Blue Suede; He Stayed

Kate Sloan

I’m a sucker for physical objects that represent relationships. I still occasionally wear an ex-boyfriend’s boxers, clutch a stuffed bunny that a beau bought me when I can’t sleep, sigh contentedly at an emerald ring gifted by an ex-girlfriend on our first Valentine’s Day. These things mean something to me, even when the relationships from which they surfaced no longer do. What they mean is this: I loved and was loved. It happened. There is physical proof.

But these are all objects which outlasted relationships. It’s rare, in my life, for a relationship to outlast an object it contains.

When my Sir bought me my first collar – not my first-ever collar, you understand, but the first collar I’d worn as an agreed-upon, mutually meaningful symbol of a D/s dynamic folded into a romance – no discussion was had about how long we foresaw the object lasting, and what we would do if and when it needed replacing. The closest we got was a conversation about what we would do if I accidentally lost my collar: dropped it down a subway grate, forgot it at a restaurant, lost sight of it in a TSA tussle. We agreed that we would be sad in such a case, but that we would soldier on and get another one, because it was the symbolism of the item, not the item itself, that ultimately mattered.

“I don’t think we would get the same one; I would want to get one that was a better reflection of our relationship at that time,” my Sir told me, and those words stuck in my head. He, with his history of fewer but much longer relationships than I had had, believed in our future – in our ability to persevere and grow as a couple. It had been so long since I had done such a thing that I hardly believed it was still possible for me.

Our first collar was suede with a silver heart at the front. We chose it after multiple long slogs through the kinky corners of the internet, fixating on it for its bright cobalt color and its simple, versatile aesthetic. Weirdly, although I knew from past experience the kinds of things that can happen to suede when it gets wet and well-worn, it didn’t occur to me that such things would happen to this collar, too. It seemed as though the symbolic importance of the item would permeate its pores and prevent any harm from befalling it. The night he gave it to me, I wore it to a crowded concert in chilly New York, double-dousing it in sweat, snow, and maybe some stray droplets of bourbon as we moshed and kissed and laughed.

It didn’t take long for the royal blue suede to darken to a formidable navy, especially given that I tended to wear the collar in sweaty situations: sex with my Sir when he was nearby, or nervewracking days when he was far away and I needed some encouragement to get through my work. The collar’s color changed so much that one of its makers remarked on it with alarm when he saw it on me at an industry event. I just laughed; I liked owning such a tangible sign of my relationship’s cozy comfort, its establishedness. But part of me missed that bright blue.

At some point, my Sir and I began discussing the possibility of replacing my collar. We were both, at once, sad and excited about it; the beginning of a new chapter inevitably also brings the end of another. Much like trading in the irrational distractibility of New Relationship Energy for something warmer and sturdier, it felt bittersweet but like a definite step forward, one we wanted to take.

We once again combed the internet for collars. We looked at fancy ones, cutesy ones, over-the-top ones. There were a few criteria: it had to be blue, it had to have a heart on it, and it had to be comfortable enough for all-day wear but easy to take off quickly, because I don’t wear it on a 24/7 or even everyday basis. It was surprisingly hard to find collars that fit these parameters and weren’t ugly as fuck, so once again, we gravitated to that L’Amour-Propre collar we’d chosen in the first place.

I thought it would work better for our purposes if it was regular leather – as opposed to suede – so my Sir reached out to the company to see if they could make that happen for us. They had to visit their leather supplier and pick out a piece for us, which they were happy to do. We pored over the one photo they sent us of the leather, trying to discern whether it was perfect or not quite right. We trusted the process. We started getting excited.

It was easier than I expected to transfer the psychic energy of one collar into another. It helped that we stuck to traditions from last time (we earth signs love our rituals and routines). Like our first collaring, the second one happened on the night of a Hippo Campus concert; my Sir pulled the beautiful piece of blue leather out of an elegant watch case he’d stored it in; he stood behind me as I knelt, and slid it around my neck. We went and looked at in together in the mirror. Tears may have been shed.

My new collar hasn’t had time yet to absorb the scent of my skin, my sweat, and my perfume. It hasn’t yet molded to the shape of my neck, tarnished from use, or rippled on the inside. But it still carries with it the weight of my relationship, my D/s dynamic, my love, so it’s more valuable to me than many objects I’ve had for years.

Intimate Intercourse: Hypnokink (Part 3)

Kate Sloan

Hello again! Welcome back to Intimate Intercourse, a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. This week we’re discussing hypnokink! This is the final part of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here and part 2 here. In this instalment, we discuss combining hypnosis with other kinks, how to ensure ongoing consent in a hypno scene, hypno aftercare, resources we recommend, how to cultivate a hypnotic voice, and the role intoxication plays in our hypno play. Enjoy! Content note for this post: hypnosis (obviously), impact play, Daddy Dom/little girl roleplay, sleepy sex, bondage, axe violence (!), and marijuana/intoxication.

Kate Sloan: So – we’ve been talking about this a little bit already, but – how do you like to combine hypnosis with our other kinks? I know we’ve combined it with impact a fair bit…

Super Sleepy: I think the best combination that we did with impact was pretty recently. You had said that impact I was giving you was already making you feel trancey – because, as you alluded to earlier, flow state, subspace, trance, they’re all names for gradations of the same feeling, the same state. And so, sometimes the brain recognizes it as one or another one or whatever, but it’s kind of the same. It’s a hyperfocused state where a lot of stuff fades away and things feel really good, and like they’re working. And the particular thing that you’re focusing on, and the particular emotional valence of it, are dependent on the context. But you were feeling like the impact I was giving you over the phone was pretty trancey. Maybe it was the rhythm, maybe it was just your mood that night, but we decided to lean into that and actually use that impact as an induction. I think that worked out really well, and I’m really looking forward to doing that in person, where we use impact as a way to make you really sleepy.

