first an update, then a gentle gift

The update is about the story I'm working on now, which I've temporarily titled "Slavestyles of the Rich and Famous." If I come up with a better title, I'll let you know - or if you suggest something better and I use your suggestion, I'll give you a free copy of the e-book and a shout-out in the credits. If you'd like to brainstorm with me, here's the basic plot. There's an island in the South Pacific that poses as a self-improvement retreat center (and New Age hippie commune, complete with free love sessions every night) for the richest and most famous people in the world. But actually, every aspect of the retreat program is designed to slowly brainwash participants into slaves who will either be auctioned off or, if they're not desirable enough for auction, become recruiters and/or staffer for future retreats. The brainwashing includes giving the slaves a "mask" personality that they can wear in public, making them seem to be their usual selves, so buyers can use them in any way they like. This includes taking them as public lovers, turning politicians into puppets, making athletes throw games - or anything else the buyer can think up. I have a very surprising, scandalous destination in mind for my protagonist. You'll never guess it, but I think you'll love it. It involves the biggest betrayal you can imagine.

All the brainwashing occurs through natural processes like sleep deprivation and plant extracts that legally and naturally induce whatever state of mind a situation requires. Then, once the participants' brains are softened up, they're led trustingly into hypnosis and neurofeedback exercises that erase their wills and personalities. But since the brainwashing doesn't use any illegal drugs or other methods, the island's mysterious "founder" has total deniability. If she were ever investigated, there would be nothing to incriminate her; and if anyone infiltrated a retreat, they'd end up enslaved just like the rest of the participants.

So that's where I'm going with the story, if you decide you'd like to play the title challenge. You just have to post your suggestion in the comments here so that there's no question of who said what first. And remember, this blog is set up to allow totally anonymous comments, so there's no need to reveal your real identity.

And now on to the promised gift. I've been researching biofeedback and neurofeedback videos since I'm using them in the story, and I've just accidentally found a wonderful guided meditation that's not sinister but does wonders for soothing anxiety, OCD, and depression. It really works. I've just listened to it, and although I started in a state of high anxiety, I feel wonderfully calm now - if slightly lightheaded. I'd recommend this video for anyone who struggles with the kinds of problems I have. But in case you're wondering if there are any hidden suggestions in there, I'll try to ease your mind.

1. The video probably uses binaural beats, since the description says it works best if you listen with headphones. I've been using binaural beats for years, to soothe myself when I get anxious, and there's s nothing scary about them, in themselves.
2. My impression is that the video induce a light state of hypnosis, but I never lost track of what the speaker was saying, and nothing he said was in any way inappropriate. He's just teaching you how to control your breathing and to use that as a way to calm yourself when you're struggling with anxiety, depression, or OCD.
3. There is a transcript of the session below the video. It's one of those automatic ones, which means it's not perfect; but it's pretty close and should reassure you that there's nothing suspicious in what the speaker tells you. The transcript includes a few "mms" and "yeahs," but I listened to those parts again after I'd listened to the video, and even with my speakers turned up to full volume I never heard anything like that. The YouTube ttranscription robot must have pulled those sounds out of the music. Again, everything the speaker says is completely appropriate. He's like a really good psychiatrist, soothing and teaching you without doing anything harmful.
4. The video is 42 minutes long, but the speaking stops after about 32 minutes, and then you have the option of either drifting off to sleep or waking up gently. I decided to wake up gently because whenever my thoughts drifted during the presentation, it was usually to think about how I should this video on my blog. But now I'm going to bed, and I expect to rest well.

I might never share anything this uncompromisingly "nice" again, so take advantage while you can...if you want. This video did me a world of good on a very hard day, and it might do the same for you.

Another trigger enhancement

I'm still playing around with Virtual Hypnotist enhancements, as I discussed in yesterday's blog entry, and I've now discovered a way to make a short trigger ripple through your brain in the most delightful manner imaginable. First the code, then the explanation.

The "tonefreq" commands are the same as in yesterday's entry. I'm dropping the binaural beats from theta to delta, just for the duration of the trigger, then bringing them back up.

What's new today is the addition of changes in volume, speed, and pitch for the trigger. You can see the commands to change each of these settings in the image above, and I think they're pretty easy to understand. There are just two important things to note:

1. To make the trigger enhancement work properly, you need to undo everything you did, immediately after the trigger is spoken. That's what makes the trigger stand out so well in the context of the session.

