Behind the Music: Imagine

Originally, when I first wrote it, “Imagine” didn’t have much to do with Lady Ru’etha. (That’s what the “Behind the Music” series is about, examining the real-life hypnosis elements that have worked their way into some of my stories. You can, of course, find more information on the stories behind my stories by buying “Greatest Hits, Volume One”, which includes a section describing exactly that.)

But at first, “Imagine” was just another story, with me trying to do something a little experimental by writing a story that was a) told entirely as a spoken monologue, b) used no gender-specific references, and c) had “Imagine” as the first word of every paragraph. I thought it worked fairly well when I sent it off to Lady Ru’etha to read (one of the perks of brainwashing your favorite writers, you get to read all their stories early.)

A few days later, I was chatting with Her in text when She sent me an email with an attachment that had the filename, “imagine.mp3.” She played a little coy about what it was, just telling me to listen to it, but I had kind of a hunch even before I put on my headphones. Even so, the experience of listening to Her speaking those words was qualitatively different from just reading them; I’m so accustomed to going into trance for Her already that it felt like the words weren’t mine at all anymore. I was totally divorced from the perspective of writing the story, and immersed in the experience of listening to Lady Ru’etha hypnotizing me with it. Oh, and I found out that it’s awfully tricky to take your shirt off while wearing headphones. 🙂

She’s since put the recording up on Her NiteFlirt page, and She’s talked to me about putting it on CD as well (She’s got some fun news about that coming up over the next few weeks.) But despite enjoying it several times since, nothing quite matches the surprise of finding out that the words I wrote belonged to Her just as surely as I do.

And on that note…

[10:52:22 AM] ladyruetha says: **HUG**
[10:52:26 AM] ladyruetha says: I need to get going to lunch…
[10:52:32 AM] ladyruetha says: And you… need to sleep for me.
[10:52:40 AM] jukebox says: And i need to eat and sleep. Yes my Lady.
[10:54:08 AM] ladyruetha says: Good boy. Eat and as you finish, feel yourself sinking down into trance before you even put on Voice.
[10:54:19 AM] ladyruetha says: It’ll feel so good.
[10:54:41 AM] jukebox says: down. yes my Lady. Must finish blogging first though. hypno-blog.
[10:55:23 AM] ladyruetha says: Good boy. You can even blog from trance. In fact, just keep typing as you were, and let people know that I hypnotized you. You may wake when you’re ready to post and put in one last line telling people what happened. You may even copy and paste this chat session.
[10:55:47 AM] jukebox says: Yes, my Lady.
[10:56:02 AM] ladyruetha says: Good boy. I look forward to seeing the results. I’m going to lunch now. I love you, pet.
[10:56:13 AM] jukebox says: i love You too, my Lady.

And I’m back. 🙂 And now I’m off to eat and sleep, as commanded. At times, I feel very lucky to be me.

A Sense of Entitlement

Even now, as I sit at ninety stories and counting on the EMCSA (and I’ve got a special story planned for #100, by the way), I still occasionally get people saying to me, “Oh, I get it! All your story titles are song titles!” Usually this is because they read my stories on a weekly basis, through the “Recent Updates” page, and it’s only when they decide to click on my author’s page that they see them all together and get the cumulative effect.

So why song titles? Apologies to those who’ve heard this story before, but my whole “career” as a writer of mind-control erotica started out as a joke with myself. I’d bought a compilation of 80s hits (I do love the music of the 80s), and while listening to “She Blinded Me With Science”, it occurred to me that it sounded a bit like a mind control story. I looked at the back of the CD, and started giggling as I came up with ways that any of those song titles could actually be turned into the titles of mind-control stories. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be an interesting project for someone. Then I realized that the only someone who would actually do it would be me. 🙂

As it turns out, what sounded like a limitation has become a very handy source of inspiration. I find myself listening to the radio with a different mindset than I did before I started writing erotica, really thinking about each song that comes on and turning it over in my head to see if it leads anywhere interesting. Sometimes the song takes me to that place (“Simply Irresistible” came out of listening to Robert Palmer’s lyrics and imagining what it would be like to really be that…um…irresistible), and sometimes it’s just thinking about the title and letting my mind wander (“Talk Dirty To Me” was a title in search of a story for a long time, until I got very irritated one night at work and swore so profusely I thought I was going to get stuck that way. 🙂 ) It can be very gratifying to feel that tiny click as the story gets my mental gears turning, like a free gift from the Inspiration Fairy.

Even when the story comes first and I’m searching for a title (and “No TV and No Beer Makes Homer Something Something” doesn’t fit), it’s not that hard to find one. I’ve got bookmarks for radio stations, and of course the indispensable LyricsWiki, all of which help me look at different titles until I find one that fits the concept I’ve got in mind. Given that my choices are “every song ever written by anyone”, it generally doesn’t take me long to find a title, and that title then becomes a source of further inspiration (“Push” evolved considerably once I realized that title would work well on a number of thematic levels.)

Of course, it’s not always that easy. I sometimes joke that there are two kinds of titles I haven’t used: The ones that are so generic that there are endless stories that can use that title (“Hypnotized”, for example, by Biggie Smalls, could fit just about anything) and the ones that are so specific that I haven’t figured out yet what story goes with them (I still find myself tantalized by “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” and “Semi-Charmed Kind Of Life”. I know one day they’ll click for me.) Sometimes those stories click (“Transylvanian Concubine” worked when I turned the concubine into the vampire), and some are still waiting in my head. Either way, it does take one element of surprise out of the writing game, and that can be very nice. Sometimes, a totally blank canvas isn’t as useful as it sounds.

