You’re walking down the street, noticing a new art installation filled with neon lights and transparent plexiglass tunnels. It was like a giant, glow-in-the-dark hamster cage.

As you walk by the entrance, someone grabs your hand.

“Hi! Would you like a walk through the Amazement Maze? You can have a lot of fun in the Amazing Amazement Maze!”

“Uhm, sure, but I—”

The person is shaking your hand back and forth, up and down. They flutter their fingers just above your eyes.

“You’re getting amazingly amazed by the Amazing Amazement Maze. Just letting yourself have amazing fun in the Amazing Amazement Maze and not ever realize I’m hypnotizing you to fall into the Amazing Amazement sleep now.”

They brush their hand over your face. You drop down. The hypnotist is moving you by the shoulders. You drift along passively. The hypnotist says something and then shuts a door. You blink your eyes open with one thought in your head.

“Enjoy yourself.”

You shake yourself awake. You’re inside a plastic tunnel, transparent and tinted light red. As you gaze down the tunnel, you notice lights that flash and spin down the walls and floor of the tunnel, orange, red, purple, and white. The lights spin so fluidly that it looks like the whole corridor is a long, deep, twirling spiral.

You can stop looking down the spiral. Somehow you know at the end of the spiral is a prize. You want to win the Amazing Amazement prize, so you walk down the tunnel. Your eyes are getting so tired from all the bright, spinning lights. You struggle to keep your eyes open or even walk in a straight line. The spiral makes you so confused and sleepy.

Finally, you get to the end of the spiral and step through the center, like waking from one dream and into another.

Now you’re in a blue elevator with a small cushioned ledge on one side. You sit on the cushions and look at the numbers on top of the elevator door begin to light up. But the elevator is see-through. You know you’re not moving yet. The numbers light up from top down.

5

4

3

2

1

DING!

The elevator suddenly drops straight down and you float, weightless for a moment, your mind spilling right out of your head. The elevator slows down and you sink heavier and heavier into the cushions. The elevator car slows and then stops.

The doors open and you stumble out. You’re in a dark room, the only light is from a flickering blue projection, like a floating flame, hovering about ten feet in front of you. You can’t stop yourself from wandering closer, your mind quiet and at peace. As you come within reach of the light, it flicks out and a new will o’wisp appears another ten steps ahead of you. You drift towards it, your eyes empty and unseeing, your body just putting one foot in front of the other.

The lights keep switching farther down the hall, luring you on. You slowly start to realize that your feet are walking to a rhythm. It feels nice. Relaxing. Just like humming coming from the walls and making your head buzz.

You round a corner and find a yellow-green spiral staircase that leads up through the ceiling. You’re not sure what’s up there, but you really want to find out. Maybe the best thing in the world is up there and you just have to climb up and get it. You think these thoughts as the humming gets louder.

You begin to walk up the spiral staircase. You can hear a tone in the background noise getting louder. It works its way into your brain and shuts down your thoughts before they begin. The note keeps getting higher and higher, even as you go farther up and up the spiraling stairs. It’s making you feel excited and a little bit anxious. The note continues getting higher and you start walking faster, eager to find the end of the staircase. Eager to finally get to the crest of the sound driving you up.

The staircase ends, but the note doesn’t change. It just gets softer as you walk forward into a room with blinking lights and purple spirals on the walls. As you gaze around you, you think you see pictures of people. People down on their knees, pleasuring each other, pleasuring themselves. People without clothes on. But the pictures vanish in an instant and you’re back to staring mindlessly at the spirals and blinking lights.

You take a step and the ground shifts, knocking you off balance. You stumble but the whole floor is covered in round tiles that spin and shift your balance with every step. You’re wobbling around like a drunk, getting bombarded with spirals and subliminal images. It feels so disorienting and dizzying, and you start to giggle. You’re feeling so happy, and silly, and dumb, like your brains are being scrambled along with your body. You laugh to yourself as you keep walking, feeling twitches of arousal pull at your mind. You somehow stagger to the edge of the room and find the door.

A long tunnel stretches in front of you, lined with blinking red, orange, purple, and white lights. You get a fleeting sense of déjà vu. Weren’t you here before? You try and piece together what’s going on, but the blinking lights are drawing you around in a spiral, and your body drifts along towards the center.

You come to the elevator that drops you.

Then you follow the ghost lights that make you blank.

Then you go up the spiral staircase that stimulates your mind.

Then through the spinny room that makes you dizzy and silly and horny.

Then you’re back to the spiral tunnel again.

There are more people walking with you now. They have a dazed look on their face and stumble along with you, dropping down deep in the elevator, following the pretty lights, climbing the spiral staircase, and getting scrambled in the spinny room.

You go through again and again, your mind getting fuzzier and sillier with every round. Some of the people near you start taking off their clothes. It looks so fun. You want to be naked too.

Soon you’re marching through the Amazing Amazement Maze completely naked, a big goofy smile on your face, giggling at nothing in particular. Outside the maze, looking in through the transparent plexiglass is a crowd of people, pointing and laughing at you hysterically. You laugh back, dimly wondering what’s so funny.

You’re not embarrassed, you just continue to skip down the tunnels, staircases, and spiral rooms without a care in your head. It feels so happy to run around the silly maze with the rest of the people who came in. Just a bunch of happy, hypnotized hamsters running around a wheel for everyone’s amusement.

Eventually, the lights begin to pulse and grow dim. When you come back around to the spiral tunnel you started at, there’s a secret door that opens to the street. You put your clothes back on, (the hypnotist has them for you) and they count you and the rest of the people back up. Before they send you on your way, the hypnotist slips a flyer for the Amazing Amazement Maze in your pocket and tells you to forget about it until tomorrow.

“Come back soon!” They call to you as you walk down the street. “And next time, bring a friend!”