2. Don't assume that the same values you see in my example will be the right ones for your session. You might have to play with them a bit. Go to your "Speech Synthesis" tab and make a note of your starting settings for volume, pitch, and speed. Your goal is make significant changes to those values without taking the changes too far to be effective. For instance, the maximum volume allowed by Virtual Hypnotist is 65535. If the value you put in for your volume change would take the volume up over 65535, it won't work; the volume will actually go down. And if the number you put in for your change takes the volume too close to 65535 and you play that thing through your earbuds, I promise you won't enjoy the results.

With that in mind, here are some general guidelines:

• If  your starting volume is somewhere in the middle range and you raise it by 20000, you should get good results.
• If your trigger is only one word, whatever your starting speed is, lower and raise it by exactly that number. If your trigger is two or three words, you'll have to play around with the values to find the right adjusted speed.
• Don't lower and raise the pitch by very much. A small number can make a huge difference.

 Sometime later today or tomorrow, I'll update my VH tutorial with more information about all of this. Be on the lookout.

A fortuitous discovery

I'm still tweaking my regular Virtual Hypnotist scripts, learning how to get the most from them, and last night I stumbled into an amazing discovery.

I was trying to adjust the frequency of the binaural beats I use during my bedtime session, trying to make it even more effective at sending me to sleep. I won't get into the technical details here (Feel free to e-mail me if you want those), but the gist of it is that I accidentally dropped the frequency from alpha to basement-level delta in one split second. Or, in layman's terms, I was cruising along at a comfortable forty miles per hour and then suddenly cut my speed to five miles per hour.

It was incredible. Even remembering it now, the next morning, I can still feel my arms growing deliciously loose and heavy, my thoughts freezing up like deer in headlights. I wasn't even trying, and I totally found the answer to my Jellybaby question. I'd never even tried such a low delta frequency before, but now I can only wonder why I hadn't.

I've been playing around with this new technique a little more this morning, and I've discovered even more coolness. You can make your trigger ohhh so much more effective if you drop the binaural frequency from alpha or theta to delta on the line just above the trigger, then raise it again immediately afterwards. See below for an example copied directly from my morning session.

If you're not accustomed to VH scripting yet, you can puzzle this out by taking a look at my tutorial. On the other hand, if you are accustomed to VH scripting, I'll just point out that the starting frequencies for this session are 128 on the left side and 133 on the right. As you can see, I'm using the trigger twice, dropping from theta to delta and back each time - but sticking to a slightly lower tone when I raise the frequency the second time.

entrain in the membrane

If you didn't get the song reference in my title, don't worry; you're probably better off that way. But what I want to talk about today is brainwave entrainment, the fancy name for what happens when you listen to binaural beats.

I've discussed binaural beats before in conjunction with Virtual Hypnotist, but here's a quick refresher. As far back as the early 1800's, scientists have been studying a strange phenomenon that happens when people hear slightly different tones in each ear for an extended period of time: their brainwaves gradually take on the frequency directly between the two tones. Certain frequencies will make a person more alert, and certain frequencies will make a person more relaxed. That's it in a nutshell; if you want a bit more detail that's still geared toward newbies, click here.

Anyway, "entrainment" is the temporary adoption of a new brainwave frequency in response to binaural beats. But doesn't it sound much more sinister than that? Whenever I hear the word, I imagine a black-clad domme with a riding crop, standing over a victim bound to a table with electric leads running from her head. ;-) But despite what my imaginary domme might prefer, entrainment is only temporary. And it's nothing at all like brainwashing, although it's certainly useful for hypnosis.

It has a host of other great uses, too, as I discovered when I stumbled across this decidedly more clinical article on brainwave frequencies. The most interesting part, to me, was the talk about the "twilight stage of learning" and hypnagogic images. That sounds almost exactly like what I think of as the "nonsense" that fills my head when I'm drifting off to sleep at night, except that my nonsense is primarily words instead of pictures (I have seen some pretty freaky images, though. For instance, I once visualized a dark, narrow room piled high with human hair). It's also exactly what I experience on those rare mornings when I'm able to just lie in bed half-awake and toy with ideas...ideas that often show up later in my EMC stories. Apparently, I'm following a long, proud tradition of artists and inventors who learned to tap into the power of the theta state. Who knew? :-)

I've also discovered another use for binaural beats, entirely on my own. As I've said here before, I suffer from restless leg syndrome; and my symptoms often manifest during the day as well as at night. But I've discovered that if I plug in my earbuds and listen to mid-alpha for about ten minutes, the symptoms disappear - not permanently, but they do disappear. Completely.