KS: We also combine hypnosis with DD/lg a lot, but not super overtly; just kind of ‘cause our relationship is DD/lg.

SS: Yeah. Daddy often wants to make his little girl sleepy before bedtime, and then often fuck her, maybe while she’s somewhat unaware of that. You know?

KS: [giggling] Mmhmm! A lot of people are concerned about consent with hypnosis…

SS: Same.

KS: So, you do the pre-scene negotiation, but how do you ensure consent when the scene is actually going on?

SS: Ongoing consent. Yeah. This is one of the toughest things to do. It’s similar to ensuring ongoing consent in any case where you’re gagging somebody or you’re taking away some obvious way that they’re able to show that – blindfolding them or putting a bag over their head or a mask or whatever. The best practice, and what I try to do, is phrase the suggestions with safeguards. So, your trance trigger, for instance, originally and every time it’s reinforced, is phrased like: “You will get sleepy and trancey and go into trance for me, as long as you’re in a place where it’s safe to do that.” If you’re not, you don’t have to do that, and also, if you don’t consent, then it’s obviously not safe, so you can opt out of it. The other thing you can do is, you can talk to somebody that’s in trance. They won’t quite be the same as if they’re in the negotiation mode, or fully aware of what’s going on. It’s sort of like talking to somebody that’s in subspace; you gotta phrase things very clearly, and you have to be aware of the differences in their mindset, but you can – while keeping somebody in trance – do check-ins, as long as you know how to talk to them about what you’re checking in about. So I do that a lot.

KS: What would be an example of that?

SS: An example of that would be, if you had somebody in hypnotic bondage, you could say something like, “It seems like you’re feeling really good right now, and that not being able to move is making you feel happy and comfortable. Is that right?” And if you hear an enthusiastic “yes,” that’s great. If you hear a hesitation, that’s when you might want to either press further or bring the person out of trance, because you’re not usually gonna get a “no” in that case. You’re using hypnotic language, and the person’s in trance; you wanna listen for the tiny hesitations. We’ve been in a lot of scenes where you’ve hesitated, and usually it’s like, “My phone is falling,” or “I need to charge my phone,” or whatever. It’s not a gigantic consent issue, but there’s these tiny hesitations, which, in a normal scene, would maybe be much easier to hear; you gotta listen a little bit harder in a hypno scene, though.

KS: And we established a safeword, which I don’t even remember now…

SS: Purple!

KS: Yeah? Okay. I think we should have it be any color that isn’t red, green, or yellow, because the fact that I couldn’t remember it now makes me worry that I wouldn’t remember it in trance.

SS: Sure, yeah.

KS: So that was just supposed to mean “I need to talk to you, so I need you to take me out of trance so I can talk to you.” I don’t remember what happened that prompted that, but there’s occasionally been stuff like, one of my roommate’s cats is in my room and I have to let her out, or…

SS: Yeah, there’s stuff like that, or, do you wanna talk about the time that you had an abreaction, like a really scary thing happened in a visualization?

KS: Yeah. You were making me picture going down in an elevator, as a deepener, and you had the elevator door open on a few different floors, and there was no reason for this to happen – I hadn’t been watching a scary movie or anything – but I saw this nun dressed in head-to-toe white on one of the floors, with the habit over her face, she had no face… It was really scary!

SS: That’s creepy, yeah.

KS: It was some American Horror Story shit. And then, when I got all the way down to the bottom of the building, I still felt like the nun was in my room, holding an axe over me. I couldn’t open my eyes, ‘cause I was in trance, so I couldn’t check to see if there was actually a nun in my room. But yeah, I got really freaked out, and I didn’t know how to communicate that to you, ‘cause that’s quite complicated and weird, and you were trying to do a sexy thing, and I was just panicking. Pretty weird.

SS: Yeah. Stuff like that can happen, especially if you’re having people visualize situations and you don’t control very tightly what you’re telling them. It’s good to have ways to communicate that, even if the person is in trance. Reminding people who are in trance that their safewords will still work, that they can still say them… I would be hesitant to ever take away somebody’s ability to talk in a hypno context. To make somebody unable to talk – that’s possible, but then you have to figure out alternate safe-signals, and that’s a pretty risky thing to do.

KS: Especially over the phone, yeah.

SS: Over the phone, don’t do it. Like, just don’t do it. I would never do it. One more thing on this: one thing I always worry about is getting disconnected. This comes from, I think, my Omegle experiences, also, because I would trance people on Omegle and they would disconnect at very random times, probably on purpose sometimes, probably accidentally other times – whatever, internet issues, people refreshing the page or whatever. But having somebody in trance and not being able to bring them up correctly and give them proper aftercare is not good. It’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for the top, it’s not good for the bottom, it’s not good for the brain, really. So, even though the physical risks are usually pretty low – the brain will realize that’s happening and usually wake itself up and it’s fine – it doesn’t feel good. So I’m always worried we’ll get disconnected, and it has happened a few times, but usually not in the middle of a situation where you’re bound and wouldn’t be able to answer the phone. That’s the times I worry about it the most.

KS: Yeah. I think it would be okay.

SS: It would probably be fine.

KS: Yeah. What does hypno aftercare look like?

