Auditors Skill - Part I (500713)
Date: 13 July 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I would say offhand that the experience, according to experience on this, there are two things wrong with it. One, he is falling back from data which is probably at least partially accurate in his own recalls, to data given to him by people who are not in reverie, who are merely remembering and who are remembering with an aim and an end in view of whitewashing their own activities and maybe even cutting the pre-clear’s throat.
Further, the relay of such information, particularly in the accusative line, will bring about, very often, a deterioration in the health of the person or persons, particularly if it’s parents.
My first clue of this was in my own case. I wasn’t thinking about this and I wasn’t aware of it. I didn’t ask them for information, I just did a very small amount of swearing, not terribly violent, calling attention to a couple of things. They had lied to me about these things and I’d always had this background feeling they had, but I’d never triggered onto any proof of the matter. Well, I brought up this incident which was a prenatal incident. My mother promptly went to bed with what was diagnosed as pleurisy and an abdominal disorder of some sort. It triggered, in other words, an engram on her. I guess she was sick for about two and a half months.She of course attributed it to the damp weather. She didn’t think it had any connection with it. After that I began to watch for this and I found in . . . Yes, John?
Male voice: Let me add one other item on that, first time my father found out about Dianetics and what it was all about and that I was very much interested in it, he had pneumonia for six weeks. No mention of any specific incident whatsoever in that case. But somebody just had the goods on him, evidently. It was—it’s very interesting.
Now, as far as his own data is concerned, a preclear who will do this is posing a very difficult problem for his auditor. In the first place, all his auditor can do is get down to the most valid possible information. If the preclear suddenly, through some aberrated computation, decides to check this data, the data does not check, he can be expected to go into an immediate spin. And it’s not a light spin, it’s a serious one.
In the first place, he is operating on, “You’ve got to believe me, you’ve got to believe what we tell you, you’ve got to believe your elders,” et cetera, et cetera. Now he goes to the elders to check his own recalls. They probably won’t give him the straight material because, after all, they can’t remember. They put no thought in trying to remember. They just fly off the handle about such a thing and they’re liable to tell him most anything.
It’s a practice which I think if anybody wants to slow his therapy down, wants to put himself into a terrific spin, let him indulge in it. Completely aside from the fact that these recriminations and so on will be very embarrassing to him in the future. If he does recriminate, or does find any material there, he is one of these days going to achieve a Release, and further on a Clear and he’s going to have to patch up personal relations without the benefit of Dianetics, and it’s not easy to do. I know of three people offhand who have practically estranged their families.
Male voice: My question is, is that necessary?
Is what necessary?
Male voice: Is it necessary?
To what?
Male voice: To patch up these relations.
Uh-huh.
Male voice: Would a person want to?
Awfully uncomfortable. In one of these cases was terribly uncomfortable for the grandchildren of the parents.
Male voice: My wife had the experience last Sunday of calling her mother, and my mother-in-law knew that we were both very interested in this, that I had expressed interest in reading the book, et cetera, so forth And then Mama-in-law very smugly asked Peggy, had she read the article in the Times, Rollo May’s article? Peggy said yes and told her about it and then dropped the bomb on her: she was going to work with Dianetics. Bang Mama went off on a crying fit, “You don’t love me, wrrr, wrr, wrrrr” and then went to bed with an asthma attack.
Female voice: I’d like to add that were eighth in the Times coming up. Eighth on the list.
Yeah? About time, (laughter) Okay. It’s very serious to do this. The preclear who does it is posing a very difficult problem for the auditor. He has no right to cause the auditor this much work. If he’s interested in objective reality as far as his case is concerned, or as far as Dianetics is concerned, let him test somebody else. He’s in no situation to test himself. None.
Male voice: I might make this additional point, that frequently the preclear, in going down the track, does have incidents confused and welded together Only when you come back up the track, on full Clear, can you be sure of getting all the data exactly right If you want to check, wait till you are Clear When you re coming up on Clear then you re getting the data absolutely complete.
No prenatal visio and so on. Now, for instance, you get an aberrated set of circuits and this person is reacting on the flash answer poorly, and you give him a flash answer for age and you’re liable to get the last count in an operation, something like that. Well now, if he is—if he picks up, let’s say, nine as a number, “How old are you?” and he says “Nine,” the information has a limited validity.
