Super Sleepy

12 Days of Girly Juice 2018: 11 Favorite Blog Posts

Kate Sloan

I wrote over 125 blog posts this year. It’ll be 137+ if you count this 12 Days of Girly Juice series. That’s 2.63 blog posts a week, for the whole year. Uhhh. I wasn’t joking when I said that sometimes my hypomania makes me more productive than is actually good for me…

Choosing my favorite 11 blog posts of the year was a tough task, but these are the ones I enjoyed working on the most and have loved looking back on since. They’re also, in many cases, some of the posts my readers seemed to resonate most with. Yay!

“Slow Burn“ was the first post I ever wrote about my Sir, back when he was just my crush, occasionally my Sir or my daddy, but not yet my boyfriend or my partner or my love. It featured – weirdly, and incomprehensibly to anyone who is not us – a photo of the room we were in when we kissed for the first time. It’s a “romantic screed” about wanting to fuck someone, but not being able to yet, and the ways that repeated recollection and rumination can re-write a memory into a legend. I sent this piece to Matt before publishing it, to make sure he was comfortable with it; he devoured it and replied immediately, “Wow wow wow, wow that’s good. I consent to all of it. A lot.” Later that night, on the phone, he asked if he could read it out loud to me, thus beginning what would become one of our most treasured traditions. Suffice it to say that this post holds an important place in my heart.

I wrote “Do You Want It Too?“ in the very early days of my relationship with Matt, when we were still negotiating, experimenting, and working out the kinks (so to speak) in our new D/s dynamic. I was amazed by how asking for something you want, sex-wise or kink-wise, can be incredibly vulnerable and scary, but tends to pay off if you’re doing it with a kind, open-hearted person. I wrote about some of the manifestations of that in our early courtship: cocktails, honorifics, iron pills, sadomasochism, makeup, and more. Our New Relationship Energy was amplified by the constant rediscovery that he, indeed, wanted what I wanted.

Next, predictably, we fell in love, and that’s what “How Did You Know You Were In Love?“ is about. I became obsessed with this question from the moment Matt texted me from a London hotel room to let me know he’d been Googling “love” and reading its Wikipedia page to try to figure out if it fit what he was feeling (what a nerd). We talked about how both of us had been in love a few times before but it was hard to know if that word also applied to our present feelings, simply because it all happened so quickly, so intensely, from a distance of 500 miles. But through much self-reflection – including writing this post – I eventually realized that yep, I was very much in love.

Matt’s fave thing I’ve written about him is “Little Girl Blue,” so I couldn’t leave it out. It was directly inspired by the first gift he ever bought me: a copy of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Our relationship was haunted by the color blue, especially in its early days – a blue app, a blue button-down shirt, a blue book, a blue collar, blue cells in a spreadsheet, two gorgeous blue eyes. This is a post about how everything can seem beautiful and meaningful when you’re mired in new love – everything is heightened, from feelings to words to, yes, colors.

“8 Strategies For Taking More (Consensual) Pain“ was definitely my favorite how-to post I wrote all year. It highlights some of the cognitive, linguistic, and logistical methods I use to increase my masochistic limits in kink scenes. I hope folks found it useful!

I’ve long been captivated by the idea of revisiting emotionally significant locations from your past to imbue them with new meaning, and that’s what “This is the Place“ is about. I wrote about romantic interludes in playgrounds, parkettes, and parking garages – and what happened when I returned to those locales at less tumultuous times.

While I had previously written about our first date, I think “A Second Date in a Golden Room“ is my favorite thing I’ve written about a specific date with my Sir. It was definitely the most nervewracking date of my life, because of the amount of build-up that preceded it and hopes I had charged it with. I interwove the story of the date with excerpts from our actual texts that day, seeking to recreate the adrenaline high that seized me and wouldn’t let go. Peppermint tea and peppery pasta, a black velvet dress and a blue wool suit, a warm hand in mine and warm lips almost kissing me – these are some of my sense memories from one of my most exciting nights on this earth.

