The Collector: An Incident Concerning a Collar

It's said that perception is reality.

Descartes used it as the basis of his philosophy; even the common, uneducated person can parrot "I think, therefore I am." The learned meanwhile will recall the full meaning of the aphorism: Descartes could doubt his senses, doubt his thoughts, doubt all things except that *something* had to be doing the doubting. And, yet, we base everything on this idea we have of reality. We shape who we are based on our experiences, which we cannot truly confirm as real. Of my entire collection, nothing exemplifies this more than the this collar.

Hmm?

Oh, my amanuensis informs me that I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. Introductions are required.

Cliché as it may be to say so, I have many names. More accurately, I have many pseudonyms; especially in this age of the Net, anonymity is a more valuable than oil and only slightly less than water. So, when dealing with anyone but my closest friends and family, I default to some affected appellation, usually a variant on The Collector. That seems as good a name as any to append to this tale as well.

I am so called because I have a fascination with people and their stories. I scour the Earth(and, twice, beyond it) gathering the personal stories which most exemplify the human condition. And whenever I collect a story, I also collect something else: an anchor, an object which played some integral role in the tale. And so we return to the collar.

As it happens, this collar is a recent addition to my collection, attained in 2010, only a few weeks after the conclusion of the events. A dealer in items of, shall we say, unique bedroom application happened to acquire it, and it came to my attention when he mentioned it to an antiquities dealer whom I have worked with in the past. He believed I would be interested, and I was. After acquiring the collar, I tracked down the persons involved in the story, and had thereby the rare treat of receiving the story firsthand. Naturally the persons so involved are still very much alive, and therefore I have obscured the names and places for the protection of, if not innocents, then those who are of only moderate guilt but considerable privacy.

I will say that the events involved took place in California, in one of those innumerable moderately-sized towns with the sea on one side and less than an hour's drive from a major metropolitan area. For want of a better name, our protagonist shall rejoice in the name of Jack...



...Jack was still young when he met Her. He'd graduated high school, but decided he didn't want to go on to college. He took the occasional class at the local community college when they offered something interesting, but he had no desire to commit to a field of study and gain a degree. He had a job which paid well enough to afford him a modest life that was, he thought, happy enough. Truth to tell, Jack was listless. He'd known, somehow, that he had some destiny in life different from all those bright young college lads, but he had no idea beyond that. So, he worked his 9 to 5 at the same local Kennel that he'd worked at since age 16. Later, after he met Her, and when She had him relating the story, he told me he now believed that this, too, may have been the hand of Fate, showing him his path, however obliquely.

So this was Jack's life. Wake up, hit the gym, head to work, surf, eat, sleep and repeat, a steady rhythm spliced with variations on the theme of occasional alcohol and trips to the city for nights out. Sex, too, a few girlfriends and a one night stand or two, but even this felt as though it were missing. He felt, deep below his conscious mind, in his bones you might say, that he needed to find his place...


Sometimes, Fate is kind. Or else God has a strange sense of humour. I incline to the latter. There's a story of a man who saw Death in the market of Damascus, where Death looked decidedly shocked. Fearing the portent, the man bought a horse and rode hard and fast for Aleppo, trying to flee his fate, making it in a single day. That evening, feeling he was in the clear, he was a bit too free with his gold in the inn, and a thief alleviated him of it in an alley, stabbing him and leaving him for Death. Death soon arrived, and kindly took away the man's pain. As Death and the man were leaving Allepo, bound for the Beyond, the man turned to his companion and asked "You were surprised to see me yesterday in Damascus. Why?"
BECAUSE, said Death, I WAS EXPECTING YOU TONIGHT IN ALEPPO.