The running of the engram with its somatics and so forth, with its effect and aberrative effect, has great validity. If you reduce that thing, you know very well that you recovered approximately the right content. A nonsonic case, even a case with some dub-in, you’ve recovered approximately the right content or it wouldn’t have reduced.
Now, ask him for flash answer, you’re liable to get ages. The preclear’s liable to say, “Well, let’s see, this happened to me then when I was nine.” He starts to check and he checks with somebody whose memory is not good, because remember, this parent’s a person. They’re in trouble too. He got the bulk of his aberrations from them. So they’re liable to say, “Well, that didn’t happen to you when you were nine years of age. That happened to you when you were a little baby.” And of course it’ll just absolutely throw the guy, boom, “Oh, my God, I’m this wrong!” Never bothers to add it up. He’s in a state of anxiety about his parents anyway.
Anybody, by the way, in these courses who goes in for checking reality come up against this roadblock. I’m just mentioning this. It poses a difficult problem for the auditor. We have actually minimum time on any case here. There’s no reason to slow it down. I’ve still got my top sergeant’s stripes stuck in my war sack someplace.
I can guarantee I’m going to be sore if anything hits the spin on this level, because for Christ’s sakes, when these people in this course particularly are going in therapy, we’ve got, day by day, an increasing jump in alertness, IQ and dynamic. It’s observable; clearly observable. And you’re slowing that down, so you’re slowing us down.
Okay What?
Male voice: What about the situation of auditing parents after release?
After release? It’s all right.
Male voice: Would it be better to get someone else to do it?
Uh-huh. After all, what altitude does little Willy have?
All right. Let’s get on with this. Who here does not have one of these procedure sheets? Pass that back . . . [gap] . . . an extra one of these and sending it to California. I mean that seriously. Because this stuff is just jargon. It’s just nothing unless you know what it is.
This thing is a guide. It is a lecturer’s guide. There will be a bulletin written up and believe me, the condensation of the bulletin to cover this is quite a job all by itself. So hang on to these things. And get out to California, why, we can keep somebody from going off the deep end on this stuff.
Now, I want to go over this with you. I want to give this to you in a very clear-cut fashion. You’re going to be using three processes that are going to require skill. It is skill that you have to develop. The process of determining by straight-line diagnosis the case computations. That takes skill. But it is no kind of skill which is very odd and strange, magical or impossible.
That is based again, and I repeat, on the formula that what the preclear believes about himself which worries him, or what he does that concerns him, or what obviously aberrates him, is contained in its exact counterpart in the mouths of the dramatic personnel in his engrams. “Somebody has said it” is the watchword on straight-line diagnosis. Somebody said it.
Because it was said, the person is worried. If it had not been said, he would not be worried. If he is rational on some point, the chances are that it is a natural concern. For instance, we find that he likes women. I would not look for an aberration. But if we find that he’s just crazy about women, he just can’t leave them alone, we look for one.
The degree. He is worried, let us say, because he is not making five hundred dollars a week. Look over his capabilities. If he’s— possible he can make five hundred dollars a week, all right, fine, that’s his expectation. But that’s not a real, valid worry because he’s— measure it this way: is he trying to do something about it?
Most of the time in engrams the worries are there but nothing is being done about them. No action is being taken. It’s an engram; it doesn’t call for action. It is merely a didactic statement of condition. The fellow has this command, “You’ve got to control yourself,” and he obviously doesn’t. It’s just that: “You’ve got to control yourself.” It doesn’t call for an overall control that is a rational control. It calls for him to inhibit his emotions, inhibit his expression, to tie himself up inside himself, perhaps, or to try to get others to control themselves. But you’ll find this person in more apathetic slumps—which is complete lack of self-control (to go into an apathy) if you want to be blunt about it. And you will find him very often with more rage dramatizations per square inch than anybody else around. He’s got a “you’ve got to control yourself,” and boy, somebody says he’s not controlling himself, boy, you watch him get mad. That is the test. The actuality of effort. How much real effort is he putting forward?
This person says, “Oh, I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m so happy, I’m very happy, you know, I’ve always been happy. I was such a happy child, I had a wonderful, happy childhood” and so forth. Yet there they are, sitting on the couch. There’s something wrong. If this person was really happy, they wouldn’t be sitting there on the couch. You would have to do quite a little bit of talking to get this person convinced that they ought to have a check run on something. But they’ll come to you quite eagerly telling you how happy they are. They really stick with it.
