#designertrances

[designertrances]

Selling too hard

I think what's wrong with the 'I drop the second I see a pocketwatch lol' types is that it, in some way, misses the essence of the appeal.

You have to understand that hypnosis is a kind of cnc kink. Yes, always and ever, discuss and respect limits, do not waste a moment more with someone you begin to feel isn't interested in them.

But at it's heart it is still amongst the broader group of cnc kinks.

You must understand that the point of hypnotising someone, from the hypnotist's perspective is to *make* them do something. When I click my fingers you will 'x' is the prototypical hypnotic frame. It is all about using the trigger that *compels* someone to do it.

The perfect antithesis to this, and the quickest way to wash the heat out of a hypnotic scene is to do 'x' while openly, obviously not being hypnotised.

'Omggg Im sooo deeeppepe' is to mock the kink in your effort to participate in it.

In a sister kink it would be a little like saying 'oh my god my hands are tied sooo tight I sure hope you dont have your wicked way with me' before the knot is even tied.

In the words of Don Draper, you're selling too hard. And hypnosis is so much about the seduction.

'mmmMm im so Seduced' after someone is half way through saying 'Hello, it's nice to meet you' is something that takes the wind out of sails more than than it's appealing.

There are exceptions and context is king, etc. etc. but I hope my point isn't lost.

[fromgrace]

It's time to shed some light

(TW: s3lf harm mention and emotional & psychological abuse)

*This is on my old blog as I can't tag the person from main @sacredabettour *

I was talking with a hypnodom that goes by @designertrances since May of last year. He was highly abusive. He loved bombed, gaslit, and emotionally & psychologically manipulated me. This was not negotiated play, it was abuse. He took the time to learn about my traumas (ie: abdonment issues) and use them against me. We started talking everyday day for over a month. It was hot and heavy. He made me believe this was normal. Then he cut me off saying I'm unwell and can't handle someone like him. After a cut off he'd passive aggressively post about subs who use doms as hooks to place their issues on. Then he would reach back out saying how good I've been at being quiet. The cycle repeated. As we continued to chat and trance, he would regularly suggest obsession and addiction only to gaslight me and threaten with no contact when I displayed behaviors of attachment. He would sexualize me taking the blame for my own desire, making me repeatedly apologize. He seemed to get off on forcing victims to take blame for his abusive behavior.

Another example of his treatment was having me in denial for several months. Before this I had never been in denial or edged, let alone for that duration. One night he tranced me, never mentioning that my denial would stop and the next day he dropped off the face of the earth. He was gone for weeks without a word. I was left to break my denial and fall apart.

He always harped on not owing me any form of contact and told me I'm not doing well mentally whenever I was deeply aroused. You'd think a dom worth their salt wouldn't continue to engage with a sub that was genuinely unwell, especially for as long he did, calling it out over and over. At one point I told him I was thinking of harming myself because of the stress he was causing me. He told me to never bring it up again and take some time to myself. We still talked for months after that.

I've never been one to remain quiet about abusers and this is no different. I'm not going to protect this guy or act like what he did was ok.

If you've talked to or currently talk to @designertrances and had a positive experience, this isn't to diminish that. It's to encourage you to rethink about your interactions and gain caution going forward. He may make what's happening sound sexy and consensual but if you're in distress more than you are happy, that may be a give away.

People that behave as this guy does are the real unwell ones. He's not a dom and intentionally doesn't claim subs. There's nothing inherently wrong with not claiming subs but his behavior gives off the impression that couldn't. He doesn't have the capacity to do what having a sub takes. That would require dedication, commitment, consistency and care. He's void of such qualities. It's truly sad.

If any subs are questioning their interactions with this guy or any other dom, feel free to reach out to me. I know what abuse looks and feels like and if you want to talk, I'd be happy to. You are not alone.

[designertrances]

What a brilliant blog. Really enjoyed your takes on dumbing down. Hypnosis is something my partner is very interested in, but neither of us have we experience with it. Any book recommendations?

