Lesson 4: Adding to your hypnotic vocabulary
Goals
In the next lesson, we will show you how to make up your own inductions, customized to the tee. In preparation, in this class, we are going to experiment with the two new induction ingredients we talked about in the last class.
Consent
In this class we will practice hypnosis, and, as always, tees might get fractionated. You will specifically be able to experiment with fractionation inductions, focus control, and voluntary muscle relaxation. You will also need to negotiate consent for touch, and this time you need to be very specific about exactly where and how touch is wanted or not wanted, including the whole body and hair stroking. You will also be able to experiment with music as a focal point. Finally, we will introduce synchronous breathing as a connecting exercise. As always, you should read the whole class description first, if you want to practice opt-in consent (and we recommend using opt-in consent unless you understand very well what you’re doing and have meta-negotiated something else). Also, as always, keep in mind that check-ins are useful, and consent can be withdrawn at any time.
Opening ritual
It can be nice to establish a ritual between you and your partner to set the mood for hypnosis. You can think about the lighting in the room, and put on some light music, if you want to. Think about comfort and interruptions. Have you peed, do you have access to water? Is your phone on do-not-disturb?
You could also light a candle or anything that helps you relax (as long as it doesn’t impair your attention and consent, of course).
Then you can do a quick tuning-into-each-other exercise. We like to synchronize our breathing for a few minutes, for example, but it could also be doing a quick meditation together, a mirroring exercise, looking into each other’s eyes, using some domination and submission ritual that you like or talking about your day. If you’re doing anything hypnotic or keen to induce subspace, you should have done your negotiation first.
In the next sections, we’re going to experiment with a few more trance mechanisms. We will start with using them by themselves, just to give you a feel for them, and that might result in light trances, but we will combine them in the next lesson, for a deeper trance.
Focus
In this exercise, we’re going to explicitly play with focus. The goal is to experiment with a single point of focus, we’re going to start with hair stroking for this, but any sensation could work.
The tist strokes the tee’s hair
The tee intently focuses on the sensation of touch
Wake up
As always, you should experiment with variables, rhythms, type of touch, etc.
As always, debrief and feedback
If you want a completely different focus point, you could try playing some music and intently focusing on the music instead. We also talked about music earlier as a way to set the scene. As with every scene-setting element, music can be a background element or a focus element. The tist decides to draw the tee’s focus towards elements, or to let them drift in the background.
Fractionation induction
The goal of this exercise is to experiment with fractionation as an induction. We’re going to teach you the fractionation part of the Elman induction. Beware that this can sometimes cause headache in sensitive people, because it has an eye-straining element. We find that element very effective for hypnosis, though.
The tee closes their eyes
The tist positions their hand close to the tee’s face a bit above their eyes
The tist instructs the tee to open their eyes, focus on the tist’s hand and follow it with their eyes, without moving their face
The tist lowers their hand slowly until the tee closes their eyes
Repeat steps 3 to 4 a few times
Wake up
Variables to experiment with: speed, distance to face, number of times to do the cycle
Debrief and feedback
Arm drop induction
This is used as a deepener in the Elman induction. It can make an induction on its own, in our opinion. The goal is to let you experiment with another trance mechanism: voluntary muscle relaxation. This version has a repeated element to it, but we will expand on voluntary muscle relaxation next with another classic induction: the progressive muscle relaxation induction. The arm-drop is usually done while the tee sits down, with the tist dropping their hand on the tee’s lap, but it can also be done with the tee laying down.
The tist instructs the tee to close their eyes and to completely relax their arms
The tist gives the tee a bit of time to relax their arm
The tist instructs the tee to let them do all the work of lifting their arm
The tist picks up the tee’s hand by the wrist and gently wiggles it around, testing that the tee’s muscle are relaxed and that the hand feels heavy and floppy
If the muscles are not relaxed, that is, if the arm is not feeling heavy for the tist, the tist instructs the tee to relax them more
The tist instructs the tee to go into a deeper trance when their hand is dropped on their lap
The tist gently drops the tee’s hand on their lap (or the bed if laying down)
Repeat step 3 to step 7 a few times alternating arms
Wake up
Debrief and feedback
Some tips and variants:
Experiment with different wiggling motions and speed
Experiment with timing dropping the hand when the tee breathes out
Experiment with timing the hand drop with seeing signs of trance. Feeling the muscles relaxed is an relatively easy one.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Progressive muscle relaxation inductions are a famous class of inductions that expands on the arm drop we just did. The idea is the same, to ask the tee to consciously relax their muscles. It is sometimes unpopular in erotic hypnosis circles, which is completely unwarranted in our opinion, but has enjoyed a bit of a regain of popularity in recent years.
The tee sits in a position in which their body is supported or lays down (this induction is very prone to flopping)
The tist verbally instructs the tee to consciously relax parts of their body from head to toe. (E.g. Relax your forehead, your cheeks, your mouth, your shoulders, …, your toes). If you are doing this verbally, the tist should ask first about any vocabulary to use or avoid when talking about the tee’s body parts.
Alternatively, you can agree in advance that the tist will just touch a body part to instruct the tee to relax it
Give some time for the tee to relax the body part before going to the next
Wake up
Debrief and feedback
Some variations:
Order in which you call/touch the body parts. We started with head to toe, but you can, for example, do toe to head as well.
