Improv, Hypnosis, and Creativity

During the year and a half I was taking improv comedy classes at Improv Boston and Improv Asylum, I was constantly struggling to achieve better focus, and get out of the way of what my unconscious mind wanted to produce. I learned really quickly that though I wanted to think things through and pick the best possible idea, a) that takes too long, and b) often the weird thing that just pops out of my mouth is way funnier and more interesting. I made contact with IRL hypnosis at the tail end of this time, and soon had the idea that hypnosis could achieve some of the same aims, since it involves relaxed focus and losing self consciousness. Recently I got to try this out!

Every improv class involves at least a half an hour of playing a variety of warmup games - a bunch of mid-20s to early-30s adults paying a lot of money to do activities you might see at a children's birthday party - because that's what it takes to leave the buttoned-up everyday world behind, and to be  spontaneously creating without judgment, as well as tuned into one another. But maybe hypnosis could substitute for the warmup.

For example, simplest game in the world: word toss. Classmates stand in a circle, and "toss" a word at each other. The objective of the person who receives it: look at another classmate and say a word. Any word at all. It just has to be fast. This game is incredibly difficult for adults. It instantly makes you realize all the layers of filtering we normally employ, to protect our self image. The choice of word could be fraught with peril: will it reveal something terrible about ourselves? Like that we're deranged, or not creative? And so the pause gets longer. Even though *any word is ok*. I'll bet this game would be a total disaster at most dinner parties - it takes a group of people very explicitly committed to not judging each other's output, and even then it takes practice.

So word toss was the first thing I was eager to try when I got a chance to do hypnosis with my former improv classmate. She's the first person I've hypnotized who does not know about my hypnosis fetish. I wrestled with myself about that, but ultimately decided it was ok, because a) she initiated, coming over and excitedly asked me if she could try hypnosis when she overheard me talking about it, b) I don't have the hots for her, c) her boyfriend would be there for the whole thing, and d) I was motivated to trance with her for reasons other than my fetish. But this is a broader issue that will come up in the future and I'll have to think about: whether it's ok to do vanilla hypnosis with people who don't want to know about my sex life, considering that I am bound to get a (usually mild) kinky thrill out of it.

Besides the warmup games, I was fascinated by the idea of improvisational storytelling. The book that got me to take improv classes, and which hit me like a lightning bolt out of the blue, was Keith Johnstone's Impro for Storytellers. This book is not just about improv comedy - the modern version of which Johnstone had a huge hand in founding - but about much bigger issues of performance, creativity, and the nature of stories.

Johnstone's most important message, that blew my mind, is that most people's problem with creativity is in trying, consciously, to come up with something good. Decades of getting graded on our work - and judging other people's work - has actually harmed us in that respect, and made most adults afraid to create anything at all. But no matter what age, we can find our way back to it with help. He describes an exercise in guided storytelling he does that certainly sounds a lot like hypnosis, in his other book Impro (you can read the entire chapter at the moment here).

If I get you to lie down, close your eyes and relax, and report what your imagination gives you, then you'll probably go into a deep state of absorption, and instead of 'thinking things up' the experiences will seem to be really happening to you. Afterwards, if I ask 'Did you feel the floor?' then you'll probably say, 'There wasn't any floor.' If I say, 'Did you experience your body?' you'll probably answer, 'I wasn't in my body' or 'I was in the body I had in the story.'

He writes that the participant "should have the experience of imagining something 'effortlessly', and 'choicelessly'. He should understand through this game that he doesn't have to do anything in order to imagine, any more than he needs to do anything in order to relax or perceive." His method is to ask a series of prompts that guide the person's attention to different aspects of the imagined situation. And it is as though the person only has to look and see what's there to answer the question, rather than deciding on it or making it up. This is long, but I wanted to include his transcript of this in action because I find it so fascinating:

'What sort of stories do you like?'
'Science fiction. Well . . . Tolkien. Stories like The Hobbit.'
'OK. Imagine a lake surrounded by mountains.'
'Yes.'
'You are swimming in the lake.'
'Yes.'
'Can you see any fish?'
'Yes.'
'Large ones?'
'No.'
'Shoals of little ones turning and darting?'
'Yes.'
'There is one particular fish. What do you do with it?'
'I catch it.'
'You swim back to the shore and three hooded figures are waiting for you. What do you give them?'
'The fish.'
'And what do they give you in exchange?'
'A stick.'
'What do you do with it?'
'I point it at an oak tree and it vanishes.'
'And then?'
'I point it at the three hooded figures and they vanish too.'
'You set out through the woods. Does the path lead up or down?'
'Up.'
'What do you hear? Is it from your right or your left?'
'Left. Someone crying.'
'You look down into a clearing and see a woman surrounded by . . .?'
'Little men.'
'What's she wearing? Anything?'
'She's naked.'
'The little men see you?'
'They're coming at me waving sticks.'
'The woman calls to them?'
'She says it's not me who did it.'
'Was it someone from the castle?'
'Yes, he threw her out naked into the forest'
'Do you help her?'
'Yes.'
'Do you go up the path?'
'I put my cloak round her and we set off to the castle.'
'It gets dark?'
'Yes.'
'And you are going to sleep?'
'We cover ourselves with leaves and we lie about eight feet apart.'
'You're fast asleep when you wake up to feel her touching you.'
'Yes.'
'What's she after?'
'The stick.'
'Does she get it?'
'Yes.'
'She points it at you and what happens?'
'It goes all grey and wintry.'
'What do you see in the mist?'
'A huge oak tree, and three hooded figures leaping about and shouting.'

This callback, or "reincorporation", of earlier material provides a satisfying ending, and was apparently really funny when it happened. I studied this carefully. Clearly the questioner has a very active role in helping the story come into existence!

