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!