serpentinemalign | the author is dead, the hypnotist is dead

this one is gonna be a doozy, strap in

lately i've been doing some automatic writing in trance. i'm not quite in the place that i can stay in trance for long without specific stimuli or cues to keep me there, so i have to use files or loops to stay in the right place for it. but it feels good. it feels important.

in doing this, a key question that arose for me was related to what i am calling my self brainwashing. as one of my favourite hypnokink writers h-sleepingirl said, you want to have a goal in mind when you're attempting brainwashing. but it's difficult to feel purposeful when you have no one to obey but yourself (and the voices of mp3s, on occasion). on a safety level, this is preferable for me. i get to be my own dom and set my own limits. i'm a huge control freak and i am viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of psychologically submitting to anyone except the objects of fantasy in my head, whom i also control. my desires are a one-way street.

the paradox of self brainwashing is that it is brainwashing with agency, which seems to be mutually incompatible. yet brainwashing works best if you can be convinced that you came up with the ideas yourself. and how better to sink into that fantasy if you actually did come up with the idea yourself, but... well, you're 20 files deep and you're not so sure that idea came from you anymore. you can kink on that till the day you die.

but it leads me to one question over and over again. which is what i actually have to gain from cultivating pliability, emptiness, smallness. there is no real world endgame, there is no guide but my own consciousness. it feels often like stepping off a ledge and not knowing how far the drop will be... only for it to always be just a step. it's elaborate play-acting with glimmers of truth and you are just hunting for the glimmers, over and over.

i began experiments in harder brainwashing in autumn 2022. i had dabbled before then, of course. i was writing my book, which is brainwashing erotica, and i wanted to do some method acting. it would be a success to even experience a fraction of what i put my poor protagonist through. i have certainly achieved that now. and i'm not done.

i think on one level, the purpose of my self-brainwashing is a 'research' question. it is an experiment. it is a drug diary but with sugar pills.

on another level it is hedonistic. it is a way to connect as closely with my fantasies as is practical. becoming a better and more malleable subject means being open to hypnotic phenomena means being able to daydream in technicolour and stereo.

on another level it's a retreat into an impossible ideal, a place where pain and sadness has been ground to dust.

but none of those questions answer what the end is going to look like, if there is indeed an end. brainwashing files for a mass audience are either inevitably nonspecific, or dangerously parasocial. i avoid the latter like the plague, so for me it's a sort of choose your own adventure of brainwashing. choose your own mantras, uniform, identity. yes, this includes when an identity is instilled within the file. everyone interprets the meaning of doll, drone, fucktoy, bimbo, puppet, slightly differently. an infamous bimbofication series i keep reading about does ask the listener to exercise some agency in selecting their uniform - a sort of illusion of choice; you get to pick the collar you'll wear but you must wear one.

(likewise, trance logic is slippery. to accept a suggestion is to find a space for it in the folds of your mind. it may not look quite like what the hypnotist intended, but it will be carried out as an earnest interpretation. the subject will also find ways to slip out of a problematic suggestion, to find seemingly 'illogical' loopholes to free themselves. i experienced the latter for the first time like a month ago and it felt super empowering to know my brain was keeping me safe like that. anyway. that's a tangent.)

in brainwashing files i have found there is a fetishisation of the feeling and aesthetic over necessarily doing anything with it. for example it's like, the file could tell you that you are brainwashed and obedient. but what does that mean if you have no external commands to obey? no owner? no bitches? if a brainwashed slut drops in the forest and there's no one else to control them, will they make any sound that matters?

and i think it's just that we are all collectively clinging to the fantasies from fetish formation. the concept, the process, is really all that we need. but also i guess i want more. i am longing to see what the endpoint looks like. i am longing to make substantial changes.

so i'm going to think on what those changes could be.