I feel the allure of this mode of creation. Although I'm not now an improvisational comedian, the book and the classes were a tremendous inspiration to me, and gave me something I desperately needed. It  had an immediate, concrete impact on my behaviour, in that I sat down and wrote a dozen comedy sketches and 20 short stories over a period of a few months, after being absolutely terrified and paralyzed to do the slightest thing "creative" since as far back as middle school. This sentence alone was enough to free me:

It's hard to write a great poem about a sunset. What a ridiculous idea. Just write a poem and see what comes out.

Most of what I created will never see the light of day (the stories are all  mind control pornography - surprised?), but thanks to Johnstone I couldn't care less. It was great.

In looking for the dialogue in Impro, I discovered another fascinating connection with hypnosis, in discussing the possibility of an unexpected emotional reaction, or "abreaction" - and he uses that term!

Once the basic technique is mastered, I let students try it again. This time they'll be bolder. They'll encounter other people, they'll have adventures, but I'll still guide them away from 'bad trips'. I'm using the game to demonstrate to the student that he can be effortlessly creative, not to teach him that his imagination is terrifying and should be suppressed! People cån get upset playing the game, but if they weep you can cuddle them, which makes them feel better. When people abreact I always establish that (1) it's good for them; (2) they'll feel marvellous in half an hour; (3) it 'happens to everybody'

Pretty plausible sounding advice, and not redundant with the tips in the major hypno books!

After plenty of pretalk and negotiation (though I didn't call it that), we did a couple of simple beginner trances, and then started the word toss. I got her boyfriend, also an improviser, involved as the one giving her the words to respond to.

The results were inconclusive. She didn't seem to hesitate over her choice of words, but they also came slowly - as words tend to do in hypnosis. I think the choices may have been a little less inhibited, less screened. For example, when he said "work" she just went "eeeugh", which certainly reflected her un-hypnotized feelings.

Then I had her do a word toss with herself. This is surprisingly hard to do normally, since you can get tripped up thinking about the pattern your words are making. So I suggested that she would hear herself say the last word and respond to it, but then let that last word go, fade away. From what she said afterwards, this "amnesia-lite" suggestion didn't work, but she still powered along, steadily giving out the words.

After more chatting out of trance, we decided to go ahead with the story. I did my best to imitate Johnstone, and even quickly reread the passage above seconds before the trance. Since she had pointed out that many of her word-toss words had related to a vacation in nature, that's where I started.

"You're in a wood. Is it a dark wood or a light wood?"

"Light."

And we were off. She saw markings on a tree trunk, heard a sound, and followed it into the bushes, to find an old man with a fishing rod, that had a boot on the end of the line.

I quickly discovered that guiding such a story is a skill that will take practice. I felt myself get worried that it was getting boring, and heard myself saying things like, "he says something unusual, what is it?" I don't know if that's against the spirit of the exercise. There were also times when I was concerned it might get scary, and wondered how much control I really had to steer the story away from distressing material. No matter what I tried to give her positive feedback and make it clear that whatever her imagination created was valid.

It was quite wonderful to see her calm, confident answers to my prompts as the story continued, and many times she offered details beyond the prompt. That surprised me because I think of hypnotized people as having a hard time initiating action. Eventually it unfolded into an eerie little tale, involving a small boy marking up the forest with strange symbols, and the old man as his servant. It wasn't a "proper" story, partly because it was so short, but it had a dream logic that I found compelling too, and there was a moment, just like in Johnstone's example, where we both knew the story had come to a natural ending. An oddly emotional ending.

I finished up with just a few more prompts to focus on the forest, with the late afternoon sun filtering through the treetops, to give her a bit more of her vacation.

She was enthusiastic about the experience, and told me how every detail of the scene had been vivid to her - that she could tell me exactly what the old man had been wearing for example. She had self-identified as visual before we began, and that certainly seemed to be true. I think visual people naturally get the most out of guided imagery, and for them it can be an extremely powerful and enjoyable experience.

I'm pleased with the session, and I want to do more someday. There are many other improv games that could be easier or more compelling in trance. (It's no coincidence that the Upright Citizens' Brigade Theatre's slogan is "DON'T THINK"!) I think of word-at-a-time stories, or some synchrony/rhythm games. Games involving high energy or initiating actions might be hard for hypnotized people.

But I think there's lots of potential for getting into characters, improv style, which of course massively overlaps with hypnotic roleplay, e.g. as discussed in Wiseguy's Mind Play. Stage hypnotists do this all the time, and also do activities where audience members interact with imposed personality traits. But I think this would be fun and funny to play with in less pressurized, more intimate settings, particularly for shy people who would normally feel too self-conscious to do any kind of performing. (which kind of makes my improv training like a months-long, thousand-dollar hypnotic trance, to convince someone as shy as me they could be onstage performing for an audience - with no script)

And where appropriate, improv character play can have a kinky dimension to it. For example, check out this hilarious audio file of a bright and literate college grad who has been hypnotized by her dom to talk like a ditzy valley girl (temporarily, and consensually). So I'm excited about both the sexual and the non-sexual possibilities. Being in the moment, not preparing or overthinking, letting go of mistakes, letting your unconscious create and accepting what it comes up with - these are all ideals of improv that trance can help anyone access.

As an addendum, a couple of people have asked, did improv training help me as a hypnotist? A little bit. Most of all by teaching me that you have to make choices, and commit to them. It may not always be the best possible choice, but the speed is important. You just have to respect the flow, and value it over everything being perfect. And often what your unconscious offers is better for that moment than if you had all the time in the world to think it over. Another way it might have helped is by the importance of truly tuning into your partner, and not letting your own plans take you out of noticing what is happening right now between you, and where the scene wants to go next. But thankfully for the sake of my slow brain, the pace of hypnosis is slower, with a little time to think - and unlike improv comedy, there is some room for thinking up wonderful ideas during the day, that you write down and then delight someone with!

