Just as a word to those who might be interested in my life: I got laid off from my day job on Monday. This won’t mean any kind of change in the posting schedule for this blog, or for my stories on the EMCSA…but if anyone’s been thinking about buying one of my books, now would be a really great time…
People usually think of sounds when they think of post-hypnotic triggers; after all, that’s the pop-culture shorthand for hypnosis, isn’t it? The sinister hypnotist says something like, “sour apple ice cream”, or “velvet curtain”, or even just snaps their fingers, and the helpless victim’s eyes glaze over and they return to trance. Sometimes it’s a visual trigger, instead; the sight of the spiral melts the subject’s brain to mush even as they remember, “Oh, yeah, this is what happened last time I walked into this room…” (And are those things ever not fun to think about?)
But very little gets said about the use of scent as a trigger, probably because erotic hypnotists get their hot fantasies from pop culture, and we won’t get hypnotic scents in a movie until they perfect Smell-O-Vision. 🙂 Which is a shame, because as triggers go, smells are very powerful. Scent is one of the most powerful and direct links between the brain and the outside world, simply for survival reasons: The smell of food, the odor of a potential predator, or even the stench of potentially spoiled (and hence fatal) meat is an immediate and urgent message from our environment, and so we’ve evolved to remember smells very well…and to have a very hard time ignoring them, as anyone who’s had to sit next to a smoker for an hour will tell you.
So it’s very easy to link a scent to a particular association, probably even easier than linking a phrase or a visual. The human brain is wired for smell. We latch onto it instantly. And a good hypnotist can use that in all sorts of fun ways. The simplest is as a reinduction trigger; for those of you who have fantasies about chloroform, but don’t necessarily want the side-effects of random fatalities, you can simply link a particular scent to a trance trigger. Put a little of the scent on a piece of cloth, press it to their nose, and they’ll go under in an instant.
You could also, if you were a particularly sneaky hypnotist, link your personal perfume/cologne to a sensation of…oh, perhaps helplessness, submissiveness, susceptibility to hypnosis…even arousal, if you wanted. So when your submissive was around you on formal occasions, or even just when they caught a whiff of your scent left behind on their clothes, they’d feel a wave of delightful dizziness and a reminder of just how helpless they are to resist you. (Mind you, you’d want to link it to you, specifically. Doesn’t do much good if they start following around everyone who wears your perfume, does it?) It’s a fun way to make someone hazy and foggy, which is always a nice place to start when hypnotizing for erotic play. 🙂
Pretty much anything you can do with a visual or auditory trigger, you can do with an olfactory one. It can be a really fun variation on the usual triggers…and yes, I do speak from experience. 🙂
No, that’s not some strange expression of unbridled enthusiasm (“NEEHU, boys! We done hornswoggled them Duke brothers!”) I’m at the New England Erotic Hypnosis Unconference, getting ready to start the day of panels on hypnosis and how to do it to others…and what to do with others once you’ve got them hypnotized, as well. Once things get underway, I’ll be updating this at irregular intervals throughout the day, commenting on the different panels I attend (but not the one I’m presenting. That’d be tricky.) So get ready to hear about a theoretically exciting day of potentially interesting discussions of possible hypnosis!
(Update: After seeing how long this is getting, I’m putting in a break. It seems only polite.)
