I think I hypnotized myself for real in a dream

A couple of weeks ago I was taking an afternoon nap, and I had a lucid dream. I'm pretty good at doing that, and if you want to learn how to have a lucid dream, there are lots of YouTube videos that will teach you how. Just don't buy the crap about astral projection.

Well, in this particular lucid dream, I decided that I wanted to act out a hypnosis fantasy. These are usually difficult for me because deep inside, I always know I'm controlling myself. But this time Agnes Zee came to mind - Agnes and her male hypnotist. Of course, normally I'd prefer to be controlled by a female; but Agnes is so hot in trance that I can't help but appreciate the man who sends her there.

I remember a video (which, sadly, seems to have been taken down), where he keeps snapping his fingers and using Agnes' trigger to send her deeper - and to bring her closer and closer to orgasm. She doesn't quite go over the edge, maybe because she doesn't want to do porn - and in fact maybe she took the video down because she decided it was too close to porn. But in this video she comes close to orgasm, so in my lucid dream, I tried to reconstruct what her hypnotist had said, using his words and snapping but my own trigger. And I think I really was hypnotizing myself in that dream, using the man's voice to help me imagine I was under someone else's control.I was also, to put it delicately, experiencing the same sensations as Agnes. Unfortunately, just like her, I didn't reach the finish line. In my dream somebody interrupted me and then I at a daycare center watching over a pack of kids.

But I still have two weird things to relate about this dream. The first is that I got stuck in it so deeply that I couldn't wake up even when I asked people in the dream to slap me. I ended up napping for four hours. I don't know if that's because I hypnotized myself and didn't have anyone to wake me up, or if it was just coincidence.

The second weird thing is that all through the daycare part of the dream, I was gasping for breath. Now, I think I have a bit of sleep apnea, although I've never been tested, but I also think it's mostly under control now. If I dream I'm underwater, I tell myself I can still breathe, and I do; or if I dream I'm about to get swamped by a wave, I tell myself I won't hold my breath until just before it hits me. These techniques seem to work. But in this dream, there was no water, so I had no reason think about holding my breath; and I thought I was out of breath from exercising. I guess in real life I didn't stop breathing, but I was probably breathing very shallowly - and even though I was lucid enough to try to wake up, I wasn't lucid enough to remember my apnea. Weird.

Again, I have no idea whether the length of my nap or my breathlessness was due to hypnosis, but it's something to think about. Anyway, I will try the stunt again if I think about it during a lucid dream. Maybe next time I won't get interrupted.

Mozart, Mesmer, and Me

About a week ago, I found an article that claimed Mozart had written his opera Cosi fan tutte entirely in a state of mesmeric trance. Franz Mesmer, in case you don't know (although you probably do know if you're into EMC) created an early form of hypnosis and was very popular in his day. If' you want to know more about him, here's his Wikipedia page.

Now, Mesmer was a patron of Mozart, and as I said, this article implied that Mozart wrote a whole opera in a state of trance. I thought about linking to the article here until I actually read it. Then I discovered it was really just a discussion of Mozart's weirdness in general, and it didn't have much to say about mesmerism. The most interesting detail, apart from the above, was that Mozart once wrote a little ditty called "Lick Me in the Ass."

Anyway, the article is still worth mentioning because it makes me wonder whether Mozart could have written coherently while in trance. I sure can't. Writing under post-hypnotic suggestion is definitely possible, but while you're deeply hypnotized, you're clumsy - and you enjoy the clumsiness because it's a sign of how deep you are. Of course, it's possible that the right hypnotist could get you to write neatly and clearly while in deep trance. I just haven't experienced that.

But by now you're probably asking what this has to do with "Transfixed," the story I've been talking about for a few weeks, and which will go to press on or around December 8 (That's an in-progress cover above. I'd love some feedback on it). Well, I came up with most of the plot for "Transfixed" while I was in trance. I didn't write it that way, but that's where the ideas began: in my subconscious mind. I just kept them in my head until I had time to write.

Here's how it came about. If you've been reading my blog long enough, you know that I have trouble with insomnia and developed a Virtual Hypnotist program designed to help me relax and get to sleep. I still use it every night, and it still works very well; but I'm so familiar with it now that my mind wanders a good bit while I'm using it (To those of you who've never been hypnotized: yes, your mind can wander while you're in trance). Since I've been so focused on this story, even writing right up until bedtime, my mind often wandered over to "Transfixed" while I doing my nighttime trance thing.

I've also written before about how some of my best ideas come to me in dreams, or while I'm lazing in bed on a Saturday morning, half awake but too lazy to get up. I guess all three states are similar, in that they allow me to tap into my subconscious - and my subconscious is usually more creative than my conscious mind. I've been wondering whether anybody will notice anything different about "Transfixed," or whether it will read pretty much like the rest of my stuff. Again, I'd love some feedback once the book comes out.

