Confident

I was confident. This bet was ridiculous. Hypnosis wasn’t real and even if it was it was the kind of parlour trick that only worked on gullible dimwits. The kind of people who believed in ghost stories and could be tricked by sleight of hand stage magic. The sort of people who believed Fake News stories on Facebook about how the government was actually hiding alien life from us.

I’m a smart, capable and highly educated woman. There is no way that this guy at this party is going to hypnotize me in front of everyone and make me cluck like a chicken or whatever he thinks is going to happen.

I’ll admit, he seems confident for someone so fucking wrong. He explains to me and the other guests what he thinks will happen. I’ll just listen to his voice and relax into a trance and then become open to his suggestions. He might as well have said that I’d end up turning into a dragon or whatever fantasy idea he has nestled into his brain. Yes he’s attractive, wearing a nice suit and clearly good looking obviously keeping himself in shape, but that’s all wallpaper over the fact that he’s clearly delusional about this.

He directs his attention towards me, telling me not to do anything in particular and not to worry about looking into his eyes. He says that just listening to his voice is enough, but that even that isn’t really important. To show him I cover my ears with my hands and shoot him a smirk signalling my victory.

Of course I can still hear him through my hands, it’s not like that creates a magic soundproof barrier but I enjoy the cheekiness of the gesture. He smiles and laughs.

“Good Girl,” he says, “but you’ll start to find as you hold your hands to your ears that naturally your arms will begin to grow heavy. As much as you want to keep them there, to show me that you’re not hypnotized to show me that you can’t be hypnotized, they’re very naturally going to begin to feel heavy. Heavy, and as they do you’ll start to feel them sink. Maybe only a little at first, but as your muscles begin to feel tired, they begin to feel heavy, and start to drop. Dropping, dropping, good girl.”

When he said that second ‘good girl’ I realized that my arms were already falling, nearly down at my sides. I blinked surprised, and looked at him starting to feel a little more concerned. Now there was no doubt that I was listening to his voice, and relaxing. My arms where heavy and that heaviness seemed to be infecting the rest of my body, like a very calm soothing virus.

He kept talking and I listened, still confident that despite his early victory I could stay awake and aware. Obviously I could not have kept my hands up like that indefinitely, I’d handed him a win because of my bravado. I would just conserve my energy, relax and rest and not worry about showing off how good I could fight him.

Closing my eyes was a good idea, they were getting heavy and this way I could relax and not worry about fighting to keep them open. That way he couldn’t use how heavy they were against me, I could just close them and relax.

I closed my eyes and leaned forward, falling against his body. He held me up and I knew this was a clever plan. Relaxing against him I was conserving my energy to resist, fighting to stay unhypnotized. Fighting to relax and be hypnotized.

No wait.

That did not seem right.

I wanted to be hypnotized not not be hypnotized.

Or did I?

It was too confusing, I could worry about it later. For now I just needed to sink deeper and listen. Listen.