The Windsor Sessions

Story Synopsis

by Frank Forrestall

Two attendants from the psychiatric facility videotape their excursion to collect a patient. A strange deformed boy that's been living like a wild child in a dilapidated building in the Canadian wilderness. The staff calls him "Tommy." They bring him back to the hospital for treatment under the renowned psychiatrist Dr. Windsor.

Five other patients are introduced; their principle emotional problems are explored up to and including the recent events that propelled each of them into therapy. They form a medley of psychiatric problems both chronic and acute.

Dr. Windsor introduces them to his own new concepts in psychotherapy, an experimental form of regression therapy that involves elements of dreamtime role-playing. The patients are put into a hypnotic state that allows them to “see” a fantasy world that (as Dr. Windsor explains) is a “dream-like projection of the patient’s psychological landscape.”

Patients in this state are semi-lucid and describe in great detail the bizarre world that their psyches have created. Desolate landscapes haunted by nightmarish beasts and menacing phantasms of every kind; the “ghosts” of the patients’ tortured minds.

A series of unusual sessions begin. With titles like The Bridge, The Tree, The Crossroads, The Dark Woods and The Pit, each session is designed to force the patients to confront the intimidating obstacles that they discover within their mindscapes.

Occasionally we see excerpts of taped sessions with Tommy the wild child. His therapy does not resemble that of the other patients. He talks in broken halting English. Over many sessions and with great difficulty he manages to describe some sort of journey he'd taken; presumably the journey that ended with him living in an abandoned building.

Tommy becomes agitated if the lights are turned on or if he is moved from his dark room. Dr. Windsor tapes these sessions using "Night vision" on his camcorder. In the near dark we can just make out that he has severe facial disfigurations. During his time at the hospital Tommy is confined to a wheelchair.

To aid in these fantasy recreations Dr. Windsor arranges supportive bodily and environmental conditions. Sessions include activities that may have the patients blindfolded and set to walk in the woods or submerged in water or deprived of light.

But as therapy progresses it becomes all too evident that Dr. Windsor has a veiled agenda. While in their personal fantasy world the Doctor forces the patients to take inexplicable and often dangerous actions. Confused and distressed the patients are slowly enraptured by this mysterious “otherworld.”

The results of the doctor’s manipulation are as varied as the patients themselves.

One by one the patients are overwhelmed by traumatic feelings of violence, paranoia and despair. Additionally – as the tapes show - strange coincident events begin to align in the patients’ dream worlds. The question begins to emerge… are they really within their own minds? Or has the good doctor sent them somewhere else?

The therapies grow dangerous. The patient’s erratic behavior escalates. A fatality, a permanent psychotic break, total mental regression and unstable violent behavior claim the patients.

In one of his sessions Tommy becomes uncharacteristically articulate. He talks with cryptic clues that would suggest that he knows Dr. Windsor from some "other place." He also claims that Dr. Windsor has been trying to "break into" his mind and has sent "five minions" to do his dirty work. The dark purpose behind Dr. Windsor’s sessions is revealed.

Out of the five other patients only one makes the difficult decision to leave therapy and in the end only one makes it through the gauntlet of sessions to claim the true prize at the heart of Dr. Windsor’s therapy.

Tommy dies inexplicably in his darkened room.