"Would You Like Some Hypnosis with Your Rope?"

I recently had a chance to combine hypnosis with rope bondage, and it went great. I was spending the afternoon with a few friends in a casual, kink-friendly setting, and I was talking with the couple that was there, who are in a D/s relationship that involves a certain amount of rope. They also enjoy hypnosis, and we decided to do a scene where I would be co-topping with the dom: I with the hypnosis, and the dom with the rope.

First, I hypnotized the sub, using the wonderful kinaesthetic induction I learned at Deepmind Darkwood. Then I gave her a post-hypnotic suggestion that she would sink into trance as her dom tied her up: the more rope she felt on her body, the more entranced she would become.

It took quite a bit of discussion to decide on the tie, a simple rope harness with arms in front, since it had to be something that she could let her body go limp in and stay safe - besides falling over, there was the risk for cutting off circulation or other such rope problems, which a hypnotized person might not be as good at noticing or reporting on (this is probably the biggest hurdle for combining hypnosis and rope).

It was a real treat to watch the sub close her eyes and slump as her dom sensuously pulled the rope around her, while kneeling behind. Then when the tie was done, they told her to open her eyes and stand up, and she had a deliciously sleepy stare. We brought her up quickly after that, because we were eager to hear about the experience. She said that one of the most pleasurable aspects, that helped her to go into trance, was the vibration of the hemp rope sliding against itself. If there was anything that was different than I envisioned, it was that she went into trance almost immediately when the rope first touched her (she confirmed that the rest of the tying had only deepened her a little) - but this is just a testament to this person's talent for going into trance.

I'm eager to explore the combination of rope bondage and hypnosis further, since rope bondage is extremely popular in my subcommunity in Boston. So this is a way that I can combine my favourite type of play with a type of play people already know they like. Also, my rope skills probably won't go far beyond the low plateau they are at now, but they can be more interesting with hypnotic enhancement. Plus it felt like a natural and low-key way to participate in a scene between two other people, e.g. a skilled rope top and their partner, with me also getting my hypno kicks.

There are plenty of different possibilities for combining them. At the hypno munch on Saturday, @PhotoJoseph told us about his favourite approach, not so different from what I did, in that he uses a tie as an induction. He links tying a single column tie on someone's wrist to going into trance, and then simply ties and unties it, creating a deeper trance via a process of fractionation. There's a powerful overlap between "rope space" and trance (not to mention subspace), although I certainly don't know enough about it to explain exactly what. The bottom from the scene I described above said that she experiences something not unlike trance when she comes into any contage with bondage rope.

There is also rope bondage that is purely in the mind, which has given me excellent results. People who are used to being tied up are often good at reproducing those sensations, and also the feeling of helplessness. Wiseguy has a good script for that in Mind Play. One of the nice things about it is that price or availability is no object when it comes to the material: silk, coconut, gold chains, etc. In fact it doesn't have to be cords either, since in the realm of hypnosis someone can just as easily be restrained by magnets, superglue, teams of keebler elves, or anything else you can imagine. However for people who love the feel of rope, nothing can compare, and even someone with limited rope skills can have fun tracing lines of rope all over someone's body with their finger, perhaps pressing to indicate where a knot is placed.

It should also be possible to modify the way real rope feels with suggestions: make it warm up, make it tingle, make it pulsate.

I think it would be too dangerous to put someone who was in a rope suspension into a trance, for more than a few seconds anyway. However, suspensions are huge in my friend group, so I'm going to keep thinking about other ways it could be enhanced or evoked with hypnosis.

Finally, one idea I had is that it might be weird and funny to hypnotize someone to believe they weren't tied up. When it's pointed out that they can't move their arms, they might insist they just don't want to at the moment, or are too tired. A variation would be to forget they've been tied, and gradually realize all their movement restrictions.

This is just a sweep across the surface. Almost all of these approaches are combined in this gorgeous scene log by someone who is, I think, the most talented writer about the hypnobottom experience out there, @sleepingirl. (also where the title of this entry comes from) That's @mephki as the top, with @OneEyeStranger assisting - by the way, how happy am I that I have now met all three people in person! Anyway, one day I would love to be able to create an experience incorporating both rope and hypnosis that is that seamless and that powerful.
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Good things are already coming out of having written this, in particular @Guilty pointing me to this incredibly cool-looking short book, HYPNOBARI (like hyno and shibari)! Really looking forward to reading it. 