...Jack found his fate in a bar, on one of his occasional trips to the city. He wasn't sure how he'd come to this particular bar; that secret lay several gin-and-tonics ago. But he was here now, in a booth, talking with Her. They'd met here and begun talking over, oh, the usual things. But in the manner of the drunk, the conversation had somehow turned to deep, passionate meditations on Politics, Religion, The Universe, Our Place In It, and Fate. When it wheeled at last upon that thought, Jack found himself opening up to this, admittedly gorgeous, woman who he didn't know from Eve. He explained his feelings of listlessness of his desperate desire to find his place. She listened to it all, taking it in with the Black Russians.

"It sounds like you want something pretty bad," she finally said.
"Yeah, but I don't know what. How can I want something if I don't know what it is?" he asked.
"Well, it's probably subconscious. Part of you knows what you want, just not the part that you can reach."
"That's damned unhelpful, then. What good is it if I can't reach it? I'll always feel listless."
"Not necessarily. You ever tried hypnosis?"
"Ha. Now there's a happy thought. I either need a shrink or to be made to bark like a dog," he snorted into his drink.

She smiled. She leaned across the table, her drink nestling right into her cleavage, the condensation making her nipples taut through the shirt. Jack felt entranced, a feeling he would soon come to know well.
"I can make you do a lot more like a dog than just bark, Jack. If you truly want it."

Jack came too the next morning. Well, technically it was afternoon, but does 12:03 really count? He became aware of too things. One, he was in a strange bedroom, and two, there was a leash attached to a collar around his neck, the only thing he was wearing. She was standing in a bathrobe, drinking coffee, smiling at him from the doorway. He smiled rather sheepishly through the hangover. She gestured for him to wait, left briefly, and returned with another cup, which Jack accepted after covering his nakedness with a sheet. He'd also removed the leash, but not the collar. He said he wondered why he didn't at the time. But where it was, it just felt...right. For once in his life, he felt...complete.

"Okay, this will make me sound like a total ass. I swear, I remember almost everything about last night, but there's...I must have blacked out at least once. I remember the bar, coming back to your place, talking, and then...what I mean is, I can't remember your name. I'm really, really sorry..." said Jack.
She laughed, which made Jack feel very, very good. Very good indeed, so he shifted the sheets again.
"Well, you spent most of the night calling me Mistress, but my name is Laura." she said, patting him on the knee. Her touch felt so good, he gave up trying to hide his growing erection.
"What do you mean, 'Mistress'?" he said, only moderately aware that in his mind that it was Mistress first, not Laura, that he thought of when he saw her face.
"You say you can remember our conversation at the bar?"
"Yeah."
"Well, when we got back here, I introduced you to the wonders of Erotic Hypnosis."
"Really? So, that's the blackouts?" he asked. Even when relating the story to me, it never occured to him that anything about this encounter was odd. From the way he tells it, one might think handsome young lads were ensorcelled by hypnodommes every day.
"Probably. We got pretty deep into your head." she said. She stood then, and put the coffee cups on the bedside table. Then she looked down at him. He wondered why that made him feel so horny, to be looking up to her. she reached to his neck, and removed the collar. He felt strangely empty again.

"Jack, you're a natural submissive. You envy the dogs you work with everyday. You want to feel what they do, feel you have no worries, feel you are protected, feel you are owned."
She handed him the collar, and a business card from the pocket of her robe.
"You've got some choices to make. Your clothes are on the floor over there when your ready to go. I left some post-hypno triggers. You'd be surprised what changes hypnosis can cause; even physical ones. If you want to go further than the triggers, my number's on the card. If you want, I'll see you again. If not, then last night was fun."
And she left. Jack felt alone, confused. He didn't want to be a dog.
Did he?
He dressed and went home. He took the collar.

He'd pulled the nightshift at the kennel that night, so sleeping till noon and the hour drive back didn't harm anything. So it was that, as the dark settled once more around the world, he sat in a room full of dogs in cages, looking at a dog collar. The collar from last night. Dare he call it...his collar?

He looked around at the dogs. Most were asleep, but some were awake, looking at him with something like anticipation.
Or maybe just dog faces. Surely he was projecting onto the dogs. Then again, reality is what we perceive...He couldn't remember where he'd heard that, but it's what was going through his mind as he walked up to the wall mirror in the dog grooming station.