Seeing Things, by Seamus Heaney. That answer is a little facetious, yes, but there is a real point behind it. I didn't learn how to hypnotise through any 'how to hypnotise someone in three easy steps' manual. I learned through many years of trial and error, propelled by a life-long passion for it.

But the step-by-step guides (in which I include my own posts, by the way) will only get you so far. They are useful for first steps, I suspect.

But more than first steps, what you really want is to dance.

Where hypnosis really blossoms into something genuinely beautiful and powerful and moving is when you stop seeing the trance and inductions as being achieved through careful attention to an instruction manual, and start seeing them as live, mutually constructed poetry.

I think to a lot of readers that may sound pretentious but poetry isn't pretentious (or at least, good poetry isn't. See the recommendation above). Poetry is honest. It's using words playfully, thoughtfully, creatively to say something that you always knew, that many people recognise, but that hasn't been said like that before.

It is experimental and its chaotic and it doesn't always work but when it does, it really does.

That's how I think you should approach hypnosis.

[designertrances]

Walking Hypnosis Pathways with Experienced Subjects

Green, yellow, and red.

Many hiking places do walkers and climbers the courtesy of informing (and warning) them about the various paths, usually by colour.

Some paths are gentle, you barely need boots. Green paths. Some are fine, so long as you're careful and you have the right gear. Those are yellow. Some should not be attempted unless you have considerable experience and confidence that you will know what to do in the event of an emergency, like someone falling.

Those paths are red.

---

Hypnosis is not like other kinks, even in the BDSM world where things can be a little frightening.

The reason it's not like other kinks is because it plays with that most essential element of all kink and all sexual encounters - consent.

Hypnosis treads the surface of acceptability and consent like a fish that breaks the surface of the water. It is, and should always be, done with explicit, discussed consent, of course.

But when hypnosis is the practice of controlling someone's mind... how they think, how they feel, what they believe... it's a little more complicated.

Say, in trance, I plant a desire to please me in someone's mind. Suppose they later express a desire to do something they think will please me. Suppose they believe telling me they are uncomfortable wouldn't be pleasing. So they don't. Is that consent?

Who is responsible there?

An experienced and decent hypnotist couches their suggestions in a variety of safeties ('if and when it feels safe and comfortable to do so, you will...', 'if you ever feel any discomfort or unhappiness with what is happening, you will say orange or red, to show me how you are feeling' etc.).

But even then, it's conceivable the subject would interpret the former as grounds to neglect the latter.

Another example. Imagine the hypnotist assumed and explained that things were to be done only if the subject wanted... and later referred to them wanting to do something, like undress. Is that going to be covered by those safeties or is it circumnavigating them?

How would you know? How would you ask?

Hypnosis is not like other kinks because it can, all too easily, get to a place where what can appears as consent is really coercian masquerading as consent. A masquerade that might fool one or both parties involved.

---

I have done a little hiking, and a little climbing. I would walk and climb yellow paths, with someone more experienced than me. I wouldn't do reds without quite a bit of training, without restoring my first aid cert, and certainly not without someone I could rely on.

Everyone is free to do whatever they please, walk any paths they please, engage in whatever consensual kink they please .

But what pleases me... what allows me to feel comfortable with a subject enough to enjoy this kink as much as I like to, is trust.

Not trust in a relationship way, trust in a hiking way.

I need to know that if something happens, a line breaks or an ankle twists, you will know what to do. That you won't panic, you won't pretend it's nothing, or try to cover over any issues you notice. I want to feel confident knowing you will understand the dangers and communicate them effectively.

Sadly, young people - as lovely as they are, as perky and pretty as they are, are not the people I would look to for this kind of reliability.

That kind of reliability is almost always a product of maturity and what I am going to call 'good self-sense'; to know themselves well enough, to communicate themselves clearly.

I don't work much with younger subjects, not anymore. By younger, I mean up to and including mid-twenties. As I get older that bar comes with me.