One final note, because I love this stuff. Even if you're not interested in improv, Impro for Storytellers is one of the best books you could read about D/s: Johnstone was a researcher on status, and how it is deeply woven into every interaction we have, and D/s is about playing with status differences. In fact, with ridiculously large status differences - much larger than are usually "allowed" to be seen in everyday life, which is probably what makes D/s feel taboo. You just don't see people grovelling at someone's feet in mainstream American society! (at least not literally.) As a simple example of Johnstone's concrete discoveries, if you want to appear more dominant, at least for a few minutes, hold your head still, keep your hands far away from your head and face, make strong eye contact except when it could be interpreted as checking for approval, and make few unnecessary movements, with the movements you do make smooth and decisive. Anyone you have ever seen successfully portraying "dominant" has incorporated this body language.

NEEHU 5 Scene: The "Suddenly Susan" Suggestion

"Whenever I and only I say <word>, until I say that word again, you will find that any little movement you make brings you pleasure and arousal - every little twitch, of any muscle, anywhere in your body, will send a thrill of sexual pleasure through your body. And this will also be true if someone else moves your body - little movements of your body will give you little thrills of pleasure, while big movements give you big pleasure. There is no way to avoid the torment of pleasure that any little movement will bring you."

I got the idea for this suggestion from a sitcom episode I saw 14 years ago. Here's the relevant scene at 14:45:

The key line, that stuck with me, was "Because if I move, I'll have an orgasm."  (And when I tracked it down, it turned out to be from Just Shoot Me not Suddenly Susan - who knew those were two distinct shows. Also, holy crap was Wendie Malick sexy!)

I'm so happy it came back to me while I was spending time with a delightful new trance partner on Sunday afternoon at NEEHU 5. She had expressed an interest in erotic control, which I was of course thrilled about, but had to think around a bit for something that would be fun and appropriate in the fairly public area of the con we were in, literally called the Fishbowl.

When I brought her out of trance, sitting beside me on the couch, and gave her the keyword, I could see the effect right away. Her eyes went wide, and I could see her tense up in an effort to stay still. Then about a second later there was a twitch, followed by a gasp, and then a wriggle, and more gasping. It's impossible to remain completely still, over long periods of time, and then the physical reaction to the pleasure would cause its own ripple of pleasure, that would just accelerate until she managed to settle down again. But that wouldn't last long. I couldn't believe what a hot show she was putting on for me. I had turned her body into a sexy perpetual motion feedback machine.

I lifted up her hand, which elicited a loud moan and shivers. Then when I let go, it stayed there in the air. Somehow I didn't realize that it would have the same effect as a mannequin/freeze suggestion - she couldn't lower her hand without more erotic torment. So I played with that for a while.

I released her then, and she sagged into the couch, clearly buzzing. I checked in and then asked her to stand up with both arms outstretched, and gave her the trigger again.

"Arms get tired after a while, you know," I said as she visibly struggled, quivers breaking out all over. "Especially when I do this." And I rested my hands on top of her hands. After a while I started gently increasing the pressure. When she let her arms go she made wonderful noises.

Then I started taunting her. "You're free to move you know. What are you afraid of? This is all in your head. Here, walk over to me." After more prodding she took a deep breath, and began the lurchingest, hip-rolling-est, sexy Frankenstein of a walk. She only made it two laborious steps before I took pity and told her to stop.

Count this as a success. Mostly thanks to the wonderful brain of this play partner, which took the suggestion and revelled in it. There's nothing really new, and in fact I recently realized the same idea can be found in Lee Allure's awesome "Big Trigger List" but the "Suddenly Susan" feels like me. And will be making future appearances. More than anything else about this suggestion, it was the look in her eyes: that inward focus and struggle, trying to attend to everywhere on her body at once and keep it all managed, only to have cascading pleasure come and wipe out all that control.

Guest post: Trance & kinky exploration

Not much I could add to this, except that I love it and aspire to write something as beautiful about hypnosis someday. By thewindow, reposted with permission from her Fetlife post.
--
I think of the center of the flame of my purple pinecone shaped candle, and can feel a tiny pull towards some inner state I’m starting to explore, a launchpad for both stillness and for infinite possibilities.

I recently did a hypnosis scene with Divney and my boyfriend where Divney hypnotized me to feel deeper pleasure, weakness and trance when my boyfriend bit me. (My recent vampire erotica was originally supposed to be a basis for the scene but we scaled it way, way back since it involved a lot of tricky parts and it was my first time in hypnosis.)

There is so much to write about this that was exciting: Playing with other people for the first time as a couple! Feeling super safe and encouraged to prioritize safety, even when playing with altered states of consciousness! But what I’m feeling pulled to write about now is the connection I’m feeling between hypnotic trance and the exploration of kink itself.

I’ve had an on-and-off-again meditation practice and have had some guided imagery done by different holistic practitioners, and I’m told that helps with going into trance. But this was my first time doing hypnosis except for mucking around with some friends as a teenager using the methods from the film Dead Again (so you know it was Totally Legit).

Trance was such a wonderful and wild space to be in. Divney had me stare into the heart of a flame as the initial induction. The impossibility and density of the center of a flame was the perfect space to get visually lost in. Days later, I still conjure up the image sometimes to tap into a more grounded space.

The internal space I found, and the relationship I found myself taking to the suggestions and directions Divney guided me to while I was in trance, reminded me a lot of an experience I had a few years ago. A friend and I were scoping out the chapel at the Harvard Business School as a possible location for a film he was shooting. It has a tiered koi pond with triangular glass walls as its lobby and the chapel itself looks, sounds, and feels like it’s inside a giant boulder of quartz. It was such a beautiful and surreal place that my senses and contemplation were heightened anyway, but these only got stronger as we went downstairs into a pitch black basement. After a short time I felt like I had my bearings, even in the dark, but suddenly realized what we had thought was a wall was actually an opening into yet another (pitch black) space. Eventually we found our way to a tiny room where all we could see were a few red LED lighs and a red clock counting down something like 18 hours.
 