Just before I started this entry, I did an online search to see if anyone else had connected binaural beats with RLS, but all I found was a smattering of seriously sketchy ads for products I'm sure don't do an ounce of good for anyone but the people making money off them. Oh, and one report from a guy who says binaural beats gave him restless legs...but he thinks RLS is just as likely to be caused by spiritual enlightenment as a medical condition, so take that with however many grains of salt you feel are appropriate. I can't speak for him, but I am quite sure that my restless legs have a lot less to do with kundalini than with stress and iron deficiency.

Anyway, if you suffer from restless leg syndrome and want to see if binaural beats will give you some relief, there's no need to deal with the sketchy-ad people. You can download all the beats you like for free, right here. Now, I wouldn't suggest listening to one frequency from bedtime till morning, as your mind passes through several different stages of sleep during the night. But do try one or more ten-minute rounds during the day, when your symptoms flare up, and see if the beats help. Let me know if they do!

And now for something completely different

Lately I've felt the need to create a different kind of Virtual Hypnotist session for myself: something that wasn't focused at all on fetishes, but rather on producing a sense of peace and healing. So I came up with a script called "Private Lagoon," which you can find here, if you want to check it out for yourself.

This script invites you to stand on the beach of your own private lagoon, then wade out into the water and float, feeling increasingly soothed and healed by the water and the fresh ocean air. The session has a strong, clear spiritual element; but it isn't tied to any specific religion, so I don't think anyone who worships any sort of loving God would be uncomfortable with the wording.

Now, when I first began running this session, I used one of the standard background music files included with VH. However, around the middle of last week, a new idea occurred to me. Let's see if I can explain it without sounding too much like the theology geek I secretly am.

Several years ago I learned about a Medieval mystic named Hildegard von Bingen, who established a number of convents in Germany, and who was also a scientist and a self-taught composer of some truly incredible music. She knew the power of certain tones (and series of tones) to create particular states of mind, and she used that knowledge in her compositions.

Well, I have a couple of albums of Hildegard's music; and it occurred to me last week, listening to one of them, that one piece in particular would make an ideal background track for "Private Lagoon." In fact, I thought, the power of her special tones might actually increase the power of the binaural beats I'd already included in the session.

And they so did. I've been having the most beautiful experiences, listening to the session with her chants in the background. This particular piece is nothing but "oo-oo-oo," but they're such lovely ooh's. If you want to hear for yourself, you can listen to a free sample on this Amazon page; it's track #15, and you'll get a kick out of the title, I'm sure.

Obviously, I can't include the Hildegard piece with my public version of "Lagoon," but if you like it, it's cheap enough to download. And if you like it well enough to explore more of her music, there are several other tracks on this album and on this one that would work quite nicely with VH sessions. Any lyrics are in Latin, so you don't have to bother at all with what she's saying; just enjoy the mystery of the sounds.

Of course, I'm sure there are hundreds or thousands of other artists, past and present, whose compositions would work nicely with hypnosis sessions; I'm just writing about what I know. So please feel free to add your own suggestions in the "comments" section of this post.

going to eleven

There's a bit in one of the great mockumentaries of all time when Nigel Tufnel, guitarist for wannabe-awesome metal band Spinal Tap, demonstrates his unique amplifier system. Every dial goes to eleven, rather than the usual ten, and no amount of logic will convince him that this is anything but mega-kewl.

"Going to eleven" has since become a catchphrase among a certain class of geeks, but I felt the need to explain it (and to include the movie clip below) because I realize not everyone is familiar with the phenomenon that is the Christopher Guest mockumentary. But Guest is a comic of world-class brilliance, and he plays Nigel in This is Spinal Tap.



So anyway, I've always been a goes-to-eleven kind of fetishist. As I've said elsewhere, my favorite kind of MC stories are the ones where the victims are most deeply brain-bound, where they can't even think except by command. And I'm continuing to seek out that elusive eleven in my own personal hypnosis experiments.