SS: Hypno aftercare is pretty verbal, in my experience. Touch, if you can do it, but if you’re long-distance, it’s pretty verbal. It’s a lot of making sure the person is actually awake, if they want to be. Sometimes we do hypno and then you immediately go to sleep – I hypnotize you in order to make you go to sleep for real – but in the cases that it’s not like that, and we’re doing aftercare, you wanna make sure the person is awake and able to go about their night or their day in a way where they’re not gonna hear suggestions in the world and still feel really suggestible. You wanna get them back to a rational baseline for their personality, and you want to uninstall any temporary triggers and make sure that you leave them in an operable state.

KS: Yeah. I actually don’t really like the times when you put me to sleep and then we immediately go to sleep. I’m only just thinking about this now. Because what ends up happening every single time is, the phone going dead startles me, and then I wake up and I’m alone and we haven’t done aftercare, and I’m really sad.

SS: Okay, so let’s not do that.

KS: Yeah. ‘Cause it’s also subspacey me feeling like a failure because I didn’t do the thing I was supposed to do. So it’s just a lot of bad feelings.

SS: Yeah, let’s not do that anymore.

KS: Yeah. Anything else we didn’t talk about?

SS: Resources!

KS: Yeah. ‘Cause we’re not doing any kind of introductory or instructional stuff in this interview, really.

SS: Right, yeah. Go read Mind Play by Mark Wiseman. Hypnotic Amnesia by Pynch and Lee Allure. If you’re in a big city, there’s probably either a conference or a regular hypnokinky meetup on FetLife that you can find. If you’re not, go to one in a big city. There’s a lot of hypnokinky people out there. A final thing on resources: the Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive is really great, and there’s tons of great stories there, and you should read them and enjoy them, but what they say is kind of true – it’s erotica, it’s porn, it’s not how you should actually conduct yourself, in terms of actually running real hypno scenes. So, read it, enjoy it, jerk off to it, but if you actually wanna do stuff, there are practical resources that I just mentioned.

KS: Oh, I wanted to ask you about your voice.

SS: [sexy voice] What about it?

KS: Have I asked you about your voice in every interview we’ve done for this series?

SS: Maybe.

KS: Tell me about the hypno voice. What’s up with the voice? What do you do differently?

SS: I don’t know! I don’t know. What do I do differently, little one?

KS: I don’t know. I thought you would have a description on tap.

SS: People who do a lot of hypnosis develop a voice, generally, to do it with, that is different from their normal voice. It’s useful to do that because, if you want to get somebody trancey, you can just drop into that voice and they’ll start going there right away. [deeper, slower voice] Like, if I start talking to Kate like this, she’ll probably already start to blink, and get a little bit sleepy, and that’s okay… [regular voice] Open. Good. So… I have a voice! It’s useful! But I don’t know how to describe it, really, ‘cause it’s sort of just a slower, more calming version of my voice. You know?

KS: Yeah. I like it. Oh, one more thing! You often have me smoke weed before we do hypno stuff, because we found that it makes me more suggestible and go into trance more easily.

SS: We did. Most people don’t find that. Most people find that alcohol and drugs make them less susceptible to hypnosis, not more, because for a lot of people, it makes it harder for them to focus, or it dulls their senses or whatever. So that’s a very individualized thing, and I would say, if you do stuff with drugs and also hypnosis, it’s partner-by-partner and you gotta experiment. We have found, in our very particular case of you being a subject, that it generally makes it easier for you to drop for me.

KS: But there are limits. If I get too high then that’s not always good. Then I can’t focus.

SS: Right, exactly.

KS: That’s all my questions, unless there’s something else you wanted to talk about. I feel like you just wanna go trance me right now.

SS: Mmhmm. I do. One other thing is, the common misconception is that hypnosis is mind control; there’s a lot of media that reinforces that idea. And it’s not. It’s giving someone suggestions that they are consenting to. On the flipside of that, there’s another misconception, which is that you can’t make somebody do anything in hypnosis that they don’t want to do, which a lot of abusers use in order to cover up consent violations, and is also not true. So the consent ethics are complicated, as they often are, and I would encourage people, if they’re trying this for the first time, to go into it with really highly highly negotiated scenes.

KS: Yeah. I think of it like subspace, in the sense that you can also make people do things they don’t wanna do, of their free will, in subspace, because that’s just how abusive dynamics work sometimes, and I don’t think it’s any different.

SS: Yeah. It’s a very good analogy. I think that’s basically right. And so you should treat hypno scenes like kink scenes, in terms of consent, and you shouldn’t do what the non-kinky erotic hypnosis community does, which is, like, ignore everything that the kink community has learned about consent negotiations and stuff.

KS: Yup. I very much appreciate that you’re always very careful about that stuff.

SS: Yeah.

KS: Okay. Thank you!

SS: You’re welcome, little one.

KS: I love you.

SS: I love you too.

Intimate Intercourse: Hypnokink (Part 2)

Kate Sloan

Hi again! Welcome back to Intimate Intercourse, a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. This week we’re discussing hypnokink! This is part 2 of a 3-part interview; you can read part 1 here. In this instalment, we discuss the difficulties of disclosing a hypnosis kink, our first hypno scene together, what makes someone a good hypnotic subject, trance triggers, hypnotherapy, and some of the sexy things we like to do with hypnosis. Enjoy! Content notes for this post: hypnosis (obviously), anxiety, consensually “drugging” someone’s drink, bondage, face-slapping, addiction, bullying, medical play, and doing kink in public.

Kate Sloan: Were you nervous to tell me that this was a kink of yours when we started dating?

Super Sleepy: I am always nervous to tell people that, yeah.

KS: Why?

SS: I’m always nervous about it because there’s a lot of misconceptions, and the first time I told a partner about it, they didn’t react very well, so I think, because of that, I’m extra cautious. But even if that hadn’t happened, I know about the misconceptions, and I know that a lot of people, especially people that aren’t that experienced with kink, might not know how to take it.

