Ginger Weiss undergoes hypnotic regression with Pablo Jackson in an attempt to discover why a pair of black gloves frightened her in Bernstein’s Delicatessen. The session moves backward from December 24 to November 12 and then toward an earlier, unidentified encounter. Instead of yielding a clear account, that deeper regression brings Ginger to a frightening physical crisis, forcing Pablo to abandon his questions and return her to the present.

Purpose and Preparation

On December 24, Ginger asks Pablo to take her back to the morning of November 12, when she encountered a man wearing black gloves in Bernstein’s Delicatessen. She wants to be held at that moment and questioned until she can explain why the gloves terrified her. Her request is unusually forceful: she is not merely seeking relaxation or an account of the deli incident, but trying to reach whatever earlier experience made the sight of the gloves so disturbing.

The conversation takes place after a sleepless night. Pablo observes that Ginger has been awake for hours and treats the afternoon as a reasonable time for a drink; they settle into their chairs and sip brandy before she asks for the regression. He initially calls the procedure impossible, but eventually offers help. The episode thus begins with both a determined patient and a practitioner who is not fully confident that her request can be met.

The Regression to November 12

Pablo prepares the room by drawing the drapes over a three-bay window and switching off the lights except for a lamp beside Ginger’s chair. Under hypnosis, she is instructed to relax and answer his questions. He then guides her backward through the calendar, moving from December 24 through the preceding days until she reaches November 12 and imagines herself waiting for an order in Bernstein’s Delicatessen.

At first, the regression produces an animated, sensory recollection. Asked what she can smell, Ginger names pastrami, garlic, honey cookies, cloves, cinnamon, and chocolate; she becomes absorbed in the imagined bakery and turns her head as if looking around it. Pablo then directs her through the deli scene toward the exit, where she is preoccupied with her purse. The sequence brings the remembered encounter with the black-gloved man back into view, but does not explain the depth of her fear.

The Earlier Memory and the Crisis

Pablo presses Ginger to identify what other pair of gloves the deli gloves recall. When she says she does not know, he takes her farther backward, instructing her to return to the first time and place she was frightened by black gloves. Ginger’s attention fixes on a horror that is neither in the room nor in the delicatessen, but elsewhere. The setting remains unidentified; when Pablo demands to know where she is, she answers that she is nowhere, then that she is no place. She abruptly stops shaking, slackens in the chair, and says in an emotionless voice that she is dead.

Pablo discovers that Ginger’s breathing is extremely shallow, her hand cold, and her pulse weak and slowing. He recognizes that she is withdrawing beyond the ordinary hypnotic trance, and fears that the attempt to force the memory into speech is endangering her. He has encountered accounts of psychological barriers around traumatic memories, but not a reaction like this. The episode makes the limit of his method immediate: the deeper the questioning goes, the less accessible Ginger becomes, until the search for an answer appears to threaten her life.

Abandoning the Questions

Pablo changes course and tells Ginger that she no longer has to answer. He promises to stop questioning her and concentrates instead on bringing her back to the present. Her pulse initially falters, then grows steadier; her breathing improves and color returns to her face as he reassures her. Within less than a minute, he returns her to December 24 and wakes her.

Ginger assumes the attempt failed and that Pablo could not hypnotize her. His response makes clear that the danger was not a failure to induce hypnosis: she had gone too far under. The session ends without identifying the place, event, or person behind her first terror of black gloves. Its outcome is therefore both a rescue and a failure of recollection. Ginger returns safely, but the central memory remains beyond the reach of the questions that began the session.