[Audio Summary: An audio recording of the first (1st) Trance Tales post. Not hypnotic content, though I will not promise you won't drop.] - Audio posted 03/27/2020

This will be a bit more casual than the typical fare.

But I figured it might be nice to hear my voice in a [slightly] less hypnotic context. This is, as you might expect, just a recording of me reading the post "Trance Tales: In The Beginning."

Here you go.

As always, enjoy.

-C

[Summary: First of the Trance Tales content, this isn't a script at all...rather a bit of autobiography for the curious.]

I've often considered writing out summaries of some of the experiences I've had as a hypnotist over the years.

As it turns out, that was a remarkably popular idea, so here we are. Understand that any names have been altered in the interest of privacy, any details are subject to the whims of my memory, and any of the subjects whose stories are touched on may request to have them removed at any time and for any reason at all.

Once upon a time, there was a hypnotist.

That's how these things start, isn't it? In the beginning, once upon a time, first...you know, the logical arrangement of start to finish.

I'd love to regale you with tales of my burgeoning obsession with mind control, starting with the familiar sources: vampires, certain cartoons, maybe stage hypnosis? In reality, while I've always felt a particular pull from stories and images and sounds relating to hypnosis and mind control, I didn't start there. There were no late nights researching the nuances of inductions and NLP following some formative experience.

Rather, I stumbled into the world of hypnosis quite by accident.

I'm fond of focusing on the foundation of my fetish by fixating on the first time I put someone into a trance. I like to tell it as follows: I had a girlfriend in high school with insomnia, and she found the sound of my voice soothing, so we exploited that during late-night phone calls to put her to sleep.

There's nothing untrue about that, but convenient omissions run through it like neon sparkling through an old storefront sign. No one from my high school would've known this girlfriend; she was Canadian. Yes, really. We got into a long-distance relationship from an introduction on a forum, back when that (and IRC chat) was the primary method of online interaction.

Thus, the late-night phone calls weren't designed for the purpose of putting her to sleep. They were a little over half of how we communicated, with the rest being a patchwork of AIM and YIM and MSN messenger and mIRC. After we became more comfortable with the arrangement, she started falling asleep on me with increasing frequency - once in a month became once a week became several times a week became every night, as we accepted that I just had that effect on her.

It wasn't exactly unwelcome. She did have insomnia, after all, so I quickly began to consider it a good thing. I can only imagine the damage it would have done to my ego otherwise.

I could've connected the prevalence of passing out to hypnotic cadence or softer vocal tones, but I didn't...not for awhile, anyway. It wasn't until this had gone on for a number of weeks that something significant changed and I had my "AHA!" moment.

It was easy enough to tell when she fell asleep on call, and say my goodnight and hang up. Ask, "are you asleep now?" then wait a bit...good, she's out. Only this time, she said "Yes."

You and I both know it wasn't a normal response, nor in her "normal" voice. It was the characteristic blank, monotone, not-really-there sort of reply we're going for (a lot of the time, anyway) in hypnosis. I was young, but it's still somewhat embarrassing to admit that I didn't immediately connect the dots. I asked several follow-up questions, and got back the same sort of semi-conscious soft tones with each answer.

"Is this how you feel every time I talk you to sleep?"
"Yes."

So it clicked then, right? Nope. Sent her to bed with neither of us the wiser. The key was when I asked about it the next day, and she had no recollection of the conversation at all. Not the standard sort of fuzzy, half-awake absence of memory...just nothing. That's the moment everything clicked, and I realized what I'd been doing for several months, by this time.

My understanding of hypnosis at that point in my life was informed pretty much entirely from fetish porn (here's looking at you, EMCSA.) Which is a nice way of saying I didn't have the slightest clue what I was doing. Were I a better person, I'd have talked things out with her on the spot and made sure everything was okay.

I'd like to say that's the case, but you and I gain nothing from that sort of dishonesty. I told myself I had to make sure that hypnosis was actually what was happening before we talked about it, which was ultimately just the first of many excuses not to "spoil" things.

Yeah, I was barely more than a kid at the time, but even in the moment I knew better. It's easy to give in, unrestrained, to the excitement that comes with all of this, and I did.

I tested to see if suggestions would stick, how well they worked, for how long...within a week, I had her going under at a trigger and following instructions whether night or day, voice or text. In retrospect, it's surprising that she had that sort of natural hypnotic amnesia - I know now that such a thing isn't excessively common, certainly not enough to be reliable.

Did I tell her then? No. I planned out the conversation, but promptly talked myself into the notion that her being aware of the "experiments" would compromise the results. Which was, as with the prior, a thinly-veiled excuse that bordered, even at the time, on being a blatant lie.

She found out after about three weeks of this, when the call dropped with her in a very different place than she started the conversation. The confrontation went remarkably well afterwards, but I can only imagine how much better things would have been if I was up front about it after the first time. There's no substitute in the world for an eager participant.

I don't think our relationship ever quite recovered from the betrayal of trust. We went on for another several months, and there was even additional hypnotic play, but everything deteriorated steadily. We parted pretty amicably, given the circumstances, but there's still plenty of regret tied up in all of that.

After the confrontation, I started seeking out real resources - forums, primarily, although this was slightly after the decline and dissolution of the Yahoo forums. I believe the main website was "hypme" at the time? Could be wrong, I'll have to check. Forums, books, articles, a healthy supply of fetish stories, and a host of willing (and informed) victims on whom to experiment...that'd be the montage following my first time.

Is this my biggest regret over the course of my development as an erotic hypnotist? No. It makes for a good cautionary tale, though, and it -is- the beginning.

The rest will be more fun, I expect. Until then.

-C

(Continued here.)