Saturday, March 27, 2010

Jellybaby

A few days ago, while I was running my morning Virtual Hypnotist session, I found myself thinking about jellyfish.

Specifically, I was thinking about the jellyfish I saw once in a really nice public aquarium. There were several tanks of them in a large, round, dark room lit by colored lights that filtered in through the tanks, which were set in the wall and viewed through portholes. The tanks were shaped like cylinders turned on their sides, and they rotated to keep the water in motion - and to keep the jellyfish from sticking to the walls as they drifted in the currents.

You might or might not be able to figure out how this relates to my hypnotic adventures, so let me help you out. I've told before that my personal morning session includes a suggestion that I am wearing a mental corset which keeps my thoughts from drifting too far off target. I also tell myself that that my thoughts are like flimsy tissue floating in water. Combine all that with the flickering lights of my Virtual Hypnotist program, and you get a pretty good idea where I'm heading with this analogy.

Still, you don't have the full picture just yet. I often think there are too many jellyfish in my mental tank, even when I'm deeply hypnotized. Honestly, I sometimes wonder if I have a mild case of ADD...but there could be more to the phenomenon than that. Part of me wants to experience true mindlessness, but another part of me keeps asking how I could ever know what true mindlessness felt like, anyway. After all, mindlessness means not knowing anything. And I do want to know what being mind controlled feels like. I want to experience the bliss of being manipulated, to know exactly what's happening to me, and to be able to remember it all afterwards.

That's part of what I was going for with the character of Leigh Holliday in A Tenpack of Trixies. Unfortunately, I was never completely satisfied with her experience because Leigh, as Leigh, didn't get to enjoy the bliss of control; her Trixie persona enjoyed that, and all Leigh got were the memories.

That's why, in my morning session, I've taken a different route. I tell myself that a tiny part of my mind can stick around and watch what's happening to the rest of it: watch and enjoy, but not interfere. Unfortunately, it isn't working out as well as I'd like because I still have too damn many jellyfish. Even in the deepest depths of trance, I'll catch my thoughts drifting to other things, like errands I need to run or ways I might finesse a line of the VH script so the speech synthesizer will read it more naturally. Occasionally I fall into a daze that might be mindlessness but is more likely just light sleep, and anyway, since I don't remember anything about it afterwards, it's not doing my fetish much good.

I suppose I should be grateful my mind still absorbs commands in that state, since the meat of my morning session is in the suggestions to be calm, confident, in control of myself, etc., through the course of the day. But I can't help wondering if there's another way around the problem. Maybe it just takes practice; I don't know.

To be continued...or not.

2 comments:

TheAdamator said...

Hey thrall, I've been visiting your site for a while, but hadn't really felt I had any significant contribution to make by commenting up 'till now. Anyway, I know what you mean about having too many thoughts that insist on sticking around, even when you've gone pretty deep. I've come up with a few thoughts about some potential fixes, though I haven't tested them myself. I'd thought about using some of the script used by Virtual Hypnotist to test for feedback in order to create a way to actively track patterns of thought and awareness when in trance. Specifically, using a combination of suggestions to hit a specific key when I notice the intrusion of stray thoughts. The keystroke could be used to trigger alternate script sections that might serve any number of purposes, though I'd originally intended that the number and frequency of keystrokes could be logged in order to be analyzed later in order to establish some kind of pattern that could in turn be used to fine tune the VH session. Since I also find that my thoughts wander persistently when in trance, I figured that I might make a VH session that included a variety of stimuli (changes in volume and frequency of binaurals, flashed words or pictures, etc.) that might provide a distraction to keep my mind more focused, all timed to kick in around the points in the session when the logged keystrokes suggested that my mind might be beginning to wander. Of course, a session could be scripted so that such stimuli could be introduced at the time when the user actually pressed the key signifying that they'd noticed their own mind wandering as a way to help them "self-correct." My reasoning behind all of this comes from the idea that stray thoughts become more frequent when my mind gets bored. Overall, the goal would be to make sure that instead of trying to eliminate stray thoughts completely, I would make sure that any thoughts that popped up would remain very simple and directed toward fulfilling the goal of the session. To that end, the feeling of mindlessness that I myself would dearly love to attain may be possible to achieve not through an absence of thought but rather a more complete allignment of thought. Anyhoo, just thougt I'd fire of this comment to see if it might provide you with some inspiration. Hope it helps, and best of luck.

P.S.
Wow, this was a lot of text. Maybe they should add a "soliloquy" button next to the "comment button, eh?

thrall said...

Wow, you obviously know a lot more about coding than I do! I don't have a very good grasp of keystroke logging, but this does give me some ideas, so thanks for delurking. :-)