Degree of granularity (e.g. your head vs your forehead, your eyes, etc)
Time in between the body parts/rhythm
That’s it, you now have experimented with 3 new induction ingredients: fractionation, focus control, and voluntary muscle relaxation. If you did thorough debriefing after the exercises you should now know a lot more about the tee’s specific preferences, and what works best for you folks. See you next lesson, where you’ll make your own induction, completely customized to the tee’s preferences.
Lesson 3: Introduction to Inductions theory
In the next few classes we are going to show you how to make up an induction that is customized to the tee and especially effective for them. In this theoretical class we will teach you some generalities about how inductions work and introduce two new ingredients you can use in your own inductions: focus control, and fractionation.
In the next few classes we are going to show you how to make up an induction that is customized to the tee and especially effective for them. In this theoretical class we will teach you some generalities about how inductions work and introduce two new ingredients you can use in your own inductions: focus control, and fractionation.
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Inductions and deepeners
Traditionally, we call an induction any process that gets the tee from an awake state to a state of hypnotic trance—although, as we have seen here, the concept of trance as a state is a bit controversial. A deepener, on the other hand, is traditionally defined as something that gets you from a state of light trance to a state of deeper trance. Depth itself is not something that is always considered important, see, for example, point 4 here, but we find it useful as a metaphor.
In our personal experience, there is not a huge difference between an induction and a deepener, as a process. We see trance-to-awake states as a continuum. We often use inductions and deepeners interchangeably, though we have found that a more attention-grabbing process (something mostly featured in inductions) is more effective when utilized in the beginning of trance, while a deepener can be more loose and use more negative space or silences. We would be curious if that’s the case for you too.
Pasting elements together to induce trance
If you agree with us that inductions and deepeners are pretty much the same thing, that we can consider them both as just elements combined with the end result of the hypnotee in trance, it means that you can always just add one induction, one deepener, one element, after another and make a free-form induction by pasting together elements that work especially well for the tee.
When it comes to named or famous inductions- there isn’t anything magical about those words or actions in that order; inductions like those work because the person creating them understands hypnosis and combines enough elements together capable of inducing trance for the most amount of people.
One famous example of such a patchwork induction is the Elman, which consists of 4 distinct parts [Dave Elman, Hypnotherapy, p.98-102]:
Eye relaxation test,
Open and closing the eyes,
Raising and dropping the arm, and
Counting backwards and losing numbers.
Feel free to look it up if you’re curious. Those four elements together results in a lot of people finding their way into trance, but considering why that might be provides a far more useful exercise than taking any one induction as gospel.
And while it may be tempting to just stick to the script, it’s worth noting that they are rigid by nature and not really tailored to the needs or desires or safety of you or your partner. They do not take into account the tee’s reaction, and they keep the tist’s attention elsewhere. On the other hand, using a flowey style in which you freely incorporate elements of known inductions, deepeners, or exercises allows you to both customize the experience and keep your focus on each other.
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Two more elements for the toolbox
We’re going to give you exercises to use this combining elements approach in the next lessons, but what it means for now is that you can take several of the exercises (induction elements) that worked well for you in the previous two lessons and use them together sequentially or in parallel.
Mix and match the things that worked best so far. Consider what order you would use and why and how it might be different if you changed up the order. If you do consider combining elements and giving it a try, be sure to talk about the relevant areas where you need consent as outlined in the previous exercises.
Focus
Hypnosis is a lot about focus manipulation. To a large extent, the tee’s focus and attention are the substance that the tist molds to create trance. That focus can be narrowed and directed towards a single stimulus. For example, the tee can focus on the sensation of the tist’s touch only. It can also be broad and overwhelming, encompassing a lot of sensations, or it can switch from one focus point to another through time.
Traditionally, the tee’s focus is directed to become more narrow as the trance deepens, but you can experiment with different levels of narrowing. In this way, the trance has more to do with focus control than with focus narrowing.
Fractionation
We talked about fractionation as a state that can happen after hypnosis, especially when a tees is hypnotized and woken up several times in a row. That is one definition of fractionation: fractionation as a state.
Another adjacent concept is fractionation as a process. This process can be used as an element in an induction, essentially dropping and waking up the tee in quick succession. The idea being that with each repeat of a fractionating technique, the tee will be closer to trance/deeper into trance/more disoriented or suggestible.
If you use this concept at the beginning of an induction, you can use eyes closed as a proxy for trance and eyes open as meaning awake. It’s possible that the tee will not wake up entirely when they open their eyes after some time, but that’s ok.
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Being hypnotized is a skill
Hopefully you experienced some sort of a mental shift in the last exercises and the meditation homework. Remember that even if it is incredibly subtle, your trance is valid! If you felt any shift, you are starting to recognize what trance feels like for you. Being hypnotized, in general, and recognizing what trance feels like for you is a skill, and as you work on it, it will become easier.
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Next week, look out for our next lesson, where experiment with these new induction ingredients.
We’d love to hear from you! Comment below or find us on twitter and let us know what you think of this week’s post. You can do so here anonymously; just type any name in the field when prompted and it will allow you to comment as a guest.
Lesson 2: First Taste of Trance
Goals
We are going to experiment more directly with hypnosis and trance states in this class. Our goal for tees is that you experience a (maybe not very dramatic) mental shift in those exercises. For tists, we want you to start getting used to recognizing signs of trance in your tee.
Content Note
We will talk about hypnosis and experiment with it, through means involving touch and gaze.
Consent
In this class, we will experiment with trance, which can feel a bit like an altered state of consciousness.
