sounds pretty interesting.

Seconding that. On the positive end of things, you have the ability to directly analyse and confront complex psychological problems in a hands-on manner; on the negative, you have the perfect tool for massive, soul-destroying mind rape.

So, yes. "With great power," and all that jazz.

Using this power for postive purpose...sounds like a great idea!

I see. Another problem with the mindscape being shaped by unconsciousness (subconsciousness is a discredited term among psychologists, remember) is that there are always at least two unconsciousness that are present; the user's and the target's. Unconsciousness is, at least with current science, highly unexplainable and chaotic, and if two of them influence a single Mindscape, it would be a mess. Is it possible to suppress one's unconscious mental activity? Also, would the shaping power of consciousness and unconsciousness be the same, because even if the user can have the control, if the victim reacts strongly, like feeling extreme fear, and reshapes the whole thing in large scale, the user would have a big trouble.

You might look at how the Mangekyou Sharingan Tsukuyomi is used in Naruto. That seems similar, though the world created is entirely under the control of the caster, rather than both.

Inception had a pretty good way of handling two conscious minds in a single location, but I doubt that applies very well here.

Look at it this way: you and I walk into a room, and see a table. A shadow speeds across the table. One of us sees that shadow and thinks it a piece of lint blown by a quick, small gust, while the other sees it as a spider scurrying to a hiding place.

Both conscious and unconscious minds are at work here. Both can agree that we're interpreting reality to some degree of sameness (we both see a table), but a quick flicker of a shadow that we both see (simple unconscious perception) turns into something different for the both of us, regardless of the reality behind it (conscious mind, sprinkled with some unconscious thoughts or assumptions).

It'd be pretty probable that if two people are in the same mindscape together, it'd be easier for the Creator to create a mindscape terrain that the Target and the Creator can agree to; especially if it follows some common, "logical", interpretations of reality. Say the Target is walking down a hallway, and enters a door. Assuming the power can work in this way, the Target can "walk" right into the mindscape, seamlessly, created by the Creator, so long as the Creator creates a mindscape to be perceived by the senses as being whatever room the Target happened to walk into.

This all works under the assumption that Inception calls to question, namely that if a Target can't or doesn't accept an idea, then the Target will ultimately reject it, making it harder to work in the mind of the Target. So if a Target walks down a hallway, walks through a door, finds himself in a forest, and accepts it as illogical, it would seem to be harder for the Creator to control what happens in the mindscape, which may result in a lot of problems.

Since this mindscape seems to be a neutral play-thing for those that know how to use it, it would seem that if two Creators are in the same mindscape attempting to work on each other, whoever has a weaker grasp on reality would find themselves victim to the system.

All of this would seem to work for whatever the Creator intends to do for or with the Target, be it positive or negative.

edited 1st Sep '11 3:43:10 PM by Newfable

Technically, "subconscious" means something different from "unconscious" when referring to thought, meaning that it is not a discredited term so much as a misapplied one, but I digress.

I know, but when most laypeople use it, they don't mean THAT specific meanings, so it still counts.