With the architecture, the room that seemed to suddenly appear, and the countdown, we started telling each other stories. We were in a submarine. The world around us was a nuclear wasteland, and in 18 hours it would be reborn. We were in the security vault of a bank. We were on another planet.

After about an hour of this, I got to a space where I really wasn’t sure what we would find if we left that pitch black space. Seeing the koi pond seemed just as likely as seeing the bottom of the ocean, as seeing a Martian landscape. And I wanted to find those other things if I looked, wanted reality to be malleable, wanted my imagination to be so rich that it would come to life.

Going into trance felt very similar to that. A mental space where I could get lost in the center of a flame, where I could drop into spaces of myself yet unexplored, where maybe I really couldn’t open my eyes when Divney told me it would be too difficult to if I tried.

And part of me knew that I could open my eyes, could turn down the suggestions, just like a part of me knew that when we exited the basement, we’d be back in the chapel, no nuclear winter to be seen. But we hung out so long in that basement because we didn’t want our imagination to be disconfirmed. My beliefs and my wishes twisted and wove together.

And similarly, I so loved savoring the trance and wanted to revel in it because it meant limitlessness, infinite possibilities, spelunking of the soul, giddy wonderings of what new directions I could ride that belief/wish line towards.

After the wonderful evening, I was reflecting to Divney how our scene felt like embarking on a journey, of trying hypnosis, of playing with new people – and realized that, well, every moment in the kink scene I’ve had feels like the beginning of some journey. It’s all continuous, but each point of growth and learning and exploration is the start of its own trajectory that will have its own storyline, its own narrative, even if it’s a part of other narratives too.

And lo and behold, last night I turned to start reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun who often writes about meditation (hello hypnosis-relatedness!), and the first chapter is all about journeys and the newness they bring. From her book:

When we begin our exploration, we have all kinds of ideals and expectations. We are looking for answers that will satisfy a hunger we’ve felt for a very long time. But the last thing we want is a further introduction to the boogeyman…. The truth is that when we really begin to [explore and face the fears that inescapably arise], we’re going to be continually humbled. There’s not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. (p. 2-3)

Wow! Just like the fortune cookie message where you insert “in bed” after everything, try inserting “in/through kink.”

Yes, I’ve hungered for a long time. I’ve hungered for my fantasies. I’ve hungered for liberation from the boogeymen I’ve faced that left me suppressing my sexuality for so long. And of course, there are new boogeymen, from the large one of the specter of rape culture to the smaller ones of how you’re never quite prepared for the next day drop after a con or a scene or a party. And yet these unsettling and sometimes frightening things only arise because I have the courage to take those steps forward, to have new firsts, to have new experiences, to have new beginnings of journeys I didn’t even know were possible.

Each step I take in my exploration of kink and in the kink scene is a step towards the satisfaction of my hunger, towards fear, towards the unknown, towards limitlessness, infinite possibilities, spelunking of the soul, giddy wonderings of what new directions I can ride the blissful blending of reality and desire towards. I’m so excited to have had such a wonderful and empowering experience with hypnosis with Divney and my boyfriend – where even as I was being guided towards something specific, it felt like my going there came from a place of amazingly expanded choices – bringing in yet another means that so directly will help me explore kink in this open, vulnerable, powerful way.

Favourite Hypnokink Posts on Tumblr

There's a hypnokink party happening on tumblr! Every day there's likely to be one or two thoughtful posts from people doing hypnosis in real life. And for every one of those, dozens of hypnofetish porn posts - mostly vanilla porn pictures with mc flash-fiction captions about how the person in the photo is hypnotized.

Tumblr, for old people like myself, is kind of a cross between your facebook newsfeed and a blogging platform. In fact you could just use it as a blog, but the interface affords easily scanning through new posts from all the people you "follow", and with one click "repost" items on your own feed. It also helps you easily share images and posts from other websites. You can add commentary to what you repost as well, which gives a welcome (if sometimes tempestuous) element of discussion.

But primarily it seems like a way to soak yourself in new content about your interest at will. Well, your interest along with a ton of jokey gifs, vanilla porn, personal status updates, and fan content (brace for Hannibal and Doctor Who). The volume is awesome for me as a hypnokinkster, but in that firehose blast, it's hard both to find and to hang onto the blog-like posts where someone took some time to describe a hypnotic experience or idea.

Therefore, this post will serve as an index to those tumblr posts I've run across that have what I'm looking for: are surprising, informative, and creative, and are based on personal experience with hypnosis. I've long looked for IRL hypnosis discussion community, finding only some Fetlife groups and a little on mcforum so I'm so excited that there is this rapidly expanding community online. All these tumblrs are worth following (note that I definitely don't endorse everything these writers post), represent every combination of top/bottom and male/female (for starters), and most are less than a year old, so it's exciting to see where this is going. (note that this does not include the wonderful blogspot-style blogs on my sidebar, like sleepingirl's and spiral turquoise's, because it's much easier to find the good stuff in there - hope to devote future posts to my favourites of theirs.)

This is also my wordy way to say I've joined tumblr: deeperforme.tumblr.com. Basically using it to advertise my blogspot posts, but maybe it is more convenient for you!