I've come to accept that I'll probably never achieve a state of true mindlessness in hypnosis (Besides, if I did, how would I know it?), but perhaps I can reach a state where I feel the bonds on my brain as something almost physical, something that prevents my thoughts from traveling down certain avenues and forces me to think and do - or not think or do - certain things.

And physicality is indeed proving to be the key. For instance, there's a suggestion in the current version of my generic induction that says, "Perhaps you can imagine that your eyes have opened again, but that they are now completely white. The only reason you can't see out of your empty, white eyes is that I don't allow you to see out of them. If I commanded you to see now, you would. You would see exactly what I wanted you to see, no more, no less." And damned if I don't really feel like my eyes are open but unseeing when I get to that command. I can actually sense my upper eyelids drawn back into my eye sockets.

Of course, I also have several other places in that induction where the synthesized programming voice gloats over how helpless she's made me and how thoroughly she controls me. Using "Mary in stadium" works fantastically well for this, because of the echo. When you have the ear buds in and you hear that voice echoing right inside your brain, it's very easy to imagine that your head is a vast, empty cavern with her all alone in the middle of it.

I also like to turn the "brainwaves" (binaural beats) up loud enough to hear them thrumming in my head like alien brainwashing rays, and I've created a few animated GIF's to go along with my personal sessions - no easy feat when all you've got to make the GIF's are an ancient program designed for JPG's and non-animated GIF's, and a very simple freeware program that animates still images you already possess.

(As an aside, that reminds me to ask: Does anyone out there know how to "turn on" a Flash object I downloaded but can't get to auto-play? The only way I can do that right now is to right click and select "play," but that isn't possible in the middle of a Virtual Hypnotist session.)

But back to the topic at hand. I'm thinking of how to rework some of Bee's experiences from Queen Bee Becomes a Drone into a personalized VH session, since her induction relies so much on physicality. I think it could work very well for me.

Right now, though, I have other priorities, like polishing "My Very Own Serial Number" for publication in another week or two. I think you'll find a couple of scenes in the second chapter that really do go to eleven...or maybe even twelve.

Nigel would be so proud.

You only *think* you know where this is headed

Here's another very, very early sneak peek at a story in progress. This is the one I mentioned in my Saturday blog post, the one I was mulling over while experimenting with delta binaurals and just generally relaxing under hypnosis.

I don't think I'll reveal the title just yet, because there really is more to this story than the opening paragraphs would lead you to believe; and I want you to be surprised. It's enough right now for you to know that I Have Plans. Muaaahahaha!

---

Amanda stared at the blinking button and bit her lip. She'd already checked the consent box, despite not having read the terms of service as thoroughly as she should have. She'd input her chosen user ID ("Mandy Barr" - Amanda was surprised to find it hadn't been taken yet and wondered if that meant she'd been clever or just too subtle) and had given a nicely anonymous e-mail address. She'd even set up a post office box in a nearby Atlanta suburb, using another false surname: Holmes.

Amanda *thought* she'd been careful enough, but she was no expert at this sort of thing. *Well,* she told herself, *it's not like I have much choice. And at least they didn't ask for my real name. Not yet, anyway.*

The button blinked cheerily at her: "Sign me up for my free three-month trial!"

"Okay," Amanda sighed, and clicked.

It was a hoary old cliché, the bright young coed paying her way through college by stripping. But at least Amanda was putting a twenty-first century spin on it, not to mention avoiding actual physical contact with her audience. She'd only be stripping online.

Amanda wasn't shy about her body, but she *did* want a choice about whose lap she danced in. She'd visited a couple of strip clubs with old boyfriends, and while some of the clientele had seemed perfectly normal, there'd been others she wouldn't have trusted to stuff a bill between her toes, much less anywhere higher.

Fortunately, Google really had been her friend. ThePowerOfPleasure.com was a startup web host offering enough free space to get Amanda going in her new (and hopefully lucrative) career. Sure, she'd have to put up with a few annoying, flashy banner ads; and this particular outfit also required its users to test products for them, and to take surveys. But as long as Amanda could do it all anonymously, she was fine with that. Hell, she'd be better than fine if the website made her enough money to keep ahead of her tuition. She'd be ecstatic.

