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ellaenchanting:

@hypnokinkwithmrdream is posting their old hypnokink class notes under the Fetlife Hypnapocalypse tag. It’s a fascinating read- like having a mini-EEHU in my living room. Since there are a lot of older notes, it’s also an interesting peek into how and when hypnokink culture evolved into what it is now. 

Thanks for posting these @hypnokinkwithmrdream!

brin-bellway:

Personally, I find these posts chilling.

Being so much about the power of suggestion, hypnosis is, to a fair extent, what people believe it to be. What hypnosis is changes over time, as society’s view of it changes.

I happened to be born into a part of space-time where the view of hypnosis meshed with what I was naturally inclined to find hot. It hasn’t always been this way, and, I expect, it won’t always be this way.

Someday, you’re going to leave me behind. You’ll move on to new pastures, where I will not want to follow. When I read things like this (or this, or that vanilla article you linked a while back on waking suggestions that I can’t find), I fear that it is already happening.

I’ve read over two pages of the /chrono version of the tag you linked, and he hasn’t said a single thing that makes me think “yeah, that sounds appealing”. It’s all a mix of things that don’t sound like fun at all and things that sound like they maybe could be fun but in a purely platonic way.

His kink is okay, but it is not my kink. If I’d been raised in a culture where this was the consensus view of hypnosis, I don’t think I would be a hypno-fetishist.

Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner, the future of hypnosis will be defined by people who say things like:

“Honestly I think the ‘relax/sleep/deep’ is counterproductive to what I want. People treat it as an idiomatic crutch but the reality is that I don’t really want any part of the person to sleep. I want them to be so focused that they can barely integrate the experience they are having with anything before, after, or around them.”

I look at that, and all I can think is, “I hope I find my real people before these people realise I’m not theirs.”

(And if I don’t find them in time, at least I’ll have had something resembling a community, and which will have taught me some useful techniques that I’ll likely be able to preserve privately even after they fall out of fashion. The next generation of people like me may be completely alone.)

ellaenchanting:

@brin-bellway I’m not quite sure how to reply here- I think this post is partially a reply to me personally and partially a reply to the community and I don’t know if I can adequately address either. 

I have had some of the same feels- seeing people I know get really into the D/s side of the kink or a more sadistic side or just a different side than I was interested in and feeling like I was being left behind or like my more tame interests were silly. I’ve had longer discussions with friends about the hypothetical timeline where I found the hypnokink community when I was young and how it would have pushed me away from learning hypnosis and towards just being a subject (and how sad that divergent timeline makes me). 

I have  developed a stronger interest in the more BDSMy side of hypnokink myself  this past year- partially because I love learning new things and partially to keep up with the community at large. However, kinky or vanilla, I think the things that draw me to hypnosis are still present in either context- creativity, trust, intimacy, and even care. So the kinky stuff feels like an extension for me, not an entirely different thing. But just because I’m exploring more of the BDSM side, it doesn’t mean I’m losing my interest in other ways of doing hypnosis. I love being playful and silly. I love being experimental. I love being therapeutic (in a small way). I love being caring. 

And (like you I suspect), one of my favorite ways of doing hypnosis is still to have someone that I care about lead me down into a deep relaxed state and be really gentle and soothing with me. That feels entirely lovely and good and potentially romantic and all of those wonderful things. I know not everyone in the community loves this, but I also know I’m not alone. This is true even amongst the people who talk about playing in ways that are edgier or seem more sadistic. 

It’s OK. You still belong. I guarantee that if you came to an EEHU and just wanted to feel lovely and relaxed, there would be other people there who were just as interested in that as you are. 

No one is leaving you behind.

@tennfan2 @rightthewaydown anyone else who has comments

brin-bellway:

>>I think this post is partially a reply to me personally and partially a reply to the community<<

Mostly speaking generally, not so much you. (I know the examples I gave were all things you linked me, but that’s mostly because if someone frequently sets this feeling off I don’t follow them. You’re not frequent.)

>>I’ve had longer discussions with friends about the hypothetical timeline where I found the hypnokink community when I was young and how it would have pushed me away from learning hypnosis and towards just being a subject (and how sad that divergent timeline makes me).<<

I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, in context.

