It had taken man a long time to discover that he was a god in his own right and that he too was capable of creating universes. Trivial universes, to be sure, when compared with the grandeur and scope of the objective one, and peopled with ghosts instead of human beings; but universes nonetheless.
The discovery came about quite by accident. After projecting himself into a patient's memory one day, a psychologist named Trevor suddenly found himself clinging to the slope of a traumatically distorted mountain. His patient was beside him.
The mountain proved to be an unconscious memory-image out of the patient's boyhood, and its country proved to be the country of the patient's mind. After many trials and errors, Trevor managed to get both himself and his patient back to the objective world, and not long afterward he was able to duplicate the feat on another case.
The next logical step was to enter his own mind, and this he also succeeded in doing.
It was inevitable that Trevor should write a book about his discovery and set about founding a new school of psychology. It was equally inevitable that he should acquire enemies as well as disciples. However, as the years passed and the new therapy which he devised cured more and more psychoses, the ranks of his disciples swelled and those of his enemies shrank. When, shortly before his death, he published a paper explaining how anyone could enter his or her own mind-world at will, his niche in the Freudian hall of fame was assured.
The method employed an ability that had been evolving in the human mind for millennia—the ability to project oneself into a past moment—or, to use Trevor's term, a past "place-time." Considerable practice was required before the first transition could be achieved, but once it was achieved, successive transitions became progressively easier. Entering another person's mind-world was of course a more difficult undertaking, and could be achieved only after an intensive study of a certain moment in that person's past. In order to return to the objective world, it was necessary in both cases to locate the most recently materialized place-time and take one step beyond it.
By their very nature, mind-countries were confusing. They existed on a plane of reality that bore no apparent relationship to the plane of the so-called objective universe. In fact, so far as was known, this secondary—or subjective—reality was connected to so-called true reality only through the awareness of the various creators. In addition, these countries had no outward shape in the ordinary sense of the word, and while most countries contained certain parallel images, these images were subject to the interpretation of the individual creator. As a result they were seldom identical.
It was inevitable that sooner or later some criminal would hit upon the idea of hiding out in his own mind-world till the statute of limitations that applied to his particular crime ran out, and it was equally inevitable that others should follow suit. Society's answer was the psyche-police, and the psyche-police hadn't been in action very long before the first private psycheye appeared.