The Waft of Jelly Babies

Someone suggested that this should be the title if I ever wrote a book on my travels through D/s and kink.

It’s a flippant title that has a serious message within it.

The dungeon is a fabulous place, full of wonderful physical and mental sensations.  It’s as safe as a domme can make it, yet you have your own responsibilities to contribute to complete the experience.

One of those is to be aware of how you react to what can be, in effect, significant trauma.  You can’t expect play that takes you to your limits and then pushes them further to be a cake walk.  You have to acknowledge that there’s a possibility of going over the edge of mental and physical overload.

I’ve been very close a couple of times in the early days and once, in strange circumstances, actually blacked out.  Good care brought me back safely.  However, it was a salutary lesson in being better prepared.

My secret confession is that I take bags of Jelly Babies each time I enter the dungeon.  Originally, in case I had some sort of emergency such as blacking out.  Lately, they have become a generally useful element of recovery after a session.  When it’s difficult to stand at the end of a session, the sugar dose certainly helps to get ready for the long drive home.

They are useful not just for CP sessions.  I also have them with me for the brainwashing sessions.  In fact I now bring two bags with me for this.  Eight hours is a long shift for the domme, so she gets a bag of her own to keep her going whilst I have one waiting for me at the end.  A brainwashing session can create surprisingly intense mental and physical fatigue.

And the meaning of the title ?

These brainwashing sessions have evolved from a form of sensory deprivation.  The difference is that whilst I’m cocooned in my own world of restriction, I have headphones playing a hypnosis loop that becomes my entire focus.  That focus means that any sensory distractions during the session will be both acknowledged and ignored.

Sensory deprivation is all about isolation.  There is confinement, most likely a solid hood to control sight, sound and smell.  Left long enough the subject loses touch with the reality of their environment.  Several hours in sensory deprivation is about losing contact with the world around you and especially losing sense of time.  What breaks this reverie is external stimulus.  The domme will have to be very careful to avoid noise, touch and even the vibration of foot fall.

These sensory distractions are what I tend to ignore because I’m immersed in the hypnosis loop and lost in time.  I have an auditory overload that the more general sensory deprivation enthusiast will not experience.

Unbeknownst to many who enter sensory deprivation, they are far from being abandoned and a domme knows she has a duty of care as much as if she was inflicting pain.  Just because you’re closed off from the world doesn’t mean you aren’t being looked after.

I know how much I’m monitored during one of these sessions.  An encroachment of external stimulus will be recognised but does nothing to bring me out of the intense focus of the trance as it might do for someone left to the silence of their own reverie.

There is, however, one sense that can become super sensitive in this environment.  That being the sense of smell.  In early sessions I’ve sniffed the faint smell of her scent and known she was there.  More recently I’ve also found myself giggling within the trance when there was the occasionally waft of Jelly Babies.  This is the sort of silly thing that the whirling conscious mind can latch on to when the sub-conscious has locked it out.

I’m that lost within the trance, having no sense of time, that these minor sensations make little difference to the way I interact with the experience.

It’s actually quite cool for me in that environment to know that I’m safe and being cared for.  It allows me to go as deep as I possibly can until it’s time for me to grab a handful of Jelly Babies and re-enter the world.