It’s not uncommon for tees to become so physically relaxed during hypnosis that they fall down if they are standing or fall forward or backward from a chair if they are sitting. You should both be prepared for the possibility of the tee completely flopping, if it’s their first time and they don’t know whether or not that’s something that will happen to them. For negotiation, that means that you might need to either do the hypnosis in a position where they can’t hurt themself if that happens (e.g. laying down), or to have permission to touch them to catch them (and make sure that you physically can do that).
Sometimes the state can last for a while after the tee is woken up (we call that fractionation). This is especially true if you are put into a trance and then woken up several times in a short period of time, so please be careful and wait until you are sure that you’re back to baseline before driving or taking big decisions.
For this class, you should discuss consent for the following:
Hypnosis
Touch (be specific about what kind of touch is ok, and where)
Fractionation
Intense eye contact
Don’t forget to also negotiate aftercare!
The trance state
What does trance feel like? If you’ve never been hypnotized, you might not know, but you might still have ideas and expectations about it. Take a moment to think about it, and make your assumptions explicit (if you started a journal after last lesson, that would be a good place for it, otherwise, now might also be a good time to start a journal). When you get hypnotized, you might find out that your trance feels like you expected, or that it doesn’t at all. Either way, keep in mind that the first trance doesn’t necessary feel like the next ones, and that if you have goals about how you want your trance to feel like, you might be able to work on these goals in the future. Making going into a trance easy and having strong trance feelings are skills for the tee too, and they can be practiced and learned, but the most important is to recognize that trance is happening, and what it feels like for you, even if it doesn’t feel like what you expected.
What does trance feel like for others? We didn’t know, so we set up a survey and asked people in the erotic hypnosis community to tell us. You can read about the results in detail here, but for now, the important thing to remember is that trance feels very different from one person to the next, and from one time to the next. A lot of answers to the survey involved feelings of relaxation and focus, but for some people it also sometimes felt like nothing! If you want to experiment with it, you will find out for yourself.
External Signs of Trance
As a tist, if you want to adapt your hypnosis to your partner and the situation, if you want it to feel like a dance in which both participants are active, if you want to do anything else than recording files, you will need to be able to read your partner’s state. With time and rapport this can become automatic and intuitive (and in our opinion, that’s the most fun!). But for now, you will need to put a conscious effort into guessing where your partner is at, hypnotically. We will go into more details about what to do if it looks like they are not having a good time in later lessons, for now you should ask them how they’re doing, and wake them up if they don’t answer or say they’re not enjoying what you are doing.
So what does someone look like when they go into a hypnotic trance? As with basically everything in hypnosis, it will vary a lot from partner to partner, and session to session. We will go much more into details about signs of trance in a later lesson, but for now here is what you should watch for:
Any sign of muscle relaxation, or general body relaxation
Any sign of muscle stiffening
If you’re playing with a sex partner or a fetishist, any sign of arousal
Any sign of body rhythm changes, such as breathing pace
Waking people up
If you’re going to put people into a trance, you need to be able to wake them up. It’s not difficult, and we have never heard of anyone getting stuck into a trance for a long time, the worse we heard about is that they fell into a real sleep and then woke up naturally, but that’s super rare. In general, people are easy to wake up from trance. There’s plenty of ways to do that (the 19th century French hypnotist Charcot, for example, would blow in his tee’s eyes [Andreas Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, p.35], something we’ve never seen done today, and would probably be surprising and uncomfortable for the tee). For now, you can stroke up your partner’s arm a few times until they open their eyes, if you have consent for that touch. Tell them in advance that you’re going to do that. Or you can just say something along the lines of “You will wake up on the count of 5, 1…, 2…, 3…, 4…, 5) and then you can snap your fingers and say “awake”, if you’re feeling like it. You can also just snap your fingers and say “awake”, but some tees might not like that, especially if they were in a deeper trance, as they might need more time to reorient.
As with everything else, it’s a good idea to check with them what they prefer in advance, if they know, or to ask for feedback afterwards if they don’t. In our opinion, it is good practice to wake your tee up after every trance experiment, even if it’s just a short snap “awake” awakener. Even if neither of you feel like they were in trance, it doesn’t hurt, it trains you to always do it, and it can wake them up if they were in a light trance.
If they still seem a bit fuzzy after your awakener, you can always ask them if they want another one.
First taste of trance
In the following exercises, we are going to move towards an explicitly hypnotic practice. You might get into a trance, so be attentive to any mental shift. Let’s see how that feels for you folks!
Swaying
This exercise was introduced to us by Divney. The goal is to help you focus on each other through touch and movements, give you a feeling of leading and following, and get the tee in a (maybe light) trance.
This works especially well standing up, but be careful with that if you don’t know whether or not the tee will flop. We successfully did it sitting down as well.
The tist places their hands on each side of the tee’s upper arm/shoulder region. The goal is to be able to sway their body comfortably. Eye contact can help, or the tee can close their eyes. You can experiment with both, if you want to! If you’re doing the eye contact version, it’s possible the tee will want to close their eyes at some point, if so, they should go ahead and do it. That desire is a sign of trance!
The tee focuses on the body sensations of swaying, and on the tist’s eyes, if you’re doing the eye contact version.
The tist sways the tee gently. They look for signs of trance and wake the tee up when it feels like it’s time (we recommend 30 to 45 seconds of swaying for a start, longer if it feels fun).
Here are some tips for trance exercises:
Always debrief after an exercise and ask the tee what worked and didn’t work for them. It is our strong conviction that tists should always listen to their tee over what any expert says, because nobody knows shit about the tee but themself, and everybody is different. Listening to your tees is, in our opinion, the single most important thing a tist can do.
