It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but a new day-care center that uses drugs, music and hypnotism to keep children in suspended animation for up to eight hours at a stretch is not only real -- your tax dollars are paying for it.

"This isn't just outrageous, it's monstrous -- straight out of the pages of 1984," says Rhonda Martinet, of the child-advocacy group Educate for Tomorrow, in Washington.

"Nobody wants to talk about it, but the program is big and getting bigger. Something's got to be done. Children of day care age should be interacting with one another and their teachers.

"They should be expressing themselves creatively and learning basic math and language skills. But this program dispenses with all that.

"This program drugs them into oblivion and then puts them in a trance on top of it.

"Parents on the far right, the fundamentalists, like it because it means they get to raise their kids without government interference since the only time the kids are active and awake is when they are at home.

"What they fail to understand is that these children will be horribly stunted. And who knows what kinds of side effects the drugs could have? I shudder to even think about it."

The mind-twisting day-care experiment has been under way since December of 2002, when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare quietly issued a $60 million grant to the ultraconservative Freedom In Education research group, which looks for "innovative ways to teach and socialize children" under the age of 5.

The group first came to notoriety in the mid-1980s when members suggested that children with attention deficit disorder "are better off in padded cells than running wild in classrooms, ruining the educational experience of normal children."

Spokesmen at the group's headquarters in Los Angeles declined repeated interview requests. But sources with close ties to the think tank say the suspended-animation experiment "is considered to be a resounding success."

"They believe they've found a way to give working parents the chance to raise their own kids in the way they see fit, which is something that