I needed hypnosis to be real long before I understood why…
As a kid, I wanted everything magical to exist with a kind of desperation that now feels embarrassing. Mermaids, fairies, Santa Claus, and psychic powers. Even then, some part of me understood these things probably weren’t real, and I hated that understanding. I let myself believe longer than other kids did, on purpose. I was obsessed.
I think part of that hunger came from control, or the lack of it.
I grew up in a pressure cooker. Everything felt optimized toward achievement. I was supposed to become something impressive, and instead I became difficult and burned out young. Rebellious in ways that weren’t glamorous, just messy. I spent a lot of my adolescence feeling over-managed, compared, and strangely invisible.
Maybe that’s why hypnosis hit me so hard when I finally found it…
My whole life people said magic wasn’t real. But they didn’t say that about hypnosis, because they couldn’t.
My story of discovery is FAR from unique.
I saw the stage show clips on YouTube and couldn’t let it go.
Eventually I tried audio files myself, mostly out of curiosity, expecting nothing. Then one day, one worked.
Not in a movie way. Not mind control. Nothing supernatural. But something happened: a strange softening around the edges of thought. Suggestibility. Focus. The unsettling realization that attention itself is far more fragile and malleable than we pretend.
And I remember thinking, almost immediately:
I started researching compulsively; clinical hypnosis, stage performers, psychology papers, forums, underground communities. I wanted to know what was possible, where the limits were, and who was pushing them.
Eventually I found the freaks. My freaks. :)
Erotic hypnotists. Experimentalists.
People treating hypnosis less like a clinical tool and more like an art form, or a game, or sometimes a weapon. They were fast, playful, intense, collaborative. Not stage performers, not mystical gurus, AND NOT role-playing.
What fascinated me most was that it didn’t feel fake. Kink communities often use the word “play”, which makes sense. A lot of kink is performance; A consensual scene, a role someone steps into for a while because it’s fun, or cathartic, or erotic. There’s artifice built into it, openly and intentionally.
Hypnosis complicated that distinction for me.
Because the hypnosis I care about does not feel like roleplay.
If I tell someone to kneel, that’s one thing.
If I compel them to kneel, not through force, but through trust, anticipation, focus, and surrender… that feels fundamentally different.
The submission stops feeling theatrical and starts feeling psychologically real. Almost like magic.
That distinction matters to me more than I can fully explain.
I don’t love hypnosis because it lets me “make” people do things. (That’s not how it works.) What fascinates me is influence; attention, emotional leverage, the strange intimacy of temporarily rearranging the architecture of another person’s experience. Being allowed access.
The submission offered through hypnosis feels earned to me in a way ordinary authority never has.
Maybe that’s because so much of my life was shaped by systems of control I never chose: expectations, structures, pressure, adults telling me who to become. Hypnosis fascinated me because it transformed influence from something oppressive into something consensual, intentional, almost sacred.
I know now that hypnosis is psychology, not magic. But realizing that didn’t make it less miraculous.
If anything, it made human beings more miraculous.
The real revelation was not that supernatural forces exist. It was that ordinary human attention is already powerful enough to feel supernatural. That language can alter perception. That expectation can shape sensation. That trust can create experiences that feel impossible from the outside and undeniable from within.
That’s still magic to me. It just looks different than I expected.
And I still love fantasy- deeply. Renaissance fairs, mythology, novels, superpowers, all of it. But I love those things with an acceptance that they are pretend.
Maybe adulthood was never about losing magic.
Maybe it was about learning that the real thing is stranger, subtler, and far more human than I expected.
I love fantasy because I wanted magic to exist.
I love hypnosis because, for the first time, it actually did.
Authors note: Holy shit, wake it upppp 🧠
This is partially inspired by @yumedesutrance writing about hypnosis and magic :)
This one had me connecting points. Self reflection is so fucking cool. I’m making the journal factory explosion everyone’s problem, you’re welcome.
I like hypnosis bc it’s fucking magic and I’m a witch casting spells. Like yes but like no.
