"What! That's so weird! Why!!! I know you said you don't know but WHY!"

He smiles broadly. "So curious! Perhaps someday you will be the one who discovers the answer." 

"Maybe I will! That will teach brains to be so mysterious."

"I think you are going to be an excellent Mindhealer! Well, that is perhaps enough for a first lesson. Do you have any more questions on today?" 

"Can we make people need less sleep?"

"Huh! Assuming you mean in the long run, I am actually not sure. There is a trick for making yourself more alert for a short period - Healers can do it too, coming from a different 'angle', our scholars think that this means the two Gifts are looking at the same underlying structure but it could be entirely distinct mechanisms. Anyway. I had never thought to even try whether making someone need fewer candlemarks of sleep per night on a permanent basis can be done. What an intriguing idea - you are so creative!" 

"It would be so useful!"

"I had not really thought about it, since I like sleeping, but - yes, I suppose it would." He seems surprised and a bit nonplussed. 

"I like sleeping too but I don't need to do it all night. Once in a while would be fine. Or just a few hours every night is probably more doable. If this is doable at all."

"...I have heard of people needing more or less sleep innately, so one assumes that if you can find the ones who need less sleep and obtain permission to look at their minds, you could at least check if the difference is one that Mindhealing can affect." 

"I want to do that! How can I find people who need different amounts of sleep?"

Lionwind thinks for a moment. "- Hmm, I am not aware of any treatises written recently such that you could still find the patients studied. You may have to just ask your acquaintances. I suppose you could write to Mindhealers across the region - I could give you a list - but they will mostly only see very sick patients, who I think on average tend to sleep more - or else very erratically and poorly - because of their mental illnesses." 

"Why do those make people sleep more or worse?"

"I think that is another case where our scholars do not yet understand everything! The theories are that some mental conditions, such as depression, involve having less life-energy to drive a mind, which thus spends more time in sleep, whereas conditions like wild-madness involve an out-of-balance excess of these energies - where the patients sleep less and yet this compounds their imbalance and their madness and wildness." 

"Why do energies need to balance? My metaphor has some weights that could tip stuff over if they were wrong but beehives don't, what's going on in the actual mind?"

"I am not sure. I...suspect that there are large-scale loops of some kind that need to balance, where - as you say, it can tip over into one whirlpool or another that is hard to escape - but to be honest, our scholarship on this is not very advanced." 

"Oh, okay. I guess I'll fix that and then we'll know."

(Awww she is adorably enthusiastic and excited.) 

"Of course. Any other questions?" 

"I will think of more for next time. When is next time?"

"I thought we could meet three times a week, to start, at this same time? And I will give you homework exercises, this time it will just be to practice refining your Sight on your own mind." 

"Okay!!!"

He pats her shoulder. "See you in a couple of days. You are making very quick progress so far." 

"I'll see you then!"

And she comes back two days later with a great big list of questions. What makes people have mental problems in the first place? Why do people have to sleep at all? Why was the first kiss thing near the rafting memory? Why is anything near anything? What kinds of things can't Mindhealers do that it might seem they would be able to? Her mama wants her to ask if this will help her defend herself when she goes on the long trip to visit her papa, it's usually not very dangerous but it would be good to know. Can she make her other potential Gifts awaken? Is there a standard best practice for making very sure someone is REALLY okay with letting her look besides just what she's been doing.

"So many questions! You are such a wonderfully curious student." And Lionwind sets himself to answering them methodically, one at a time. 

It's not entirely understood why people have mental problems! Some of it seems to be an inborn predisposition; the same way some people are physically frail and prone to sickliness, or born with heart problems, or end up falling ill with cancers, some people are prone to nerves and phobias and melancholy, or succumb to sudden madness. Sometimes it's caused by stressful or traumatic life events, but how damaged different people are by the same event also seems to vary. It's a known pattern that many women because depressed after giving birth, and some much smaller fraction have bouts of madness, and honestly no one has any idea why! 

There are theories about sleep but it's mostly Healers who've studied it, she could go look at books in the library on it. The current understanding is that memories end up near each other because of similarity, where the similarity can be on a number of aspects - place or time are one kind, but he suspects the rafting and the kiss were already near each other because they were both exciting, exhilarating experiences. 

He's not sure how to answer her question on kinds of things Mindhealers 'should' be able to do but can't, maybe because he's had such a long time to get accustomed to the reality of what's easy or hard or impossible; she has fewer preconceptions, maybe after this she could list out what she would expect and he can correct her? 

...There are ways a Mindhealer can incapacitate people but he wouldn't recommend she try that in self-defence this early in her training, unless she's literally about to die, it's a lot harder to undo than it is to do in the first place. Depending on when the trip is planned, though, she can ask him about it again later. He doesn't know whether one can awaken potential Gifts much less how. 

In terms of best practices for consent, the other thing to keep an eye on is whether people will feel like they have to say yes, either because they want to please her or think she'll be disappointed in them otherwise or are scared of the consequences if they aren't cooperative. Probably she doesn't have to worry about this yet, since she's a young trainee and he doubts her friends are worried about losing the friendship if they decline to let her practice on their brains, but it'll be something to keep in mind more once she's an adult and a trained Mindhealer. 

"Well, like, you said you can't just make people forget only one thing, why not? It seems like we should be able to. Can you tell in advance who's going to have a problem? What is the self defense thing, I won't try it. Why do we have metaphors at all, nobody else does with other gifts."