Ms. Mesmer's 10(+) Sexy as Hell Days of Hypnosis

Someone named Ms. Mesmer has been killing it on her hypnokink blog lately, especially starting with Day Five of her "Ten Day Journey to Getting My Kinkified Groove Back." From that entry on she describes working with a number of different hypnotists online, most of them known to me, and the very hot, very D/s-flavoured erotic trances they guided her through.

Together they're a great first-hand introduction to the fun that can be had even over Skype, and the wild and sexy things that are possible for the hypnotized mind, from bimbofication to hypnotic bondage to trying to resist a brainwashing machine. (That last is a perfect example of the "hypnosis + story" variety of roleplay I learned about this week.) It's a joy to read about a true hypnofetishist getting her wishes fulfilled, and explosively reconnecting with a neglected side of her pleasure-seeking self.

Hypnosis for Roleplay (Boston Hypnosis Study Group)

This month's hypnosis study group was a must for me, since it was a presentation by a couple who have developed a fascinating use for hypnosis: to enhance long term sexual roleplay scenarios. They had really prepared for it too, with a powerpoint slideshow and various planned activities. So we had two bespectacled engineers tag-team-presenting heavily bullet-pointed slides, clicking through them with a remote. But in contrast to the usual talks I see, the content was about fun sex games you can play. One of those moments of incongruity that make me smile.

(on a related note, have been amused by how my life exploring kink and going to secret sex parties has turned out to involve plenty of Excel, Word, and now powerpoint... really the whole office suite... not to mention e-invites and updating Wordpress pages. Lots of work that is essentially identical to running a college club.)

As someone with no familiarity with LARPing or online roleplay, they really got me hooked by talking about the similarities between hypnosis and roleplay. They both need active and willing participants. So they both involve adults committing to unusual scenarios, and not getting too self conscious. Here as in many areas of kink, you realize that sidestepping the impulse to laugh at a practice not only lets you relate to the practitioners better, but also allows the possibility of it expanding your own life and repertoire.

Also like hypnosis, roleplay requires plenty of clarity of communication, and negotiation. The fantasy is that it just happens, but in reality there needs to be plenty of talking and outlining.

So how can hypnosis and roleplay enhance each other? The presenters gave us three ways:

1. Hypnosis + story. Providing some context for the hypnosis that takes it out of the ordinary, like you are an evil hypnotist who is going to bend the mind of your tied-up captive. One neat thing they point out is that all the things the books say hypnosis can't do - hypnotize someone against their will, make them do  something they don't want to do, be "stuck" in a trance - you can pretend are happening through (negotiated) roleplay, if those scenarios turn you on.

2. Roleplay with hypnotic assistance. Taking a sexy roleplay scenario - like cop and person who's been pulled over, or say two dark elves having a nude wrestling match in a glade - and using hypnosis to make it seem more real, and help people get into character. It can also provide "special effects", like a potion that really does make you sleepy when the wizard forces you to drink it.

3. Immersive hypno environment. This one took me a little while to understand, but I think what they meant is that the hypnotist creates a complete interactive environment for the hypnotee, much like a dungeon master (of the dungeons and dragons, not the play party, variety). So while the hypnotee sits in a chair with their eyes closed, the hypnotist invokes sensory imagery and perhaps portrays different characters, and the hypnotee makes choices and interacts with the world. This takes plenty of preparation, just like an RPG campaign, and can be enhanced with actual sensory stimulation, like sound effects, giving the entranced person an object to hold, or for instance holding fresh meadow dryer sheets in front of their face if they're supposed to be in a meadow.

The couple giving the presentation are into the latter, and have elaborated some of their scenarios for *years*, with dozens of characters and complex evolving relationships. They are both heavily invested in stories, especially of the fantasy/science fiction type, and in exploring alternate possible worlds, like one where mind control powers are ubiquitous, and complicate sex and class and gender accordingly.

So this is where we tried to get them to tell us more about their long term fantasy play, or what they called "shared headcannon", which caused plenty of blushing and assurances they didn't want to make our ears bleed. Of course, this is perfectly reasonable, since it is such a private and intimate thing for them (while one of them has written many of their scenes out as stories, the stories are never shared with anyone but the two of them).

I did ask, how much are you motivated by cool story ideas and worldbuilding, and how much by working backwards from some hot sexual scenario? And the answer was 1000% cool story ideas and worldbuilding. And then they try and work sex in somewhere. Very cute.

Our imaginations were definitely stimulated by the props they passed around, such as a beeping metronome that can double as a fake heart monitor (slowing it down will actually relax the person), and a bottle of "mind control pills", that they had made a delightful custom Rx label for.