Now, the auditor can go in against these aberrations and break the dramatization if he doesn’t care what happens to the preclear. Any auditor who would go in and try to console, to convince the person that this belief isn’t so, or spend any time in this direction, is not only wasting time but he’s liable to break the dramatization in some way and probably make the person very nervous.
Hypnotism is an effort to break dramatizations. Of course you realize somebody with a bad eye is dramatizing an engram which says it’s a bad eye. Now the hypnotist says, “You haven’t got a bad eye. You know you haven’t got a bad eye” and so forth. Well, he’s broken that dramatization and at that moment the person comes down with kidney trouble.
Well, that dramatization will come up, the hypnotist says, “You know you haven’t got kidney trouble. You know very well. Now, your kidneys are very good and there’s no more pain in the kidneys.” All of a sudden he gets gout. Dramatization after dramatization trying to come through. It’s a very basic form of expression, a psychosomatic illness—a basic form of dramatization, nothing but that.
If you look at psychosomatic illnesses and aberrations manifested as dramatizations, you can recognize that the laws which govern dramatizations are still very much at work and that you should pay attention to them. Which is, if the dramatization is ineffective, if it’s broken, then the person is knocked in that engram back toward worse health. You can run the scale on psychosomatics from a light illness to a very serious illness. And you can keep on hammering down and knocking flat these physical dramatizations of psychosomatics until you have a very sick patient on your hands. You understand what I mean now, that this is just the statement of the fellow comes in for a session and he’s all worried and he’s sweating about something and you say to him, “Well, you know there’s nothing to worry about.” Christ yes, there’s something to worry about. He doesn’t know what it is, but there is something to worry about. And he’s going to tell you that he’s worried and you tell him he’s not worried. So he’ll have to think hard to find something to be worried about. You’re stiffening up the engram.
It’ll come out and the auditor one way or the other could finally break this dramatization and make the fellow admit that he’s no longer worried. At that moment he’s got a sick patient on his hands. The patient might not be sick that afternoon, but watch him tomorrow, watch him the next day.
Male voice: What about alcohol in this? You can get many more dramatizations after a person who is used to drinking has a couple of drinks. Practically get a diagnosis. Do you advise this . . . ?
Sure, well, if you want to precipitate this temporary psychosis of alcoholism—I mean, if you want to do this you could get material.
Second male voice: How about doing it with a social drinker?
A social drinker?
Second male voice: Yeah.
Well, the trouble is, alcohol is a restimulator. It’s just like breathing ether, the smell of ether. It’s a restimulator. In the womb, the taste of alcohol comes right straight on through to the child. As a result, what you get when you get an alcohol restimulation of the individual is the alcohol itself may restimulate the alcoholic engrams only. And as such you get a very lopsided picture of his engram bank.
However, there are alcoholics who are in alcoholic valences, who have been shoved into alcoholic valences which have to drink. Now, maybe Mama never took a drink. There, alcohol is not at first a restimulator. But it very shortly becomes one. So you’ll get dramatizations. The way of the alcoholic. He gets into fights, quarrels, people start to argue with him.
Here is how an alcoholic really gets himself in a bad way. He starts telling people how he has to drink. The engram says, “I have to drink. I’ve got to have my bottle.” The demon circuit says, “You’ve got to have your bottle, you know? Well, the baby’s got to have his bottle, that’s what he needs, his bottle. That’s what he’s crying for. Now he’ll feel much better. Aw, he couldn’t get along without his bottle.” All right. The fellow’s telling you this. He’s saying, “Well, I—you know I couldn’t get along without my bottle. (hic) Man has a right to drink” and so forth, dubbing in his justifications down the lines of the engram. Everybody has stood around this alcoholic, said, “You know that you are becoming a pariah for drinking. You mustn’t drink. You will ruin your family, completely aside from ruining your health. You can’t hold down this job any longer because you are a drunk. You realize this. Now, you’ve got to stop drinking.” And of course this fixes the fellow up so now he’s really got to drink. And we go up against this dramatization harder and he drinks harder, up until the point where we break the dramatization. Now he is just in a confused, unreal state and he goes right on drinking. The old gimmick of putting wug juice in the liquor is an effort to bring this about precipitately. Or he gets sick. You can take an alcoholic who’s been getting along fairly well, and because of the social aberration of alcoholism, eventually deteriorates, begins to think of himself as a bum.