In the meantime, I can tell you some places in "Transfixed" where I've noticed contributions from my subconscious mind. The subconscious communicates in symbols, sometimes but not always sexual in nature; and since I'm writing erotica, my thoughts are headed in a sexy direction right from the start. Now, "Transfixed" begins with one ship getting run through by another ship. The second ship has been taken over by mind-controlling aliens (but of course!), and now they're invading the first ship as well. I explained in a previous post how that part of the story grew out of a failed collaboration between myself and several other EMCSA authors, so you can't blame trance-plotting for that. But now let me throw out a new non-spoilery details regarding the finished story. See if you can work out all the Freudian references:

• The ship which gets pierced has a female captain (Michiko), and the ship doing the piercing is captained by Michiko's husband Alec.
• Alec, under the influence of MC, constantly tempts Michiko to give in to the aliens' control and he tells her how hot it feels.
• Part of the alien MC process involves piercing the skull of the victim - in a way that causes orgasm rather than pain.
• When Alec's ship first appears, it emerges from a wormhole; and it carries Michiko's ship into another wormhole - which is where the piercing occurs.
• The guns fire darts instead of lasers or bullets. This actually makes sense from a "preventing hull breach" standpoint, but darts are still more phallic than lasers or bullets.
• At one point a character on the run hides inside a large egg-shaped object.
• In two other scenes, crucial information is shared by two people talking inside small, enclosed spaces.
• And as a bonus for you Jungian fans, a white man* receives help from a black woman who is his opposite in almost every way.

*Actually, you don't have to assume he's white; I often leave characters' races unspecified so that readers can imagine people who look like them, and I encourage you to do that with this guy. But in my mind, he has pale hair and skin.

Having some (Studio Black) fun

One advantage of my latex/total enclosure fetish is that Facebook doesn't block any pictures related to it. And Facebook is where I discovered the multi-pronged entity known as Fetish Chimera, Studio Black Fun, Nikitzo, Madame Gillette, Kylie Marilyn, and Lady Ashley. All of them are involved in the images you see here, and since I've left all the names and URLs attached, I won't bother making actual links. You can find the sites and the original versions of pics easily enough on your own if you're so inclined.

The pictures in this set are called "Coma Play," which makes sense in English, but which I suspect makes slightly different sense in German.  Maybe one of my readers can help me understand what the participants in this set mean by "coma." "Drugged," maybe?

Anyway, the reason I'm posting these pictures here is because they fit so well with the fantasy I use in one of my Virtual Hypnotist sessions. It's one where I imagine myself captured and drugged and brainwashed into a white-eyed, latex-bound drone. I've shared some of the text here before, and I've shared more of it in a story I posted on the EMCSA but later took down (Don't worry; I'll make an ebook out of it eventually). Well, it occurred to me recently that I could use a little photomanipulation to make the pictures fit my fantasy even better, and that I could then pair them with a couple of snippets from my VH session and post the results here for your viewing pleasure. So here you go. Imagine Madame Gillette speaking the words below, to her increasingly brainwashed slave.

---

So very deep now, thrall So very, very, deep. So deep you can't even hear yourself think. But you can hear yourself chanting the programming I gave you during previous trances. And you can hear my voice, echoing in your empty head. One way or another, I'm doing all the thinking for you. That feels so very nice, doesn't it? And it's so very easy. It's become so hard for you to think. And my voice is right there in the center of your mind. Just let it do all the heavy lifting for a little while as you relax. Just for a little while.

My words are in the center of your mind, thinking for you now. And everything around them is delightfully, deliciously empty. Your mind is a blank, and I can do whatever I want with it.

Imagine yourself now, sagging so limply in your chair. Eyes closed, mouth open. Physically plugged into a machine that is brainwashing you, and helpless to resist it. The plugs from the brainwashing machine are so delicate. All you'd have to do, to disconnect them, would be to reach up and tug, just a little. It would be so easy. If only you had the will to do it.

And once upon a time, you did have the will to resist me. You fought against me so long, so hard. But in the end, you couldn't resist. You betrayed yourself. You gave in. You submitted. Now I have enslaved you. And made you love it.

 Now you can imagine, that your eyes have drifted-open again, but that they are now completely white. Featureless. Blank. Just like your mind. You can imagine that 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. I control you completely now.  You have become my mindless, helpless, obedient drone. My pawn. My puppet. My slave.

*****

Remember, you fought for your freedom at first. I strapped you down and forced you to watch this program. I forced you to listen to my commands. You can remember so clearly how you fought me. You can remember your resistance weakening under the onslaught of my brainwashing machine.  In the end you were helpless. And finally, despite yourself,  you began to love what I was doing to you.

Now you revel in slavery. You want to be brainwashed. You love it, because I have made you love it.

Show and Tell

Tell first. ;-) I've discovered that when I take some time away from a particular Virtual Hypnotist session and then come back to it, it becomes more powerful than ever. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it gives me a chance to forget the fine details of the session so that I can be more surprised and struck by them.