KS: Yeah. You told me pretty casually. I think I said something about how you were staring into my soul on our first date, and you were like, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about my hypnosis kink.” And I thought you were joking, ‘cause you said it so casually. I was like, “Wait, really?”

SS: [laughing] Why did you think that was a joke? Like, why would that be funny?

KS: ‘Cause, I dunno, we were just casually talking about how you were staring me down, and we had been texting about our kinks and stuff already, so… I also don’t think I had met anyone before that who was into it, to my knowledge, so I wasn’t sure whether or not to take you seriously.

SS: Yeah, that makes sense.

KS: And then we did our first trance scene over the phone, by accident. How did that make you feel?

SS: Uhh, a lot of ways. So, what happened was, you have a winking kink – I think people that read your blog probably know that, if they’re paying attention! – and I had been practicing winking at you and sending you lots of videos of that, because I was very into you. Still am. And for some reason, you decided to open those all in QuickTime Player and have them all open at once, in little video player windows, and then one night you were experimenting with turning the loop mode on and playing them all at once, and we were talking about how that could potentially be hypnotic, or we could do a scene with that. And I guess I dropped a little bit into a hypno-toppy kind of voice while I was describing what I would do if we were doing that, hypothetically. And then… what happened from your end?

KS: I got really trancey, but I didn’t really have any experience with that, so I knew what it was, but I was like, “Ahh! What do I do? Is this okay?”

SS: Yeah. So I felt a little weird about that, because we hadn’t specifically negotiated it, and I didn’t want to be unsafe and I didn’t want you to go to a place that you didn’t want to go to, but at the same time, I felt like, I don’t want to make your first experience of this thing a scary thing. So I felt like the right thing to do would be – ‘cause we’d talked about it a little bit – to guide you into it, and out of it, calmly and safely, without panicking. So that’s what I did, and didn’t do any suggestions or anything, just really in and out of it, and then we talked about how it felt.

KS: Were you surprised at how easily I went into trance?

SS: Yes, very.

KS: Is that uncommon?

SS: I don’t know. I’ve only done trance in person with 4 partners. That’s not a very large sample size, so I don’t really know how common it is. Especially when you’re playing with another person’s kink and looping video, like, it was the first time I’d done any of that, so I don’t know. But I was definitely surprised that you got trancey so fast, and without a lot of pre-talk and without a lot of the other setup that I would normally do.

KS: Yeah. I wonder… I have been in flow state a lot of times, because I’m a musician and a writer, and that’s a large part of how I do that, so I wonder if that played into it at all.

SS: Yeah. From what I know about it, people who are more imaginative, creative, intelligent, capable of flow state, are easier subjects in general, because their brains are practiced at going there.

KS: And I’m also just… I go into subspace really easily, and I go into little space really easily, so maybe that’s just a thing about me. I don’t know why.

SS: Right.

KS: I feel like, when you wanted to give me a trance trigger, it was almost like when you wanted to give me a collar. It was equivalent in some ways. So tell me about that. Why and how did you want to do that?

SS: I gave you a trance trigger that I can use to make you trancey whenever I want, and it was a similar decision to collaring you or deciding on honorifics or stuff like that. Putting something in someone’s brain, semi-permanently, that will let you control them is a pretty big decision. It’s a pretty big mutual decision, ideally. And I wanted it, not because I didn’t want to do inductions anymore – most of the time, we still do inductions, even though it’s not technically necessary. I wanted it because I wanted the ability to drop you whenever I wanted to. I wanted that comfortable level of control over you. As a dominant-leaning person, and a very hypnokinky person, it means a lot to me.

KS: Yeah, I like it. I like that it feels like it proves our trust in each other.

SS: Yeah. How did you feel about it when we discussed it?

KS: I remember being surprised that you hadn’t brought it up earlier. But I think that I didn’t know enough about hypnokink to know that that’s kind of a big deal, at least for some people, so to me it was just like, “Why didn’t you do this before?” but I mean, it makes sense that you waited.

SS: How long did I wait? I don’t remember.

KS: I don’t know. I don’t think I have any journal entries about that.

SS: I think a couple months?

KS: Yeah, two or three months. So, you mentioned being dominant-leaning, and you’re switchy, and you’re switchy in this kink as well. Do you prefer trancing people, or being in trance?

SS: Uhh, they’re both great. Such a fuckin’ switch! They’re both really good. When I started exploring this kink, I read primarily male-submissive fantasy stuff. That is because I didn’t think I would ever be able to do it, so, as a fantasy, being controlled and having my mind be taken away, or my thoughts be taken away, was very attractive to me, because I think a lot, and I’m very in my head, very cerebral. But once I started exploring real-life kink communities and online kink communities with real people instead of just fantasies, I was almost immediately on the other side of the slash. The nights that I would try to be a subject [on Omegle] never went very well, and the nights that I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna study up and try to be a top tonight” were much more satisfying, sexually and in terms of what I actually got to talk to people about and experience. I don’t know; it’s very good either way, but in terms of my real-life experience, I’ve been a top far more.

KS: You mentioned being cerebral, and that, I think, is a large part of why I enjoy hypnosis, now, too. I have anxiety and depression and stuff, so a lot of times, I have thoughts that I don’t want to be having.

SS: Yeah.

KS: And I find it really helpful in that way. So I guess I want to know how you view it as a tool, not just for sexy kink stuff but for the more lifestyle-kink side of our relationship.