AmHypnotic: You Did Nothing!
HS: How does one tell if they're in trance?
HS: Wrench Wench
HS: Hypnosis techniques: Amnesia
HS:Little Bird’s Mantra
HS: Hypnosis vs Trance
HS: Why I do it
AmHypnotic: The Kind of Moments I Love in Hypno Kink Play...
AmHypnotic: Tips from a Hypnobottom 4 Commentary
AmHypnotic: Consensual Nonconsent, Mind Control, and Hypnofetish...
AmHypnotic: Look Into My Eyes, a musing about my favorite D/s style induction...
HS: On The Importance Of Trust
TSLIB: Hermione Granger as a hypnotist
TSLIB: Too elaxed for the letter R
TSLIB: January
TSLIB: How to Write Good (for hypnosis)
TSLIB: The Doge trance
TSLIB: Scientists discover most relaxing tune ever
TSLIB: Bat Trance
TSLIB: Robots and Emergent Behavior
TSLIB: It’s really frustrating being a female hypnotist on Omegle.
DOASF: What is some advice you wish you could give your younger self?
DOASF: Tips from a Hypnobottom (whole series)
DOASF: Like a sexy, involuntary improv class
DOASF: Sex chair
HV: Hypnotic bingo
OIP: what goes on in your mind when hypnotized
HSurrender: Resistance is Futile
TSLIB: Commentary on sir-with-the-pendulum
Serena: Trance time with Spiral Turquoise :)
subject-e: Playing on the edge of the Void
POM: Text induction
Dommestic: How does proximity to last orgasm affect depth of trance?
Daja: Lessons Learned at NEEHU
Hypnotic-tale: Proper Hypnosis Session
HV: I can do this by myself...I often do
Charlequin: Consent and Negotiation
HS: Why I am Proud of my Subjects
DOASF: One of the most emotionally intense scenes we’ve ever done.
DOASF: Bimbofication by talking like a valleygirl + audio!
Charlequin: The Story of You 
TSLIB: What would you recommend for our first experience?
Hypnotic-tale: Trigger and suggestion post!
HS: Hypno-Guns and Other Things

NEEHU 5 Scene: The Hypno T + a Divney/Ashman Joint

"Whenever you look at the middle of the spiral on my t-shirt, it will seem like the most fascinating thing in the world, and you will find that your eyes get stuck looking at it. You'll lose your train of thought, and all your attention will be drawn to it. With an effort of will, you'll be able to tear your eyes away, but it will take more and more effort the longer you stare at the spiral. Eventually your eyes will just be captured. And once that happens it's only a matter of time before the spiral sends you into a deep trance, as deep or deeper than this one."

After a few repetitions, safety suggestions, and time for her to accept it completely, I snapped my fingers: "Wake up!"

I had a good feeling about this one, because GleefulAbandon and I had already used my t-shirt for an eye fixation induction twice that day, so she had the experience of staring blankly into the spiral on my chest - which is a wonderful, arousing sight from my viewpoint. Best Zazzle purchase ever.

But I underestimated how delightful this would be. We chatted a little bit post trance on the couch, while I kept a cushion over my chest. Then in the middle of her talking I dropped the cushion and she went, "oh." Her eyes widened slightly, and she was clearly stuck. After a few seconds, she went "Ah!" and looked away grinning sheepishly. "Pretty good, right? Look again."

Something I enjoyed immediately was watching her brain go to work on the problem - of course, that same brain that was playing this trick on her. She wanted to experiment, and discovered that if there was a fold in my tshirt she could position her head in such a way that the center of the spiral was invisible, and so she wasn't captured. The same if I just covered the center with the palm of my hand. But then I would straighten the fabric, or take my hand away, and she would be stuck again. I loved watching her go, "I can totally still look away! It's not too bad yet..." and then either breaking away, with great apparent effort, or go, "uh oh, nope, I'm stuck". For a hypnofetishist, those long periods where her eyes were stuck but she wasn't yet hypnotized, but it was now inescapable, and those slow eye blinks and slumping down were coming with time, were just gorgeous.

Part of my inspiration was knowing that GleefulAbandon is someone with a busy, curious mind, so that if she knew she wasn't supposed to look at something, she couldn't help but take a glance to see what it was she wasn't supposed to look at - and get stuck. "This shouldn't be so hard, you can just look me in the face, right?" And then her eyes would flick down, and that would be it.

We had a lot of fun playing with it on that couch. But the best part was the rest of the night in the dungeon, each of us on our separate business. I would stroll past her while she was talking with a group of people, and she would go "Ah shit!" and be stuck looking my t-shirt. Sometimes I would walk on, breaking the spell, and other times I'd stand there and she would be forced to explain to the people around what was happening to her. (I made sure to say to her at a couple of points, let me know if this gets old and I'll turn it off) Some of those people would help, blocking the spiral to snap her out of it, and some would hinder: like when her dom held her arms behind her and forced her to stare until the trance came on (hot), at which point she collapsed forward onto me - the first time I've had to catch someone like that.

So this was a series of lightbulb moments for me: a type of suggestion that works great in a public dungeon, and where other people can play along too. In particular that person's partners. It was the funnest. It was like a Warner Bros cartoon at times: she would be sitting chatting with someone, and I would sneak up and stand where she would see the spiral close up when she turned her head. "Ah shit." I had to get used to talking to her with her head or whole body completely averted, or with her holding her fist in the air to block it.

Later, we were chilling out talking about Howard Ashman - we both love musicals, and Menken/Ashman in particular - while I tried to decide on another fun post-hypnotic suggestion. Suddenly Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors came up, and the line, "He'd snap his fingers and me, I'd say 'sure'!"



And then I had it. I reinducted her and told her that when I snapped my fingers, she'd say "sure". It was great to see someone crack up in trance, even as the suggestion sunk powerfully into her mind.

There was a sort of a startle, or indignance, each time she found "sure" popping out of her mouth, that I enjoyed each time. Highlights included people trying to figure out what was happening ("Is she saying 'shore'?"), her attempting to explain the song reference while I snapped throughout ("He'd snap his - sure - fingers - sure - and me I'd say - sure - sure. Ah!") and combining it with her exasperatedly getting captivated by the spiral: "You're having fun, right?" <snap> "Sure."