Understand he is under sedation: alcohol. Remarks are made to him. They pile up as locks. And the next thing you know, you may have a sick person on your hands who started out to be quite efficient when he was drinking, and who has had the dramatization raised up and blunted and raised up and blunted and raised up and blunted until he’s finally broken.
Male voice: How about the file clerk and somatic strip?
On an alcoholic?
Male voice: Yeah.
All depends on the circuitry. An alcoholic is no different in the reactive circuits than anybody else. I know people who are food drunks.
Male voice: Oh, yes.
Ran into one not too long ago who was—had to drink very heavily, but it wasn’t drink, it was food. “You’ve got to eat. You’ve just got to eat it—”; come to think about it, we’ve got one here.
Male voice: Ron, just how much, from your experience, how much physical deterioration is there with an alcoholic?
Structure. I’d rather not commit myself. I would say that a long, prolonged history of alcoholism might possibly bring about some deterioration of the body, but I’m afraid that it would bring it about more or less on an indirect line. [gap] . . . muting the productivity of the cells in glandular secretions, and a person may have had his testosterone production seriously interfered with, or in the case of a woman her estrogen output seriously interfered with. And if you watch them you will see glandular deficiencies or excitements kicking up and throwing out their physical structure. And this, as such, is bad.
Now, that can go to a point where it can’t recover. So there is an indirect physical deterioration in any engramic situation. And there is always a point in the life of an individual when an aberration or an engram has—can have produced a state from which the patient cannot recover. Having—he’s gone too far along some certain lines and now the fat, you might say, is in the fire, to clone a cliché.
Male voice: Ron, on the same line, how about drug addiction?
Drug addiction? Oh, yes. Somebody once, the other day, told me that somebody had been on a very, very small dosage of drugs for a number of years and was alarmed, thinking he had run into a drug addict. If you’ve ever been up against a drug addict, there is no doubt about the fact that you are up against a drug addict. The dosages have to be extremely heavy after a while to produce effect. Heavy in proportion to the—what would be a standard medical dosage.
And, to have gotten—you get a condition of craving, you get a physiological deterioration. You take phenobarbital. Phenobarbital has to be in a pretty high dosage before a person could be called an addict on the stuff.
Male voice: Ron, I could draw a parallel with this business of psycho-somatics and breaking dramatizations and asking questions—the business of taking a person who’s got circuitry and going down into the basic area where it’s more easily circumvented. Find a person who has, let us say, through a series of therapy sessions, been given a bad jolt from time to time because they believe that—they have become acquainted with Dianetics, and now they know they have circuitry. Now, in addition to the business of that and the “control yourself” there’s an “I can’t believe.” In addition to that there’s the analytical knowledge of circuitry now and, “Well geez, now I can’t trust myself at all.” Don’t you find that it becomes almost a necessary factor to begin to build that person s confidence in his flash answers and in . . .
Sure.
Male voice: . . .his procedure and treatment . . .
You’re going to find something, though.
Male voice: . . . very carefully and very easily.
You’re going to find something. People who knew just vaguely that they were dub-ins or suspected that maybe they were, are in a state of upset. And people who know they are dub-ins, bluntly, and know the cause of the dub-in and know that it’s remediable are not going to be as seriously affected by it.
I have tried this out in the last couple of days and I have found out that people were happier about it.
Male voice: Well, did you find that by taking a person, let us say, who did not have knowledge of circuitry or dub-ins and just had this feeling, “Oh, I’m making this up. Oh, I can’t believe this. Oh, my Lord, I know this happened here and yet I see it here, it just can’t be true. I’m all whacked up,” and in addition to this they have a “be reasonable’ attitude —that by taking stuff like this and treating it as it comes out in your attitude, I mean, let’s say in the personality approach you would find . . .
Well, the way I would find the personality approach on such a thing is one of cheerful reassurance, or sympathy for the concern. The quickest way you can stop a person working that I know of is to obviously not care what has happened to that person. One can go just so far. He can be cheerful and say, “Oh well, hell, this won’t bother you in a week.” A person will accept that. But let’s go over the border on it. “Oh, you know goddamn well this won’t bother you in a week, what are you griping about it for?” (dwindling whistle, pop) It is the difference of attitude.
