My Journey with Amnesia by sleepingirl

My Journey with Amnesia

Amnesia is a complicated topic in terms of hypnosis. I am always very cautious about categorizing hypnotic phenomena in the sense of how “difficult” or “easy” they are -- everyone has a different experience, and I think that kind of boxing-in of broad themes is where we can make a lot of mistakes. But that being said, I think for most people, achieving amnesia tends to be more of a long term goal.

That was certainly the case for me -- I started listening to hypnosis files a very long time ago, and I think like most people, they really weren’t effective at all for me. Responding to any kind of phenomenon suggestions just didn’t happen, and especially not amnesia. I didn’t understand how I could simultaneously be aware of what was happening and also forget something point-blank.

When I first started branching out to play online with others, I pretty much immediately experienced a difference in all of my responsiveness. Suggestions felt much more real to me as a whole. Still, though, getting hypnotized by randos in a chatroom wasn’t getting me to amnesia.

But what was happening was a developing understanding of what hypnotic suggestions felt like -- and most importantly, an increasing self-awareness and introspection about them. I can’t stress this enough: introspection and examination of hypnotic response is one of the main tools I’ve found for increasing my skill as a subject.

Active Redirection

One of my earliest experiences of this was with hallucination (another “tricky” phenomenon). I realized as I was being hypnotized that when it was suggested that I see something that wasn’t there, it wasn’t just that nothing was happening. There was some sort of partial, fraction of a response. It was sort of like a part of me believed or questioned something was there, and that I was visualizing something in my mind’s eye. As though layered on top of my “concrete” perception of reality was a hypnotic reality.

The important takeaway for me was coding every response as a successful one. Any change to my perception -- even minor -- was an important change, and one that I wanted to explore.

This understanding of “partial” response is what led me to my first experiences with amnesia. Soon after, when told to forget something, I focused my awareness on the parts of myself that were processing that suggestion. When amnesia is suggested, the first impulse we have is to “check” to see if it’s gone. (From the hypnotist’s perspective, this is why more indirect methods are so important.) But I realized that I could sort of chain that checking impulse to the other impulses I was having -- the impulse to not think about the thing. It was a little process of the suggestion being given, me starting to check and then quickly directing my attention to the desire to forget.

The result was a sort of “stuttering” sense of a memory. When I impulsively started remembering it, I would actively direct away. Sometimes this would happen very fast many times in a row, but sometimes if I was able to focus on something else, I’d have longer periods of time where I simply wasn’t thinking about it.

Passive Redirection

This was a valuable practice for a number of reasons, but one of the best things that came out of it was essentially a conditioned response. Eventually, I had basically trained myself to do this redirecting automatically, and I’d developed a number of variations of it. Sometimes it would be a little phrase or mantra (“I can’t remember” or something else to do with the trance), sometimes I would focus on pleasure or arousal, or something else.

I also got very good at making the length between remembering/checking impulses longer. It was very simply the ability to not pay attention to the thing I was supposed to forget -- I was focusing on the other parts of the trance or the experience that I was having. What ends up happening in that case is that I DO forget the original suggestion, especially if the trance continues and I have other things to focus on. So the suggestion happens, my attention gets passively/automatically directed away, and then I let myself really be engaged in whatever else is happening.

I say this in the present tense because this is still how amnesia works for me most of the time. This amnesia feels both solid and fragile, because there is a sense that I am choosing not to remember what I’m told -- if I sit there and consciously try to recall, it tends to come easily. But there has been a lot of nuance that I’ve developed since then -- which has culminated into some experiences beyond.

Hypnotic Response Is Unique

Something I learned from all this was my perception of the nature of hypnotic suggestions. I really believe that a lot of new subjects get “stuck” at first because they expect hypnotic suggestions to feel indistinguishable from reality, or the way that things feel in a dream where it both feels real and you’re not aware that it’s not.

I figured out pretty quickly that hypnosis feels unique, and the things you feel, hallucinate, etc are unlike anything else. It is not quite just like imagining something, and it’s definitely not like the expectation of magic or mind control (in most cases…). When someone suggests that I forget something, I feel like I have a reasonable expectation of that hypnotic experience -- so when I respond hypnotically, I KNOW it is a hypnotic, real, successful response.

Spontaneous Amnesia/The “Need” to Remember

For a long time, I thought of myself as someone who didn’t experience trance amnesia -- I tended to recall trances really well. So well, in fact, that I was writing about my experiences almost word-for-word, and sharing those writings was how I really got into the community.

I think a few things were happening here. When I was new, every experience I had with hypnosis felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Of course I still value each and every trance I get to experience, but back then, the excitement of finally getting to engage with the thing I’d fetishized my entire life felt incomparable. I NEEDED to remember what happened, and I was hyperanalyzing every single moment. I also realized that writing about these experiences was important to me (and others really enjoyed it), so I was motivated to recall as much as possible.