SS: That’s an area that I’m still not 100% comfortable with, because a lot of people in the erotic hypnosis/hypnokink community – like a lot of kink communities – are like, “This can be therapeutic, but it’s not therapy.” And hypnotherapy is an entire field. There’s a lot of training involved in it, and it’s very complicated. There have been some books written by people that have seemed to take concepts from hypnotherapy and try to apply them to sexy things, which included age regression and other stuff that a lot of people consider far too risky to do in kink contexts, and I consider a lot of things that would be used by hypnotherapists to be far too risky to do in kink contexts. If you’re manipulating and playing with somebody’s body, you can see what you’re doing, in a lot of ways. You can see and feel and sense what you’re doing. If you are messing around inside of somebody’s brain that is not your brain, you really don’t know what you’re doing, and so there’s a lot of psychological risks in this kind of play if you don’t limit the kinds of suggestions that you’re doing and the kinds of places that you’re taking somebody when they’re in a suggestible state. So, for me, I think I’ve kept the lifestyle, non-sexy suggestions to very simple, positive, affirmation-style stuff, like, not anything involving re-experiencing or regressing into specific memories, because I know that there are risks to that, or behavior modification and addiction are kinks for some people, and I’m nervous about those… I’m nervous about any permanent personality changes… All of that stuff, I don’t know enough to mess around with it.

KS: Yeah. I was thinking of stuff like, when I’m having a bad anxiety day and you tell me I’m safe, which, in some ways, is like foreplay for me, because my anxiety is a huge part of what Emily Nagoski would call my “sexual brakes,” so I find that helpful for both sexy and non-sexy reasons – which is true of most of my kinks.

SS: Yeah. I think that’s pretty low-risk. I think hypnotizing someone and telling them that they’re safe, or that they’re okay, or that it’s okay for them to be happy, or that they’re comfortable, is pretty low-risk. I think modifying somebody’s personality, or telling them in trance that they’re getting more and more addicted to you as a person, or even the feeling of you being together, is a lot riskier.

KS: I always appreciate how conscientious you are about this stuff. It makes me feel much safer doing it.

SS: Thanks!

KS: Okay. What are your favorite things to do with me that are sexy in hypnosis?

SS: Hmm. Okay. I like making you really blank, like your brain is just this total empty blank slate that I can fuck, because I also have a sleepy kink, and I also just like when you’re compliant and useable for me. So if your brain is blank, and your body is splayed out, and I can use it however I want, that is very good. I like the times that we’ve done anything involving hypnotic drug play stuff – so like, a couple of times, I’ve tied a food item of yours, or water or something, to some kind of post-hypnotic response, like having your water turn you on more the more of it you drink, because it’s been drugged. That’s very good. I like the few times that we’ve played with amnesia a lot. It’s not overtly sexy to have somebody forget something, but there’s a lot of sexy things you can do with it, like making somebody forget that they’re naked, or forget that they’re wearing clothes, or make somebody forget their name, or your name, and then tease them about that in a D/s way… Arousal triggers are incredibly useful; that’s probably the most common thing we do, is having some word or phrase or set of numbers turn you on more and more, and then less. Like, occasionally I’ve used a 1-to-10 scale to turn you on, and then I’ve teased you by turning it down when you really wanted to be turned on more. It’s frustrating and useful. One of the things that we also do a lot, because we’re long-distance, is what is often called I guess like a guided-meditation style of trance, or a guided-roleplay style of trance, where you’re in trance and, because you’re in trance, your brain interprets words in a different way and can create sensations from that, so you can do sensation play where, because we’re far apart, I can tell you that I’m touching parts of you, or that you’re feeling certain touches on your body that you’re not physically feeling, but you can feel them in a more real way than normally if we were just having phone sex. So I like that a lot.

KS: Yup. Hypnosis is very good for long-distance. It’s a handy kink to have.

SS: Yeah. What are some ones I didn’t mention that you’ve really enjoyed?

KS: Bondage.

SS: Oh, yeah. Fuck yes.

KS: Yeah. It took me a really long time to realize that I have a bondage kink, because it just seemed so basic and obvious, and also I was often pairing it with other things that I also enjoyed, so I didn’t know where the arousal was coming from, but it’s become increasingly clear that I’m turned on by even just the sensation of being restrained, even if nothing else is happening. So it’s been fun to play with that. It makes me feel really submissive, which is nice.

SS: Hypnotic bondage is sort of like, telling somebody in trance that parts of their body are immobile, or feel like they’re tied down or restrained, and a brain that’s in trance is usually very cooperative with that. So if you tell somebody in trance that their arms are tied down and they can’t move them, and you ask them to try, it’s very likely that they won’t be able to move those limbs.

KS: Yeah. I also really like fractionation, which is not really a sexy suggestion, like what we’re talking about, but being pulled in and out of trance really fast makes me feel like you’re literally fucking my brain.

SS: Yup.

KS: It’s really disorienting, in much the same way that getting slapped across the face can be, which is nice, ‘cause I really like being in subspace, and you really like when I’m in subspace.

SS: Yeah. The sounds you make when I fractionate you are as good as the sounds you make when I fuck you.

KS: [giggling] It’s always the same sounds, too.

SS: Mmhmm!

KS: I can’t even change them. We’ve also occasionally enjoyed mixing hypnosis with roleplay – like, hysteria stuff and other types of roleplay.

SS: Yeah, there are certain roleplay scenarios where it’s even more exciting if the person roleplaying the dominant or toppy role also knows how to hypnotize you. So like, a school bully that pushes you into a closet, that also can hypnotize you to give him your homework, or a doctor that is trying to get you to come because it’s part of your treatment plan, but also can hypnotize you to make you feel a little more comfortable spreading your legs. You know?

KS: [giggling subbily] Yeah. I know.

SS: Aww.

