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temp in the green, fuel level’s fine; check the sky clear of other aircraft, check the Earth unrolling softly below.
    Once one masters the basics of flying an airplane, there’s plenty of room for split personalities in the cockpit. One mind flies the airplane, the other solves mysteries for the fun of it.
    Minutes later, level at 7,500 feet heading one-four-zero degrees to Arkansas, one of Jamie Forbes’ minds fell to wondering why, if it were no coincidence, he had met Ms. Harrelson this morning, on her mission to prove what she’s so sure is true.
    Not every event needs to be labeled, he thought, coincidence or destiny. It’s what happens after, that matters—whether we do something with our little life-scenes or let them slip downstream from our heart, washed to the Sea of Forgotten Encounters.
    Had he hypnotized Maria into landing safely? Had he hypnotized himself that he could help her do it? Is hypnotism so common, we do it every minute of every day to ourselves and to each other and never notice?
    Hypnotism doesn’t pretend to tell us why we’re here, he thought, but it sure chatters on about how we come to this place and how we continue playing along.
    What if the hitchhiker were right, with her version, Maria landing in trance; what if it were true?
    If hypnosis is nothing but suggestions accepted, then a whole lot of the world we see around us must be paintings from our own brush.
    “Hello Pratt traffic, Swift 2304 Bravo’s entering forty-five to a left downwind Runway Three Five Pratt.” Faint on the radio, the airplane was miles away.
    What suggestions? For the first time in his life, in the high noisy silence of the cockpit, he opened his eyes to see.
    He flew back through time; time with himself and with others, through marriage and business, through the years in the military, through high school, grammar school, through home as a child, life as an infant. How do we become part of any culture, any form of life, save by accepting its suggestions to be our truth?
    Suggestions by the thousands, millions, there’s seas of suggestions; accepted, worshipped, reasonable and un, declined ignored ... all of them pouring unseen through me, through every human being, every animal, every life-form on Earth: got to eat and sleep, feel hot and cold, pain and pleasure, got to have a heartbeat, breathe air, learn all physical laws and obey, accept suggestions that this is the only life there is or ever was or ever will be. Dee Hartridge had only been hinting.
    Any statement, he thought, with which we can agree or disagree, on any level—that’s a suggestion.
    He blinked at that, airplane forgotten. Any statement? That’s nearly every word he had seen spoken heard thought and dreamed, non-stop day and night continuously, for more than half a century, not counting the non-verbal suggestions to be conservative ten thousand times more.
    Every split instant we perceive a wall, we reaffirm solid-can't-go-through-that. How many nano-instants during one day do our senses include walls? Doors? Floors? Ceilings? Windows? For how many milliseconds do we accept limits-limits-limits without even knowing we’re doing it?
    How many micro-instants in a day, he wondered— a trillion? That many suggestions each day in the category of architecture alone, before we move on to something simultaneously flooding suggestions about its own limits, let’s say perception, biology, physiology, chemistry, aeronautics, hydrodynamics, laser physics, please insert here the list of every discipline ever conceived by humankind.
    That’s why infants are helpless as long as they are, even learning quicker than lightning every second. They need to accept a foundation, a critical mass of suggestions, acclimate from spirit to our customs of space and time.
    Infancy is basic training for mortality. Such a savage bursting dam-break of suggestions on the poor little guys, no wonder it takes years for them to swim to the first still water, talk ideas