Forgetting Can be Fun (A Hypnotic Amnesia Session)

Hypnotic amnesia has been a fascination of mine for a while. There's such potential for twisted D/s games with enthusiastically consenting partners: check out hypnotic bingo and "You did nothing!"  for playful, advanced examples. There are a lot of negative associations with forgetting, so it's good to think about about the many ways it's natural, helpful and fun:

• Letting go of boring, irrelevant test material immediately after the test.
• Forgetting spoilers someone told you about a movie or TV series.
• Forgetting someone's PIN or other private info right after you accidentally saw it.
• Dreams fading so they don't get tangled up with your waking memories
• Forgetting that your roommate was making muffins, and being surprised by them on the kitchen table when you get home.
• Wiping an important task from your mind when you hand it off to a trustworthy  helper (which might be an automated helper, like a calendar alert)
• Getting a package that you forgot you ordered online, and being excited to open it and find out what you got yourself!

Part of why I brainstormed this list was because I think reminding the unconscious mind how enjoyable forgetting can be, can help it to happen in .

Hypothetically, being able to induce amnesia in your partner has horrific abuse potential. Without permission, it would be a severe violation of agency. And it broke up Willow and Tara! There are two things that temper this in hypnosis, though, based on my reading and limited observation. First, it's inconsistent in how well it works. Second, it tends to wear off over time. I would hope, but don't know for sure, that both are more true for things that happen that are emotionally charged, like crossing a boundary. All of these mean that such a violation could not be counted upon to stay hidden.

Nevertheless, this is a very high trust activity. I had been doing sexy hypnosis with this particular partner for almost four months before I even brought up the idea. We had a serious talk about it first, and we agreed I would stay within the bounds of things we had done before, and I would make sure all memory was restored by the time she left.

The type of amnesia I wanted to explore I'll call "session amnesia". There's another type, that I'll call "knowledge amnesia", in which you have people forget specific bits of knowledge, such as their name. This creeps me out a little: the symbolic value of obliterating someone's name, even temporarily, seems intense, not something to mess with without a solid emotional foundation to the relationship. I have also had two people tell me they very much don't like knowledge amnesia - one because she's experienced unpleasant forgetfulness side effects from medication.

In session amnesia, you forget some or all of what happened during the hypnotic trances. Unlike in fictional portrayals, most people remember most of what happens in every trance, even if it's a bit jumbled. But you can specifically suggest otherwise. This has lovely potential when combined with post-hypnotic suggestions, in terms of power exchange. Imagine coming out of trance and knowing that a suggestion is there waiting to be activated, but you don't know what it is. Or that your perception has been altered in some way that you can't quite tell yet. It most definitely fits into the category of "eerie control". To quote a 15 year old movie, this sort of thing is my bag, baby!

The first suggestion I had in mind was that the next time I asked her to recite the alphabet, she would get sleepier and sleepier with each letter, until she fell back into trance. I said she probably wouldn't make it much past the letter "N". Because I wanted to give it the best possible chance of working, I piled on as many techniques as I could from threads like this:

• I used the language that the post-hypnotic suggestion would slip away from her conscious mind, but that her unconscious mind could take care of it and activate it when the time was right.
• I reminded her of some of the nice versions of forgetting from the list above (taking my inspiring from the Erickson book)
• I did other activities during the same trance after giving the post-hypnotic suggestion, such as hand levitation, and evoking sexy sensations.
• I had distracting questions ready for immediately after she woke up, to help prevent consolidation of the memory. Which I didn't use, because when I counted her up she leaned forward and we started making out. My reaction was, that works!

A bit after she woke up, I asked her to say the alphabet, which she had a puzzled reaction to. A great sign! If she had remembered the suggestion, she would have smirked. She looked at me warily, and started briskly reciting the letters. Nothing was happening. She got to "R", and I was trying to think about my next move, when I saw her eyelids droop just a little, and she hesitated. Then her body slumped back onto the chair dramatically, eyes closed, in a trance.

She told me later that she had not remembered the suggestion, until partway through the alphabet. The sleepiness had snuck up on her, and then she had realized, "Oh, I can go into trance." This was a revelation, because I realized this is what would happen if you genuinely didn't know what was happening to you: the sleepiness would be a distraction that you would push aside to get through the task, until it got too strong to ignore.

My favourite part, though, was when she told me that when I asked her to recite the alphabet, she wondered if I had made her forget some of the letters of the alphabet (despite saying that I was only going to do session amnesia). That's wonderful: that meant her mind was going all over the place trying to figure out what I'd done. I realized that I could now point out anything she did, and make her wonder if it was because of a post-hypnotic suggestion I'd given her. That's a mindfuck!

The amnesia I was going for was for the memory to not be firmly grasped by the conscious mind in the first place, which may be what HS refers to as "memory failure" in his classification. This is in contrast to techniques suggested by Wiseguy and others, where the unconscious is instructed to hide a memory away, put it behind a barrier, or otherwise make it inaccessible. For my first time out I just thought this seemed like a better bet, by analogy to dreams sliding away upon awakening, and also because it doesn't put direct attention on the thing to be forgotten, which it seems to me could be counterproductive.

We did another trance and another forgotten post-hypnotic suggestion, this time of a sexual nature and triggered by drinking from her water glass. This was perhaps not so smart as a test, because as she pointed out, she was thirsty anyway, and that activity was definitely already on the menu for the evening. But she didn't remember the suggestion!

Before we parted ways I checked that she remembered everything, and assured her that *was* everything. I wanted her to know that even though I might joke about it, at the end she would know exactly what suggestions I had given her.

I will be at NEEHU starting tomorrow (!!!), and there's a memory play class (along with everything else under the sun), so I'm sure my thinking will evolve dramatically. But I'm glad I got a taste of how fun this kind of play can be.