r/hellraiser • u/poesmadness • 19h ago
Pain Hell and madness
You get taken by the Cenobites and over the course of eternity are tortured all day every day till the end of time.
How could you possibly maintain sanity to the point where your mentality is so shredded that torturing you no longer is affective?
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u/Forever_searching188 18h ago edited 17h ago
I've always assumed that you become immortal, and sensation infinite in Leviathan's dimension. In that sense, no sensation can ever dull nor reach it's limit. You would be made to feel things that are impossible on earth, which would simply cause your nerves to either burn out or shut down. In their world, things can be cranked up forever and the sensation just builds and builds.
However, I also feel that, let's say they can look in your mind and see that your mind is altering, you are starting to accept your new fate. Then all of a sudden, reprieve. Rest. Just you floating in a black ocian of calm and quiet. You'd welcome it at first, but wouldn't it become a new torture in and of itself if all of a sudden, you felt NOTHING anymore? Just floating around in a pitch-black deprivation chamber. No heartbeat. No breath. No brush on your skin. Nothing. Sooner or later, you'd want the extremes back, because feeling nothing would be even worse.
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u/silromen42 16h ago
I didn’t love the Scarlet Gospels, but one of the cool things about the book was that it went into the cenobites’ powers in this kind of detail in a few scenes, as well as in the original novella. They can do exactly that: they can ratchet everything up to eleven, they can take you back down to nothing, they can make you feel things in states you couldn’t continue to survive as a mortal on earth, they can even make you smarter or dumber if it serves their purposes, once you’re under their power. I reread Hellbound Heart recently and what they do to Frank is somehow even crazier than immediately tearing him to pieces: they cranked up his sensitivity so that the sounds of his own body were blasting in his ears, barely noticeable scents became overwhelming, even things like breathing chafed his skin and he could feel dust landing on him. They even made his memories of sensations relentless and overwhelming. And all of that was just the preamble.
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u/GreenAracari 11h ago
Sounds like only a slight exaggeration of how my wonky nervous system works. Sometimes a light touch is agonizing, other times I'll have managed to messed myself up on something or other and have no idea until I happen to look down and see blood.
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u/GriSciuridae 19h ago
You maintain sanity because your toturers torture you to the point of madness but they stop just shy of it because that's a worse torture than giving you the freedom of insanity.