I did, in fact, end up reading Mind Play
Jan. 24th, 2019 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway(followup to this (mildly NSFW) post)
I had a bit of Amazon-US credit lying around in my personal account from the time I tried to accept a gifted copy of Too Like the Lightning and it wouldn't come through properly, and since it turned out I wasn't going to need that money for its intended purpose I figured I might as well indulge my curiosity.
The book was fairly good, I think? I definitely recommend getting a broad variety of perspectives, but one has to start somewhere and this looks like a good place to do that. (And it comes with an other-resources section, with plenty of links to places you can start branching out into that broad variety of perspectives! Some of them I hadn't heard of, so those will be interesting to investigate.)
Some scattered livebloggy thoughts:
[cw: nsfw text, arguably some tmi, (mild) amnesia]
"For so many of us, in the beginning were the words." is such a great first line. (and it was actually not until I wrote that down that I noticed the Biblical parallel)
(to clarify, that quoted line was in the foreword by Lady Ru'etha)
He apologises for inadvertently cissexist language in the first edition in a way that seems to indicate he assumes the audience will agree that this was bad, yet not long after talks as if he thinks the audience is unaccustomed to the use of singular-they (even in the context of talking about generic people). I'm not sure who he thinks he's talking to.
My inner 20-year-old self--while not *quite* in the category of "people who think they can't be hypnotised"--is nevertheless close enough to feel rather insulted by the mostly-dismissive approach towards such people, and thinks that one should at a minimum not say "Some have been in trance many times but don't realize it because it didn't feel the way they expected it to." without then following up with the fact that you *can* learn to feel it more viscerally with practice. This is a *very important* fact and it needs to be said, and possibly he's gonna say it later (edit: he does) but he didn't say it *there*.
I'm not sure I've heard the term "multi-evocation" for a dual induction before.
You can *really* tell Wiseguy doesn't find hypnosis to be *necessarily* erotic--he makes this pretty explicit in the about-the-author section near the beginning, but it also leaks in elsewhere--and intellectually I know that's fine, but as one of those people whose brains *do* throw an exception at the idea of non-sexual hypnosis it's kind of weirding me out.
"The IT guy in me feels an urgent need to remind you, however, that most laptops vent from the bottom and will overheat quickly if used on a bed." It's times like these that I am very glad we picked up that bamboo lap desk from the Zellers going-out-of-business sale. It's such an integral part of my day-to-day life that mostly I don't even really think about it.
I like the amount of detail he goes into on ideas for inductions and deepeners(mostly because it's hot).
"Some people need to be reassured that the numbers will come back to them when they need them. Don't be afraid to do that if someone seems to be holding on to them. (Accountants and mathematicians are notorious for holding on to the numbers.)" *snort*
(I, an accounting major, *had* in fact recoiled at that bit; I think, though, that it was more the archivist in me that recoiled than the accountant. He recommends reassurance that the memory will come back in this paragraph, and using letter-based countdowns a bit later on, but I think the tweak *I'd* want is to frame it, not as the memory not *being* there, but as being too out of it to think straight long enough to access it. Same *practical* effect, much more palatable way of looking at it.)
"It's also a good choice if you want to get the induction done quickly so you have more time for the actual erotic stuff." excuse you
(tbh I don't really get the appeal of rapid inductions in general, they almost invariably rely on unpleasant feelings like confusion and surprise and inadequacy, why would you do that when you could just as well be having fun instead)
Re: balloons:
"You can use this test on yourself when practicing self-hypnosis if you wish. The sensation of your arm moving itself is fascinating and fun and gives you confirmation that you really have achieved trance." I know, right?! (I have a rather awe-struck diary entry from 2014 on this subject.)
why would you encourage time *compression*, if anything you should encourage time *dilation*; "time flies when you're having fun" is a *bad* thing and to the extent practical you should be trying to fix it
"Nobody has figured out a way yet to do suspensions with hypno-bondage." Growth mindset!
Laughing bitterly at the mention (in the other-resources section) of a "vibrant erotic hypnosis community" on Tumblr. (though note that back in early-mid December I shoved a bunch of familiar community usernames into the Archive Team priority queue†, so there's that)
(Also to be fair it's nowhere near ghost-town level yet: many of them are currently flying mostly under the radar with text, audio, and/or [images that are only sexual when viewed through kink goggles]. But the one person I know of whose blog Discourse levels were sufficiently low that I was willing to directly follow her (rather than popping in when I feel up to it) decided not to stay where she wasn't wanted, and you know I absolutely respect that but the end result is that the amount of kink on my dash *has* very much dropped post-purge.)