>>And (like you I suspect), one of my favorite ways of doing hypnosis is still to have someone that I care about lead me down into a deep relaxed state and be really gentle and soothing with me. That feels entirely lovely and good and potentially romantic and all of those wonderful things.<<

:)

>>I know not everyone in the community loves this, but I also know I’m not alone.<<

It’s…hard to believe, sometimes. It seems like it tends to be a secondary thing for others, even when it comes up at all.

>>I guarantee that if you came to an EEHU<<

(Oh god, imagine me at an EEHU. Like, even if you ignore the logistical issues*…as I was tag-rambling about recently, I still haven’t really grokked the idea that kink can be consensual. Given how badly I cope with audios, I fully expect my brain would “defend me against the threats” by wrapping me in a protective layer of panic.)

>>No one is leaving you behind.<<

Even when I’m feeling hopeful, I still expect it eventually. Ever since I read that book on animal magnetism and saw how unrecognisable hypnosis used to be, I figured it would end up unrecognisable again in the future. There might, however, be a lot more time to prepare, and a much gentler break.

>>tennfan2 rightthewaydown anyone else who has comments<<

I wonder if I should wait to respond to avoid cross-posting, but I suppose I could always write additional responses to other people later.

(I’m curious what made you think of @rightthewaydown. I don’t really know her, though the fact that she was one of the people that came to your mind makes me wonder if maybe I should. (I did hear her seance audio once, though see above re: coping badly.))

*I can’t afford travel, and I don’t have enough freedom of movement to skip off to America for the weekend (or even Toronto, for that matter) without people asking a lot of uncomfortable questions.

tennfan2:

I can’t speak for all of hypnosis-land, but if what I see at EEHUs is any indication, you’re not going to be left behind anytime soon.

Over the past two years (!) I have mostly observed that there are two paths folks take with hypnosis, in particular those who are not otherwise kinky. This is not exhaustive, your mileage may vary, etc etc:

One group of people who enter arrive for the hypnosis, and then realize using hypnosis for recreational or erotic purposes opens the door to a whole big world of kink. They may get drawn into sadism or submission or pet play or whatever. They may get less of a rise out of hypnosis for hypnosis sake, and more toward it being a tool for evocative experiences of other kinks.

The other group (which is to say, me) end up in erotic hypnosis world and while we are exposed to the great big world of kink, tend to feel more comfortable and much more at home playing with hypnosis. Maybe we play with suggestions that are broader than we once might have, but everything orbits around trance. I’ve dabbled in quite a few other kinky pursuits, but nothing gets me like a perfectly executed confusion induction.

This is all to say: there’s never going to stop being room for an interest in hypnosis that isn’t wrapped up in other kink. It’s never going to leave you behind. Hell, one could argue that Entranced (formerly MEEHU) is actually moving pretty intentionally in the direction of making even more space for that, given that they have dropped “erotic” from the event’s name and are marketing it as “recreational”

As to the larger questions about whether kink can ever be consensual, I wish you luck and discernment in figuring out how you feel. I only know from my own experience that it is, but my experience doesn’t count as more than that.

Finally, as to @hypnokinkwithmrdream, he’s someone who has a really particular perspective on how to do this kink – it’s fascinating stuff, and even though his style is very much not my style, I rarely talk with him about this stuff and don’t pick up something I can apply to how I do hypnosis.

Anyway, I hope you hang around and eventually find a way to get down to an event. It would be great to meet you, and I’m sure I’m not alone in the sentiment.

soundshypnotic:

So as @tennfan2 alluded to in his tags, he and @enscenic invited me to be part of their Hypnosis in Kinkland class which was set up specifically talking about this sort of thing. Namely the divide between recreational hypnosis, hypnosis as a tool for BDSM, and the overlap (roughly represented by tennfan, enscenic, and I respectively).

When I entered all of this I was not prepared for anything beyond the “You are getting sleepy” variety (but hopefully with a lot less wavery voice tomfoolery), and I stayed there comfortably for a couple years before I strayed into power exchange land. I do play in various kinds of more traditionally BDSM kinks as well but ultimately it’s because power exchange helps me enhance my hypnosis–my partners are okay with feeling powerless to the pull of my hypnotic spell, or so our setup goes, and so I feel more empowered to explore consensually the unconsentual version of the thing because my first exposure that took so strongly for hypnosis and mind control was that forced and forceful nature.

