What it feels like

I haven't talked about my experiences with Virtual Hypnotist lately, but they're still going well. I continue to use one of the scripts I wrote for myself at bedtime every night, to help me get to sleep. By now, the background music (Men at Work's soporific "Down By the Sea") has become so ingrained in my subconscious that, if I don't have access to VH at bedtime, I can play the song in my head a few times and drop off pretty easily. VH is more fun, though. ;)

I thought you might like to hear how it feels for me, slipping off to sleep via hypnosis, so here we go.

When I first wrote the bedtime script, I was trying to put myself in a state of near-mindlessness; I thought that was the best way to still my thoughts enough to get to sleep. Well, I haven't managed mindlessness with my bedtime session (Oddly enough, I have managed it with my morning session...but that's a little too personal to go into ;)). But even though my thoughts still bounce around a lot during my bedtime session, I am becoming deeply hypnotized. I just don't realize it until the program ends with the command for me to get up and go to bed.

This is where things get cool. The script tells me that it will be easy for me to raise my arms, remove my earbuds, and get up; but it's not. I've become so relaxed by now that it feels like I'm deep underwater. My limbs are heavy, my movements slow, and performing more than one action at a time is more than I can handle.

I can't time myself, of course, but my guess is that it takes me about 15 seconds to get out of the chair.

Picture this. I'm in front of my computer with my chair tilted back and my feet up on a stool. My elbows rest at the point where the chair's arms connect to the back, and my hands are loose in my lap with my fingers lightly curled. "Now go," the program says. "Go to bed."

My arms draw outward until my hands are barely touching my body (To move them any further would just be too much work). Then slowly, oh so slowly, my hands move upwards, fingers grazing the sides of my torso and then the sides of my breasts. Now I move them inward, toward the "V" where the separate earbud cords join together and snake off toward the computer. At this point my hands have to rotate so my fingers are in a position to grasp the cords. Then my grip has to open a bit and my fingers feel their way upwards, looking for just the right spot to grasp the cords and tug.

But even after that, I'm not through. Now I have to lean forward and place the earbuds with their cords carefully on the computer desk. Otherwise, they might drag on the floor and the chair wheels could roll over them, potentially destroying them. Only after I'm sure the earbuds are safe can I get up from the chair, putting one foot on the floor at a time, and head off to bed.

After all of that, it's no wonder I feel sleepy enough to drop off right away.

*The image at the top of this post is by Kassandra Vizerskaya.