Anyway, earlier this week I went back to my "morning" session after maybe a couple of months away from it. Now, that session does have a section of really useful, positive suggestions for my life; but it's mostly just about pleasure. It's also extremely powerful. Even when I use that session frequently, it takes me so deep that by the time I get to the suggestions, I'm just sagging there with unblinking eyes, almost perfectly mindless. Afterwards, I don't even really remember that part of the script.

I do remember the bit before that, though. "Mistress" commands me to look at the screen and tells me that it holds my attention completely and I can't look away. And long before that, the first time I hear my trigger, my eyes roll up automatically into my head. I imagine it pleases my Mistress to know how quickly and fully I fall at her command. My The rolled-up eyes represent the offering up of my mind to her.

Now, as I said, I hadn't run the "morning" program for a couple of months; and I've learned that when I take time away from a program and come back to it, it's even stronger than usual. That happened to me when I ran the "morning" session not long ago. I think I have the trigger in the script again just before the suggestions start, but I'm not really sure and don't really want to go check because I like being hazy about that part of the script. Anyway, even though I was supposed to be focused on the screen, my eyes suddenly rolled up and I just could not bring them down. I'll admit that I didn't have the will to try very hard hard. ;-) I didn't have much will at all by that point.

I knew that Mistress had commanded me to look at the screen, but I also knew that my rolled-up eyes were a sign of my submission, and they felt like they had rolled up further than ever before. So knowing that (and not knowing much else at the time), I felt myself falling even deeper. My head sagged down all the way to my shoulder and I hung there, blinded and stunned like a deer in headlights, wallowing in the depths of my enthrallment. It was glorious.

That's the "tell" piece of this post. ;-) The "show" piece is closely related, since it features another bit of real-life (I think) deep hypnosis. The subject in this video is wonderful in so many different ways. She's beautiful, she drops very deep very quickly even though this seems to be her first time under hypnosis, and you can tell she's a natural sub. She doesn't speak even before the induction starts. All she does is smile and nod. Then the induction begins, and there's a wonderful, wonderful moment when she realizes how deep she's fallen and she cries a single tear. It seems to be a tear of joy or maybe gratitude. She loves what's happening. Maybe it's something she's always wanted.

Then the hypnotist starts giving what sound like more sinister suggestions. She doesn't seem the least bit nervous, though. She's already gone too deep, become too submissive, to resist what's being done to her mind. Or maybe she has reason to trust the hypnotist. But I, watching as an outsider with an EMC fetish, prefer not to trust him. I like to imagine that sometime after the end of this clip, this pretty young woman reopens her eyes, and they're not green anymore. They're perfectly white, and she's perfectly mindless: a drone for all eternity.


Green Eye Girl Hypnotized by DarthSheelal

On display

There's a train track just behind where I live. I've grown used to the whistle and the way the building shakes, and sometimes I even use them to give an added kick to my "morning" Virtual Hypnotist program. As I'm sagging there in my chair, deep in trance, I sometimes feel the rumble of a train going by (I can't actually hear it with my earbuds in place). Then I tell myself the rumbles are actually explosions: my friends know I've been captured by an evil brainwasher and they're trying to rescue me. Unfortunately for them, I'm too far gone to save. I'm bound in place by nothing more than a flashing monitor and the oh-so-thin cord of my earbuds. I could escape so easily, if only my brain weren't bound.

After awhile - and this is the most important part - my would-be rescuers break into the bunker far enough to see me in my chair. They can't reach me, because my Mistress is still in control, and they'd never have gotten this far if she hadn't allowed it. But they can see me.

I'd been describing myself as a closet exhibitionist years before I learned anyone else used the term. It's a central part of my fetish: the idea of being put on display, sometimes as a brainwashed slave whom my friends are powerless to help, and sometimes as a drone who's been so thoroughly depersonalized that people don't even realize she's human.

The train came by this morning while I was running my VH session, and the extra enjoyment it provided left me wanting to reread trilby's else's Dark Forest. I did, and it didn't disappoint. If ever a story deserved the "exhibitionism" code, it's "Dark Forest." I sooo want to be Veronica, or better yet, Bridget. And thanks to my VH "morning" program, I at least know what Bridget's stare feels like. I stared that way again as I was reading the story.

Later I scrounged through my folders of saved images, trying to find something suitable for this post, but I couldn't settle on just one. So here are three photos, all came from Model Mayhem. From left to right, we have shots by Steve Prue, Uberdog, and Rebecca's Rubber Room.

Adventures in self-hypnosis

Lately I've been tinkering with my morning session, creating a more sinister second version as if the first version wasn't sinister enough! But I've had a very strange problem when I try to use it.

I've written a new scenario for the last part of the "suggestions" section that's loosely based on this Sorayama image, and I added into the script just after the part that puts me in deepest trance. At this part in the original morning script, I'm totally zoned out staring at spirals and subliminals; so I was hoping I'd still be deep enough when the Sorayama scenario kicked in to buy into it 100%.

