[Audio Summary: An audio recording of the second (2nd) Trance Tales post. This isn't hypnotic content, though I will not promise you won't drop anyway.] - Audio posted 07/03/2020

While I didn't deliver the next segment of Trance Tales as soon as I'd implied (or hoped), that is nearly finished at long last.

In the meantime, this is a recording of me reading through the second post in the series, "Trance Tales 2: Trial and Error."

There's no hypnosis, but if you enjoy my voice and wanted to learn more about me and my experiences...here you go.

As always, enjoy.
-C

[Summary: Second (2nd) entry to the Trance Tales series...a bit more reflecting on my past. Again, not a script. This is also the one-hundredth (100th) post on the site - or at least it is, until I consolidate older content or something.]

(Bit of an aside here - this is my 100th post. I don't know how I feel about celebrations, but I felt like it should be, at the very least, noted. Woo!)

If you've missed the first, you can find that here.

Alright, where were we? These ultimately don't need to be read in any sort of order, true, but I'm going to attempt to get it in chronological order so I don't miss anything.

Ah yes, the first experience with the long distance girlfriend. What happened next? I found a mentor in the community who taught me about consent and safety and proper technique, and blossomed into the brilliant lunatic you find here today?

Naturally not. That would be too easy.

No, what followed was a hormone-and-curiosity driven set of extended experiments and forays into the wonderful world of erotic hypnosis that began on a handful of websites. It was past the days where Yahoo Groups were an active thing. Primarily, there was a website, I believe by the name of "Hypme."

There were other websites, of course. I mentioned EMCSA (the erotic mind-control stories archive, for those unfamiliar with it) in the prior post. It is, of course, an archive of hypno-smut (in so many words or less) so it is (or was) pretty easy to avoid direct interaction. There's also a site around by the name of The Collective, which I frequented without a lot of active participation. That one is devoted mostly to images, though many of them are presented in story form.

Hypme, though, was like a Myspace page. I made a profile and started chatting with people - almost exclusively subjects, though I did make an effort to pay attention to the non-sleazy hypnotists (more on that later.)

There is, you see, a bit of a dating-app vibe in the online hypnosis community. To be clear, it isn't a monolith - every site is a little bit different. But to understand how these places come to be, you have to understand a basic reality about hypnosis on the internet: payment processors do not like it.

What does that mean, exactly? Hypnosis (in any context) is treated by certain (large and obnoxiously influential) payment processors as if it is in the same category as hardcore fetish porn - they ban it unilaterally. Websites that cater to it often find themselves closed off from any of the "free" hosts (back when those were more prevalent) and even kicked off of paid ones. It isn't easy or straightforward to set up a website with any appreciable traffic or user base under those conditions, you see.

[Note: it is wrong and upsettingly invasive of payment processors (or anyone else, for that matter) to censor (consensual) content online, porn or otherwise. Just so we're clear on where I stand on that issue.]

That translates to a somewhat transient set of websites, typically run by a handful (if even that) of experienced individuals with vastly different levels of availability and involvement. Usually, they get burned out or run out of funding, and the websites drop off the face of the internet. So any connections made that aren't bolstered by social media or chat apps? Gone in a flash. I say the community isn't a monolith because this has happened at least 5 times in the span of my involvement with it (which isn't short, but also isn't especially lengthy.) We've been banned from Fetlife a few times, for fuck's sake.

When vanilla websites spring up (somewhat rarely, but it happens...what was it, HypnoThoughts?), they wind up facing the same issues...which obviously is far more discouraging to hypnotherapists and vanilla trance-seekers than to those already erotically-inclined. That's just a fact of life for the internet at this point in time, however idiotic it might seem.

I'll confess here that I haven't sought out the community in many places for several years. Hypme became Hypbook became Hypwatch, which is where I currently "reside" - and it's pretty inactive, aside from a chat room I don't frequent. I am told there is a somewhat active community on Discord, which is cool. I'll eventually get the app going. Twitter has been fantastic so far, but looks to be going the same direction as Fetlife (at least at the moment. We'll see.)

But back to the notion of the dating-app style of many folks around. Hypnosis is an intimate thing, whether vanilla or erotic, and it makes people predisposed to want to connect on an individual level. Websites that don't very carefully cultivate active discussions degenerate rapidly into sets of people "sliding into the DMs" with no visible (public) activity. This does a few things, but for the scope of this post the important effect is that it's damn near impossible to moderate - especially for the standard skeleton crew (or army of one) running the places. This has made it very easy for predators and sleazeballs to operate, and there's definitely an overabundance of them online.

Because the community shifts from place to place fairly often, it has historically been difficult for people to build public profiles or followings. That's changed with the growth of Patreon, YouTube, Clip Sites, etc...but in an unfortunate cult-of-personality sort of way. Hell, even this website is my words and mine alone.

This makes it very difficult to call out bad behavior without being greeted with a litany of "well they meant well/have changed/weren't -that- bad, and who are you anyway?" and the like. Add that to the inherent difficulties in moderating websites consisting of largely private conversations without getting massively invasive re: user privacy...and you've got a recipe rife for exploitation.

I worry about coming off the same way. I wasn't always the best about consent and safety and clarity in communication, after all. I made plenty of stupid mistakes, like anyone experimenting without a mentor.

I had quite a lot of fun in my growth as an erotic hypnotist too, and I promise we'll get to that very soon. Thanks for being patient with me so far.

If there's anything to take away from what I'm saying here (and it may not have been clear, so I'll try to say it plainly now) it's this: there are tons of people involved with hypnosis online. There are not tons of places for them, and there's a constant risk of those places changing. There are lots of predators who are used to operating with near-impunity because of the nature of the internet and especially this kink, and they have spoiled the experience for lots of great subjects. There are also a lot of really good people out there doing the best they can to make this patchwork community a more welcoming and safer environment.

In short, I absolutely encourage exploring hypnosis (obviously. I'm here proselytizing about it, aren't I?) - whether as a kink or as a topic of interest from the vanilla perspective, or both. But it is important to bring the same kind of caution to that exploration that you should bring to large and unwieldy online communities like Reddit (or Yahoo Groups, in days gone by) - we are all, particularly at first, relative strangers. It's hard to know someone's intentions up front, and it's very easy to be deceived. Take the same kind of care with opening up your mind to someone online that you'd take discussing intimate details of your life in person...perhaps more.

That's why there's a page on safety and consent up on this blog, and maybe I'm harping on it too much. I don't mean to be boring, seriously, but I have met way too many subjects who have been soured to hypnosis because they were taken advantage of early on in their exploration. If talking about this stuff helps even a few avoid the same fate, I'll happily be dull and preachy for a bit every now and again.

Next time, though? We're talking about the things I've done with subjects, rather than waxing poetic on the nature of online hypnosis communities at large.

As a bonus, that'll be up soon. Consider it a prize for putting up with my meandering warnings. Until then...

-C

(Continued here.)