KS: We also, in the past few months, have been playing with doing hypno stuff in public – which is really interesting, because I think there are very few kinks that you could do in public and be reasonably confident that no one’s gonna know what you’re doing, and you’re not gonna rope anyone into it without their consent. ‘Cause it can really just look like two people having a conversation, or one person taking a nap in the other person’s lap. It looks very innocuous. And I know you really enjoy doing that. What do you like about those public scenes?

SS: Yeah. I don’t really think I have an exhibitionism kink at all. I just like the totality of the control of that. I like that I can be out with you and I can use your trigger, or I can induce you quietly by looking at you or touching your shoulder or your hair, and make you fall asleep on me. Once, we played with hypnosis in addition to a remote-controlled vibe in your cunt, and that’s just a very discreet, very hot fucking thing, to be able to whisper in someone’s ear about how they’re feeling like you’re fucking them, and also have something on their clit. I mean, I don’t know. If people don’t get why that’s hot, I don’t know, I don’t get it.

KS: [laughing] Yeah, that’s fun. We should do that more.

SS: Yeah.

KS: It’s getting cold now, though. We’re gonna have to go to, like, a mall or something.

SS: Okay.

Check back on Friday for the last instalment of this interview, in which we’ll be talking about combining hypnosis with other kinks, how to ensure ongoing consent in a hypno scene, hypno aftercare, resources we recommend, how to cultivate a hypnotic voice, and the role intoxication plays in our hypno play!

Intimate Intercourse: Hypnokink (Part 1)

Kate Sloan

Hello! Intimate Intercourse is a series where I interview my boyfriend/Sir/daddy, who goes by Super Sleepy Dude, about various topics related to sex and kink. Previously we’ve talked about phone sex and Daddy Dom/little girl kink; this time we’re discussing erotic hypnosis! I’ve split this interview up into 3 parts, which will go up over the course of this week. This first part is about how my partner got into hypnosis, what he finds hot about it, and the basic components that make up a hypno scene. Hope you like it! P.S. We’re not getting into the basics of hypnosis very much in this series, and we would recommend that you read the book Mind Play by Mark Wiseman if you want to know more about how to actually hypnotize someone. Content notes for this post: hypnosis (obviously), brief mentions of bondage and impact play.

Kate Sloan: Are you excited to talk about hypnokink?

Super Sleepy: Yes, always! It’s my fave kink!

KS: Okay. So, what is hypnokink, and how does it differ from erotic hypnosis?

SS: Oh, gosh. I don’t know that it does. Hypnokink, erotic hypnosis, recreational hypnosis, are all phrases that are thrown around by similar communities, and there’s a Venn diagram of overlapping people that participate in each of them. It seems to me, from what I’ve read and participated in, that “recreational hypnosis” generally refers to people who do hypnosis for fun, not for therapeutic reasons, but it’s not always sexual. “Erotic hypnosis” is obviously sexual; people doing it for sexual reasons. And then “hypnokink,” I think, is pretty interchangeable – but the distinction between erotic hypnosis and hypnokink seems to be that some people identify with erotic hypnosis as somewhat of a vanilla sex act, and people who identify as hypnokinky, or hypnokinksters, tend to recognize that it is a kink.

KS: Interesting. Tell me about how you originally got interested in it.

SS: Okay. Happily! When I was a kid, I would watch cartoons and movies and stuff, and there’s a lot of ‘80s and ‘90s cartoons and Disney movies – like Scooby-Doo and Aladdin and The Jungle Book – that have hypnosis as a plot device. And always, during those moments – I remember it the most with Aladdin – I would feel very, very intensely interested in those things. Like, I didn’t have the vocabulary for “I am getting turned on,” and I don’t think my dick was necessarily getting hard, but I was very interested: leaning forward, paying attention to that shit. And I remember, in 5th grade, there was a policy in my school where, if you got done all your work, you could pick up any encyclopedia and read whatever you wanted…

KS: [giggling]

SS: What?!

KS: That’s so cute!

SS: You could read whatever. Read the dictionary, or the encyclopedia, or any of the books on the shelf. And I found myself drawn to the “H” one, and to the “HY” one… I was like, “Oh, wow, hypnosis! Weird! What’s up with that?” And then I was incredibly hard and incredibly turned on in the middle of class, and I was like, “Oh, shit, fuck. Close that!” And that’s about the time that I started Googling stuff and trying to figure out why hypnosis, and the idea of mind control and controlling people’s thoughts/minds/bodies with words, was such a hot idea to me.

KS: And you told me that for a while, you didn’t think that it was real, or that you could actually do it, and then eventually you learned how to do it. Can you tell me about that?

SS: Yeah. When I started Googling it, one of the first things that any baby hypnokinkster will likely come upon is the Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive; that’s the big site and it’s been around for a long time, and on the front page of that site, there’s a statement about how it’s all fantasy and it’s not real, and I think that that, combined with probably stuff from Wikipedia and stuff from Penn & Teller’s show Bullshit!, all of which I was consuming at that time, was like, “Okay, well, this isn’t a real thing, and you can’t do it, but it’s still really hot to me, so I’ll read this erotica and I’ll fantasize about it and masturbate to it but it’s probably not something I’ll ever be able to do because it doesn’t exist.”

KS: And then how did you learn how to do it?