Nearly anything I’ve picked up I’ve only added in order to be a new lens through which I could explore my primary kink of hypnosis (and sometimes to follow the interests of play partners, but ultimately any long term play partners I end up with it’s because our default way of being naturally clicks). It’s through those various strong contrasts that I feel I get a fuller experience of the thing because I love it for all the bits and bobs that make it up technically speaking as much as I just love the face of someone so blankly blissed out I could leave them that way contently for hours until I reasserted their reality to a new all consuming focus. More pure BDSM pursuits without some hypnosis woven into them have never, to this day, hit my buttons but they have been of great interest to me intellectually partially because I’m a reaction junkie, partially because I love walking my partners through new intense experiences and protecting them every step of the way through it, and partially because seeing them divorced now and again from the hypnosis I always otherwise bring in helps me see by contrast what each adds to the other. But watching my partner drift away into a cloud of only my words and lose all touch with everything else will be what I select every time between the two of them, because that is so much more central to who I am and what I’m here for.

I’ve watched the hypno kink community over the past fifteen years as it’s grown up, and only just in approaching three years now (Jesus, has it been that long already? I feel like I just got here) did I finally put my face out there at one of these events to see what the community had become. I went wholly preparing to be alienated and out of place, which is why I went for one day only in the middle of the con, talked almost exclusively to those I’d come with and the one person I went to meet, and expected that to be the end of it unless something astonishing came up to change that.

While I enjoy the kink community, I’ve never felt I clicked or fit really. They were more my people than the regular folks around me, closer to the heart of who I am and the traits I admire in myself, but I was always going to be stuck in that weird niche of the hypno-Domme: either not kink enough because what’s the big deal with whispering someone still like is that it? or the response that what I did was twenty steps too far and more intense than a really heavy beatdown scene because at least they never touched that person’s mind.

I went and I found my place in it so quickly I’ve been reeling ever since, because I am a shy and anti-social little anxiety ball of a person. There are several different break ups of the community, but they all are so overlapped in their Venn that there’s really no beginning nor end between them. If you happen to overlap with none, that’s fine. Your niche will still bump up against others and you’ll still find people who will be encouraging and even curious about your different perspective. It’s been so much more welcoming than I ever dreamed.

For what one more person’s word is worth, I don’t think you’ve anything to fear of the culture evaporating around you into something unrecognizable. We’re a part of it, a central over lap even, even if we’re not the part held up as the most flash by some sources.

enscenic:

I’ll throw my own two cents worth of possible wisdom here as well.  As @soundshypnotic and @tennfan2 both say, there are really quite a lot of people around who love the actual process of hypnosis – hypnotizing and being hypnotized – for the sake of itself, and wander around in a sea of kinkier hypno-folk always feeling like they don’t quite fit into the community.

But we find each other! And it is definitely possible to have an entire weekend at an event hanging out with just those people and play around with the less bdsm oriented stuff and have a great time without feeling like you’ve missed anything. I have never had anyone make me feel like I was less welcome for not wanting to be fully immersed in a more loaded type of play than I might be comfortable with.

I hope that you will find a way to incorporate what works for you into the community at large; if you don’t, I wish you the best.

(This is going to be pretty disjointed, sorry. I might end up missing some bits, and I know I’ve repeated some bits in different words.)

@tennfan2: >>As to the larger questions about whether kink can ever be consensual, I wish you luck and discernment in figuring out how you feel. I only know from my own experience that it is, but my experience doesn’t count as more than that.<< 

Intellectually, I believe it. Viscerally, I tend towards paranoia at the best of times, and was raised on a pop culture consisting entirely of non-con.

—

It’s…I know I’ve accumulated a lot of issues around inclusion and belonging and such, particularly in sexual contexts. I was raised liberal: I got my sex ed from sources that were very proud of being “inclusive”, by which they meant they had several boxes to shove people into instead of just one. I’ve gotten used to the idea, over years of this happening repeatedly throughout a variety of fractal minority groups, that nobody’s ever going to include me, and people saying they will is a sign they don’t actually think I exist and have pattern-matched me into something that fits into their worldview.

(I mean, if anyone could actually include me, it’d probably be you guys. I’m not saying I don’t believe you, exactly, just that it’s never been true before.)