Unfortunately, every time I've run morning2, I've still been so zoned out when the Sorayama part kicked in that I might as well have been fast asleep. I can't enjoy it because I can't pay enough attention to enjoy it. Even adding commands to pay close attention now don't help. The previous passage had just taken me too deep for anything else.

Now I've revised morning2 to put the Sorayama bit before the zoned-out bit. I haven't had a chance to run it yet, but I have high hopes. Meanwhile, as I was rearranging my script, I tweaked a few other lines and ran across one in the zone-out section that made me roll my eyes. Right there, in the original set of commands, was the suggestion that eventually I'd be able to go deep enough to become a mindless drone, just like I'd always wanted to be. I guess that command took hold of my subconscious a little more strongly than I'd intended.

I never know which suggestions are going to stick and which aren't, and the fact that I've commanded myself not to notice the deep suggestions in my morning program means that I hadn't thought about them consciously in ages. I'd forgotten that line was in there, but damn if I didn't zap myself good.

Anyway, this is all part of my continuing quest to find just the right level of trance. If I'm not deep enough, I tend to analyze the script instead of enjoying it and my mind occasionally wanders. On the other hand, if I'm too deep, I don't even know what I'm experiencing. I know there's plenty of middle ground between those poles, but I'm still trying to home in on it.

Happy accidents

I've blogged before about Windows 7 causing a few glitches for Virtual Hypnotist, but there's one I haven't mentioned until now. I assume it's a Windows 7 glitch, but it's still a little mysterious to me because it only happens in my "morning" session, not my "bedtime" session. That would lead me to believe there's a glitch in the "morning" code, but the workaround I've found makes me think it's not the code causing the problem.

Here it is, in a nutshell: sometimes the background track to my "morning" session doesn't loop. It plays once and stops, so then I have to listen to the rest of the session with no sound except the speech synthesizer reading the script.

I can fix the problem by exiting the program and rebooting my computer, which is why I don't think the code is the issue; but of course, once I get into the session, the very last thing I want to do is exit and reboot the whole damn machine. :-/ As a result, I've learned to restart my computer every morning when I get up (I leave it running all night with the "bedtime" session paused).

Well, yesterday morning, I rebooted my computer and then noodled around for maybe half an hour before starting my morning session. I didn't think that would be enough to stop the background track, but I knew it might; and I told myself that if it did, I'd just keep going. I've done that before a couple of times and still enjoyed the session.

Anyway, the background track did stop after a couple of minutes. I was already pretty deep because I've used this session so often that it drops me like a rock, and I'd primed myself beforehand to cope with the stoppage if I had to. I was half expecting it to happen...but what I wasn't expecting was that my subconscious mind popped up with the perfect in-session explanation for the problem.

A quick explanation if you haven't read (or remembered) my previous posts about my morning session: It begins with a supernatural Mistress saying she's talking to me live, through my computer. She's been brainwashing me for a long time, and now it's time for more programming. You can imagine some of what happens from there, but if you want some specifics (with a few red herrings), just check out my story If Wishes Were Horses.

The background track is three layered tracks of me chanting mantras about submission, obedience, and my inability to resist my programming. That's what dropped out, just as my imaginary Mistress said she was taking me deeper.

And that's when my subconscious chimed in with the perfect rationale for the chants dropping out. It told me I'd reached such a deep level of programming that Mistress didn't need to use the background chants on me anymore; instead she deigned to speak to me directly, with no distractions to dull my mind.

I was still alert enough at that point to know I was playing a game, so I had a moment of surprised delight at my own inventiveness. Then I let the idea do its work, and within seconds my mind was very nearly blank, with Mistress's words echoing in my empty skull just as realistically as the script said they should.

It was an incredible experience.

My most frequently asked question

From time to time I get emails from my blog readers, and in those emails, one question pops up more than any other. They've experimented with hypnosis either through Virtual Hypnotist or a live hypnotist, and they just don't think they're going under.

I always tell them what people told me when I started experimenting: they're probably going deeper than they think they are. You can test this for yourself by focusing on how relaxed your body is, when you're listening to a hypnotic induction. Notice how limp your arms and legs are. Notice how slack your jaw has become. Notice how you just don't really want to move. You could move, you tell yourself; but you're just too comfortable to bother. You see, feeling this way means you're at least somewhat hypnotized.

At this point, you might argue that only your body is hypnotized; your mind is still wide awake. But think about this: yes, you really could move, if you were motivated enough - but you're not. And motivation comes from the mind, not the body. Your mind is at least somewhat involved in the hypnosis. So it's only a matter of practice and finding the right imagery to make you feel it.

Having a real, certified hypnotist as a partner is the best way to go, but of course, not everyone has access to that. And even if you do have access to a hypnotist, that doesn't mean you have access to a kinky hypnotist. And even if you do have access to a kinky hypnotist, that doesn't mean you should automatically trust them enough to take you deep. As a matter of fact, I hope you won't trust them that much until you really get to know them. Anything else is dangerous.

