Thursday, May 17, 2007

Awake and Enchanted

My friends c and K have been talking about getting a new house. That gave me an idea. I was chatting via Yahoo Voice with c today, while she sat in her bedroom. I asked her what she'd like a new bedroom to look like. "A sea theme," she said, "with blue walls, and yellows and greens."

OK, it looks like that right now, I said.

Long pause. "Oooooh," she said. "But the yellow's too bright." OK, tone down the yellow, I said. "That's better." And the window now looks out on the ocean. She went over to open the curtains and look out. "This is freaky," she said. "I'm in Portugal." She didn't like the view from the first floor, so I raised the bedroom to the second floor. She missed the trees she usually sees out the window, so I added a bit of palm tree in front of the blue sky.

She seemed to like the effect so far. So I changed her clothes into a swim suit and gave her flipflops. The warm sun, the now bright room, and (for some odd reason) the carpet being changed into a sand floor, suddenly gave her an urge to relax and take a little nap. She woke up a few minutes later feeling the cares of the day long gone.

It's all an example of a hypnotic effect that gets too little use: The waking illusion.

Sure, you can give someone illusionary scenes while they're in a trance, but those memories are sometimes lost when they wake up. And while subjects are awake it's common to give them "little" illusions of things like specific objects. But this is much more vivid, and lands the subject in the middle of a scene.

I'm a big fan of the full-on illusionary scene delivered to an otherwise awake person, a sort of technicolor posthypnotic effect. I love it because it means I can talk her through it, listen to her reactions moment by moment, and steer it in whatever direction I want to as it occurs.

Besides, it's a thrill to hear her gasp and say, "What a mindfuck."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Honestly haven't been able to reach that particular point at all - reality always ending up looking like reality - and I wonder offhand exactly what about your experience is different.

HypnoMaster D said...

One thing I have going for me is just dumb luck, having met several subs now who are highly suggestible.

A second thing that might be helping me is that, from the first trance, I try to establish a relationship with the subconscious, urge her to develop her skills and applaud her efforts on my behalf.

Finally, I usually take baby steps... first illusions in trance, then small visual or body illusions while awake, then increasingly complex ones, and finally a scene like today's. It makes sense that the subconscious wouldn't know how to pull off a stunt like this without building up to it gradually.

Does any of that help?