It's not that younger subjects can't be trusted nor that they can't express consent; I'm mindful of the bizarre, infantalising rhetoric that claims women in their twenties engaging in sexual activity with older people are being predated upon. That's not where I'm coming from.

They are just on the wrong side of the correlation.

Older subjects tend to be more experienced, and more experienced subjects have a much better grasp on what feels like what to them. 'Older' is hardly an appropriate word for someone in their thirties but English is a crude and barbaric language.

---

If you go hiking or climbing, you can take the green paths. They are comfortable and they are pleasant. Often times, I want to do just that. Easy and gentle, and not much more than some fresh air.

There are yellow paths that can bring you to higher places, give you better views, give you something of a work out and a healthy sense of satisfaction once done. But I wouldn't be comfortable walking them with someone I don't know.

Then there are red paths. The mountain tops. The cliff faces that, when climbed, overlook an ocean or a forest from an angle you've never seen before. Breathtaking. Eye-opening. Moving. Places that change you, change your life, make you different in some way that cannot be easily described.

I can't get to those places if I'm handholding someone ... and I have no interest in trying.

---

Sadly, enthusiasm is no substitute for experience.

However much you might feel or believe you are capable of, and wanting to, walk the yellow and red... if you are not at least yay-high, I simply don't feel comfortable taking you there.

And with more experienced subjects, who overwhelmingly tend to be older than those bright-eyed younger ones... there's very much to do, very much we can see.

Someone I can trust to move in red, to exist in red, to stay in red, and who will be able to communicate the moment they need to be lifted out of the red, that is someone worth more than gold, as a subject.

Someone who knows themselves well enough to say no, to know what it means to say what worked and what didn't, someone that is trying to get to all the same places that I am wanting to go and who knows that to get there, we will need each other...

With someone like that, there's no limit to the places we can go.

[designertrances]

Hypnovember prompt: ladder

It seems so easy, doesn't it?

A ladder for stepping down, down into deeper trance. The induction practically writes itself.

But let's think about it creatively a moment.

Yes, 'down' the ladder is an easy metaphorical match for going 'down' into trance but what about inverting that?

What could going 'up' the ladder be?

Well it's climbing. It's pushing yourself against your own weight, pulling yourself up, grip by grip.

It's work. It needs drive.

Climbing. Pulling yourself up. Working toward something. What might that be? What might you want to place at the top of the ladder for your subject to pull themselves up toward? Maybe your approval. Maybe your praise.

Maybe the ladder is a metaphor for how much your subject wants to work toward those things. Climbing up to your attention, pulling themselves higher in your praise.

In trance, they can start climbing the ladder and later learn what they are climbing for.

Oh... and before I go. That motion they are going through, putting one arm in front of the other to move themselves forward... On a slightly different axis, it looks an awful lot like crawling. Doesn't it?

[designertrances]

Sentence Breaking

This is something I have referred to often in the various posts on trance techniques over the years so let me offer a brief outline of what I mean by it now.

(note: This is centered on text trancing as it is my most commonly used and most comfortable format but I have found the principles of this very effective in voice trancing too)

------ What (is this) and Why (should I care)? ------

This is a technique that will greatly help your induction - it is advice for hypnotists. Anybody who is in any way serious about real (as opposed to roleplay) hypnosis should care about holding a subject's attention properly so you can draw them into deeper states of trance. It is not possible to induce someone by giving them a paragraph to read. It can also be jarring, however, to hit a subject repeatedly with too many separate lines of text. A word of caution; this is going to be getting into the minutia of text-based inductions. Unless you are properly interested in the nitty gritty of hypnotic inductions, it will be, I expect, insufferably dull. You have been warned.

------------ How does it work? ------------

A sentence break, as the name might suggest, is a sentence that is broken somewhere in the middle. For example; - Tell me about the last time - you remember being hypnotised This post will be examining that small couplet as an example, across a three dimensions; cadence, hook, and framing.