He held the collar, and glanced back at the dogs.
"What do you think, guys? Should I be in there with you, instead of out here?"
A chorus of barks goaded him on, like frat brothers chanting "CHUG!"
So he faced the mirror, and buckled the collar around his neck.

He modelled it a bit in the mirror. It looked good, he decided. He liked the way it seemed to match his shirt, and drew attention to his moderate muscles and dog nose.

Wait.
Back up.
What.
No.

But there it was. On his face, in the mirror, was a black, wet, dog nose. A quick touch from his hand confirmed that the mirror did not lie. As he watched, he would have sworn his teeth had become larger, sharper, and his face more muzzle like by the second. His ears, he now noted, were beginning to point and flop down. A strange pressure was building in his pants. He undid his belt, and saw in the mirror the tail of a golden retriever.
"More than the tail..." he said as he saw his new sheath. He was curiously detached. This was far, far from normal, he knew, but he couldn't muster up any panic. This must be the work of the post hypnotic triggers. When he put on the collar, he became more dog-like. It stood to reason that removing it would reverse his changes. For some reason, he felt no need to test that.

He suddenly felt very tired. He glanced over at one of the dog cages, empty tonight. He wouldn't be relieved till 6am. If he set the alarm on his phone to 5...

But this was ridiculous. He couldn't sleep in a dog cage.
Why not? He was a dog.
No, he wasn't.
Dogs have wet noses, and so did he.
Well, yes.
Dogs have fur, and so did he.
Okay, yes.
Dogs have tails, and so did he.
Alright, he'd cop to that too.
Dogs wear collars. That's a collar around his neck.
Okay, fair enough, I'm a dog, but only temporarily.
If it comes to that, you'll only be temporarily in the cage.

Unable to refute this logic, Jack removed his shirt, set his phone alarm, crawled into the cage and shut the door behind him. After lapping some water from his bowl, he curled up and went to sleep.

Jack awoke the next morning just as he'd intended. He dressed, cleaned up, and removed his collar. This was done with immense regret. He felt more at peace than ever wearing it, but there was still something missing. When his boss showed up to relieve him, Jack was human again. On the outside, at least. Inside, he had to resist the urge to pant and bark at the man. But he knew what he had to do. He resigned his job; said he was moving out of town. The boss was sorry to see him go, but accepted it. He assumed Jack was finally going to find his place, as all his friends did.
They were right.

He dialed Her number.
"Hello?"
"It's me, Mistress Laura, it's Jack."
"You put the collar on?"
"Yes, Mistress."
"You know what you want now?"
"Yes, Mistress. You were right. I want to be owned. By you, if I can."
"I see. Your affairs in order?
"What few I had, Mistress."
"You know how to find my place."

Jack knelt on the floor, in front of a mirror. She stood behind him, holding the collar.
"I will ask this only once more, Jack. Are you sure you want this? If I put this on, it will go further than last night. You'll never be anything but My Dog."
"I'm sure, Mistress."
"Very well. I accept you, my pet. Now, say goodbye to your thumbs..."
And she placed it on him.

The changes progressed this time, just as she said. His face pushed out into the muzzle like shape, and then kept pushing.
"My name is Jack, and I am Mistress's dog. Mrry narme irs Jarck, rand Ir arm RMistrrrs drrrg. Mrrrr rough. Woof! Woof!"
As she had said, this time his hands became full paws. Soon, he really did say goodbye to his thumbs. He looked in the mirror. What he saw was not the dog-man from last night, it was a golden retriever. He was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a dog.
He was Her dog.
And with that, he felt his human intellect fall into a mass of happy barks...






Now, I suspect you will be compelled to rationalise this story. Hypnosis is powerful, yes, but not that powerful. Certainly it isn't instantaneous. If it happened at all, it was all in Jack's head.
I invite you, though, to remember Descartes. Reality, too, is all in our heads.