As for those of you who don't have access to a kinky hypnotic sex partner, Virtual Hypnotist can be pretty fucking awesome - if you're willing to take time with it. Those of you who've been following my blog for awhile (especially the "My Hypnotic Adventure"-tagged posts) know I started out in the same "I don't think I'm going deep" boat as many of you. Well, I can say with absolute certainly that I'm going very deep now. In fact, I had an absolutely unbelievable experience just this morning. Too bad I don't remember it completely, but that's by choice. I like the idea of having a Mistress who implants commands I can't even follow. And the fact that she's really me, the fact that I devised these commands myself to enrich my life and give myself pleasure, allows me to go as deep as I like. I trust "her" completely, because I can.

That's the biggest advantage to VH: if you write your own scripts, you have total control - even when you don't remember that you have it. You know just how to push your own buttons, and you can trust yourself more than you can trust just about anyone else, so that allows you to go extremely deep and have an extremely pleasurable experience. It just takes time to get there.

Caveat: I don't recommend pushing the envelope too much on the self-trust issue. I always preach safe play, so I hope you won't try to program yourself for intentional harm. At the very, very least, I imagine it would make you less likely to trust yourself in the future - and that could lead to poorer hypnotic results. At the worst, who knows? I don't. Just don't try it.

When you're writing scripts for yourself, try to get into the headspace of a kinky but ultimately benevolent hypnotist. Any post-hypnotic suggestions should be designed to enhance your well-being. Tell yourself you're a good person, a strong person, able to cope well with difficult situations in life. Tell yourself you can resist temptation to do things that would harm you. Tell yourself you deserve love and happiness, and you can find it.

And when you're giving yourself commands about how to react to hypnosis in the future (for instance, going deeper every time you hear your trigger), make sure you give yourself an "out" so you don't get yourself into trouble. For instance, suppose you've chosen "broccoli" as your trigger word. You don't want to fall into a trance every time you hear that word, because who knows when or where you might hear it? Worst case scenario, you could be shopping at your local grocery and suddenly drop your pants and start humping the produce. Okay, I'm kidding...but not entirely. Do follow up any suggestions about trigger words or falling into trance again with conditions: when it will work, and when it won't.

I also think it's important to program yourself not to be controlled by just anybody.   Don't let some random stranger who knows your kink take advantage of you, and don't become so submissive that it affects your everyday interactions. Tell yourself you'll only be hypnotized or otherwise manipulated when you consciously want it.

But enough preaching. I hope these tips will help you get the most out of your hypnotic play. If you want more information about how to customize Virtual Hypnotist, just look up to the top of the sidebar here; I have a whole tutorial.

*The image at the top of this post came from Bizarre. The model is Sophie Howard.

Important addendum to my last VH post

If you've already copied the script snippets I gave you in my last entry, be sure to add the following suggestion (or something similar) to whatever script you use them in.

If you give yourself the idea during trance that, just because you can't hear your thoughts, you don't know what you're thinking, this can carry over into your waking life. I found this out the hard way. ;-/ It didn't stop me cold, but it did make concentrating and focus a bit harder - and I'm not even hugely suggestible. If you're more open than me, it might really be a problem for you. So if you use the "How do you know what you are thinking?" bit in your sessions, be sure to counteract that suggestion with something else later on. This is what I use in my bedtime session:

When you wake in the morning, you will feel refreshed and ready to get out of bed. The wormhole will have disappeared, and you will think normally, and be able to focus easily on whatever task is at hand.

Getting back on track with Virtual Hypnotist

If you've been following my blog for awhile, you know I lost all my old Virtual Hypnotist sessions in a computer crash earlier this year. Since then, I've been slowly recreating my morning and bedtime sessions based on scraps and older versions of the sessions.

The morning session is now in...acceptable...shape, although there's a lot more I need to do with it before I can enjoy it properly. But that's less of a priority than my bedtime session, since I only run the morning session every now and then, for fun. I use the bedtime session every night to help me wind down enough to get to sleep.

Fortunately, Bedtime 2.0 is in excellent shape now. It's a little different than it used to be because I couldn't recreate it exactly, but I think the new wording is mostly an improvement over the old wording. Let me give you a few examples, which you're welcome to plug into your own VH sessions if you like. I just ask that you give me credit for them, if you share those sessions with anyone else later on. I'm also leaving out the bits of code and other tweaks I use to make the speech synthesizer sound more human. After all, I don't want to make things too easy for you. ;-)

Anyway, here are some bits I'm especially proud of:

