A Personal Journey Through D/s Hypnosis – Part 8, Scrambling Time Sense

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I’ve been experiencing the brainwashing sessions for a year, there are a number evolutions over that time as both of us have learned so much.

The key word for this post is TIME.

The perception of time is a key attribute of consciousness.  The way that time appears to speed up and slow down is fundamental to the way our conscious being interacts to the world around it.

Amongst other things, a brainwashing session is an opportunity to play with and alter those perceptions of time.

Time-01

There are many aspects to time for one of these sessions.  There’s the fact of the extended time in the dungeon.  There’s the amount of time isolated and listening to the loop.  There’s the minefield of ‘guessing’ how long the loop is and most significant of all is the perception of the passage of time, how long have I been here ?  How long to go ?

I’ve said it before and it’s worth reiterating, you don’t blithely enter this kind of activity without major caution.  We had two years of standard hypnosis before even considering the idea of brainwashing.  Even then, eight hours in the dungeon was split between bondage/confinement activities and the time allocated for brainwashing.  From the domme’s perspective it takes time before really trusting that the subject (me) can handle it.  Unlike CP there’s no immediacy of body language feedback.  Feedback comes afterwards when it’s too late to counter any mental damage in a sub that rates their submissive and endurance abilities far higher than they are.

It’s not always obvious in these posts that caution from both of us is paramount, it tends to get in the way of the narrative.  Take it as a given that the caution is there.

With each session the bondage predicaments decreased giving more time for the serious brainwashing.  Five, six, seven hours until the whole time could be dedicated to the sleepsack and the loop playing through the headset.

My sensation of time under the headset has gone through many phases.

The first time I thought I could be a clever bugger and count how long the loop was.  Even if only 90% accurate it provides a hook to help manage what’s going on when the spinning mind has little to gain traction on.

Of course I told her about the counting to estimate the loop length – she told me not to do it again and I couldn’t manage it the next time.  Counting the number of loops is legitimate.  However, without a handle on loop length the conscious mind can be left in a perpetual spin wondering about elapsed time.

An estimate of elapsed time is a coping strategy because what you’re really estimating is can you make it to the end ?

I’m reminded of a piece that Chris Boardman did a few years back on the coverage of the Tour de France about the art of time trialling.  He said you’re constantly asking yourself, “can I get to the end ?”.  If the answer is ‘yes’, then you’re not trying hard enough.  If the answer is ‘no’, then it’s already too late.  The correct answer is ‘maybe’.

As the time under the headset has increased, that answer of ‘maybe’ has started screaming at me once in a while.  It also reduces the variables because I know that the total time will now be 8 hours whether I have proper perception on the passage of that time or not.

Even without counting the length of the loop, experience can lend a hand.  Familiar elements in a loop can help with a reasonable guess and the internal doubts assuaged by thoughts of only about 10 loops left.

This is low-level warfare.  As I learn to endure the full 8 hours and create coping strategies, she is learning how I process the loop and equally creating strategies to make the experience as disorienting and stressful as she can.

She really succeeded this last session.

The format of the loop made it very difficult to even determine where the start and end were.  That was a bad start for me because she kicked it off somewhere in the middle such that my count of the number of loops was rapidly confused.  Another aspect of the format made the loop feel much longer than it actually was (retrospective analysis).

Combine those two effects and from quite an early stage I know I have a very fuzzy sense of time.  Is eight hours just around the corner, or have I barely started ?

Time-02

There’s a point in these sessions where I crave oblivion, to be able to switch off and go to sleep, but seemingly can’t.  This is also the point where attention can drift, leaving short blank spots of indeterminate time missing.  She reported that I’d been asleep for a very short while.  Whether it’s the blankness from deep trance or a micro-sleep, it’s pretty much the same thing.  When the attention returns it has no idea how much it’s missed – 30 seconds, 3 minutes or 30 minutes.  The nature of this loop means there’s no way of working it out, especially with the fatigue that just grows with each small blankness.

As best I can reconstruct, after about 6 hours I was convinced that 8 hours had gone by and it would soon be over.  Never mind the content of the loop, her construction of the loop is a mindfuck in it’s own right.  Everything beyond this point feels like overtime with the mind constantly second guessing itself as to the nearness of the end.  My only reference point being the level of physical discomfort.

I was pretty ragged by the time I felt her hands start the process of releasing me.

As we discussed the session over coffee it became apparent that these effects in the hypnosis loop were very deliberately created.  She won that one hands down.

And so did I.

In losing all time sense, enduring the session was a very pure experience.  Previous coping tricks rendered of minimal value, instead, entering a limbo state until I either cracked or saw it through and the only answer to that question was ‘maybe’.

 

Previous posts in this series:

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