One of cheerful reassurance while the guy says, “But I know I must have dub-in, because for heaven’s sakes I have prenatal visio and I have this and I have that, and these words just keep coming to me and I don’t know what I’m doing about these words” and so on. And you say, “Look, take it easy, for heaven’s sakes. We’ll get this stuff out, sure, we’ll straighten this out.” (snap) That kind of an attitude. They would respond to it much better than . . . Now, building up his confidence in his recalls. Yes, an auditor always has to do that. Any auditor, on any patient.
Male voice: Well, it seems that even sometimes, by let’s say tone of voice when you ask somebody for a flash answer and even though the auditor—I’ve seen many of them who will go along and say, “Yeah, uh-huh.” But that just “yeah, uh-huh” — the patient lifts one eyebrow and says, “Oh no, he doesn’t believe me, huh-uh.” Well, you’ve struck dead center on a demon circuit that says “Nobody believes me.” Male voice: Yeah.
By the way, that tone of voice—one dub-in recently, I said, “Oh yeah?” on a flash answer and so forth and the guy laughed like hell. He says, “Okay. Oh yeah.” And I said, “Now let’s see if we can’t find what the hell’s clipping in here.” And so he just went to work on it just as busy and so forth. Right up to that point he had been all gloom on the subject of the fact that he could never get the straight data. Gruesome. You see, it’s a nice adjustment to the other person’s mood, a nice adjustment to their reactions is what’s required. And sometimes I imagine you’ll be able to say to somebody, “Well, for Christ’s sakes, how can we expect anything out of you with all that dub-in?” Male voice: Comes down to the fact that auditing isn’t hard.
Uh-huh. That’s right.
Male voice: Ron, I find that it seems to help in these cases when, prior to opening the case while still in the straight memory circuit, validate the feeling or rather the inner reality of the basic personality. If this is done with the individual then throughout the session, I can quickly say he will accept whatever data the file clerk has given him and get instantly that response, that well, they have some inner security, some data validity that’s within themselves that they will . . .
Well, this is an interesting thing that in all of these cases where you’ve got a lack of self-confidence which is—probably goes right straight across the boards with aberration—there are a few people who have too much self-confidence, which would be an aberration in itself, would be a manic. Though I’ve never seen that do anything like the damage that I have seen lack of self-confidence do an individual. If I had to choose the aberrations of a society, they would all go on the lines of “It is real. I can believe it. Everybody believes me. I believe in myself. I can do anything I put my hand to.” Now, if he could—yeah. And by the way, in some past schools of psychology and so on there were terrific prohibitions against giving children a good opinion of themselves. I ran into this down in Washington. I was horrified. Beautiful little girl, and I said, “My, you’re a pretty little girl.” Mommy said, (gasp) “Don’t say that to her.” I said, “What’s the matter,” I said, “isn’t she pretty?” And she said, “Well, we mustn’t mention some of these things. Little pitchers . . . heh-heh.” So I said, “Well, of course how could she expect to be other than very beautiful having such a very, very lovely mother!” (laughter) Insidious, isn’t it?
Well, the—this business of faith is a very fascinating subject. Faith can be artificially installed. You can take a person as a clinical experiment, hypnotize him and install the Great God Motaw. You tell him that the Great God Motaw is now taking care of his life, safeguarding him, looking after his concerns, will see that the future is all arranged for him, will see that all goes well and that everybody loves him. And will, beyond everything else, give him absolutely correct data every time he asks for it. And the Great God Motaw, installed as such a circuit, more or less takes the whole computer, just moves it over. And now he has the Great God Motaw sitting over here and it says something. You can even install it so the Great God Motaw is sonic, which is strictly hallucination. And you have moved the computer from behind the aberrations, you’ve divorced it from the reactive mind, and you’ve divorced some of its circuits. They now compute perfectly. You can ask the Great God Motaw anything—the patient can—and get a positive and correct answer, a correct solution. The Great God Motaw will predict, command, plan, so on. And in setting this up on a writer, “The Great God Motaw will now give me a story plot. Will you please give me a story plot, Motaw.” That wasn’t the name I was using, but that’s all right. And this writer would get a dictated plot. Good plot!