As I got more comfortable with regular partners and having a place in the community, that relaxed. Now, I do NOT believe that struggles with amnesia stem from some unconscious need to remember. But I DO think that it can be a factor.

Realizing that it was OK if I forgot parts of my trance experience -- simply accepting that being really hyper engaged in the moment instead of “telling myself a story for later,” plus later on when MrDream and I started recording all of our online sessions -- helped me achieve really intense, sweeping trance amnesia.

…Pretty much all of the time. More than I’d like sometimes, in fact. And often despite suggestions to remember things.

I really cannot emphasize enough how much it helps to know that you DO forget things in trances, to see yourself as a person who forgets easily. I also think that most people forget parts of their trance, whether through things getting fuzzy, time dilation/contraction, or etc. I very much recommend setting up some sort of recording -- online, or a literal audio/video in-person -- and go back to see afterwards what slipped your mind.

Having a concrete experience of forgetting stuff in trance like that gave me another thing that I was able to be introspective about and then encourage and train those feelings to be more intense. After a trance, feeling what it felt like to remember the whole thing as blurred, and the natural experience of simply not being able to recall every word that was said. I could pay attention to that feeling and sit with it. I could get familiar with it and learn how to notice it more easily.

Framings/Metaphors That Helped

It was not just “I don’t need to remember” that gave me a good baseline for accessibility. There were a lot of different perspectives and metaphors along the way that I discovered -- many just to myself in my own head -- that really worked for me. Again, I don’t subscribe to the idea that people don’t forget because of an unconscious block, but there are ideas that I think can make it more attractive, exciting, and for me, easier.

It was less the direct metaphors for a suggestion that made a difference for me in the moment (i.e., the memory being put in a box or etc), and more of a broad transformation of the concept of amnesia itself.

One of the most obviously hot aspects of hypnotic amnesia is the connection with mind control and power exchange -- forgetting something as an act of submission and loss of will. I think that most people are already motivated by this, but for me, having other kinds of hypnotic responses where it felt as though I was helpless to resist really gave me a solid framework for it. It feels to me that trying NOT to do something can actually make it happen more passively and automatically -- whether there is a trick of psychology there or just my fetishization of noncon mind control (or both), I’m not sure. But really having a lot of faith and proof that sometimes I am truly being controlled outside of my will helps suggestions move to a more intense space.

Connected to this was something that spontaneously came to mind one time while I was being hypnotized: the idea of “secrets.” I think that there is something almost spiritually powerful about sharing a secret with someone. Especially nowadays with social media, a lot of us focus on our experiences as stories to share -- how we represent them to ourselves and others is what matters most. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” This isn’t just a direct philosophical question, it’s a metaphor -- if we have an experience and we don’t share it, what is its worth? And -- if we have an experience and we don’t remember it, does it lose value?

I realized that secrets -- things that are kept from others, and things that are kept from ourselves -- are more valuable, in some ways. Something that I forget exists in a liminal space, unable to be touched or altered, permanently safe from the transformation of representing it. I am not a religious person, but I have some sense of spirituality and the esotericism of certain concepts, and to me, it feels like something I am amnesiac about is solidly in the domain of being between worlds, or simply only seen by God, or made magical for being intangible.

In a power exchange sense, my hypnotist being able to access the memory of an experience that I can’t is an incredibly powerful secret, because they are able to exist in that space, while I am made blind to it. I’m affected by the magic while they are the ones who can actually touch it.

I want to emphasize again how important my role in this metaphor is. I think inward thought is an invaluable part of the hypnotic experience as a subject. My trance cognition and thinking about concepts like this while I’m hypnotized really improves my experience, and I think that this is something that more people should develop. As a bit of a side thought, I think hypnosis is inherently philosophical because it has to do with the way that we holistically view and connect concepts to our perception and experience. If you change the way you think about something, you change what is available to you about it.

Identity

Identity is one of my favorite topics because I find it to be very psychosensual. This is something else that I’m introspective about a lot of the time -- I think the fluidness of our identity (and how it is defined based on lens) begs examination. Much of my enjoyment of hypnosis and brainwashing is connected to the manipulation of the self and everything that that entails.

I think it is no accident that my self-identification as a bimbo has increased my capability to forget things. Airheads forget things easily. Dumb people are bad at remembering things. Seeing myself as more of a bimbo has allowed me to really achieve a lot of amnesia, and achieving amnesia reinforces the idea that I’m a bimbo.