Recycling Is Fun!

And no, I don’t mean “old ideas”. 🙂

What I do mean is that hypnosis,  when used in the context of a D/s relationship, can have some very nice, positive effects in a general everyday sense as well. Obviously, Lady Ru’etha has been hypnotizing, conditioning, and brainwashing me for a good long while (since somewhere around this time in 2001, in fact.) And yes, we’ve done all sorts of nice things with hypnotic orgasms and freeze play and all the good, yummy things that I generally save for my stories, but one of the first, most basic, most frequently reinforced pieces of programming She has put in my head is, “Obedience is pleasure.” When I obey Lady Ru’etha, it feels good to me. I don’t have to be hypnotized at the time–She can ask me to grab Her a glass of water, or do laundry, and I’ll still feel a warm, soft rush of fuzzy happiness when I do it.

One of the other pieces of very basic, very frequently reinforced pieces of programming is that She wants me to do things that are good for me. This gets elaborated on in different ways at different times–for example, it really helps me to stick to my diet when I get a dreamy, hazy flood of bliss in the back of my brain every time I pass up pizza. 🙂 Everything that’s good for me becomes something that feels good, because I know my Lady would want me to do it, and “obedience is pleasure”.

So today, when I dropped off some stuff at the local recycling center, it didn’t just make me feel good because I was saving the planet, or because I was getting junk out of my house. No, I was submitting to Lady Ru’etha’s hypnotic commands, obeying like a good boy should, and I felt warm and happy all the way home as a result.

So yeah, recycling is fun. Very fun. 😉

Behind the Music: Take My Breath Away

I figured that maybe some of the people reading this blog wonder to themselves, “How much of these stories is just Jukebox making stuff up, and how much is based on actual hypnosis experiences he’s had?” To be honest, a lot more of it is “making stuff up” than people probably hope for. As much fun as I have belonging to Lady Ru’etha, there’s a limited number of hours in the day and we do enjoy each other’s company in more than just a D/s capacity. Not to mention, my real life experiences tend not to involve werewolves, vampires, nanites, or secret conspiracies of telepaths. Which rules out a big chunk of my stories right there.

But that doesn’t mean that Lady Ru’etha hasn’t been an influence on a lot of these stories. “Take My Breath Away”, for example, isn’t based on a specific hypnosis experience, but it borrows from a number of things that She and I have done together. When I wrote this one, it was when She had just re-awakened my love of writing erotica, and I was in the midst of a big rush of creative writing (to give you an idea, I was writing roughly five or six stories a week during this period.) I felt a strong desire to write something that stood as a tribute to Her, something that would give people an idea of just how much fun it can be to be hypnotized by Her. (At this point, I do feel the need to point out Her website, where you can pick up CDs and arrange a NiteFlirt call and find out these things for yourself. Yes, it’s a shameless plug. But I only plug the things I actually like, and boy do I like being hypnotized by Lady Ru’etha. 🙂 )

So the basic structure involved a fantasy She and I have had on occasion, where She finds some sweet, hypno-curious young woman and slowly seduces/induces her into hypnotic bliss, using me as both a subject for demonstration and as a hypnotic focus. (This is key–in the story, Tara is hypnotized long before she actually closes her eyes and goes under at the end. She’s totally focused on watching Jon and listening to Ruth, she’s stopped thinking critically about what’s happening about three paragraphs ago, and she’s open and accepting. That’s all hypnosis, even if she hasn’t realized it yet.)

I modeled Ruth on Lady Ru’etha, of course, and I like to think I’m familiar enough with Her style of inductions that this was obvious to Her fans even before I said it. Both Jon and Tara are modeled on me, at different points in my personal timeline–Tara is me, circa 2001, when I knew that hypno-kink was an interest of mine, but I didn’t know what could actually be done with it (if anything) and I was a little uncertain of what I wanted to try (if anything.) Lady Ru’etha was one of my guides there (an upcoming story, “Feels Like the First Time”, goes into this in a bit more detail. But I digress.)

This isn’t a fantasy we’ve ever played out, by the way, so the actual incidents described here have never happened. Well, not quite the way they’re described. I do have a tendency to be so cued in to Lady Ru’etha’s speaking style that I can tell just from Her tone and inflection if She wants me to go under…and my subconscious tends to err on the side of “yes,” so there have been times when She’s woken me from trances that strictly speaking, She hasn’t actually induced. (There have also been times when She hasn’t woken me from those trances, too.)

Likewise, we’ve done a lot of fractionation play, and it remains a favorite of Hers and a major part of Her style of hypnosis. (In “Mountain Lake”, She does a neat trick with nested countdowns, inducing you further from inside an induction to great effect.) She’s brought me up and down like a yo-yo on more than one occasion, and the bit about my eye getting stuck shut actually happened. I seem to recall that She put me back under just as I finally got it back open.

Of course, this story was fairly light on the actual sex, and heavy on the hypnofetish. I try to vary that from time to time–I feel like it’s a bit of a cheat for a writer of erotica to always cut away from the sex and focus only on the seduction, but I’m aware as well that for a lot of hypnofetishists, the induction is what they get off on a lot more than the sex. So I mix it up a little, and this one felt “complete” after Tara went under more than others. Let’s face it, if you can’t figure out what they did after this, you probably should be looking at regular porn for a few pointers anyway. 🙂