Some more tips from the session:

• Planning involves "roadmapping": agreeing on a simple plot together, along with key details.
• "No god mode": you don't get to control what the other person chooses to do - unless that's part of the scenario.
• In addition to the regular kink scene safewords, you can have a "break character" safeword. A common one in the world of LARPing is apparently putting your fist to the side of your forehead.
• If you're having trouble getting into the headspace for in-person roleplay, try going into different rooms and starting with online chat roleplay, if that's what you're comfortable with. (by the way, delighted that MUDs are still in use for such roleplay! Got to love technology that I knew at the dawn of the internet still being perverted.)
• There is no copyright in private sex play, so you can exploit whatever fandoms you love.

Obviously I can't capture it all, from a fun example they elaborated of a "hypnotic face slap" storyline (my favourite variation of which involved the phrase, "Sir, you have offended my hypno-honour!"), to brainstorming roleplay scenarios, to the repeated invocation of "sex jail".

The evening ended up being something like 4 1/2 hours, which is long even for a hard core hypno enthusiast like myself, but I was so glad the presenters shared their unique type of play. It's opened up my imagination to new kinds of fun that can be had, when the hypnotist evokes not just thoughts and sensations, but character, environment, and even the surrounding society (I pictured a super-repressed THX 1138 society, where any kind of sex is an incredible act of deviance!) At one point one said that roleplay activates some percentage of your imagination, and hypnosis some percentage as well, so that together they can make the most use of your imagination possible.

Milton Erickson: Would You Shake this Man's Hand?

Milton Erickson invented a special hypnotic handshake. He describes the beginning like this:

The letting loose becomes transformed from a firm grip into a gentle touch by the thumb, a lingering drawing away of the little finger, a faint brushing of the subject's hand with the middle finger - just enough vague sensation to attract the attention. As the subject gives attention to the touch of your thumb, you shift to a touch with your little finger. As your subject's attention follows that, you shift to a touch with your middle finger and then again to the thumb.

After more mysterious steps, the other person's hand is left suspended in mid air, and they are paralyzed in general, occasionally being guided to other phenomena. And it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that the person shaking his hand usually didn't exactly agree to be hypnotized by him. Erickson notes in passing:

There are several colleagues who won't shake hands with me, unless I reassure them first, because they developed a profound glove anaesthesia when I used this procedure on them.

Running into Erickson, in the faculty lounge say, how keen would you be to accept his friendly handshake offer?

Milton Erickson was a clinical psychologist who died in 1980, having enormously influenced psychiatry, psychology, and the understanding of hypnosis. His hypnotic handshake is symbolic of both sides of Erickson that I got from reading his book, Hypnotic Realities (1976): Erickson had eerie insight into the workings of the human unconscious, and he sometimes used it in ways that are disrespectful of people's autonomy.

Hypnotic Realities is an extraordinary book. It was recommended to me by MrDream, and I can see why it might be the best way to encounter Erickson: rather than glowing stories of patient cures and his outsized personality, most of the content is transcripts of actual hypnotic sessions by Erickson, integrated with detailed discussions and deconstructions, sometimes literally line by line, by Erickson and his colleague Ernest Rossi. Even without Erickson's striking manner of speaking and personal aura, I could feel the power of some of his formulations:

Now physical comfort exists, but your don't even need to pay attention to your relaxation and comfort.

Please let me know when that feeling of warmth develops in your hand.

Do you think you're awake?

Something has happened to your left hand.

Now the important achievement for you is to realize that everybody does not know their capacities. (pause) And you have to discover these capacities in whatever slow way you wish.

Eveyrone has had the experience of nodding their head "yes" or shaking it "no" even without quite realizing it.

That's a little taste of Ericksonian language, although they're even more compelling in the flow of the transcribed session. You notice that the language could not be more different than a stage hypnotist, and in fact the flow is utterly different too: there is often nothing that resembles a traditional induction - he just talks for a while - and trances most often take their own course, gently nudged along by his masterful indirect suggestions. As one example, he will encourage visual hallucination, without telling the hypnotee what to hallucinate. So what they report afterwards is a complete surprise to him.

If there's any hypnotist in history that today's recreational hypnotists can name and explicitly claim as an influence, it's Erickson. My understanding is that he made at least two enormous contributions:

1. He argued that depth of trance and suggestibility are not the same thing. Someone can be completely zonked, and not respond to a particular suggestion for a whole variety of reasons. And someone could respond well to a well crafted suggestion even when not really in a trance. The important thing is knowing how to speak to the unconscious mind.
2. He discovered how to talk to the unconscious mind. A huge host of principles and tactics and even bits of phrases that hypnotists use today can be traced back to him: truisms, leading questions, double binds, and many others. (which  also formed the foundation of NLP, I believe)

I had heard of Erickson, originally from a section in Wiseguy's book that didn't clarify much, but I first started to get an idea of what he was about when MrDream used one of his techniques on me at Deepmind Darkwood, when I was not in a trance. (with my consent) He simply sat across from me and began with, "Which of your feet feels more stuck to the ground?" Then when, after a few more words, he told me my feet were free, I felt like they really had been stuck! The opening is what Erickson called a double bind, and appears in this book almost word for word.