SS: Good question. I think a couple of years later, in my late teens/early twenties, I started branching out a bit more – not just reading erotica but finding communities of hypnokinksters on websites like Tumblr and Sleepychat and Hypbook and FetLife and Omegle. People were spread out all over the place, but these places were all overlapping, and if you used the same terms, you could find community in all these places at that time. In spaces like that, in live-chat spaces and on Tumblr where people were posting scene logs and stuff, it was very obvious that people were doing it for real. It wasn’t just fantasy. I think one of the first people that I read was H-Sleepingirl. She posted a lot of scene logs from parties in New England and New York, and the New York hypnosis group on FetLife was constantly posting about how they were doing parties or trancing people. And also, on Omegle, it’s a chat website where you can flag what terms you want to chat about, and I was flagging with “erotic hypnosis,” “hypnokink,” all these terms, and there were people on there that clearly wanted to do scenes, and that’s how I learned to do it, is by chatting with people, and trying stuff I had read about on Tumblr and in other places, and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

KS: That’s gotta be different, doing it in text chat versus doing it in real-time.

SS: It is! It’s super different, yeah. There are people that are more susceptible to being hypnotized in text versus audio versus in person, based on their modalities, essentially, and there are people that can’t go into trance in any of those various things, or for whom it’s less likely.

KS: Tell me what is sexy to you about me being in trance, or about putting me into trance.

SS: Sure. The hot thing about hypnotizing you is that it is a form of control, but it is control of your brain. It’s really hot when I strap you down, because I have more control over your body, or when I hit you, because that puts you into a more submissive place, where it’s easier for me to tell you what to do… but with trance, it’s bypassing, a lot of the time, the conscious mind or the critical factor, so it’s hot because I can suggest that you do things and you’ll respond much more quickly and without a lot of questioning of the commands that you’re given. Also because I can make you do things with your brain that you wouldn’t think to do on your own, or that you would think were ridiculous if you were fully conscious.

KS: This is a basic question: can you explain the components of a hypno scene?

SS: Yeah. Not every scene will have these components, but this is probably generally relevant; most scenes will have them. You’re gonna start with a negotiation of what’s allowed, what’s acceptable. Some people don’t want to be touched during hypnosis, some people do; some people have existing triggers that they don’t want used, some people have existing triggers that they do want used; et cetera. So, a normal BDSM-style negotiation of, like, “What are you consenting to? What is okay? What’s not okay? How are we going to get out of this if we need to? What will you need after this?” That’s step 1. Once you have that, there’s often a concept in hypnosis of something called “pre-talk,” which is talking to your subject, as a hypnotist, about what it feels like to be in trance. So, talking about what that state feels like, giving them – before you’re in the scene – a sense of the fact that they’ve probably been in the state before, and a reference point for what being trancey and being hypnotized feels like. If you don’t do that, it’s much harder to get somebody to that place, if they don’t know what they’re going for, if they don’t know where they’re trying to get. So, in a lot of people’s pre-talk, they’ll talk about “highway hypnosis,” like, “Remember a time when you’ve been driving, and you got to your destination, but you don’t remember all the steps?” or flow state, like, “Remember a time when you thought you were never gonna finish a paper, and then you wrote for hours and hours and got it done, and all of that time in between sort of melted together into this very focused place?” So that’s pre-talk.

KS: Cool.

SS: Once you’ve got somebody comfortable with that, and agreeing that they recognize that place, it’s a lot easier to start an induction, especially if you’ve never done that with them before. Let me just define what that is first: an induction is when you take somebody from an awake, alert state into trance, usually a light trance at first, and then we’ll talk about how to deepen that in a second. Inductions vary pretty widely; there’s a lot of different kinds. Progressive relaxation is the one that a lot of people are very familiar with, which is like, talking about relaxing somebody, muscle by muscle, or muscle group by muscle group, their eyes, their shoulders, their chest, their feet, whatever, every muscle group is getting more and more relaxed, and as their body gets more relaxed, their mind gets more relaxed. The other ones that are pretty commonly used in erotic hypnosis contexts are the Elman induction, which is a multi-stage induction that does some progressive relaxation and some fractionation and an arm-drop and some other stuff… There are rapid inductions, which are commonly used by stage hypnotists or magicians, which are like, handshake inductions, butterfly inductions, stuff like that. There are confusion inductions, which are when you overload the brain with too much information or too much input to process, and in that moment of too much information and input, you can give the brain a suggestion, which is just to let go of all of that, and a lot of people will follow that and just sort of drop. There are others, but those are some examples of inductions.

KS: Okay.

SS: So you have the pre-talk, the induction, and then deepeners, usually. Deepeners are techniques that will take a trance that already exists, a light trance, and then deepen it. There’s a lot of ways to do that. There’s countdowns, there’s deepening patter, there’s fractionation, which is bringing someone up and then down rapidly many times, and every time that you go down, you can drop deeper. And then, when you have somebody who is in a trance and has been deepened, you can do suggestions. So there are short-term suggestions and long-term suggestions. You can install post-hypnotic triggers: things that, after the person is out of trance, will make them react in certain ways to certain stimuli. You can do amnesia play, you can do immobilization, all kinds of different things as triggers or suggestions. You can play with people who are in trance, and you can install suggestions and play with people who are not in trance. Those are both things that are fun.

KS: Yup!

SS: And then there’s an awakener after that, which is bringing somebody out of trance, whether that’s to play with those post-hypnotic suggestions, or even after you’re done playing with them while they’re in trance. And then aftercare, after the scene. Those are the main components.

KS: Thank you.

SS: You’re welcome!

To be continued on Wednesday, when we’ll discuss the difficulties of disclosing a hypnosis kink, our first hypno scene together, what makes someone a good hypnotic subject, trance triggers, hypnotherapy, and some of the sexy things we like to do with hypnosis!

When Your Partner Comes Out As Your Partner

Kate Sloan

It all started when a friend kept referring to my boyfriend’s other partner as his “primary partner.”