Matt and I collaborated on a lot of posts this year – most notably our Intimate Intercourse series of interviews – but I think my fave collab we worked on was “Cocks & Cocktails: Drink Pairings for Sex Toys.” I threw a bunch of sex toy names at him and then made frantic notes while he extemporized on which drinks best suited those toys. Synthesizing the brilliant thoughts of someone I love is always a fun challenge, and I love the way one of my interests and one of his came together to make this post.

Let’s get sappy… “10 Thoughts on a Long-Term Relationship Out of Left Field“ was my love letter to the whole idea of established, settled love, something I hadn’t really experienced for years. It wasn’t always my decision to end relationships so soon after beginning them, but nonetheless it still felt like my fault: the result of a personal failing, an embarrassing inability to sustain anyone’s interest. So, needless to say, I had a lot of Feelings about finally finding someone I wanted to stay with for a while, who wanted (and wants) to stay with me for a while too.

One of the most fun (yet most complicated) posts I worked on all year was “A Month’s Worth of Phone Sex,” which is exactly what it sounds like. I made scattered notes after every phone-sex sesh we had all month – which, as it turned out, totaled 19 times in 30 days – and then tried to write about them, though, as I’ve learned over and over in my years of being a sex writer, it’s very tricky to write about sexual encounters in a way that adequately translates the magic of them to someone reading from the outside. I did my best, though!

Finally: “When Your Partner Comes Out As Your Partner“ was definitely one of my most emotional and meaningful posts all year long. Reading it still makes me cry. Whoops.

What are your fave things you’ve read or written this year?

Protocol Diaries: To-Do, Ta-Da!

Kate Sloan

It started – as many of our protocols do – with a more unofficial version, before either of us could acknowledge with confidence that we wanted something more.

Throughout the early months of our D/s dynamic, I would sometimes text my Sir a frazzled list of my various tasks for the day: finish dayjob work, write blog post, take photos, wash dishes, do laundry, and so on. I did this because I wanted him to press me to actually do those things, which, fortunately, he did. There are few things more disappointing, as a submissive, than hinting that you want some measure of discipline and receiving, instead, an oblivious nothing.

As time progressed, I took to copy-and-pasting my to-do list from my Notes app directly into a text to him – not every day, but sometimes. And then its frequency crept closer to daily. He said he enjoyed knowing what I was up to, on a granular level, at any given day – that it made him feel closer to me, even though we’re long-distance.

One day in September, after weeks of this, I tentatively texted him: “I wonder if my daily to-do list should be a shared note with you. Or is that too hardcore DD/lg for us?” We already had several shared notes – most notably, one that lays out our rules, protocols, and relationship boundaries, like a D/s contract for the digital age – but I was concerned that this one would be placing too much responsibility on him. Having everyday access to my to-do list would implicitly come with the duty to keep an eye on my tasks and my status, and to reward or perhaps punish me accordingly.

It took him fifteen minutes to get back to me, because he was swamped at work, but those minutes felt interminable because I was so worried he would say no. Instead, when he did respond, he said, “Oh my god. How did you read my mind? I thought about that all day yesterday.”

As we discussed it more, it came out that both of us had been wanting this for a while but had felt guilty about wanting it. This has been a recurring theme in our ever-evolving D/s negotiations. I’ve learned to trust, at this point, that if I want something, or have thought about it, odds are good that he wants it or has thought about it too. Some would say we’re in sync because we’re profoundly in love and an uncommonly good match; I would add that we’re also both total pervs, in many of the same peculiar little ways.

We’ve gone several weeks now with me making a to-do list almost every day (every weekday, some weekends), and we talk often about how much we both love it. He loves it because it makes him feel more closely entangled in my daily life, it gives him a sense of how much is on my plate on any given day so he knows whether he can safely assign me additional tasks, it supplies information he needs to support and encourage me properly as a dom, and it’s an incredibly intimate window into my brain (always a selling point for a hypnokinkster). I love it because it feels like a deep sign of mutual trust, it helps me feel more accomplished when I get things done, and it makes me likelier to actually do the things I need to do.