I'm so excited about this book. It's answering so many of my questions. For example, how to achieve good results with people who aren't particularly suggestible. Well unlike stage hypnotists, Erickson set himself to hypnotize everyone who wanted to be (and some who didn't). And direct suggestions don't work for everyone. So he comes at the hypnotee from the side, making statements that seem innocuous to the conscious mind while they have the intended effects on the unconscious: "Suggestions are statements that the patient cannot possibly argue with." There's a recognition that hypnotees are different in infinite ways, and that the hypnotists must take a great deal of trouble to attend to every microreaction and tune in, since "hypnotic suggestions are effective only to the degree that they can activate, block, or alter the functioning of natural mental mechanisms and associations already existing within the patient."

Since Erickson is already an important teacher for me, it's important to examine what kind of attitudes I might inadvertently absorb along with the technique. Erickson was potentially more dangerous than the proverbial ethically-challenged online hypnotist douche for one reason: his shit worked.

I have to say, though, that he doesn't come across as the patriarchal nightmare I was expecting from my glancing knowledge of other oldschool psychologists. It helps that his actual therapeutic approach is based on the idea that the therapist doesn't necessarily know better than the patient what they need, and that the therapist's role, whether using hypnosis or not, is to help them break themselves out of self-defeating patterns they're stuck in, or "depotentiating habitual frames of reference" (got to love the jargon). So that calls for playful, open-ended trances, with the hypnotee doing much of the guiding. Not much room for therapist as god, or anything like the power imbalance of the stage or fictional hypnotist.

But as might be expected from someone who goes around giving non-consensual hypnotic handshakes, there are a few things even in this book that were red flags to me. He loves to initiate trances and amnesia without warning or discussion, including one instance of inducing amnesia for an educational hypnotic session he did with a fellow psychologist when it was in fact against her wishes. He simply decided it would be better if her unconscious, rather than her conscious mind, worked away at the lessons. In another case, he gives a hypnotee the sensation of being topless, without it having been discussed, or any kind of sexiness being established between them. It's notable that every one of the five or six hypnotees is a woman.

The situation gets worse with his wikipedia page (which shows clear signs of ideological editing warfare), as in his own case report:

"Now you need to know how to undress and go to bed in the presence of a man. So start undressing." Slowly, in an almost automatic fashion, she undressed. I had her show me her right breast, her left breast, her right nipple, her left nipple. Her belly button. Her genital area. Her knees. Her gluteal [buttock] regions. I asked her to point where she would like to have her husband kiss her. I had her turn around [naked]. I had her dress slowly. She dressed. I dismissed her.

This and other anecdotes hint that he might have been a stealth hypnofetishist, and one without a lot of respect for boundaries or consent. At the very least, there's a lack of recognition of the power position he puts himself in as the hypnotist and influencer. Other anecdotes talk about him influencing his students' and colleagues' lives, as well as his patients', with prescriptive suggestions intended to make their lives better. It's clear he got off on that, at some level, which is what bothers me about practically all famous, influential psychologists I have read about.

The great gift the kink world has given me is learning that it's ok to want to feel powerful and have strange influence over your partner's thoughts and actions, as long as that person is in on it, and properly consents. You don't have to be sneaky about it - and in fact if you are feeling sneaky, that probably means something is very wrong.

But even though I have no interest in therapy - or nudging the lives of the people around me via hypnosis for what I consider to be their own good - studying Erickson will be extremely important for my progress. Since my focus is erotic hypnosis, my goals fall somewhere between the stage hypnotist and Ericksonian nearly undirected healing trances (though some of that is an illusion, as he subtly exerts control). I do want to achieve specific effects, but there are a wide range of effects that please me, and already I've experienced plenty of surprises delightfully arising from my trance partner's mind. Where I can learn the most is about how to work with the inexperienced and doubting person, building that person's hypnotic capabilities cumulatively over time and carefully avoiding giving the impression of having "failed". I saw MrDream achieve startling effects in that realm (including with me!), and in other Deepmind Darkwood trances, and now that I've read this book I'm convinced that Erickson holds the key to truly understanding and communicating with the unconscious.