Oh sure, the writer could always think of wonderful plots anyhow, until somebody—about 965 rejection slips had landed one after the other on his desk. Mind you, he at the same time sold a couple of thousand short stories. But those 900-and-some rejection slips one after the other told him he was no good and he couldn’t plot and he couldn’t do this and he couldn’t do that. And the first thing you know it just added up on him as too high and he stopped writing. Now we move the Great God Motaw out from behind all this garbage. And, “Give us a plot.” Wham, he’s got a plot.
Male voice: I’ve always wondered how you wrote those stories. (LRH and audience laugh) [gap] . . . and a couple of computing loops in order to do the person’s thinking for him. Now mind you, if he believes this Great God Motaw implicitly, he will sooner or later begin to place all his reliance on him and the Great God Motaw will begin to sap the persons own individuality, the Great God Motaw circuits will become themselves infected with aberrations and because of other social aberrations eventually some fear or something of the sort, of punishment from the Great God Motaw may enter into it and at this moment we have a terrible louse-up. But for the little while after you install this, for the few days—the first few days, it’s the most gorgeous thing you ever listened to; it’s wonderful. Now, by encouraging the person to understand the file clerk’s data is always absolutely correct you are setting up the Great God Motaw.
Male voice: When we say we will accept whatever data without saying that it’s right or wrong . . .
All right. Sure. But you are encouraging the validity. You are actually encouraging the file clerk to go up and set up a couple of loops to give a good, solid flash. And it is a good procedure because you’re not asking the file clerk to run his life. The file clerk situation only becomes confusing on a patient that you have let run exclusively on the file clerk, because this data is not validated on a straight memory circuit for him. He’s bypassing everything and getting it all from the file clerk.
Yes?
Second male voice: Could you set up Motaw as a therapy circuit by any chance?
Yes, you can set up a self-control circuit. And then the person will come to class all in jitters every morning, and, yeah . . .
Second male voice: No, what I mean is could you set Motaw up as a way of getting down to the engram data in order . . .
That’s just what I said. That is setting up a self-control demon circuit of a sort. And it will operate when you don’t want it to operate. People who set this thing up—you will uncover this in people—they will say, “You know, I set up this file clerk, told him to run out everything while I was asleep. And he’s just getting along fine.” Sure, they’re shifting engrams from bank one to bank two of the reactive mind, maybe.
I’m not condemning the file clerk because you can suddenly knock him loose from the engrams in a lot of cases merely by encouraging the file clerk, say, “Oh, you got a good file clerk; by golly, he really knows his stuff” and so forth, even when you know damn well this file clerk is mixed up with too many circuits.
The file clerk always is all right. The problem is to reach the file clerk. Now, the person is encouraged to believe that he is reaching the file clerk and everything is going along well, it’s okay.
The encouragement—the conclusion on this is just that an encouragement of the person to believe his file clerk is of course desirable. But you can’t do this up against his knowledge of the fact the file clerk is handing through bad data consistently. The best way to tackle the problem is tackle it dually. Get the circuit out, tell the person how strongly that file clerks trying to come through, get those circuits out.
We ran across an interesting circuit last night on this order, “Got to rewrite this.” Male voice: “Got to go over it again.” “Got to go over it again and rewrite it.” Yeah. So of course the second time across this thing, one had to change all the words in it. And that—by the way, I wanted to bring that up—is locatable merely because you know two things; that Papa is a writer and that he’s doing this when he goes through, “No, I don’t think that was right. Now, let me see, I’d better say that some other way.” And as a consequence he tackles the engram the first time straight. And the next time through he was hitting—he was changing the wording in it because when you went over it again you had to change it. So there you had it. You had an automatic set of circuitry there that was going to flip. But that isn’t a real honest-to-God circuit, that’s just an aberration.
I can think of a half a dozen that would—aberrative commands, very common commands in the society, “You think you’re going to change things around here. Well, you’re not and I’m going to show you.” That kind of a command would make the fellow do again . . .
Male voice: “Once the job is done, it’s done.” Yeah, “When the job is done, it’s done, it’s through with it; to hell with it. Nobody’s going to tell me off about it.” Something like that.
Male voice: Oh, it’s common, I’m wondering . . .
Yeah, it’s awful common. It’s awful common. I give you a caution about working on writers’ children, which you may be doing, and working on actors’ children. The sense of reality has been kind of ripped up, because they are fond of saying that it is all a world of imagination anyway. They’re fond of saying, “Well, I’ve got to get my imagination to work on this, it just doesn’t seem real to me.” That sort of stuff. (Recording ends abruptly)