Granted, this friend isn’t super schooled in the technicalities of non-hierarchical polyamory. He didn’t fully grasp, I think, that it’s possible to be equally romantically devoted to more than one person at once – or that it would be hurtful for me to hear myself implicitly referred to as the secondary partner. The less-important one. The sidepiece.

See, this type of language just fanned the flames of fears I already harbored. Despite my boyfriend always treating me as a priority, and making it clear that I wasn’t less-than in any way, I still felt like the “side” girlfriend moreso than the “main” one. As we discussed this in a tearful phone call, it became clear that there were three factors contributing to this impression: I felt inconsequential next to my partner’s other relationship’s longer history and future plans; they live together, while he and I live 500 miles apart; and they each publicly acknowledge their partnership, on social media and elsewhere, while he and I do not – because I am a sex writer.

“Well, the last one’s the easiest one to fix,” my boyfriend said, “so let’s fix it.”

I was floored, though I shouldn’t have been. He had been telling me for a few months that he eventually wanted to be “out” as my partner – which meant, in turn, being “out” as kinky. He’d already come out to friends, family, and colleagues as bisexual and polyamorous over the years – so why not this, too?

As we talked, it suddenly occurred to me – like the lid being ripped off a paint can and spilling bright pigment every which way – that I’ve never really had a partner publicly acknowledge being my partner for the whole time I’ve been a sex writer, except for those who also already worked in the sex industry. A couple of short-term boyfriends didn’t mind being associated with me on Twitter and such, but usually they had nothing in particular to lose, and sometimes they even had something to gain: they were porn or camming hopefuls, and I felt that they wanted to use my following to help launch those ambitions.

Needless to say, it provokes a pretty creepy-crawly feeling when the people who will happily admit to dating you are mostly people for whom doing so would be a tactical advantage more than an intimate celebration. All these feelings spilled out of me during that conversation with my boyfriend: I’d realized, in one fell swoop, just how much damage had been done to my psyche over the years by partners wanting to hide in the shadows, deny our connection in public, and treat me essentially as the “secret” girlfriend. Of course I always felt like the least important one when my beaux had multiple partners; I was usually the only one conspicuously missing from their Facebook posts, their Instagram selfies, their smitten tweets.

The thing is, I completely understand why someone wouldn’t want to associate themselves with me publicly, even if they love me. Being as loudly pervy as I am is a risk not everyone can afford to take, and I’m immensely privileged to be in a position where my absurd kinks and sexcapades don’t (usually) harm me or limit me. This is my career, this is the life I have chosen, and not everyone who dates me or fucks me has made that same choice, nor should they necessarily have to. My boyfriend owns a company, so in managing his own public image, he’s making decisions not only for himself but potentially also for his business partners and his employees, not to mention the other people in his life who might be affected by this disclosure. We all deserve privacy, and no one should have to give that up just because of who they’re dating.

But I also know now, after much reflection, that I don’t think a serious relationship is sustainable for me if I’m made to feel like my partner is ashamed of who I am and what I do. It may be kinder to them to downplay my own needs and insist they can hide behind a veil of anonymity, but it is, in the long-term, gravely unkind to myself. It digs me deeper into a preexisting negative self-image, and furthers my feeling that my relationships are somehow illegitimate or unimportant to the other people in them, no matter how big and beautiful they may feel to me.

It was difficult to phrase this to my partner in a way that didn’t make it sound like an ultimatum – which it isn’t really; I could keep dating him if he wanted to stay anonymous, albeit not altogether happily – but fortunately he didn’t take it as such. He understood immediately why it would be painful for me to publicly pretend my partner is a Man of Mystery, instead of acknowledging the marvelous man he is in reality. Like me, he grew up on the internet, so he grasped that if something doesn’t exist online, in some ways it doesn’t fully exist at all. It has always been hard for me to see my non-sex-industry friends posting cute selfies with their partners, or tagging their sweethearts in tweets about date nights and romantic adventures, believing I would never be able to do that. I am so grateful that my boyfriend understood that particular pain and decided it wasn’t worth putting me through.

He is careful and thoughtful in everything he does, and this endeavor was no exception. He spoke to his therapist, his business partners, his other girlfriend, his friends, and even some casual business acquaintances, trying to get a read on whether coming out as a kinky sex blogger’s boyfriend and dom would be a disastrous error. Most of them knew he’d wanted this for a while and seemed surprised he hadn’t done it sooner. Few of them expressed any reservations, and the few they brought up were risks he had already considered and decided he could accept.

I kept telling him, whenever we discussed this, “You know you don’t have to do this, right?” – to which he would always say, “I know. I’m not doing it because I have to. I’m doing it because I want to.” Invariably I would start crying so hard as to become unintelligible. Being a loud-and-proud sex writer, I’d sort of just accepted that no one would ever want to be linked to me by anything more solid than a false name or a censored selfie. I’d assumed that no one would ever love me enough to be visibly mine, and that belief was slowly poisoning my self-worth from the inside out. And here was this man, telling me that not only did he love me, but he wanted to shout it from the proverbial rooftops.

Though he got all his ducks in a row a few weeks ago, we agreed we should wait until we were together in person to actually pull the trigger. “I’m going to want to touch you after that,” he told me, which is the same thing he said when we discussed whether we were ready to say “I love you” for the first time. In a way, it feels like the same act, just shifted and magnified: this is him showing me he loves me in a way that feels even more impactful than the words themselves. He’ll dash off a tweet, casually-but-not-casually mentioning that I’m his girlfriend, and it’ll change our relationship and our lives. I can’t think of anything more romantic.

All this to say: my Sir’s name is mb. He wanted me to let you know.