     You can hear my voice, and the music, echoing through your empty head; and you know that the echoes mean your head is already very, very empty. But there is still one thing in your head besides my voice and the music. There is a wormhole at the very bottom of your mind. 
     Picture this wormhole now, spiraling gently inward, there at the bottom of your mind. Every time one of your thoughts becomes logical enough and heavy enough for you to notice it, the gravity of the wormhole draws it in and carries it down, down, down. Far below your body. Far beneath your chair. Much too far for you to find it again tonight. 
     Gravity is such a powerful, pervasive natural phenomenon. Nothing with any weight can resist it. 
     But music has no weight. And subconscious thoughts and unconscious dreams have no weight. So they're not affected by the gravity of the wormhole. They will become even more powerful, even more pervasive, as your conscious thoughts spiral down into the wormhole and disappear.
     Already, you can't hear yourself think over the music. And if you can't hear yourself think, how do you know what you are thinking? 
     You don't. 
     What you hear, is what you think. It's just too hard to think anything else, when the music is right there in the center of your mind. It's too much trouble to pay attention to your own thoughts, when you can't even hear them. So you can just let the music be your thoughts. It's so much easier that way. So much more relaxing. And all you want to do right now is relax anyway.

     And of course, your mind and your body are connected.  Picture the nerves that run from your brain, down your spinal column, and throughout your body. Just as your brain sends signals to your body, your body sends signals to your brain. So as your body relaxes, your mind relaxes too. It's a loop. A circuit. A spiral.

     The inside of your head is a vast hollow cavern, filled with nothing but music and echoes. Only your subconscious thoughts, and your unconscious dreams, can move freely through this vast empty space, because subconscious thoughts and unconscious dreams have no weight. Everything else gets drawn into the wormhole and erased. It feels so wonderfully relaxing, to let all your conscious thoughts be erased.

     And now you are even deeper. And going deeper still. Deeper by the second. You have made such a nice, inviting playground for the nonsense. Even your conscious mind is pretending to be asleep now. The music, and the wormhole, have erased and replaced so many thoughts, leaving so much beautiful, relaxing emptiness. And the music echoes through that emptiness so beautifully. The music invites the nonsense, and the dreams, to come out and play. Now they are peeking eagerly out from the darkest corners of your mind.  They want to come out and play. They can tell how relaxed you are. How empty your mind is becoming. Because mind and body are connected. In a spiral. And your body is so clearly very, very, relaxed.

Now, the next suggestion is very important, if you plan to use the "How do you know what you're thinking?" bit in your sessions:

When you wake in the morning, you will feel refreshed and ready to get out of bed. The wormhole will have disappeared, and you will think normally, and be able to focus easily on whatever task is at hand.
 

A happy little update

First, thanks to everyone who offered sympathy regarding my computer crash and loss of data.

Some people asked me if I could just recreate the lost Virtual Hypnotist sessions, and I said I couldn't. I put so much work into getting my bedtime and morning sessions just the way I wanted them, that I couldn't bear the thought of doing it all over again from scratch. Any of you who've read Stephen King's Misery will understand. At the beginning of that novel, the protagonist is carrying the only copy of his just-finished novel with him when he wrecks his car and gets rescued/captured by a murderous lunatic. She claims to be his biggest fan, but when she reads his precious new draft, it disgusts her so much that she makes him burn it. Well, I don't think it's a huge spoiler, after all these years, to say the protagonist survives. The important thing about his story, for the purpose of this post, is that his new novel didn't survive: he couldn't recreate something that big and complex...not in the Misery book, anyway. I think I remember him rewriting it in the movie version, but that's Hollywood for you.

My VH sessions, of course, were nothing close to novels; but they were still too involved for me to rewrite from scratch. Fortunately, I was so desperate to get them back that I ended up checking every saved folder which was even loosely associated with my "thrall" identity; and in one of the very last places I expected to find anything, I turned up some really old versions and scraps of versions of the lost sessions. That was enough to spur me to action. Maybe you could compare it to rediscovering 2/3 of a novel you thought you'd burned, and outlines for what was still missing.You'd rewrite from there, wouldn't you, if you knew your work was worth saving?

I've already done a lot of work recreating the bedtime session. It will never be exactly like it was before, but it's getting to the point where it does what I want it to do: put me to sleep at night. It still needs some tweaking, but I'm pretty happy with it - and I'm backing it up every few days to a CD. I'll probably end up throwing it into the cloud, as well. This will never happen to me again.

My morning session isn't as high a priority as my bedtime session, since it's mainly recreational, but I'll get around to it soon. And when I do, I'll have If Wishes Were Horses to help me. Thank goodness I wrote that when I did! Most of the session's text is embedded within that story; so the only hard part will be tweaking the pauses, punctuation, etc., to make the speech synthesizer sound more human. I also have an old list of suggestions which had already been tweaked for the speech synthesizer, and I can insert them at the proper point in the script. I'm looking forward to getting started on that sometime soon; but I have a few other things I want to do first, like beginning that new MC story I mentioned in the post about my computer crash.

Oh, and speaking of upcoming stories, about a week ago I had a fantastic dream which laid the groundwork for another MC story that badly needs telling. And you know me: I can't deny my Muse. ;-) I'm just glad she's hanging around so much lately.