Besides, the product samples weren't just sex toys. There were shampoos, cosmetics, vitamin supplements, mp3's - all kinds of interesting things. Amanda thought she might actually enjoy using some of them. And hey, free was *always* good when you were in college.

Relieved now that she'd actually taken the first step, Amanda hummed along with the music while the POP software downloaded.

Mmmm...so relaxed

No, the image at left doesn't have anything to do with my current state of mind; it's just something I rediscovered in one of my fetish folders several days ago, while searching for something else. I had already planned to post it with this morning's entry, which was going to be about a different topic; and now that I've changed my mind (for the moment - the other entry might show up here later), I figured, why waste such a delicious image? The source of this one, if you want to see more, is latex fashion site HW Design.

But back to the topic at hand. This past week has been pretty depressing for me, for a number of different reasons, so I've decided to pamper myself today and tomorrow. Today I started by reconfiguring my morning hypnosis program to let me just lie back in the chair and relax for as long as I felt like relaxing, after I'd finished the morning suggestions. So I lay there for about 45 minutes. And then I had the idea of going back to that site where I found the binaural beats and trying out the delta binaurals for awhile. I had only listened to that recording very briefly before, but I remembered that delta is supposed to induce a state of dreamless sleep and sometimes even give the listener an out-of-body experience. Well, I didn't go to sleep or have an OOBE. But I did have an incredibly, luxuriously relaxing experience. In fact, when the audio finished, I had to run the morning wakener all over again.

Oh, and while I was relaxing after the morning suggestions, and then on into the delta experiment, I began toying idly but productively with a new story idea. Now, I'm already deeply involved with "Union, Reunion," but that's turning out to be a multi-parter; and this new idea might be something I can dash off fairly quickly. We'll see. It's certainly a yummy idea, anyway. It's practically begging to be written.

a cool discovery

For the first time, just now, I tried running a Virtual Hypnotist with earbuds on rather than listening through my speakers. Wow, what a fantastic difference that makes! The voice and the binaurals just wiggled right down into the center of my brain and tickled it deliciously into submission. I'm going to listen to every VH session this way from now on, and I encourage anyone else experimenting with the program to give it a try.

Oh, and just BTW, trying the Bedtime session with the binaurals set to mid-theta rather than high-theta did send me much deeper; but I still wasn't able to get to sleep that night with just the melatonin. It's pretty clear now that I need that expensive Medication B to get over the hump. Dammit. But still, going deeper and deeper every night as I refine the session is just soooo nice. I can't wait to try it tonight with the earbuds.

More about the VH "custom audio" function and binaural beats

I sent the male Silver Robot sessions back to Jukebox for proofing this morning, and since then, I've been doing a little experimenting on other VH-related matters. For instance, I've finally figured out how the custom audio works. I'm going to post my latest discoveries here in this entry, then go back and update my "Virtual Hypnotist 103" entry, as well. And once I have all the VH tutorials online, I might write them up in a single document and make them available here for everyone's use.

So this is what I've found out about the custom audio. It is, indeed, the best way to play an mp3 by Lady Ru'etha (or Follow the Watch, or anyone else) which you're using to replace the scripts and speech synthesizer. But in order for custom audio to work, you have to work through several steps. First, save the mp3 in the VH "sessions" folder. Second, enable custom audio under the "Components" tab (Note that this will disable all the scripts and any other selected audio, because the mp3 is replacing those). Third, go to the "Graphics and Audio" Tab and choose the file under "Custom Audio."

Now, this is where it gets just a little tricky. Note that the default option in the "file name" field is the name of the currently-selected session. You can easily change that by selecting the mp3 you want, but then when you try to save the session, you'll find yourself prompted to save the session under the name of the newly-selected custom audio file. But just switch it back, and you're good to go. See? I told you it was just a little tricky.

And now, on to binaural beats. I've been doing a little more online research, and I've found a neat little meditation site that explains binaurals in layman's terms and lets you test and download different kinds of beats. In doing so, I discovered that I drop like a rock after mere seconds of mid-theta, so I'm going to incorporate that into my Bedtime session tonight and see how it works.

Once I knew a little more about binaurals, I felt more competent to experiment with the "Brainwave Synchronizer" under the "Other" tab. I saw that the default difference between the two tones was six hertz, which is high theta, so I just changed it by a single notch. But testing the result with the "test" button revealed the pitch to be much higher than that of the sample from the meditation site, so I adjusted the frequency of both tones downward until I got what I wanted.

