A Personal Journey Through D/s Hypnosis – Part 9, The Whirling Conscious

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“Let the mind wander as it will.”

That’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot.  She uses it towards the end of an induction so that the separation between my conscious and sub-conscious is more distinct.  It’s the instruction for the conscious to go mind it’s own business whilst she talks to the sub-conscious.

In a normal hypnosis session the conscious kind of slips to one side and observes her conversation with the sub-conscious.  It will be quite analytical in doing so.  It will parse and analyse the words, recognising links and content that is the result of feedback conversations.  Sometimes, when the deepening sequences are taking effect the conscious will spin off in to a random thought train.

The conscious is only sidelined for about 20 minutes until the awakening sequence and the amnesia effect from the sub-conscious starts to blanket the memories in a thick fog.

I had reason after the last brainwashing session to contrast what happens to the conscious when the trance session lasts for 8 hours.  The induction before the headphones are placed over my ears is familiar and about the last thing I hear before the hypnosis loop is activated is “let the mind wander as it will”.

What does the conscious mind do for all that time ?

keren-let-your-mind-wander-if-you-want-to-know-7227398It starts off in the same analytical mode.  The hypnosis loop can be anything from five to twelve or so minutes long, not that I know exactly anymore – well, not even close these days.  Just like a normal session it parses the words to try to understand them and it does so for about the same length of time.  Having heard the loop perhaps two or three times the conscious now enters a free wheeling state.  There’s nothing new for it to analyse, so with little to gain traction on it will start to do it’s own thing.

Sometimes its attention will wander in a state of white noise, dropping in and out of recognising the content in the loop.  Abruptly locking on to the loop for a short time before letting go again for an undefined and unknowable time.

What I found really interesting in this last brainwashing session was that within the randomness, conscious thoughts would flit in and out of focus.  The conscious could have a long thought stream, but not in a directed way.  It didn’t have the concentration to do that.  What it was able to do was recognise when, after some indeterminate time, the next thought in the chain arrived and came in to focus.

I call it a long thought chain only because I was able to reconstruct some of it a few days later.  However, I suspect that those thoughts may have only taken perhaps an hour of elapsed time spread across some 7 hours of time distorted isolation – not that I really know.

It’s a very odd way to have a conversation with yourself.  Constantly interrupting or blanking out, like a mental tourettes periodically stuttering for attention.

A key question is, what was the conscious mind doing for the rest of the time ?  It was definitely wandering where it willed.  I have no true recollection of the themes it was processing, only how uncontrolled the switching of thoughts was.

The uncontrolled conscious consumes energy at a prodigious rate because it never pauses, it’s a continuous day dream with no sensory threshold to blank it out, never interrupted by external stimulus.

It’s for this reason that I end the session physically as well as mentally drained.

let-your-mind-wander

 

Addendum.

There’s a somewhat obscure book by Frank Herbert called Destination Void.  It’s set in a spaceship which is consciously controlled by specialised human brains.  All the brains fail, they go rogue; paranoid and psychopathic before self-terminating or being killed by the crew in order to save themselves.  The book is a fascinating discussion on what constitutes consciousness.

The brains fail because they have a directive to be conscious all the time and are bombarded with intense amounts sensory inputs.  They have no threshold of consciousness, no means of filtering out low-level sensory inputs.

I see my free wheeling conscious as a microcosm of this tale.  With no threshold on the limited sensory input, there’s nothing to keep the conscious in check and controlled.

 

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