There were other great hypnotic experiences at NEEHU, but I wanted to get this one with GleefulAbandon down first and in detail, because of how it points the way to future hypnosis I want to do: themes of struggle with the self, games, and public stuff that is fun for others too. Really happy we made this connection.

NEEHU 5: People and Place

I'm still buzzing from the New England Erotic Hypnosis Unconference. Fears that I might not make new friends or have any hot scenes were unfounded. Will write individual blog posts about some of the scenes, but I wanted to say a little about the environment and the people - the kinds of things I would have been curious about as a lonely hypnofetishist in Canada, not knowing I would ever connect with so many others of my kind.

NEEHU 5 had about 150 people, which means I have no doubt that it was the biggest gathering of hypnokinksters in history, anywhere in the world. If Deepmind Darkwood was the valley of the hypnokinksters, this was the home planet. Deepmind Darkwood really did do its job though, of giving the attendees a bond in a short period of time, just like we had been to summer camp together. So I felt a sense of real joy at being reunited with MrDream, ZanyM, Lee Allure, GleefulAbandon, Chewtoy, mephki, Lady Ru'etha and the rest. Then there was the chance to get to know awesome people who I only really knew, and admired, from their blogs: Spiral_Turquoise, HS, AmHypnotic, and Ms_Mesmer. Along with my Boston buddies and more great new people, it meant that for the first time I had that warm con togetherness feeling that I have heard friends report who have a regular science fiction convention or ren fair they go back to every year.

I want to paint a picture of the physical environment. This was my first time in a dungeon (something that is not allowed to exist in Massachussetts), and it was really not so far off from my imagination - it was nice touch that many walls were painted in faux-stone! It had obviously been a crummy office space in a warehouse district, where many of the walls had been taken out, the windows covered, and many wonderful devices and comforts brought in. With the lights on, the effect was a little like the afterschool teen clubhouse I remember from my youth, what with the couches and linoleum. But with many more wooden contraptions with straps coming out of them. It was a constant source of pleasurable vertigo to sit in a class looking idly up at the drop panel ceiling with the fluorescent lights and small water stains, to look down at the giant St Andrew's cross the presenter was standing next to, and remind myself he or she is talking about erotic hypnosis.

Those pleasant dissonances abounded, like the awarding of lovely printed certificates of appreciation with names like DrHeadcrash and DirtyOldMan65 on them, or the well-lit bag room with riding crops all in a row, or the christian rock band rehearsal coming through the ceiling at a couple of points. I'm really in a sex dungeon! I would tell myself. And it is comfortable and fun! There were plenty of rooms with quiet corners to trance in (often filled with people trancing!), a giant chain spider web, and a coffin (love that!). But even more of what made it comfortable was due to the organizers' terrific efforts, with snacks always around and a little blanket fort area for chilling out.

Nearly every class slot I would experience physical pain about not being able to be in two places at once, and I still grieve many of the classes I gave up to the gods of multi-track programming. But the real con was in the hangout and the people: the hypnotist who came all the way from Ireland and talked about blending traditional storytelling with hypnosis; the 21 year old pro hypnodomme who excitedly showed us the art for her new "epic fantasy" recordings; the equally painfully young dapper gent in a villainous goatee and grin who told me the most nightmarish ideas for hypnotic suggestions I've ever heard (which delight his masochist partners); another hypnodomme who had started it as an additional stream of income after retirement (but 21 years of recreational hypnosis), and was just now joining the kink scene; the West Virginian couple figuring out how to work with the wife's love of getting powerful hypnotic orgasms from people over the internet; the gentle, nerdy fellow in a long term loving relationship who's singlehandedly written most of the evil, hot, top quality mc porn that's out there. There's a theme that kept emerging, of love and affection, as much as sex.

Not that it wasn't sexy. Hot people in various states of undress, hot trances, plenty of visions of people writhing and moaning in a hypnotist's arms as he or she whispered in their ear... and then there were truly wild sights like the trance based on Doctor Who's Weeping Angels, which has already received a great writeup. (So many Doctor Who references that weekend...)

That's a start, anyway, on three days that changed my life. Now that I've been turned on to Hypbook, and have so many more hypnokinkster friends on FL keeping my feed active, the end of it was not such a sudden shock. But I'm sad thinking about how I'll be leaving soon, with my return to NEEHU uncertain, and so I have to make this charge last.

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.

10 Reasons I Don't Like the Checklist Approach to Negotiation

1. It makes me think of filling out forms at the doctor's office.

2. Every item could require infinite expansion and exploration. If the item is about hypnotic amnesia, you would have to figure out whether some kinds are ok and some aren't, of those kinds are there ways of doing them they do and don't like, etc. This stuff is fractal, and there are always going to be important questions that are left off.

3. Inevitably most of the items aren't going to apply to this particular situation.

4. Likely some terminology will have to be explained, especially for newer people. While potentially interesting, it's a shame to take the time for an item that isn't directly relevant, and it's also a different vibe than negotiation should have I think, to get sidetracked into an intellectual discussion of BDSM terms.

5. It makes me think of 50 Shades of Grey.

6. Items on the list could bring up unpleasant or triggering associations, unnecessarily. There was a good writing about this recently, which I can't find, called "Limits are Weird". The author writes how going over all the things she has an objection to would end up with her curled up in a ball in the corner - not a good mood for play (well most types anyway). To take an example from 50 Shades of Grey (ugh), part of the contract discusses "acts involving needles, knives, cutting, piercing, or blood", and "gynecological medical instruments", both things that are the opposite of sexy for some people. In the hypnosis community we know how sticky words and images can be for the unconscious mind. Why activate these concepts at all if it's not for a particular scene?