I felt guilty about this at first, and spiralled into self-doubting thoughts. Why is it easier for me to stay on top of my tasks when a man is supervising my progress? Shouldn’t I be self-sufficient, driven, and motivated all on my own? Isn’t it unfeminist, unevolved, or psychologically lazy of me to rely on someone else to fuel my motivation?

But in thinking about it more, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that there’s nothing inherently wrong with pursuing externally-imposed structure and validation. We all do it, to some extent. It’s part of why we post things on Facebook, dress to impress when we go out, and curate our life’s aesthetic to be more Instagram-friendly. My friend Bex once told me that he sometimes goes on wild adventures just so he’ll be able to say he did on social media, and that if it takes an external force to get him to do something fun (like pose for kinky pictures with Santa), so what? He still did the fun thing, so everyone wins. In this case, I usually complete every task on my to-do list and I deepen and intensify my connection with my partner, so… what’s really the problem here?

I think our culture is over-invested in the myth of total self-sufficiency, of “independence,” when what we should really be focusing on is interdependence and how we can support each other and lift each other up. No man is an island, as the saying goes. D/s just makes those connections more explicit in how they function and what’s expected of them – and makes them hotter, in the process, to those involved.

My partner has told me that he wants me to eventually become more self-sustaining – and I’ve already seen that happen in some of our other protocols. Sometimes, for example, I take my iron pill and forget to text him about it, because the daily habit of texting him about it has also instilled the daily habit of taking the pill. Maybe one day I’ll feel as fired up about plowing through my to-do list solo as I do when I know my dom has his eye on it. This is yet another way kink makes me a stronger, better, more fulfilled person.

Monthly Faves: Steel Wands & Sweet Words

Kate Sloan

Hope you had a pleasantly scary Halloween! Here are some things I enjoyed in October…

Sex toys

• We-Vibe sent me their Anniversary Collection and I adore it. It contains updated (and sparkly!) versions of two of their best vibes, the Tango and the Sync. The included case works for both storage and charging, and makes this duo super travel-friendly – always an important consideration for someone in a long-distance relationship like me.

• I’ve owned my Njoy Pure Wand for years but it deserves just as much revere now as it did when I first bought it. Truly, if you like intense G-spot or prostate stimulation, there is nothing better. Also, adorably, my partner bought his own recently, so sometimes we each separately use ours while having phone sex. Aww.

• Speaking of Njoy: I feel like I mention the Eleven every five seconds on this blog, but like… seeeeriously… it is quite good. It’s also integral to the story of how my Sir and I met (our first contact of any kind was him tweeting a link to my own Eleven review at me) so it’s, um, very romantic when he pounds me with it.

Fantasy fodder

• At one point this month, my partner – an actual living kink genius – sent me the following text: “What if the We-Vibe Anniversary Collection was actually sent to you as a medical device to treat your obvious hysteria symptoms, and you have to call in and speak to a doctor over the phone who can supervise your treatment by controlling the device and monitoring your progress?” We did a “hysteria hotline” roleplay over the phone that night – not a new thing for us, but the inclusion of the remotely controllable We-Vibe Sync was a new element of it – and it was so hottttt, helpppp.

• My monthly writing assignment for my Sir involved making some recommendations of porn and erotica for him, and one of my selections was a Sherlock fanfiction story where John has a hypnosis kink and Sherlock takes it upon himself to play with this newfound knowledge. I have a long-standing weakness for subby-John/dommy-Sherlock stories, and this one paints a particularly excellent picture of what trance feels like and why it can be so hot.

