A Great Adventure Begins, Part 2

NOTE: This post is a follow-up to the post just below. If you haven't stopped by my blog in a few days, you really do need to read that one before this one.

Okay, so now it's time for me to stop dangling you and let you drop gently back to earth. I'll start by telling how how I started.

The first mp3 Lady Ru'etha shared with me was "Robotic Transformation 101." I came into this one stone-cold ignorant about what to do or what to expect, and was very much afraid that I wouldn't be able to get over my self-consciousness enough to go under. My mental image of what real-life hypnosis looked like was based entirely on stage shows, and I really doubted I could allow myself to relax that much. Oh, I wanted to, very badly. But I doubted I could.

Well, for some reason that's no longer clear to me, I thought I needed to be lying down for the recording - but I didn't have an mp3 player then (I bought one yesterday), so I had to listen in the living room where the computer was. And in order to really splay out like I thought I needed to do, I had to drag the mattress off the futon, down onto the floor. Now, folks, if you don't own a futon yourself, you have no idea how heavy and cumbersome those mattresses are - especially if you don't have anyone around to help you move them! And putting one back again without assistance is even harder. :-/ But I digress.

Anyway, there I am, turning on the recording and then flopping down on the floor with my eyes closed, trying to relax. And practically the first sentence of the recording is a suggestion that I listen to "Safe Space" for a week before trying this mp3. Damn. I didn't have "Safe Space."

But I went ahead and did my best to listen and relax and imagine. And I did enjoy the sensuality of Lady Ru'etha's voice and the creativity of her language; but when all was said and done, I felt like I'd experienced nothing more than a pleasantly relaxing guided meditation.

So I wrote her back and asked what to do next, but she didn't respond because she was in the middle of a move and a bunch of other things that kept her away from her e-mail. Or so I imagined in my saner moments. In my less sane moments, I wondered if she wasn't answering because she was disappointed in me.

Anyway, long story short, I eventually stumbled across her Realm of Bliss podcasts and saw that she'd given my blog a very favorable review in one of the most recent ones. That let me know she hadn't thrown me out with the garbage. So, newly energized, I went back and hunted for "Safe Space" in a place I hadn't thought to look before, and there it was. Just like Missy/melissa/m finally getting Black Pearl's message in Willing Subject. Not that I think Lady Ru'etha was playing those sorts of mind games with me, but, well, you know. ;-)

The first time I listened to "Safe Space" (sitting upright on the futon this time ;-)) I definitely felt more relaxed - not to mention aroused - than I had with "Robotic Transformation 101." The second time I listened to it, I was resting my hands lightly atop my thighs; and I noticed that the longer I listened, the limper my arms became and the further my hands slid outward. Finally they just dropped right off my thighs and thunked onto the futon. That was a very cool moment.

But I still didn't feel like anything but my body was responding. My mind felt wide awake. In fact, the whole time I was listening - each of the three times I listened to those two mp3's - I was constantly analyzing my sensations, thinking about what I could write on my blog about them, wondering how to get Lady Ru'etha or Jukebox to help me, etc. In other words, the inside of my head seemed to be its usual pinball-machine self.

So now we come to the part of the story I told you in my previous blog entry. I won't repeat myself here; I'll just note that Follow the Watch's "Robot Mode" e-mail and the encouraging words of Lady Ru'etha and several other members of the Realm of Bliss Yahoo group convinced me that I really had gone under and just didn't know it.

Then came Virtual Hypnotist and that special program Lady R and FtW cooked up for me. You know what happened (well, some of what happened ;-)) to me the first time I watched that one. It crashed straight through all my mental barriers so hard that I almost...well, I almost. ;-)

When I fired it up for the first time, I thought the program must be missing an element because there was no sound, only visuals. But then I started to feel my jaw drop and my mind dissolve; and while I was still able to analyze it much, I decided that Lady R and FtW had been very clever to leave the audio out. And once everything was over and I'd had a chance to look back on the experience, I thought I understood their game plan. As you know, I'm a writer and an ex-English teacher. Words are my tools. I own them; they don't own me. So, I figured, Lady R and FtW had just dispensed with words entirely (aside from the subliminals) and taken me beyond all that into unfamiliar territory where I was blissfully at their mercy.

So then I ran the session a second time yesterday evening and had an even more mind-melting experience.

And then Lady Ru'etha called me again and asked if I'd had a chance to listen to the mp3 that went with the visuals.

Turns out there was a missing element, one I was supposed to have downloaded separately and combined with the rest of the program before running it. Hah. Serendipity, I tell ya. Pure serendipity.

Well, a couple of hours ago I ran the session with the mp3 for the first time, and you can take everything I said about those first two times and double it. The recording began with instructions that it was for me and me alone, so I won't be giving you any details about what Lady Ru'etha put on it. But I don't think she'll mind if I hint at a few highlights, like how my eyes dropped shut all by themselves when she counted me down and hit zero, even though I thought I should keep them open to let the spiral and subliminals do their work. So I forced my eyes back open, but then they shut themselves again later on when she drove home the trigger, and I just let my forehead sag completely against the monitor, then down onto my arms crossed atop the computer table. But then I was upright again a minute or two later, eyes wide open and typing like a dyslexic automaton - still completely, deliciously under. And then a minute or so after that I just flopped back into my chair like a stringless puppet. Mmmmm. It was all just as wonderful as I'd hoped it would be. :-)

So now she's implanted a trigger in me. I know what it is, more or less. It's a little hazy and I'm not trying too hard to think about it because I don't really want to. That's my own decision, not something she planted in me...as far as I can tell, anyway. ;-) But I am wondering if it's strong enough yet to really drop me. How many times do I have to hear it before she can just speak the words and send me slumping? Wow, what a thought! I'm just dying to have it become reality.

I told Lady Ru'etha a day or two ago that I feel the way I felt the first time I dated a woman. I couldn't wait for that first kiss, because I knew it would tell me for sure if what I thought was true was really true. But that woman kept me dangling for three or four dates - waiting, I think, to be sure I was as ready as I thought I was. And Lady Ru'etha is doing the same with me again now. She hasn't put me into trance over the phone yet; we've just talked. And that's been a lot of fun all by itself.

I just have to trust her, as the experienced one, to know when the time is right. And in the meantime, I'll keep making myself as ready as I can. Somehow, I don't think it's going to take much longer.

P.S.: Once I post this entry, I'm going to start updating and rearranging the links in my sidebar, so watch that space next. :-)

P.P.S.: Just so you know, the special mp3 Lady Ru'etha made me also stressed, from start to finish, that my loving relationship was with my girlfriend and that the hypnosis was only a way to play out my fantasies.