PILLOW TALK

MONTREAL, 1963

I remember when my dad came home one evening with our new pillows- two of them- brand new foam rubber pillows with rayon slips. I can see the tentative look on his face as he came in the door in his winter coat and hat, clutching them to his chest. "Here are your new pillows. From now on you'll use these and not the others." So our feather pillows went into the closet. Our mother said nothing, just nodded. We dutifully took the new foam rubber ones to our rooms and slept on them from then on. Never suspecting ...

I remember thinking it was unusual for our dad to be bringing pillows home from the high school where he worked. They didnt come wrapped in saran wrap, as they would have if he had bought them at the store. No, these looked like they were a gift from someone. Also he brought home a new bottle of Wampoles syrup and put it in the bathroom cubboard. A spoonful at night before bedtime.

This happened in January or February, winter of 1963. Winter of weirdness. Since his six weeks in the Allan Memorial over Christmas and New Year, our dad seemed like a different person- much less impatient, no longer volatile. Soft around the edges, a little fuzzy at the center.

A book on numerology had appeared on our living room shelf, along with one on handwriting analysis. Our mom pointed out that his handwriting has changed -- it was now 3x larger - indicating a new willingness to express his emotions. The problem for us twins was that we were unaccustomed to this new father who often acted somewhat lost and vague. It was embarrassing at times to witness him so strangely vulnerable.

"Tell him you love him," our mother suggested.

"Why?"

"He needs you to. Try."

In a way we missed our old, bad tempered dad. At least we had known where we stood with him.

Our parents were still sleeping in separate rooms. This was supposedly for health reasons-- our mother was having flareups of rheumatoid arthritis and she needed a room of her own. So my brother and I took turns sleeping in our mother's bed in the master bedroom, next to our dad. In between the beds was a small night table with a lamp, an alarm clock, and a paperback copy of The Annals of Tacitus, his night time reading.

With the foam pillows, came the hallucinations. As I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, I felt myself swelling like a balloon, almost to the point of bursting, then suddenly shrinking down to the size of a pea. The bedside clock would speed up and slow down. Then a voice in my head would start repeating, over and over:

You're no good

You will fail

You will never succeed at anything

Years later, my brother told me he had the same nightly experience that winter. He heard the male voice but could never make out what it was saying.

I later read this was one of Dr. Cameron's recorded messages, word for word, played to patients through speakers installed inside football helmets at the hospital.

Were there speakers inside our new pillows?

Only many years later I finally learned what my dad was really doing that winter, following his six weeks in the Allan over Christmas and New Year.

While he pretended to go to work every morning, just as before, in fact he was on extended sick leave and would never teach high school again.

He was spending the week as an outpatient down at the Day Hospital with the MKULTRA doctors who were also programming his wife and kids without our knowledge.

Talking pillows were the latest device invented by the wizard Leonard Rubenstein, Dr Cameron's technical assistant. They probably contained a tiny radio transmitter that broadcast our master's voice into our ears at night while my brother and I were tripping on LSD that they'd slipped into our bedtime tonic.

That would account for much of the weirdness we experienced that year, at home and school. Cameron was at his peak -- he was depatterning dozens of patients in his hospital and developing new ways of reaching out into the community. Our family was just one of many - we may never know exactly how many were drawn in, damaged or destroyed.