7. Checking a box could give the bottom a sense of having committed to a particular act, and so might feel some pressure not to change their mind. It could also give the top a way to dispute a bottom's statement of a boundary violation based on the wording of an item on the list.

8. It could give an inadvertent subtextual message that the bottom is just one on a long conveyor belt of play partners, so much so that the negotiation needs to be automated.

9. You actually need to have it on hand when you play for it to work as a checklist, ideally printed out so that you can physically check things off.

10. Especially if it's very long, I can't see people keeping up the use of it. I mean as checklists, going over every item and making a decision for each. Our negotiation ideals should be things we can reasonably do in practice.

I think the work that Professor-X and colleagues are doing in developing erotic hypnosis consent checklists (as well as other such projects, including one by NEHG members) is incredibly important. These are critical jumping off points for discussion, and give us a sweeping overview of the whole consent terrain. They highlight the many things that absolutely need to be negotiated. Every top, and probably every bottom, should have some version of these lists in their head.

But as someone who is very much in the learning category, I don't believe that checklists can substitute for building my consent skills and knowledge, nor can they protect me from messing up. There's an art to negotiation (in the BDSM sense) that requires experience, and in particular really getting to know your partner, through multiple conversations and through ramping up the play gradually. And my guess would be that what good negotiation looks like in practice is not giving your partner a huge battery of questions at the top, but rather specific tailored questions, at the right junctions.

Therefore the only checklist I plan to use in practice is my 5 item pre-flight checklist, which only helps to avoid obvious bloopers (like forgetting to go to the bathroom before trancing). But I will be reading those BDSM and erotic hypnosis checklists over and over, and trying to internalize their ideas as much as possible.

Highlights of My Winter Flea

Everyone's 2014 Winter Fetish Fair Fleamarket was totally different. Just for starters, there were often *seven* simultaneous classes, all with tantalizing topics (including things you might never have thought of, like balloon bondage!)

But of course the real Flea happens outside the classes. This year I skipped the saturday night ball, barely went to the vendors, and didn't really meet a ton of new people, but it was a total blast and I felt like I used my time well. This is still the only giant kink event I've been to - my first time was just the Saturday last year, and thank god for that warmup - so I don't have much to compare it to, but I completely see how people can build their year around it. I'm so grateful to the hard working volunteers at the New England Leather Alliance for making this happen.

The highlights of my personal Flea:

* Meeting the nice and interesting people who stopped by the New England Hypnosis Group community table, and both teaching and learning bits of info about erotic hypnosis with them.

* An unexpected one: the shuttle rides between the overflow hotel and the con, which I had worried would be a drag. It worked, the drivers were fun, and it was great for chatting with people. On our first trip, PhotoJoseph and I met the first transgender person to serve on the front lines in Afghanistan! She had an outfit with a nifty militaristic flair, which went well with her military posture.

* On another shuttle ride, I chatted with a couple in their 70s, who had gone to their first Flea 15 years ago. "That was a real eye opener!" I asked them how the Flea had changed over the years. They noted that they didn't see much in the way of bears like they used to, specifically large populations of men in very skimpy leather loincloths. There used to be a Mr and Mrs Leather award ceremony. They said the crowd was a bit younger and nerdier, which they found to be a positive. After a little thought, the woman said, "Oh, and steampunk! That's new."

* 6 solid hours of erotic hypnosis classes! (Out of a potential 12 hours!!) On saturday I started at 9 am and the last one was at 9:45 pm. Heaven!

* Watching a middle aged ponyboy elegantly pulling a carriage through the community tables area, with a woman in cat ears riding high like a duchess.

* Getting habituated to the carriage after they trotted by a few times, only taking notice again when the woman gave a lift to another woman rocking PJs and a pacifier, riding on her lap.

* Seeing all the various interpretations of kink wear, from Comic-con worthy costumes including wings and fangs, to streetwear with just a touch of subversion. I truly could not summarize how people dressed. Although I can say that cat ears were really, really popular.

* A million versions of gender bending and gender fucking. Even I with my fairly settled, privileged identity felt a distinct sense of relief and freedom.

* Using exclusively all-gender bathrooms at the actual con, making me reflect on how traditional segregated bathrooms are sort of propaganda for the binary, and are probably a minor manifestation of rape culture.

* Meeting other hypnokinksters from outside Boston. In particular, the fierce young consent warriors and hypno researchers from what may be, very improbably, the recreational hypnosis capital of the world: a small liberal arts college in Western Mass. Hope to report more about them soon!

* Doing a trance after midnight, in a hotel meeting room that was set up as a board room.

* Meeting the sexy Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast.

* Getting into Midori's humiliation class just under the wire, and experiencing the charisma of that superstar presenter. The message was simple: for erotic humiliation, you figure out what are the "load bearing pillars" in someone's sense of self, and then knock out ones that are not those, like say their gender expression - which can help them to feel the strength of those core pillars (but you still put those non-load-bearing ones back at the end). But the way it was presented, including an intense and sexy mini-scene, was unforgettable.

* Making time for a hot hypno scene in between two classes, that we could only pull off in a hotel room.

* My friend talking me into letting her suspend me from a luggage cart - my first rope suspension ever. Getting mocked for singing under my breath during the tying, specifically "How Do You Know" from the Enchanted soundtrack. It was stuck in my head!

* Seeing a bunch of my Boston friends outside of their customary setting, dressed to the nines and at play. (even if sometimes stressed out) When it comes to the con experience, friends make all the difference in the world.

Hypnosis Without Respect for Agency

Recently, I had an experience of an erotic hypnosis class I found very disturbing.