Beyond this too, I think many kinds of personality alteration can trigger this for me. Petplay and age regression are heavily amnesiac spaces for me (and regression in particular is good for blurring the lines between what is a real memory and what is false). I love regression, by the way. No reason to say this except that I find it extremely exciting and I never get to talk about it!

“I’m Going to Forget This”

As I grew more comfortable with amnesia and especially trance/spontaneous amnesia, I began to recognize when it was going to happen in the trance itself. There is a strange subjective experience of being very immersed in trance, the qualitative experience of being deep and not trying to commit things to memory.

Once, suddenly, I felt myself realizing, “I’m going to forget this.” It was the recognition that I was simply not remembering in the moment, that I was in the kind of trance where amnesia was just going to happen. This thought was incredibly reinforcing, and it seemed to ratify the amnesia and my confidence in it. After the trance, I remembered thinking it to myself, but I didn’t remember what was happening.

Now I feel very sure of my capacity to know when I’m being amnesiac, even though sometimes it surprises me. I have even had this happen while self trancing, and after the first time it happened, trance amnesia has been even more common for me. I believe this is a combination of a lot of things -- training myself not to actively remember things, self suggestion and passively creating a “forgetting trance,” and introspection.

The Black Wall

I think that all of these experiences are stepping stones, and that I am constantly learning and growing as a hypnotic subject. I think that I experience a lot of success with amnesia in different ways, even if suggested amnesia is generally more fragile-feeling than one might prefer.

However, recently, I had two scenes that seemed to imply enormous progression.

The first, I simply don’t remember. MrDream and I were playing on a video chat, and I know that it was very deep and intense for me. I don’t know what it was about. I do remember him saying something to me like, “You don’t have to remember this,” and I instantly felt everything melt away. A full hour that became a hole in my memory.

What was different was how complete it was. This amnesia wasn’t tenuous, and there weren’t bits and pieces that I could fuzzily recall. When I get amnesiac, I will tend to poke and check at the loss of memory to see what it feels like -- and usually I will feel a little sense that if I keep digging, it’ll come back. But afterwards, when I was testing it, I felt like I was looking at a black wall. I tried harder, and harder, and there was still nothing. An hour -- just gone.

I even went back and listened to the full call. As I listened to it, things began to ring bells, but by the end, it became fuzzy again. I believe what was happening was very intense intelligence play and changing the way that I was thinking and processing -- I recall thinking very bimbo thoughts and feeling my brain just being super overwhelmed.

This was obviously very exciting, and even more so because we had a date coming up. On our date, I got to a similar place, except this time it was more focused.

It was a scene that involved a similar kind of overwhelming trance, and then many suggestions and reinforcement that I was forgetting everything about who I was and where I was. All of my memories, all of my understanding of myself and my identity. I remembered MrDream, but as an idea of a person: my boyfriend, the man who controlled me.

It was effective, and it was scary. I spent two full hours not knowing who I was. It was incredibly unsettling, and I couldn’t put my finger on why at the time, which added to my confusion and fear. Every time he hypnotized me, I got turned on, and that was the most concrete thing I knew. I communicated to him at some point that I was scared, which he used as an opportunity to reinforce my arousal and lack of control.

Afterwards, it took a long time for me to get back to baseline. My memories felt like they weren’t coming back all at once -- my sense of self was taking time to recover. I realized that what had happened was that I had forgotten my name; I hadn’t thought of my name those entire past two hours. That wasn’t suggested, but was an obvious side-effect of forgetting my entire identity.

It was very hot, and very powerful. It was different than that experience of the black wall, but more so because I wasn’t even really having the impulse to check for missing memories while I had no sense of my identity.

In Conclusion

Until I have more of those experiences with “fuller” amnesia, it feels like guesswork to try to determine what has changed for me or what was different that made them so intense. Obviously, the way that amnesia is suggested matters a lot, and this is a more complex and nuanced thing than using simple metaphors. I think successful amnesia (from the hypnotist’s perspective) relies a lot on a thorough understanding of permissive and indirect hypnosis, plus the right preframing and set-up. Depth is not a linear concept, but I think both engagement and intensity of trance experience are important. This is perhaps one of the most obvious aspects of hypnosis that proves how much we need a holistic understanding of the way people process instead of a mystical idea of trance + suggestion = result.

But from the subject’s side of things, I feel very confident that the work I’ve done myself has made a huge difference. Constantly analyzing and reframing my experiences, trying to identify where my successes are and what they feel like -- and an ethos of reasonable expectation and curiosity. And -- it’s cliche, but trust plays a huge role.

To wrap this up, I really do think that the best hypnotists are switches, but it’s not exactly that you need to experience something in order to do it more effectively. It’s that introspection about your experiences creates a deeper understanding about human processing as a whole. I hope a writing like this leads people to look inward more to themselves, and leads to a desire to more intimately know yourself.