I’m mesmerized by hypnokink. Lately I have been losing myself in the work of Sleepingirl and Mr. Dream, scrolling through their blog posts late at night, plowing through the Two Hyp Chicks podcast, falling into these oeuvres like a trance.
Erotic hypnosis isn’t new to me, having dated a hypno pervert for nearly two years now. But this thirst for practical info and first-person accounts is new. I’m an obsessive person and have become fixated on certain kinks for periods of time before, and there always comes a point where I want to move from disinterested, clinical explanations of the thing to dirty stories of people actually doing the thing. I mean, would I have gotten half as focused on spanking as I did if I’d never read “spankophile” Jillian Keenan’s electric book peppered with impact-play eroticism, Sex with Shakespeare? Doubt it.
The thing that Sleepingirl, in particular, captures so well about hypnosis is the intimacy of it. Nobody really explained this aspect to me when I first threw myself into this kink, probably because, to hypnokinksters, it’s often so obvious one might forget to mention it. Of course this sex act you fetishize, which is predicated on extreme focus and listening and paying attention to your partner, might feel romantic to you. Of course you’d feel more connected to someone when they’re manipulating your mind with carefully-chosen words than you do while doing “normal couple things” like scrolling Twitter across from each other at the dinner table or holding hands absentmindedly as you stroll down the street.
There are a lot of misconceptions about hypnokink – listen to Matt’s episode of the Bed Post Podcast for more on that – and one of them, maybe, is that it isn’t romantic. This is the same narrative that’s been used to suppress and oppress queers and kinksters for generations: if you can PR-spin a particular relationship style to seem dirty, illicit, “all about the sex,” you can strip its practitioners of their humanity, and their love stories. It’s why, still to this day, many right-wing cretins will talk about the supposed horrors of (consensual!) anal sex instead of proposing any actually valid arguments for why gay people shouldn’t exist. Love isn’t a prerequisite for respect or acceptance – after all, aromantic people exist, and rough, casual anal sex is just as valid as getting married and having babies, all of which you can do in the same lifetime or even in the same week if you want (kudos!). But love is often part and parcel of alternate sexualities and their expressions – whether or not it’s the romantic kind of love – and to ignore that is to dismiss, dehumanize, and “other” the people who traverse these less-traveled-by routes of erotic connection.
All this to say: I’ve been saying “I love you” a lot during trance lately, and that shouldn’t surprise me as much as it sometimes has; trance is profound and emotional. I’ve never felt so focused upon in a sexual encounter before – naturally, a Tinder boy two beers deep is never going to give me the pinpoint attention that a careful hypnotist will, watching my every eye-flutter and lip-tremble for signs of going deeper and floating away. If ditching a submissive after a scene sans aftercare is like pushing them down a well, hypnotizing a willing sub is like slowly lowering them into that well at the end of a rope: it requires watchfulness and strength and concern, all the way down. So it’s no wonder, then, that sometimes, at the bottom of the well, I feel the words “I love you” bubbling up from the deepest part of me, rising with slow determination to the surface. Competence, care, and connection, swirling together into a sugary cocktail, a love potion, push these words from my mouth even when the rest of me can barely move. No thoughts come but how deep I am and I love you, I love you, I love you.
Though the hypnokink community has warmly welcomed me under its spell, and though I’ve enjoyed many a trance scene, I am not a hypnokinkster per se. I do not fetishize the mesmeric state; pocketwatches and spirals don’t make me wet. But I like the things one can do with trance, and I like this new-to-me avenue of romantic expression. When I love someone extremely, I want to know them fully; it’s thrilling to know not only how they kiss and hold hands and write love letters, but also how they wield a paddle, polish a boot, and – yes – whisper into the ether about staircases and elevators and getting heavier now, yes, that’s right. Kink is so often a prism that lets me peer into dormant corners of a beloved’s brain, even as they’re peering into mine, and that’s one of the most mesmerizingly beautiful things I can think of.