Tees should remember that beginner tists are in the vulnerable position of learning in front of someone, when wording their constructive feedback.
Moods and tips to experiment with:
It can help to get a stronger feeling of leading and following if the tist is careful not to let the tee anticipate their move. You can play with avoiding patterns. The tee should conversely let the tist lead them, rather than anticipating and moving themself.
Conversely, the leader might want to follow where they feel that the tee’s body wants to move. Feel the difference between these two moods. The tist can also alternate going with or against the tee’s body’s natural movements.
The tist can also play with creating patterns and then intentionally breaking them.
When varying the exercise to see what works best for the two of you, think about all the different aspects of touch and swaying. What speed, pressure, hand placement, amplitude of movement, direction of movement, etc, feels the best for you?
Head Swaying
This is almost exactly the same exercise but with moving the tee’s head rather than their whole upper body. We got that variation from sleepingirl. You can place your hands on their ears, and we find the difference in sound quite hypnotic, but others find it annoying. If you do that, be extra careful and gentle when placing and removing your hands. We heard that ears are super fragile!
All tips from the previous exercise can work here too. If you want to add something new, you can experiment with starting with faster movements and progressively slowing down until you’re immobile. Similarly, you can start with bigger movement and progressively go to smaller movements. It’s possible that the tee will get so relaxed that their head droops forward. You should let it do that rather than trying to keep it up (or forcing it down).
Don’t forget to allocate a lot of time for debriefing in between exercises. Everything the tist learns from the tee will make them a better hypnotist.
The rope induction
We learned this one from bottoming for rope a few times. If you’re into rope you might be doing something similar. (Please tell us in the comments if this is familiar at all, and how you do it!). It’s a ritual that we’ve seen several rope tops do a variation of at the beginning of scene. This one is a bit more physical, feel free to adapt or skip it, as always.
Have the tee kneel or crossed legged in front of you, kneel behind them and hold them. We personally like a forearm on chest hold. Feel and listen for their breathing. You can synchronize your breathing to theirs if you want to. You can start by doing some downward movement with their exhalation, pressing on their chest gently, or pushing them slightly forward with your body. Remember what kind of movements (with or against their natural movement, patterns, speed, etc) worked best in the previous exercises, and you can start experimenting with similar movements. This time, instead of just your hands, you can use your whole body to move theirs.
This is a bit more complex than the previous exercises. How did it feel? One difficulty here is that you don’t see their face, so you have to use other means to feel their mental state. Maybe you can feel them relax in your arms, or feel their breathing get slower (or faster!).
Debrief
What worked the best? What didn’t? What did you learn about yourself and each other? Did you modify anything to make the hypnosis more potent for you folks? Was there any shift in mental state such as relaxation, focus, or something else entirely? If so, congratulations, you now know what trance can feel like for you! Did you notice any external sign of trance? Please tell each other everything, and share with us if you want to! It’s ok if you’re not sure, we’re not either, and we’re here to explore together.
Homework
This is optional of course.
For tees: try meditating. Meditation and trance can feel really similar in our experience. It’s sometimes a bit risky to just listen to files online—which we will talk about in another class—but we recommend the Calm or Headspace apps. We also heard good reviews about the breathing app which is free, but it’s apparently a bit more advanced, so you could start with the free content of the former apps first.
For tists: What is hypnosis anyway? Try to find as many definitions as you can, keeping in mind that all of this is pretty subjective. Let us know in the comments, if you want to!
We love you with true passion, hypnonauts, see you soon!
Lesson 1: Flow, focus and intuition
Welcome to your first lesson, hypnonauts!
Prerequisite
You can just read these blog posts if you want, but the vast majority of classes are going to be pretty exercise heavy, so it would help a lot to be able to do hypnosis exercises. We are assuming that you are taking these classes as a pair (or more) of people that are all enthusiastic about learning hypnosis. We strongly believe that there is as much skill and experience involved in hypnotizing and being hypnotized, and our classes are accordingly written for hypnotists, hypnotees, and switches. We insist that you only do the exercises that you want to, and only assume the role or roles that you want to. Please never use our classes to push yourself or your partner into something that you folks are less than enthusiastic about.
Goals
In this first class, we will show you some exercises to experiment with flow, intense focus on each other, and using your intuition to communicate with your partner. All of these are basic components of hypnosis, in our opinion, and you might start to feel a light trance state during some exercises (or you might not, and that’s completely normal too). We will also quickly introduce the consent notions you need to do these exercises safely.
Content Note
We will talk about and experiment with hypnosis, and flow, through means involving touch and gaze.
A Note on Consent
We will go much deeper into consent theory in a later classes. For now, we recommend using an opt-in model of consent, unless you have negotiated some blanket consent. If you’re not familiar with blanket consent, we will talk about it more in the future, but for now, you should go for opt-in. Opt-in means that you talk about everything you want to do in details with your partner before doing it, and only do it if they are explicitly enthusiastic about it, without any pressure. With hypnosis exercises, the tee might feel a bit over-relaxed for a while after several exercises—or even just one. As a result, you should talk about everything you want to do in that session before starting the session. We will tell you what kind of consent you should negotiate in advance for each lesson, but we also recommend reading through the lesson together first, and seeing what everyone wants to do.
You can always adapt exercises or just nope out of them entirely. Everything we suggest is optional! The most important here is that you never push yourself or each other into doing something you don’t 100% want to do.