Now, I don't know for sure if it matters whether the tones are loud enough for you to hear consciously; but I did notice that the lower I pitched the frequency, the softer the result sounded. So I kept bumping up the volume, because I want to be able to hear the sound. It might be purely psychological, but hearing those low, vibrating tones makes me feel like my whole brain is buzzing; and that's a really lovely sensation. :-)

So that's the news for now. I'm still exploring options for hosting the Silver Robot mirrors (Thanks to drp for the megaupload.com suggestion, but unfortunately, they don't allow adult content), and the fact that the sessions won't be ready for another day or three gives me more time to find something workable.

Virtual Hypnotist 102

Yesterday I gave you the basics for getting started with Virtual Hypnotist, enough to let you experiment with the presets and peek at the scripts, audios, and videos. But if you did as I suggested, you probably have half a dozen new questions now. Well, once again, I'll be glad to any specific questions via comment or e-mail; but if you prefer to lurk, I'll probably get around to answering you via blog entry somewhere down the line.

This particular entry is going to be about some of the optional elements included in most of the pre-installed VH sessions.

Yesterday I pointed you toward the "Components" tab, which you can access from the "Advanced Configuration" button on the main screen. You'll notice that you can select or deselect various options there, but what exactly are you selecting or deselecting? Okay, the "scripts" are pretty obvious, and I explained those in detail yesterday, anyway. But what about the video, for instance? What are "brainwaves"? Are "flashers" the same as "phrase flashers?"

Well, pardon me for recycling the same image I used in my last post, but it'll explain everything you need to know.

Let's start with the video. In this screen grab, it's the central image and is actually an animated GIF called "spurt" that flashes from "deep" to "sleep." The video image in this shot takes up 40% of the screen; I configured it this way by going to the "Graphics and Audio" tab and moving the "video zoom" slider bar to 40. If you create a new program and don't adjust the zoom, the video will automatically size itself to the height of the screen, and that usually doesn't look very pretty. 40% looks much better, and allows you room to throw in a custom visual in the background.

So let's talk about those custom visuals next. In the screen grab above, they're the red and blue rings, which pulse delightfully when you actually run the session. You can choose or create your own custom visuals from the "Other" tab, under "Hypnotic Visual Maker." When you click this button, a new window will pop up that lets you experiment with different color tunnels, spirals, custom objects, or a Grok Tunnel (Don't ask, just try it out; the demo screen alone put me under). The latest version of VH has 12 custom presets under the color tunnel tab; the red and blue one I used above is #2. I got it to fill the whole screen by dragging the "size" slider all the way to the right. Note that if you don't make the custom visual large enough, it might be hidden by the video, and you certainly don't want that.

Now, also in the screen grab above, you can see a vertical blue bar on the left - but nothing on the right. That seems odd, doesn't it? Well, that, my friends, is one half of a set of "flashers" (See? They're not the same as the phrase flashers.). You can configure them from the "Other" tab by clicking the "Brainwave Synchronizer"...but don't try to configure them unless you really understand what you're doing. Me, I only dared to change the colors, nothing more.

So, what are these brainwave thingies I'm telling you not to mess with? They're binaurals. Wikipedia has a long, technical article about them, but here's the short version: scientists have discovered that, simply by using the right combination of tones or flashing lights, they can induce a state of relaxation in human brains. It only takes about five minutes for the binaurals to have an effect, which explains why most VH inductions last 7-10 minutes.

You're only seeing one of the pair of lights in the image above because it's just a snapshot, and the lights don't flash at exactly the same rate; but when you run the session (And you know which session it is, don't you? ;-)), you'll see them both flickering together: blue on the left, red on the right. Oh, and there are also a pair of hidden tones in this and all other sessions, unless you turn the "Brainwaves" component off. One tone comes from each speaker, but they're both masked by the audio file (assuming there is one), so you won't consciously hear them. You'll just feel them. And that's oh so nice. :-)

But now, I'm afraid I'm out of time. I'll let you in on a little secret: if you see an entry on my blog with a timestamp of 12:00 PM, it was no accident. I wrote it beforehand and timed it to post itself at noon the following day. Right now, it's time for my Bedtime program, and then bed itself.

Nighty-night.