1. Cadence

First, and of some significance, you will notice that this couplet simply feels quite different to the same sentence given in full.

Compare how it sounds in your mind to read; - Tell me about the last time you remember being hypnotised. and note how differently it feels to read; - Tell me about the last time - you remember being hypnotised There is a difference, isn't there? Even without the benefit of actually being able to insert a small pause between those lines, it still feels different.

Though the words are precisely the same and grammatically the two are identical, the latter conveys something the former doesn't. In fact, it conveys something normal text always struggles to convey - rythym. I don't find much time or inclination to write poetry anymore but studying poetry, and being more mindful of how words simply feel, particularly how they feel together, is something which every hypnotist should be mindful. It carries a kind of .. breath, maybe.. or even just a slight pause that would be almost imperceptible in normal conversation. - Tell me about the last time .. a small pause..

- you remember being hypnotised Of course this blog post, by it's nature, cannot convey this point perfectly well but I trust it isn't difficult to sense how leaving a second or two between each of those lines creates a sense of ease, a kind of spaciousness and simplicity that putting them together does not. Comparatively, one long sentence can feel somehow cluttered and fastidious in a way that is antithetical to relaxation. Comparably,

- Breathe in for six seconds, hold it for four and then breathe out for eight. is a line which, I confess, I have used in my earlier days. It isn't terrible, but it's not as clear, not as simple, and not nearly as comfortable as - Breathe in

... - and breathe out. This way of structuring 'breathe in and breathe out' is, I suspect, how most tists first encounter the value of sentence breaking but not many seem to carry it much further than that, which is a shame. But it remains a perfectly good example of how breaking sentences functions to cultivate a more normal, more natural feeling to text and there is no reason for it to stop there.

2. Hook

Let's let ourselves notice what happens internally, when we see the line all together

- Tell me about the last time you remember being hypnotised So what happens? How do you feel on reading that?

'Ok I guess I can do that. If you want me to and if I am in the mood and I feel like playing along. I can choose to tell you about the last time I was hypnotised. Eh maybe I will pick the time I went to ... ' Something like that. You gave an instruction. They received the instruction and they now have something of a job to do. They have to think about how they might accomplish it and then go about accomplishing it. They are chosing if and how to do that. They are choosing. They are in control. Now pay attention - Tell me about the last time Right here, in this moment, after that first line, how do you feel? Well, you feel sort of ... paused, don't you? Right here, in this moment you would normally not even really be thinking much of anything ... because you're waiting. All of human interaction is intricately structured around recognising those moments when you are expected to speak and react and those moments when you are not. You can and should leverage that structure when inducing someone. When the subject is waiting on the hypnotist to finish the sentence, they can't reply until you do. They are not thinking about doing anything until you do. They are not thinking. They are waiting. The locus of activity has shifted from 'me and what I might say and what I might do' to being fully attentive on the hypnotist, eyes open, vacantly attentive. It is only for a moment of course (and man-handling that moment poorly and letting it run on doesn't just flush the magic but replaces it with annoyance) but a moment of putting the subject into an open, attentive state is.. certainly a step in the right direction. The more they find themselves in that state the more normal it becomes. And I should hope the implications of that are obvious.

3. Framing

This one maybe a little more fun so we can consider it a treat for all the perverts who bothered to read down thus far. Breaking our one sentence into two half sentences creates a kind of temporal duality. - Tell me about the last time - you remember being hypnotised

is both one sentence and two, even if only for a moment. The spacing and physical appearance of those lines is understood as both a single sentence over two lines and also two things being said. Look at that second one. When you break up a sentence like that, it creates an opportunity to frame a a sentence all on it's own. A sentence which, on it's own, would not be acceptable. As much as you may want the subject to bring back to mind that warm feeling of sinking down into trance, simply stating... - You remember being hypnotised.

... would sound odd. Too odd, in fact. It wouldn't feel like a conversation anymore. It would feel more like someone is trying some kind of janky induction technique. The whole point here is to be able to slip some quiet suggestions into the subject's mind without their noticing. Janky is not what you want.