We will discuss the specific added difficulties of doing hypnosis online, in later classes. For now, we assume that participants share a physical space for the exercises.
Consent
While we don’t expect you to go in a deep trance, the exercises we will practice are hypnosis-adjacent, and could potentially put you in a light trance, and you should get consent for that.
For this class, you should discuss consent for the following:
Hypnosis
Touch (be specific about what kind of touch is ok, and where)
Intense eye contact
Emotion play (be specific and choose emotions you want to play with. They can be complex feelings too, such as dominance or love)
You should also discuss what you are going to do as a cool down after the class. Some exercises can be emotionally intense, and you will maybe want to spend time together after them. Anything that helps you both process and return to a more usual state of mind is called aftercare, and you should discuss it before starting, to make sure both your needs are compatible and will be met. If you have no idea, a good place to start is to see if either of you might want cuddles, water, a blanket or a snack. It’s also always good practice to ask each other what you’re going through after a scene. You should check with each other that your aftercare needs are met before moving on. Our lessons are probably going to take about two hours each to go through.
Flow
You might have heard of flow before—people talk about it as a state of pleasurable intense focus. We use that term relatively loosely to refer to a light to intense focus that can be experienced by both tees and tists. In our vision of the world, flow is adjacent to trance but lighter than a deep hypnotic trance. We see the intense focus of the tist on the tee as a flow state or a light trance. In the following exercises, we are going to experiment with creating a state of flow.
We call rapport, an ensemble of results from interpersonal intimacy. Trust is part of them, as is an intuitive understanding of the mental state of your partner, as well as a capacity to communicate non-verbally. We will experiment with non-verbal communication, specifically, in this lesson. Rapport makes hypnosis easier. We also believe that intuition and non-verbal communication are at the center of creative, emotional hypnosis play.
Flow and rapport exercises
In this section we will experiment with tuning into each other, flow, and focus on your partner. You might or might not get some trancey feelings during those exercises.
Mirroring
The goal of this exercise is to get you both to focus on each other, as well as getting famiilar with leading with non-verbal cues or following them in a scene. If you want to, you will do the following:
Sit or stand facing each other. You will need to be able to see each other clearly and to each have one or, ideally, two hands free.
Position your hands so that you’re in a mirror position to each other
The leader moves their hand, the follower follows to continue simulating a mirror
You can reverse leader and follower, if you want to
Ask each other how that felt and listen to answers
It might feel relaxing or focusing in a way that is similar to a light trance or it might not. Either way, the idea here is to get a taste of what it feels to be focused on your partner, for the follower, and to lead your partner non-verbally for the leader.
The leader and the tist do not need to always be the same person. Sometimes, the tist might want to concentrate on their partner, see where they are going and take advantage of that, either to follow it, or to go against it. We will talk about this more in the next lesson’s exercises.
A note on silliness
Some of these exercises can feel super silly and awkward. That’s normal, in our experience. You don’t have to be serious to do hypnosis! It can be your vibe and it can be your kink and we respect that, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ve all had a really funny scene from time to time, and we’re still bad, dangerous to know, hypnokinksters! (just kidding). If you or your partner starts giggling, don’t worry about it. Some of those exercises are pretty funny in our opinion too.
Pocket watch
Here, the goal is to show you how unconscious responses can happen and what they can look like. This is a one-person exercise, and we recommend you both do it, but you, of course, don’t have to.
You don’t really need a pocket watch for this, but as hypnokinksters, you might have one. (Don’t worry if you don’t, they’re super optional! Some people in the scene like their gadgets, which will be for a later class, but you never need them). But you will need some sort of a pendulum. Anything a little heavy attached to a chain or string of some kind will work. Actual pendulum, pocket watch, crystal on a string, a hardware nut on a string, anything of the kind.
Hold the string in your hand with the weight hanging below, you want to give it some length, because that will reflect your micro movements better.
Think about the weight going left to right a little. Don’t do it consciously, just focus on the idea of that pattern. It will probably happen “on its own”, if you think about it hard enough and for long enough
Same with the weight going in circles.
Hopefully, at this point, you have convinced yourself that unconscious micro movements can happen. They are called ideomotor responses, if you want to Google what’s going on. They can be used for the tee to communicate in trance, and acting on hypnotic suggestions can feel similar for some people. People sometimes use this pendulum method for divination, or talking with their unconscious. (Exactly what the unconscious is, and whether to see it as a separate part are very disputed, but we find the metaphor useful).
Guessing emotions
The goal here is to continue to learn to focus on each other, and to use your intuition for leading or for following. The leader will demonstrate an emotion from a list of agreed upon ones with the least amount of outward/physical shift as possible, trying to focus on using internal mechanisms and intent instead to pass this emotion to their partner. The receiver will try to guess the emotion.
Position yourselves in a way that you can see each other’s face clearly
The leader thinks about one from an agreed in advance set of emotions or feelings (dominance, happiness, or love could be a place to start), and tries to demonstrate it to the receiver while moving their face as little as possible. The idea here, is to use unconscious micro-movements that the receiver can pick up on.
The receiver focuses on the leader’s face and tries to feel or guess the emotion.
You can talk about which emotion it was and then do another
Switch if you want to
Talk about how it felt for each of you. Was the receiver able to pick up on anything? For us, it was sometimes more general categories, for example, aggression and dominance felt about the same. You’re doing great if you got anything! And if you don’t yet, it might happen later with more experience and rapport. Also remember that this might be extra difficult for some people, but they will be better at other exercises.