---
†I think they figured there's no reason *not* to give a higher priority to sex blogs that people cared enough about to specifically request them.
I had a bit of Amazon-US credit lying around in my personal account from the time I tried to accept a gifted copy of Too Like the Lightning and it wouldn't come through properly, and since it turned out I wasn't going to need that money for its intended purpose I figured I might as well indulge my curiosity.
The book was fairly good, I think? I definitely recommend getting a broad variety of perspectives, but one has to start somewhere and this looks like a good place to do that. (And it comes with an other-resources section, with plenty of links to places you can start branching out into that broad variety of perspectives! Some of them I hadn't heard of, so those will be interesting to investigate.)
Some scattered livebloggy thoughts:
[cw: nsfw text, arguably some tmi, (mild) amnesia]
"For so many of us, in the beginning were the words." is such a great first line. (and it was actually not until I wrote that down that I noticed the Biblical parallel)
(to clarify, that quoted line was in the foreword by Lady Ru'etha)
He apologises for inadvertently cissexist language in the first edition in a way that seems to indicate he assumes the audience will agree that this was bad, yet not long after talks as if he thinks the audience is unaccustomed to the use of singular-they (even in the context of talking about generic people). I'm not sure who he thinks he's talking to.
My inner 20-year-old self--while not *quite* in the category of "people who think they can't be hypnotised"--is nevertheless close enough to feel rather insulted by the mostly-dismissive approach towards such people, and thinks that one should at a minimum not say "Some have been in trance many times but don't realize it because it didn't feel the way they expected it to." without then following up with the fact that you *can* learn to feel it more viscerally with practice. This is a *very important* fact and it needs to be said, and possibly he's gonna say it later (edit: he does) but he didn't say it *there*.
I'm not sure I've heard the term "multi-evocation" for a dual induction before.
You can *really* tell Wiseguy doesn't find hypnosis to be *necessarily* erotic--he makes this pretty explicit in the about-the-author section near the beginning, but it also leaks in elsewhere--and intellectually I know that's fine, but as one of those people whose brains *do* throw an exception at the idea of non-sexual hypnosis it's kind of weirding me out.
"The IT guy in me feels an urgent need to remind you, however, that most laptops vent from the bottom and will overheat quickly if used on a bed." It's times like these that I am very glad we picked up that bamboo lap desk from the Zellers going-out-of-business sale. It's such an integral part of my day-to-day life that mostly I don't even really think about it.
I like the amount of detail he goes into on ideas for inductions and deepeners
"Some people need to be reassured that the numbers will come back to them when they need them. Don't be afraid to do that if someone seems to be holding on to them. (Accountants and mathematicians are notorious for holding on to the numbers.)" *snort*
(I, an accounting major, *had* in fact recoiled at that bit; I think, though, that it was more the archivist in me that recoiled than the accountant. He recommends reassurance that the memory will come back in this paragraph, and using letter-based countdowns a bit later on, but I think the tweak *I'd* want is to frame it, not as the memory not *being* there, but as being too out of it to think straight long enough to access it. Same *practical* effect, much more palatable way of looking at it.)
"It's also a good choice if you want to get the induction done quickly so you have more time for the actual erotic stuff." excuse you
(tbh I don't really get the appeal of rapid inductions in general, they almost invariably rely on unpleasant feelings like confusion and surprise and inadequacy, why would you do that when you could just as well be having fun instead)
Re: balloons:
"You can use this test on yourself when practicing self-hypnosis if you wish. The sensation of your arm moving itself is fascinating and fun and gives you confirmation that you really have achieved trance." I know, right?! (I have a rather awe-struck diary entry from 2014 on this subject.)
why would you encourage time *compression*, if anything you should encourage time *dilation*; "time flies when you're having fun" is a *bad* thing and to the extent practical you should be trying to fix it
"Nobody has figured out a way yet to do suspensions with hypno-bondage." Growth mindset!
Laughing bitterly at the mention (in the other-resources section) of a "vibrant erotic hypnosis community" on Tumblr. (though note that back in early-mid December I shoved a bunch of familiar community usernames into the Archive Team priority queue†, so there's that)
(Also to be fair it's nowhere near ghost-town level yet: many of them are currently flying mostly under the radar with text, audio, and/or [images that are only sexual when viewed through kink goggles]. But the one person I know of whose blog Discourse levels were sufficiently low that I was willing to directly follow her (rather than popping in when I feel up to it) decided not to stay where she wasn't wanted, and you know I absolutely respect that but the end result is that the amount of kink on my dash *has* very much dropped post-purge.)
---
†I think they figured there's no reason *not* to give a higher priority to sex blogs that people cared enough about to specifically request them.