But that same suggestion embedded neatly in the base of

- Tell me about the last time - you remember being hypnotised sounds natural and normal, insignificant and unnoticeable. Insignificant and unnoticeable is the opposite of janky and it is precisely what we are looking for. A slightly sexier example of this, might be - So, sarah - tell me a little about why - you want to be hypnotised

And by now, I think, you should be able to see it clearly. Again, stating outright the line - you want to be hypnotised in a normal conversation is... well, you may as well be swinging a pocket-watch and waggling your fingers. It's so crude and overt a suggestion that the incompetence is a little tickling. But because of the cadence, because of the hanging-waiting sensation that's created at the point of every gap, the sequence - So, sarah - tell me a little about why - you want to be hypnotised contains exactly the same suggestion, but now it is all but invisible. It doesn't even sound like a suggestion. It sounds like the end of the sentence. Because it's both. In summary, consciously and smoothly breaking sentences allows you to say, straight to your subjects face, the words "- you want to be hypnotised" And they will accept them without so much as batting an eye-lid.

------------ So now what? ------------

There is still quite a bit to say about this that I would like to get into but I think I had better pause there. I strongly recommend beginning to break sentences in innocuous contexts for a while first - learn to find the places it is comfortable and natural to break them, until it becomes more natural to you. If the first time you do it, you have framed out 'you are going deeper' it may stand out garishly and may create an uncomfortable vibe for the rest of the trance so... go easy. And other than that, as always, practice, practice, practise... Have fun geeks.

[designertrances]

Ads, the sort that are algorithmically inserted between the sweet and warming words of real people, are a disturbing, black mirror of sorts.

"oh you, you are kind of into these mindless, juvenile, power fantasies in game form aren't you? Here, look at this trite, tripe, artless immitation of that."

"Oh you are in your forties now? You must be absolutely craving a tshirt that reads "Old men do it best" thinly stretched over some ripped twenty year old"

It can be so bizarre and crude as to be laughable and yet, if you stare through the surface of the mirror you can see yourself. You see your demographic. You see the needs and fears and cravings that the thousands of people like you quietly, privately, shamefully encounter. You see ominous warnings, mockeries of who you are that are somehow like peering into a neighbouring reality that is far but.. not far enough.

The ads I described may sound completely alien and unrelatable to many of you. You may wonder if that is really what is appearing on other people's feeds (feed... What an unfortunate word we agreed to use), and it is.

You will have your own unique array of mockeries, your own crude parody of your own insecurities. An inhuman droid foisting proudly high your least flattering underwear, waving it like a conquering banner under some mistaken view that you will be attracted - you have kept them so long, after all, this must be something attractive to you.

The crude, comical failure to understand humanity at such a foundational level... That leaves and afterthought of sadness.

The closest machinery has ever come to intelligence and we use it to mock ourselves, to belittle ourselves enough to try and buy our way out of our shame.

Handing our pocket money over to an automated bully.

Say what you will about television, call it the boobtube, the thing that dumbed the world, call it what you will... But at least that gave a shared experience; a phenomenological floor we all could stand on together. We all saw the same show, the same ads. When we talked about them, we were talking about the same thing.

Strange that the fragmentation and isolation the TV induced induced in communities and families can now be looked back on fondly compared to the isolation of the algorithm.

I hadn't realised my heart was awake tonight and I wonder if it can be broken - the isolation, I mean.

What ads do you see? What absurdities are slipped into your experience without your consent?

What do your ads tell you about yourself?

[designertrances]

Putting the work in, adding suggestions, reinforcing them, tying them together, like turning a metaphorical silver peg in her back. Click-click-clicking it around and around, adding potential energy to the system... click click click.

Sometimes it's time to just ... let go. Watch her go. Watch as all those things unwind through her, making her move, making her speak, making her think certain thoughts.

It's important to take your hands off the wheel from time to time. To take the time to ... just watch.