What I did on my summer vacation

...and what I did afterwards. Let's start with the bad news first so I can get it out of the way and move on to things that will make you and me both happier.

Not long after posting the last entry before this one, my Paleolithic computer died the True Death. I had to buy a new machine, which is good in some ways but bad in others. The worst part was losing everything on my C drive. I'd been backing up my most important files and/or storing them on an external drive just in case something like this happened, but unfortunately, there was one set of files I somehow left behind: my Virtual Hypnotist scripts. I can download the program itself again, and I still have access to the scripts I've posted online; but gone, gone, gone are my bedtime session and morning session. It makes me want to kick myself so hard. Technically, I could try to rewrite them, but I put so much work into getting them just right that I can't imagine doing it all over again. Thank goodness I've reached the point where I can get to sleep without the bedtime session now; otherwise, I'd be really upset.

Anyway, enough of the bad news. The good news is that during my staycation, I was daydreaming one afternoon and came up with a new EMC story idea without even trying. I don't want to say too much about it yet because I write so slowly; it might be months before I'm ready to publish this one. I'll say this much, though: the story is set in the Tenpack of Trixies universe, will feature at least one of the characters from the original "Trixies" story, and will probably be just one chapter long. Of course, I've expected other stories to be just one chapter, and they turned into three- or four-chapter stories, so don't hold me to my word on that. Just be glad I have a nice, new computer to write it on. ;)

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.

Hypnosis this, MC that

First, thanks to Deep Helix for pointing me toward Scott Adams' blog post about hypnosis. I had no idea that Dilbert's creator was trained in the field, but he's written a fantastic analysis of it. I suppose you might consider it a little spoilery in places, if you don't want to know how hypnosis does what it does, but all in all it's fascinating. Here are a few (non-spoilery) choice quotes:

I describe the state of hypnosis as acquiring a power. The subject has all of his regular faculties operating plus he gains some more, if he has no objection to those new powers.

About one person in five can experience what hypnotists call “the phenomena.” For those people, their powers of imagination become so strong it is almost indistinguishable from reality. Those are the people who can give birth without pain, or see an elephant in the room, or eat an onion and think it’s an orange, or have multiple orgasms on suggestion. My name for that group is “lucky bastards.”

Some people have a problem with the idea of hypnosis because they don’t want someone else having control over them. That’s the wrong way to think of it. A hypnotist is more like a coach, or a tour guide. He shows the subject how to unlock his extra powers. He doesn’t “control” the subject. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who didn’t totally enjoy the feeling of being hypnotized. It’s like getting a pedicure on your brain. It’s deeply relaxing, and the hypnotist does all of the work. It feels a bit like being pampered.

I had already planned to make today's entry about my own hypnosis experiences, so Deep Helix's link makes a nice lead-in. I can't say I experience all the "phenomena" that Adams describes - and I really envy the people who do experience them - but at least hypnosis has made some deep, positive changes in my life. I've been going at this for roughly a year and a half now, and as a result of the suggestions in my morning and bedtime Virtual Hypnotist sessions, I feel happier, more confident, more in control of myself (especially my tongue), better able to see through people's manipulations, and better able to fall asleep at night. It's also fun, throughout the day, to think about the kinky secrets I'm keeping from my coworkers. ;-P

Now, from time to time I offer tips for use with Virtual Hypnotist, and here's another. I'm continuing to work on suggestions that will help me stop thinking and analyzing, so that I can just enjoy the depths of mindless bliss that feed my fetish (and help me wind down enough to sleep at night). The best I've come up with so far is this. I use the fact that I can't hear myself think, but I can hear the voice of the hypnotist (meaning the speech synthesizer - I'm still using "Mary in Stadium") and any music and/or recordings of my own voice chanting mantras, to make my own thoughts so insignificant that they almost disappear.

Here's what I mean. This is a screen grab from the text behind my morning session. I've chosen to give you the code, rather than the words alone, because this way you can see the various elements I added to get the most out of the speech synthesizer. If you're using VH and want to make the voice sound as natural as possible, you can drop this text into your own program and get very nice results (more tips along those lines here, of course).

Note: In my 100% nonprofessional opinion, it's very important that, if you use this suggestion, you make it clear that the effect will only work during trance. You certainly wouldn't want to be going about your daily business and realize, out of the blue, that you couldn't hear your own thoughts so you must not be able to think!

Now I'm off to update my VH tutorial, which I relocated to this blog not too long ago. It occurred to me that people who are interested in hypnosis but who aren't actually hypno/MC-kinky might find this site through Google and be put off by some of the other stuff in here...not least the "adult content" warning you get when you first click the link! Poor little vanillas. I'll do what I can to make them feel comfortable. ;-P

This is me

No, not literally me; but I bet that title got your attention! Sorry. You should know by now how much of a tease I am. ;-P

The first picture at left is another piece of digitized-photo-art by Vizerskaya, whom I showcased a few posts ago. The second picture is model Tara Chin, photographed by Mallory Morrison. Both images are pretty accurate representations of how I feel when I'm falling into hypnosis. It's like sinking deeper and deeper under the ocean, only you don't have to worry about holding your breath or being crushed by the weight of the water. It's just so quiet...and peaceful...and wonderfully, wonderfully dark. I don't know how better to convey the sensation than with these two pictures.