The theme of the presentation was long term hypnotic Dominance/submission relationships. It turned out that the whole first half was focused on initiating these D/s relationships - framed as making someone into your hypno sub. Right away the language hit me as predatory: describing techniques as "weapons in your arsenal", recounting the story of the young bull and the old bull without seeming to recognize it refers to rape, bringing out this standby that I heard from him last year, and, most creepily, referring throughout to the person being targetting as "your intended" (he even did the joke of saying "your victi- I mean...").

He gave advice on how to select your intended, like taking the time to get to know them and make sure they're not "crazy".

Then he gave step by step instructions for using hypnotic suggestions and suggestive language to get the person to the point where they are ready to submit to you. Here he emphasized the need for patience, and used the metaphor of the frog boiling in the pot.

Later, in a part that bothered me even more, he talked about how he had used a series of post-hypnotic suggestions to change his long-term partner's mind about doing erotic hypnosis with him, when she hadn't been interested in it before. He was careful to say that was the only part of her personality he changed, that he liked all the rest of it just as it was. When he was asked if he had had her permission to change her personality, his answer was, Well, she's happy with it now!

Retroactive consent - and not the only time he cited it. Pretty indicative of the shaky grasp of consent and coercion overall in this class. He would emphasize that his "intendeds" could withdraw at any stage of the process, and often did - and then would seamlessly shift to bragging about how irresistable his techniques are ("This is an atom bomb").

But there was a deeper problem than lack of understanding of consent, which was a lack of respect for agency. This post about hypnotic ethics proposes the right to agency as one of the two key rights of hypnotees (along with honesty):

Simply put agency is the capacity to choose (and therefore act) independently. While we are restricted in our actions by our environment, we should do our best to ensure that each partner in an intimate relationship is able to act on their own behalf, to make choices, and to be both respected and responsible for those choices.

So consent generally requires agency (i.e. you cannot gain consent from someone who is not making their own choices).

In hypnotism, we play around with the idea of taking agency away, but that is a fantasy.

This presentation was all from the viewpoint of doing things to someone. How to get them to do what you want.

It's not like lack of respect for agency, especially of young women, is exactly rare in the broader world - I'm thinking of things like the slimier pick-up artist materials, i.e. about 99% of them. Then there are the terrible role models in hypnosis, from stage hypnosis shows to paternalistic, ethically-challenged psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Milton Erickson.

But in the kink community, we can't pretend it's ok. A central principle for us is that both parties are active agents, and both viewpoints are equally important. Even if one party is the submissive. If we don't reject and stigmatize the idea of hypnotizing people without permission, of using sneaky language patterns, of trying to alter someone's personality without extensive negotiation, hypnotists deserve to have a rotten, creepy reputation in the kink scene.

In the second half, he introduced a long term partner (not the same one) who is in an intense D/s relationship with him. She was very charming and grounded, and the relationship had obviously been a positive one for her. This part had some valuable tips about the care and maintenance of such a relationship.

The presenter has a pleasant and disarming manner, and I recognized that he was taking a risk in exposing this part of himself. But that pleasantness made it all the more unsettling as the class ended and the feeling of grossness surfaced fully. I looked over at my friends, who also had an air of "did we just see that?" Another friend who had left partway through told me later she was "experiencing something similar to a panic attack", she was so upset. She was one of a number of walkouts.

But I'm more worried about the people who stayed, and laughed at all the right places. I saw people writing down his language patterns word for word. Concern about predators is far from abstract for me: at least four of my friends have been harmed by abusive doms who exploited my friends' interest in hypnosis. If nothing else, this class was incredibly insensitive to that reality. I'll bet some of these tactics would have hit too close to home.

When I brought it up afterwards, how he had neatly packaged hypnosis as another tool in a manipulator's hypothetical toolkit, the presenter said "This stuff is out there. If they learn it from me, at least they'll get the ethics along with it." I didn't like that answer.

--

There's a lot more to think about with this, but I had to get it off my chest. The worst part is feeling like my fantasy life, which certainly is wrapped up in D/s-flavoured hypnosis, has been tainted - hopefully that will wear off soon. I would like to hear about other people's experience of the class, and whether the same things bothered them.

All Glory to the HypnoCake

This is a hypnotic cake, baked for me by my amazing baker roommate for my birthday. A double-layer, chocolate with raspberry-butter-cream-filling cake. That I used to hypnotize someone. This may be a historic first: the first ever hypnosis-by-pastry.

I planned my birthday as a low-key hangout with a light hypno kink theme: I put eye-swimming optical illusions around as decoration, and played another one of my birthday gifts, Hypnoprism by Momus. I also did some hypnosis. There another notable occurrence that I will certainly write about in another entry, but now the cake.

Cassi came to my party, and agreed to gaze into the spiral. We snuck away from where most people were gathered, in the living room, and she sat at the kitchen table. She put her elbows on the table, and looked across at the cake. I started spinning the rotating cake stand (kindly supplied by another guest) and started my patter. Very quickly her eyes started to blink and her head to droop. I had been worried about the loud sound of the cake stand as it turned, but she later said that was what really helped her go into trance! I found myself including more and more cake-based language in my induction: "imagine yourself sinking into the thick, dark chocolateyness..." Did I mention that the spiral on top is a layer of actual white and dark chocolate?

I brought her up after a little bit. She said that she had felt like she was eating the cake! Not with her mouth, but I guess on a deeper level? In any case, after a couple of people had taken camera video of it, we set about to eat it in a non-hypnotic way. And it was amazing. First, though, a room full of people sang Happy Birthday to me in tranced-out voices. (a delightful idea from another one of my friends who was there!) Even more so because most of them weren't hypnokinksters, it made me feel very accepted and cared for.

This has been such a home to me. I like these people so much, and I'm not even close to being done with Boston. And yet I have to leave, to travel so far away, in less than two months. That's going to be a life-changing adventure in its own way, but still:

"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.