Debrief
Did either of you experience a cognitive shift or a change in perception during those exercises? (Tell us in the comments or @ us on Twitter!) It could be a sign of light trance, and it’s not unusual, in our experience, for the leader to feel that too. We believe hypnosis and flow can be very similar sometimes. But don’t worry if you didn’t feel anything. The goal here is more to get you in touch with the intuitive side of hypnosis, and more comfortable with intense focus on each other.
Homework
Start a hypnosis journal, writing down about your experiences. This can be especially helpful for tees to see how hypnosis feels like for them over time.
How did that feel, hypnonauts? We’re craving your feedback!
What does trance feel like?
We asked for your thoughts on what trance feels like. 30+ people responded and we analyzed the results.
(Please note that the following contains vivid descriptions of trance which can feel trancey for some people. There is also mention of water, falling, and space/void imagery)
Hypnotic trance is a mental state that can be induced by hypnosis. The concept itself is somewhat controversial. Here is a pretty good summary, if you’re interested. We personally have little doubt that trance exists as a phenomenon that can be experienced, and there is even some evidence that it can be measured neurologically (here is a review in a 8.33 impact factor journal. It’s behind a paywall, but you can have a look at the abstract if you want to).
People sometimes feel like they are difficult to hypnotize because they have specific expectations about what trance should feel like, and trance doesn’t match those expectations for them. You can learn more about this, for example, by attending Sex Obsessed Lesbian‘s excellent class Setting your Subject Up for Success.
But what does trance feel like? We set up a survey to find out. We got 31 responses so far, presumably all from the erotic hypnosis community. Here is what they said:
It depends!
9 responses tell us that it changes all the time. One person said “'I’m always discovering new things about what I feel in trance.”, for example. Here are some set & setting components respondents said the sensation of trance depends on:
The trance partner (3 responses)
The position of the tee “Different depending on whether I'm seated or lying down” (1 response)
What is suggested by the tist. “The trance itself can end up shifting into entirely different types of feelings, depending on what suggestions I'm being given.” (2 responses)
For one respondent, “[t]rance and the way it feels is very dynamic to me. It can vary and change a lot moment to moment”
Mood and setting where also mentioned twice: “Trance is highly subjective, depending on the partner, circumstances, how I'm doing, etc.” and “it depends on my mood, the tist, the setting of the session”
Not what they expected
It does sound like a lot of people were surprised and maybe a little underwhelmed by trance feelings. Five people mentioned something along these lines:
“I don't pass all the "tests" but still feel like I'm in trance”
“[N]ot entirely "empty" or "blank" like I often see it described”
“Trance is a tricky beast because I can be in it before I notice I am, and noticing and acknowledging it tips the whole thing over into a full, immersive experience”
“[It doesn’t feel] like much, if I'm being honest. The first time I was hypnotized I thought I was just playing along until afterwards, when the top started using the triggers she'd implanted and they worked.”
“[S]ometimes no feeling at all where I question if I'm in trance”
These might be the most important results here, especially if we suspect expectations are a reason why people feel like they are not good at going into trance. We have some evidence here that trance is very variable, and often doesn’t match expectations. Whatever your trance feels like, it is definitely valid! But, still, what does it feel like for others? Here are some more concrete answers.
The above word cloud is a depiction of the most frequently occurring words amongst respondents. The larger the word, the more frequently it was used to describe trance.
Thought changes
The most common answer had to do with some sort of thought changes, which was present in 18 of the answers. The most common thought change was a shift in focus (13 answers). People feel more focused on the hypnotist and their words, and less focused on other sensations:
“[I] always feel like my hypnotist's words become much more prominent in my mind, and everything else kind of drifts away. it's still there, i just don't care about it.”, “time doesn't have much meaning, just the words I listen to”
“My focus of attention has shrunk down to a very narrow, close, and slow field where everything outside of it, including the passage of time, is fuzzy and indistinct.”
“My head is silent apart from focusing on the words”
“All kinds of things can be happening around me, but I don't notice”.
Outside of focus shift, nine people noted a quieting of the mind:
“my brain shuts up”
“quiet and fuzzy. I'm distant, not thinking fully - thoughts occur but they pass just as quickly.”
“directly in front of my eyes, though, are a pair of whiteboards, and all of my miscellaneous thoughts automatically get written there and then erased, windshield-wiper style, to keep my mind more or less blank.”
“slower thoughts”.
Here are a couple more interesting quotes about thought changes:
“Following without effort”
“Like the words spoken are narrating my own thoughts and echoing inside me.”
“Inner experiences more real than sensory input.”
People also noted spontaneous amnesia and derealization.
Change in body sensations
These were second most common type of feeling reported (13 answers). Of these, the most common was a feeling of pressure or heaviness. For example:
“a feeling of weight in the chest that creates calm like sleep or a weighted blanket”
“it's usually heavy in some way”
Often, that heaviness was associated with a lack of movement:
“like i'm too heavy to move but if i could i'd float away”
“I feel heavy and know I CAN move (since I roll over in the night and can push blankets off in the middle of the night) I just don't want to move because of the way I feel”
On the contrary, some felt a lightness (sometimes at the same time as heaviness, such as the quote above):
“heady, dizzy, floaty and untethered”
People also felt some change in their breathing, or the way they perceive it:
“every breath feels significant”
“it could include [...] a change to my breath”
“I had the awesome feeling of euphoria and would barely breathe (I'd kind of hold my breath and do a light shallow breathing thing).”