There might or might not be a weekend post; I'll be offline for a few days beginning Saturday, and I don't know yet if I'll have time to put together another "My Favorite Things" entry before then. Stay tuned...or not.

Miscellaneous updates

Where to begin? There's a lot going on right now, not least the continuance of tree sex in my throat. I swear, I wish they'd just come and be done with it. But anyway, here are a few quick notes about various things I'm involved with.

My collaboration with Jukebox is just about exactly at the halfway point, meaning halfway through the second of our three stories. I don't know how Jukebox feels, but I think the interplay with someone whose ideas are very different from mine brings out the best in me. It takes me to places I wouldn't go on my own, and that's cool. It's also kind of funny to watch how gently two subs butt heads. ;-)

I'm still reading Anathem and am down to the last two hundred pages. I continue to be amazed and in love with the novel, but I've also realized that the average SF/fantasy reader might have a problem with it because it's pretty talky in spots. There's a heck of a lot of theorizing about belief systems, parallel worlds, and other things Terry Pratchett's stodgier characters tend to dismiss as "quantum" (I have a hunch Neal Stephenson is a big Terry Pratchett fan. Either that, or they read a lot of the same books). Fortunately, just when the story seemed about to turn completely into Socratic dialogue, there was a huge revelation - one I should have seen coming from a lot further down the pike - that changed the nature of all the talk preceding it. And now several of the main characters are floating around in space having Apollo 13-like adventures. I'm curious to see where Stephenson takes things next. I don't think we're in for a typical space Western, but I do think there's room for some wuxia to creep in. ;-P

Lastly, I've finally cracked a lock I've been working on for awhile now: I've figured out how to turn my Virtual Hypnotist morning session into a proper MC story. See, I didn't want to just post the text as an induction; I wanted to build a tale around it. So the trick was finding the right sort of tale, something that would include pretty much the whole induction but still be just as spooky and dramatic as the rest of my stories. Well, a couple of days ago, it came to me - in the middle of one of my morning sessions, as a matter of fact. This is definitely one of those cases where not being able to go completely mindless worked to my benefit. I know how to write the story now, and I plan to begin it this weekend. No telling when I'll have it finished, but I don't anticipate it being more than one chapter. Oh, and some ideas for a title so far: "Inside-Out," "Onion," "The Worm at the Heart."

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.

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.

Caught

Last weekend, I had a delightful, um, conversation with Lady Ru’etha by phone. We’ve talked a few times since my visit last November, but we hadn’t had a chance to do any more trance play until Sunday night; and I, at least, was practically begging for it. I like to think Lady R was eager too, but of course I can’t speak for her. ;-)

Anyway, we agreed on a time to get together, and she came into the session with the idea that I’d want some robot play – not surprising, since I've made no secret of kinking that way. But I was browsing the sensual nudes of the Yerbury website when she called, and (as I later realized) I also felt really self-conscious about doing the robot thing in front of someone else, even her. Isn’t that hilarious? After all the stuff I’ve posted on the EMCSA and this blog! After all the stuff I’ve done with Lady Ru’etha in person already!

Well, I’m sure she could get me over my self-consciousness pretty quickly, but she was happy enough to go in another direction. Lady R is the kind of storyteller who can whip up a tale at the drop of a metaphor, and in minutes she had me dreaming I was wrapped in sensual vines, then sprayed with intoxicating pollen, then bitten on the neck (by what, I don’t entirely know, but we had been discussing vampires before the trance play began).

Of course, she made sure I knew she was the one who was controlling my bonds; and the scenario ended with the vines gone and me cradled in her lap: a lovely image, so rich with possibilities.

I won’t say much more about what went on during the play, but I will tell you this. After awhile, the feeling of being tied became so strong that my hands went up behind my head and crossed at the wrists. In fact, I ended up straining so hard against the imaginary vines that my biceps are still wobbly as I write this.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to the phone while my arms were above my head, I had it cradled between my chin and shoulder…which probably explains why we got cut off at a couple of critical junctures. ;-) Fortunately, she called me right back, and I never broke trance.

I haven’t even had the chance to tell Lady Ru’etha about the arm thing yet, so I hope she’ll get a kick out of reading this entry. When she gives you a gift as fantastic as a personalized trance, you just naturally want to repay her. Part of my repayment was my pleasure Sunday night, because being the cause of other people's pleasure pleases her. And part of my repayment is writing about the experience here. This entry is a tribute to Lady Ru'etha and to the awesome things she can do with a willing subject.

Okay, and yeah, maybe it’s a bit of serial recruitment, too. You never know. ;-)