Have you ever been hynotized? I was, once. It wasn't what I expected. It wasn't like being asleep or absent from my body or made into an automaton. It wasn't like the hypnotist said "take off your shirt" and my hands moved without me, or I felt compelled to do it.
It was like I was totally awake and in control of myself, and I freely decided that taking off my shirt was a thing I wanted to do.
Sometimes I have that same feeling during sex. I'm a totally rational and free mind, and if I so chose I could be totally stil and silent and unmoved. I just decide to thrash and clench and moan and scream, is all. To some small exent this is true--when my roommate is home I rediscover my volume control, and although I'm not exactly silent I do manage to hold in the more unholy howls. Although other times I want to be quiet and the best I can do is clasp a hand over my own screaming mouth. Like it's someone else's.
The strangest is when I have those hyper-orgasms, the ones that knock me flat so I can't move or speak right for a few minutes afterwards. During that time, when I'm crashed out quivering and babbling, I'm completely aware of myself and a little chagrined how ridiculous I'm acting. I could just decide to pull myself together at any moment... I never fully understand why I don't.
Altered states are like that, though. They always seem real and ordinary when you're in them; a person with schizophrenia or tripping on hallucinogens, or even just dreaming, doesn't experience just images but the knowledge that those images exist and make sense.
(Or maybe all of existence is like that. Right now, I have the sensation that everything I'm experiencing is real and sensible and I'm in control of myself--and that proves what, exactly?)
Maybe the line between "the devil is talking to me through the rats" and "oh god fuck me fuck me fuck me" is a whole lot finer than I'd like to believe.
I don't find that true in my personal experience, however. When experiencing an altered state, I'm usually quite aware that something's different, and often become paranoid about my ability to make good judgments. ("Okay, apparently I'm drunk now. Don't do anything stupid. To be safe, don't do anything really.") Though sometimes I am mistaken about the nature of the altered state... for example, there were a few times when I thought I was dreaming but actually had a high fever. And when I lost my virginity, I wasn't planning to do so - I was so desperately horny that I ended up screwing a complete stranger for no reason other than he asked me to. And during that time I was desperately trying to force myself to stop doing it but for some reason my body and voice just wouldn't cooperate. And oddly, knowing that I'm dreaming doesn't usually give me much, if any, control over the dream itself. (Though when it does, the results can be rather strange. Apparently my dreams really don't like being forced to go off the script...)
ReplyDeleteNot Me - You need therapy worse than anyone I know. I don't mean that as an insult. i just mean that every time you post on my blog,you tell me things that you should be telling to a qualified queer-positve professional. Seriously. Don't be that guy who coughs for three months but won't go to the doctor. You need help a sex blogger can't give.
ReplyDeleteIDK if this applies similarly to everyone, though. I did a hypnosis experiment for cash back in college and it just...didn't really work. It wasn't that the guy didn't know what he was doing, but I didn't find myself having any particular desire to do anything he asked me to.
ReplyDeleteI can have sex, and it's good sex that feels awesome and gets me off, but I never get lost in it. Maybe it's because I live in my head a lot--it takes an effort for me to get really involved with anything that's going on around me--I don't know. I think a lot of it depends on the person, though.
I agree with aebhel. I don't tend to get lost in experiences to quite the same degree and even when I'm having the best sex of my life I have to be careful not to step out of it, as it were. When I AM having an altered state experience I haven't got a choice about (as when I discovered that if I don't go to sleep as soon as Ambien kicks in, I hallucinate instead), I'm conscious that what I'm experiencing isn't real and find the unreal sensory experience more disturbing because of that than because OH SHIT HAND OF DARKNESS REACHING FOR ME.
ReplyDeleteAdmittedly OH SHIT HAND OF DARKNESS was plenty disturbing on its own, but it was knowing that what I was seeing was unreal but that the sensory experience wouldn't stop anyway that really freaked me out.
"You know what would make me insecure? Knowing that my partner was only with me because she depended on me for her quality of life or even survival. I would always wonder if she even liked me or if I was just a tolerable meal ticket. Dating someone who doesn't need me is a wonderful reassurance that they want me."
ReplyDeleteA-fucking-men! I've never understood how keeping someone emotionally, economically, or physically captive can work in the long term. Unless you're one of those Ayn-Randian/Tea Baggers who see everything in life as a purely selfish and economically motivated transaction in which a individual always maximizes their personal gain. I guess in that view, if there were no economic chains, people would be constantly shopping for a better deal.
Awesome Cosmocking, as always :)
This is fascinating. I've been hypnotized several times (psych experiments back in undergrad) and I remember thinking to myself that I was totally able to *not* do what I was being told to do, but that it was much more fun to just go along with it. Same deal with sex, sometimes I can just decide to be in the moment and it is wonderful...and often leads to hyper-orgasms. But there's something that's really been bugging me lately, and that's that I don't remember what happens to me while in these states in the same way that I remember other things. I've got little snapshot memories, and if someone describes things to me in detail afterwards I can kind of trace my way back through a few remembered moments...but without help I have trouble even accessing the snapshots. My sense of time also becomes wildly distorted, but that bothers me much less than the fact that if sex is really really mindblowingly amazing, I can't remember it - or at best I can remember bits of it with assistance.
ReplyDelete