Other body sensations included “a slight buzzing sound, like being under water”, “a twitching at the top of your eyelids”, “[a shift] centered around my eyes/vision”, “[a loss of] all feeling in my arms and legs”, “[a] light numbness in my fingers and toes”, and “imbalance”
Relaxation
People reported a lot of feelings around relaxation (11 answers):
“it's like letting my muscles relax into a warm bath”
“A safe place, like a warm home you can take your shoes off and relax in after a long day “
“[the] mental equivalent of being in a fuzzy blanket”
Movement metaphors
These were present in 11 answers describing trance feelings. (They are also popular with hypnotists when they give an induction).
“Drifting, everything flattening and smoothing out, spreading apart, dissolving”
“your mind and body feels like it's descending a high-speed elevator”
“it's like feeling the back of my brain fall/roll”
“It feels like I'm both suspended floating and falling head over tails, like just before you fall asleep”
“it feels like I'm trying to rock-climb the craggy rock walls of a pit I've fallen into (never mind how I've never rock-climbed even a little bit in my life), making some progress as I inhale, then losing my grip on the exhale and catching myself after I've fallen further than I was at the start of the previous inhale, until I finally can't pull myself up and I let go to plummet the rest of the way down.”
The void
Nine people mentioned an emptiness, a feeling of void, maybe akin to ego death in some cases.
“Grey space, outside time”
“Sometimes I go so deep that I disconnect from my body and can't feel arousal or other sensations”
“it's the kind of silent like a heavy snowfall, there isn't anything to echo around. My world is falling and the tist. “
Arousal and euphoria
Maybe because a portion of the people who answered this survey are hypnofetishists, five of them mentioned arousal or euphoria.
“Sometimes I feel so relieved that I am being hypnotized that I cry”
“The feeling is intimate, artistic, and ultimately more sensual than simple physical sex. It's like a sensual dance of giving, taking, guiding, being guided, and it can be incredibly arousing and satisfying on both physical and deeply emotional levels.”
“the blanket gives way to pockets of this rollercoaster euphoria”
“Emotionally, there is a soaring excitement, a moment of ‘Oh my God, it's happening,’ that in some ways really marks my entrance into trance”
Other
Here are a few interesting answers that don’t fit the previous categories:
“It feels like all the best parts of sleep deprivation, without the sleep deprivation.”
“Sometimes I feel like I am in love”
“Sometimes, if I was put under by eye fixation on a crystal, it might feel like I've curled up inside the crystal like it's a shell, watching the sparkles as they reflect and refract the starlight around me.”
“Sometimes, there's not really any of that, and I drop while being made to roll my eyes, which leads me to feel, once I'm under, like I'm looking up toward the top of the inside of my skull.”
Common metaphors
A few metaphors came back often. That is the case of water (4 answers) (“a warm bath”, “sinking to the bottom of the ocean”, “being under water”), blankets (3 answers) (“wrapped in a blanket and yet completely free”, “weight in the chest that creates calm like sleep or a weighted blanket”, “being in a fuzzy blanket”), and space (2 answers) (“Grey space, outside time”, “in space, drifting among the stars in a way that still feels a bit like falling”)
The role of inductions in creating the feelings of trance
One big unanswered question here is how much our culture around hypnosis influences the feelings of trance. Are those metaphors common because hypnotists use them a lot too? Are the feelings of trance the product of explicit suggestions, and if so, how much?
What do you think? This is only what 31 people felt about the trance experience, and as you can see from the above, it’s a little (okay, a lot!) different for everyone! The survey seems to demonstrate what lots in the community have said anecdotally for some time now — the only way to know what trance is like for you is to give it a try. And then tell us below, if you want!
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The Hypnonaut Uncertainty Principle
Philosophically speaking, we are committed to making sure you know how sure we are of the things we tell you. We’re serious about not telling you bullshit, without telling you it’s bullshit..., and there’s gonna be a lot of bullshit. Just because we read it in a book, doesn’t mean it’s true. Even just because we read it in a peer reviewed scientific paper doesn’t mean it’s true, but it’s a lot more likely to be true.
We started writing some of our initial posts and quickly realized that we were qualifying every sentence and decided a post that establishes our baseline and outlines our commitment to identifying fact versus inference versus anecdotal evidence whenever we’re straying from that baseline. Understanding our philosophy is a great place to start.
One reason why we’re pretty wary of “science” here is that the way the erotic hypnosis community and the scientific community practice hypnosis can be quite different. We believe there’s some really fundamental differences in the practices of erotic hypnosis and clinical hypnosis: different goals, different buy in, different power exchange, different cultures and fundamental paradigms. Almost all of the science that exists is referring to practices and research in clinical hypnosis. We see it as tangential research to our community and practices. There’s much to be learned and much that is likely to translate to what we do, but our practices might reproduce similar outcomes, or they might not. Conversely, their methods translated to our community might or might not reproduce similar outcomes.
This is our opinion. Of course, don’t just take us at our word! Just because we saw it and we think it works doesn’t mean it does, or that it it does in a reproducible way. But it is part of our default level of truth.
Default level of truth
So instead of using the 47 “of course this is just our opinion’s” we had in our first post, we decided we’d just let you know what we’re considering a baseline level of truth for our methodology with this project. The erotic hypnosis community has a long and rich history of translating, transforming, and terraforming together that is the resulting blend of semi-pseudo science pilferings, creativity, and outright horniness. Most of what we are going to tell you as factual is the things that are generally agreed upon as true by the community at large and are not contradicted by our own experiences.