• Still giggling over this story: in a cab ride back from a Halloween party, I told my Sir I desperately had to pee, and he (jokingly?) suggested we do a watersports scene upon arriving back at our hotel. I told him he wouldn’t be able to get all his clothes off fast enough to account for the urgency of the situation, and he was basically like, “Try me.” Once we were in our room, he shed his clothes faster than I’ve ever seen him do it, and laid down in the shower for me before I was even half out of my dress. While my emotions in the moment were a mix of anguish and amusement, in retrospect it was a surprisingly hot experience; unbridled enthusiasm from a sexual partner often is.

Sexcetera

• Some of my work elsewhere this month: I read my review of the teddy bear vibrator at the Bed Post variety show. I reviewed my favorite band’s new album, while meditating on depression, toxic masculinity, and men’s inner lives. (Please check out the album; it’s divine.) On our podcast, Bex and I discussed sex education, roleplay, polyamory myths, and fear play, and I interviewed my pal Dick Wound about knives, death, sweat, and all kinds of weird shit.

• Excited to announce I’ll be teaching/speaking/reading at this year’s Naked Heart festival! It’s coming up soon; grab your pass online, or you can get tickets to individual sessions at the door.

• Hey, thanks for the outpouring of love when my Sir decided to come out as my Sir! We were both thrilled and relieved that the reaction was so positive. Taking this risk together made me feel even more in love with him and even safer in this wonderful relationship, which was already one of the best ones I’ve ever been in.

Femme stuff

• I got my legs waxed for the first time this month! Actually, it was my first time getting anything waxed. My technician asked me if I had a decent pain tolerance, and I was like, “Uhhh… Yeah.” It wasn’t too bad at all, and I had silky-smooth legs for a little while. Would do again!

• If you’re in the centre of the Venn diagram composed of “people who like spooky things” and “people who live in Toronto or are familiar with historical Toronto landmarks,” you probably need this “Honest Dead’s” shirt. Every time I wear it (in Toronto, at least), I inevitably get asked multiple times where it’s from.

• As I told you on Monday, I have a new collar! I want to give an extra shout-out to Tal at L’Amour-Propre for being so accommodating of our special request vis-à-vis material. Tal is the actual best and I highly recommend their products!

Media

• Pinegrove’s new album Skylight is gorgeous (with caveats about the lead singer’s problematic behavior). The refrain of the title track – “Whatever you’re feeling is alright… Whatever you’re feeling is natural” – felt particularly needed.

• I read a lot of books this month, and their common theme seemed to be “shitty men interfering with brilliant women.” Sigh. What else is new. All of them were good, though: The Wife is about a woman who decides to stop giving her husband a free pass to be terrible after decades of marriage; The Real Lolita is the tale of the pedophilic kidnapping that supposedly inspired Nabokov’s masterpiece; Our Kind of Cruelty is about an obsessive love that turns into a sick delusion; and Gone Girl is about… well, if you’ve never heard of Gone Girl, you should really watch the movie and/or read the book, stat.

• My Sir recommended we watch some of James Acaster’s comedy specials together this month and we loved them. What a strange man with a strange sense of humor.

Little things

Eating chicken noodle soup while paging through The Science of Orgasm. Getting slightly better at rejecting creeps when necessary. Interviews with articulate, generous kinksters. Thigh bruises from sweet and loving impact scenes with my Sir over the phone. Seeing Dick get a lap dance at a sex club (OMG) and then hanging out in a hot tub with Lav. When autocorrect knows me too well. Max telling me stories from touring with his band (“I don’t feel too good…”). Kissing Sir in between songs at a Hippo Campus concert and keeping my hand in his hoodie pocket. Knowing he still loves me even though he made me laugh while I was eating a French fry and standing over him so I accidentally spat some potato onto his jeans (“CLOSE YOUR MOUTH, little one!!”). Autumn daiquiris. A literally perfect truffle risotto at the NoMad (and also truffle mac and cheese the night before; give me all the truffles). Boys in bowties. Phrenology skulls (the best creepy decor!). Watching horror movies with my family. Attending a Halloween party with some of my favorite goofs. Feeling like part of a community.

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!