Author Gao Ming has always been fascinated with the mysteries of the human mind, the dreams, nightmares and hallucinations from the inner world. He’s interested in the depths and the edges.

He’s just out with his second book, “Journal of a Hypnotist.”

For years Gao produced popular “true-crime” TV courtroom and law and order shows with re-enactments, appealing to public fascination with horrific acts and the legal system.

Eleven years ago, he decided to find out more about the mind and mental patients. From 2004 to 2008, the layman interviewed more than 100 current and former patients, some hospitalized. He then wrote “Geniuses on the Left, Madmen on the Right” (2010), considered the first popular laymen’s book on mental patients in China.

In that book of case histories, he wrote about a patient obsessed with quantum physics, a man who believed he was possessed by aliens, and one who believed that stones were alive.

It contains sections on the end of life, ghouls, shamans, “Death Week,” “Asao Tomb Dead, “Edge of Immortality,” the “Final Satan,” “Walking Dead,” “Lost Travelers,” “Evolutionary Enertia,” “Foreseeing the Future,” “Woman Planet” and other sensational subjects.

It’s more of a fun read for a population that knows very little about mental illness and psychology — and reads disturbing and far from uncommon newspaper reports about crimes committed by “mentally ill” people. The label is swiftly and uncritically applied.

It’s not a serious examination of mental illness, but, as Gao points out, it’s not a medical book.

It could be argued that Gao’s rather sensational works do not actually educate but simply entertain and reinforce stereotypes and prejudices about mental illness as something frightening.

Now Beijing-based Gao has published “Journal of a Hypnotist,” released last month. It’s a semifictionalized collection of 15 case histories — all based on fact, he says.

“In these books, I call for concern for mental patients and their own inner world,” Gao told Shanghai Daily in a recent interview after he gave a book promotion lecture in Shanghai.

Asked about mental illness in China and the mental health care system, he declined to comment, saying, “I’m not an expert. You wouldn’t ask a psychologist about the state of food safety.”

Eerie pictures

The book — with a splashy, colorful Rorschach-like image on the cover — is about a hypnotist (Gao himself) unlocking secrets of the subconscious. The hypnotist and a psychologist friend open a clinic and use hypnosis and other therapy to treat an escaped murderer, a middle-aged woman who hates herself, and an athlete desperate to regain past glory.

They also treat a rich man’s mistress who was abused by her stepfather in a poor family. She had feelings of guilt and hallucinated seeing a reproachful woman and child — Gao suggests they represent her lover’s wife and child. She was also plagued by dreams of being back in her poor neighborhood.

Illustrations, some in color, mostly dark and lurid, depict nightmares and visions, including skeletons, death heads, strange lights and monsters.

Gao, who did not attend high school, has no training in psychology, but he knows a good story and knows what the public wants to read. He also has friends who are doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as friends in the Public Security Bureau. He said he gained access to personal medical files but disguised everyone’s identity and created composite characters.

In one case, a woman had a recurrent nightmare of being chased by a monster with only half a face, in Nottingham, UK. That’s where she and her husband spent a holiday and where she became pregnant with their son. After the child was born, the woman gave up her dream of becoming an artist and instead took care of her family. Through hypnosis, she followed the monster and came face to face with a mirror, showing herself had half a face. The hypnotist said the monster was her lost dream and if she again took up art, she would feel better and whole again.

Q: Have you ever been hypnotized?

A: I tried hypnosis when I was 28 or 29 and going through personal issues. I was talking to a hypnotist friend, who wrote parts of the book, and he said I could try. He asked me to relax, leading me to a place in a dream. He asked me to tell him what I saw and heard. When I awoke, I had forgotten what I saw and said ... (but) hypnosis untied a knot deep inside my heart, though I cannot tell you what it was. I cried very hard afterward.

Q: Is hypnosis scientific or occult?

A: It is kind of occult. It’s fairly common that hypnosis, like any treatment, doesn’t reach its goal of helping people. Not everyone is susceptible and a good candidate.

Q: How did you collect information?

A:  It was complicated because people don’t want to be exposed and it was essential to protect privacy. I met them through psychologist friends and promised no one would be recognizable. I kept their chronologies but changed personal information. I didn’t create anything, I just blended and reorganized information. Every story is true.

Q: Why do you write about hypnosis?

A: The main theme is not hypnosis but the inner world. Everybody has an inner world that they don’t understand very well and I want to write about it through stories of hypnotist’ cases. Ever since I was young, I’ve been curious about the human mind and the inner world.

Most people don’t realize the nature of their inner world, or don’t want to know. They cover it up, even to themselves.

After I was hypnotized during my 20s, I realized it’s important to communicate with one’s inner world. Now I frequently do self-analysis, either when I commute, or when I’m about to fall asleep or wake up. It’s like collecting fragments in my heart and I come to realize something interesting that has been buried in deep memory.

Q: What was interviewing like?

A: Mental patients are more absolute than ordinary people as they only see things from one angle. They can see part of the world without noticing others or themselves. Some are like artists. Some talked about shadowy, philosophical questions, such as “Who am I?” and “Where did I come from?”

One patient was obsessed with quantum physics and went on and on ... He really did have rich knowledge.

Some hospitalized patients had a propensity for violence. I couldn’t have anything sharp, including pens, and doors were always left open. We could never anticipate what might trigger an episode. I was once chased by a patient around a yard.

Q: Will you write more?

A: It depends on feedback. I have enough material and if readers give a good response, I’ll “renew” a third season for the book, just like TV shows.

Q: What kind of feedback do you get?

A: Sometimes I get phone calls from readers who are interested in patients described. They ask how they are doing, but I really can’t tell them. One reader hated “Geniuses on the Left, Madmen on the Right” so much that he wanted to tear it to bits. I think the book touched something at the bottom of his heart. WHAT OTHERS SAY

About “Journal of a Hypnotist”

  Danish critic Georg Brandes said, ‘The heart is not a peaceful pond or a lake in the woods, it is a vast ocean, where plants and dreadful residents hide at the bottom.’ And in this, Gao Ming is a tireless explorer.

— Beijing Youth Daily

  They say a hypnotist is the whisperer in the dark, where all of us are illusions, and the dream is the real thing. Hypnotism is filled with magic and fantasy.

   All the subjects were  between healthy and unhealthy, including a habitual liar, a strange dreamer, a teenager who sees ghosts, an old doctor afraid of hell, a gay lawyer and a suspicious husband. Those cases opened my mind.

  I finished in half a day. Loved it. Maybe everyone has a gray part no one else can enter and where the person is trapped.

Readers on douban.com, a popular culture site for reviews of books, music, film and art.

About “Geniuses on the Left, Madmen on the Right”

  Apart from the author’s four-year efforts to interview mental patients, he also has a strong philosophical mind to help readers understand. Normal people will be moved.

— Wu Zhihong (Psychologist)

  The author really embellished mental patients and I believe they are fictional, despite the author’s claim that they are real. He also ... exposed his ignorance of physics.

­— Han Dong (Reader, science fan)

  The book satisfied my curiosity. It didn’t change my  thinking or worldview, but it encouraged me to get to know a bigger world, to explore the unknown.

­— “Jobs Bill” (Reader on zhihu.com)