When we say X is true, we mean that if you repeat X in the erotic hypnosis community:
people will generally agree it works in most instances,
that X matches anecdotal evidence either in our practice or in the practice of people we know, or that we encountered in the making of this project, and,
that we have no reason to believe that X is not true.
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Now we know what you might be thinking. We’ve told you repeatedly how little is known factually about hypnosis and also that our opinions often diverge from the sentiment in the erotic hypnosis community.
So here’s what we pledge to do when we’re talkin’ non-facts:
When that is not the level of truth we are giving you, we are committed to be explicit about it.
Sometimes there will be published research about a thing, and we’ll tell you about the impact factors of journals in which that research was published.
Sometimes we will say things that match our experience but that is probably going to call a lot of debate if you repeat it. We will warn you of that too.
Sometimes, we will stumble into one of the Great Debates of our community, and we will strive to give you perspective on each side.
And sometimes we will not resist the temptation to give you total bullshit we just made up because it sounds cool or coherent to us. You’ll get the bullshit. But you’ll know when.
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Click here to learn more about the folks behind this blog.
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Our Philosophy
Welcome aboard, fellow Hypnonaut!
Come explore the vast and boundless space of erotic hypnosis with us! Join us weekly as we venture into the abyss, traversing the galaxy and covering everything from hypnosis 101 and the basics, consent and negotiation, to advanced erotic hypnosis topics, including, of course, how to hypnotize people for fun, for sexy times, and for kink.
We’re working to put together an explorer’s guide, a hypnonaut handbook. We’ve started outlining our thoughts and passing them on to a small group of fellow travelers to refine our ideas. This blog is the product of the feedback we’ve received from them. We invite you along on this journey with us; you can just read along for fun, or you can find one or several enthusiastically consenting partners and join our experiments. You can share your ideas and experiences, try out our exercises, and let us know your thoughts here or on twitter.
Our goal is to get you started, debrief our own observations (for science!), and ultimately, to pass on the idea that the only limit to the erotic hypnosis universe is your own imagination.
So! Is this for you? Find out as we lay out our philosophy:
Intuition and beauty over dogma
Hypnosis is an art form, a give and take. It’s flowy and there’s endless room for exploration. We want to see you traverse that space in the relationships that you build with your play partners, treating it like a dance in which both partners are equally important. Only through this back and forth, giving and receiving, observing and leading, can the fundamental intimacy of our scenes be forged.
You’re doing it right
As long as you’re doing it consensually, you’re doing it right. There’s no wrong way to be a hypnotist. Intimacy and fun are the only goals. There’s no wrong way to be a hypnotee, only experience in surrendering to trance. Your limit is your intuition; if you can feel it, you can do it. Our goal is not to make you into copies of us but rather to help you to become better mind explorers than we are, whether you're a tist, a tee, or a switch.
Don’t follow, make-believe it up
You’ll learn the transmission of flow instead of memorizing steps or scripted inductions. We want to teach you how to cook, not just how to follow recipes. In hypnosis, the whole universe is always left to invent, every invention is an opportunity to discover more.
Anyone can be a hypnonaut
How hypnosis is usually taught is directly derivative of clinical hypnosis and as a result can be stilted, and formulaic. This makes the barrier for entry feel very high and creates an intimidating atmosphere that discourages a lot of people from giving hypnosis a try. Further, the arbitrary knowledge that is taught is often used as a gatekeeping mechanism in the erotic hypnosis community, where someone’s familiarity with made-up technical-sounding vocabulary (“transderivational search”, anyone?) is sometimes seen as a proxy to their hypnotic skills. We believe, on the contrary, that what we know pales in comparison to what is yet to be discovered. If you’re curious about hypnosis, you’re already one of us explorers.
Facts exist (but they might be difficult to prove)
One of our top priorities is to make it clear when we are stating a scientific fact and when we are giving a somewhat educated guess. In reality, people are certain of next to nothing about hypnosis, regardless of certification or clinical degree. But the community as a whole has tested a lot of things and came up with its own diverse set of theories and anecdotal evidence. The erotic hypnosis scene in particular is full of extremely creative people that made up a lot of fun things to try. We will strive to credit them for what we teach when possible.
Context should be explained
Not only will we always strive to explain where we are coming from, how we arrived at our opinions, and why we believe what we do, but we’ll also aim to acknowledge our biases whenever relevant to the conversation. We are all the sum of our experiences, and we plan to include relevant perspectives and insights that helped to shape the opinions we have today.
We will also aim to explain the risk particular activities might hold. Risk exists on a continuum and mileage may vary. We will do our best to explain why we think some activities carry a higher risk than others and discuss relevant consent and negotiation ideas to minimize and mitigate risk.
Inclusivity
With hypnosis, it’s much easier to expand beyond the confines of our current physical forms and current states. Playing around with gender identity, receiving pain and pleasure without physical contact, altering sensory input are all things that can be done with hypnosis and don’t require that the body and mind match the concepts being explored in a given scene.
So, we believe the breadth of hypnosis lends itself well to inclusivity and we will always seek to be as inclusive in our ideas as we can. Neurodivergence, disability, race, sexuality, and gender are all marginalized subsets we aim to be deliberately inclusive/accommodating of as we compile the material we’ve learned along the way. We actively will seek specific feedback on this and encourage anyone with ideas to be better at this to share them.
We’re all explorers. Join us, Hypnonaut!
Above all, we will empower you to do your own exploration, only limited by your creativity, and to find for yourself what works and what's hot, outside of the limits of what others have decided before you.