—

I’m not sure I *am* a hypnosis-for-hypnosis-sake person, exactly, though it’s certainly closer than BDSM. I might be more of a means-to-an-end person, but with a different end. IME, it seems like “hypnosis for hypnosis’ sake” tends to mean a lot of playing around with suggestion, and the thing that sets off this particular sub-type of loneliness *is* people emphasising suggestion over sensation. (Like the research article I linked to in the original reply, which acts like relaxation is useless because it doesn’t increase suggestibility. I read stuff like that and the theory-of-mind-lacking bit of my brain just goes “You’re–*headdesk*–missing–*headdesk*–the–*headdesk*–point–” (The more theory-of-mind-ish bits of me assume they must be hitting a different point.))

Suggestions that the for-hypnosis-sake people see as exploring trance often fall for me into the “stuff that sounds fun-but-platonic” camp (freezing, probably) or the “why would you even want that” camp (memory play; I deal with more than enough of that shit at bedtime).

(I think I’ve gotten narrower over time. I’m less desperate now, I suppose.)

—

@injygo​ replied: “Same feel on the ‘kink is inherently nonconsensual’ feeling. It’s really hard for me to imagine going to a hypnosis convention and being at all ok with seeing or hearing anything.“

@ellaenchanting​ replied: “Hmmm- injyo, not to be rude, but have you done hypnosis before? It’s not as nonconsensual as it looks from the outside, especially with empowered subjects (which is a big deal in hypnokink)/“

I don’t think I really have anything to say here, but I thought I’d post it to make sure people see it (in particular, to make sure injygo sees Ella’s reply).

—

*leaves to do homework*

*returns, checks if anything else has been added in the meantime*

…goddammit.

—

@hypno-sandwich: >>I wouldn’t judge the scene based on one person’s notes.<<

It’s *not* one person, just the latest example. If it were one person it wouldn’t bother me.

@hypnokinkwithmrdream: >>I am not sure why you think what you are doing is what I am doing.<<

It *isn’t* what I’m doing. Wasn’t that part of the point?

>>If I want to relax I nap.<<

I dislike unconsciousness, and I despise hypnagogic amnesia. Hypnosis offers a better solution.

>>Now people take it for granted that consent is necessary and good negotiation is necessary. But yeah, the times are changing. The days when it seemed acceptable for hypnotists to treat subjects as if they didn’t have the understanding to be equal participants in whatever they did, the conception that the subject has to be fooled into doing what they want to do rather than be treated like adults, is really fading.<<

…given the original context in this thread of the sentiment “the times are changing”, this looks like you conflating dozing fetishists and rapists. Why would you do that?

>>Don’t complain to me if what I built isn’t for you.<<

Please, point me to where in this thread I was complaining to you. This isn’t *about* you. You were one of multiple examples. You *happened* to be the example that inspired this particular post. Somebody thought that meant they ought to ping you and drag you into this, but that’s not my fault.

(I suppose I should have dug harder for that article on waking suggestions, where nobody who had any significant chance of coming across it could mistake a response for being aimed at them personally, and pretended that that was the final straw instead. It actually almost was: I nearly wrote something approximating my first post at the time.)

>>Maybe I don’t teach a lot of vanilla or non-kinky or orgasm related hypnosis but every con I got to that is what I see<<

You realise there’s more than two sides here, right? I’m willing to believe that you’re an embittered minority, but that doesn’t make my perspective the dominant one. We can *both* be embittered minorities. You don’t have to fight me for it.

–

I suppose it’s actually kind of flattering that you’re responding to me as if I’m a threat. (…at least, I hope you aren’t this prickly to people you *don’t* feel threatened by.) I’m no threat to you. I have neither the desire nor the ability to kick you out. I am simply accustomed to being collateral damage, the one that even people who take pride in acknowledging all sexualities don’t acknowledge, don’t even *leave* space for (let alone *make* space), and I get worried when I see things that might fit into that pattern.

(I know that people cannot reasonably be expected to account for my existence. I have had to accept that. That doesn’t mean that I can’t quietly grumble about it.)

–

I don’t merely wait for my community to find me, and it is not something that can be taught. What I do, is I speak. I speak of what makes me tick, and I go out and I listen to see if others are saying the same things. Speaking doesn’t just leave a trail that others might find: it implicitly enlists the help of those who are listening. There are people out there in the world now who would hear somebody saying something like me and say “Hey, I know somebody I think you should meet.”

—

(Goddammit, I’m probably not making any sense, and judging from Mr Dream’s response I’ve somehow managed to come off as entitled. *sigh*)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #discourse cw #long post #nsfw text