Day Three at Charmed! - Mannequins Part 3

Let's see, where was I? Soup, check, corset, check, mannequins, check...

Oh yes. After vending. I might have eaten something. It was probably cookies. Yes. Let's go with that. I also might have gotten to watch a hot music video, and also I might have gotten to know Heel_Edge a little bit better. Yes, those are all factual statements.

And then...
And then the snarkstorm* began.

Earlier in the weekend, possibly while talking about the hotel, I'd gotten the idea in my head that it would be a ton of fun to collect the snarkiest people I know, remove whatever natural filter they might have, and throw them all into a room together with a list of topics and, you know, see what happened.**  We never really got a chance to do that, so (because I was in a snarky mood) I decided to combine that idea with the evening's Cookie Room shenanigans.  The rule that night for the Cookie Room was anyone wanting a cookie had to get permission (and more than likely perform a task) from the person who'd previously managed to acquire a cookie. At the same time that this was going on, Carneggy quietly removed my personal snark filter.***

And, braintwinning being what it is, I was able to easily help Pynchon**** remove his.

And also Calico.*****

And Tennfan.******

And Morgan.*******

And AndSleep.********

I quite enjoyed it.

However, combining the two games into one space?  It probably would have worked better if the "ask permission for a cookie" rule had worked out better. It didn't take long for someone to claim the title of "Cookie Czar", and after that I felt the need to continually step in to make that part of things run more smoothly. (Because no snark filter.)  It was still fun, though.

This is also the night where I discovered that I am not the only hypno-person to be in love with A Very Potter Musical (shout out to GleefulAbandon) and that’s you know, totally awesome.

Although now that I think about it that might have happened Sunday night. 

Eventually people ran out of gas and went back to their rooms, presumably to sleep.


*I have just now this moment made that word up, and I love it so much that no one should be surprised when it starts showing up in conversation. Seriously.

**Right, so when I was living in Denver in the 90's and married to the world's biggest football fan, I got to read a lot of sport columns and see a lot of SportsCenter - and there was a particular someone who leaned heavily on the concept "lock them in a room together and, you know, see what happens". Fortunately for me, I can't quite remember who that person was, but if anyone reading this knows, please let me know in the comments. Thanks!

***Removed it with the caveat that I'd still have the good common sense to not be hurtful or vicious. And I wasn't...to anyone's face anyway.

****You know how there are those phones you can touch screens with and it automatically transfers data? Well, for us, it works with foreheads. The more you know.*********

*****One of the sweetest parts of the entire evening was when Calico begged to have her filter put back - and then apologized profusely for what she felt was her rudeness. I repeat again, for the entire world to see, you were at most as rude as the average customer service rep at a grocery store. In other words, not really rude at all.

******Tennfan swears that I did not forehead bop him. I have decided to take his word for it.

*******And I know I barely tinked Morgan on the forehead with my finger; she was pretty close to being filter-free already.

********I <ahem> may have bonked him harder than necessary. I <AHEM> also might not care.

*********"The more you know" also applies to learning how to tighten a corset. I'm just sayin'.

Day Three at Charmed! - Mannequins (Part Two)

“But what about the mannequins?” I can hear you asking. We’re almost there.

After Alternate Personalities, we all enjoyed a special treat. @hypnosubdude​ had posted a request on the suggestion board for a hypnotic dinosaur fight - and @kittykatkatja jumped at the chance to do it. In the end there were four dinosaurs total, three t-rexes and one triceratops (although I will always think of him as a “tricerastegosauratops” since our Ringmaster, the talented @everydayis-girlfriday​ kept getting the two types of terrible lizard mixed up.)  It was a grueling and vicious battle, and everyone came out of it bruised and a little bit bloody - and in the end the triceratops was overwhelmed by numbers, but not before driving one of the rexes out of the fight through sheer exhaustion.  It was a fantastic spectacle and hopefully will be repeated at every event ever forever from now on.

And then we set up the vending area so that Lee and Pynch could sell the Book, and Lee’s hypnotic jewelry.

Which is where the fun begins.



The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel Part Three (Part Two)

As Noelle hurried upstairs to change into her vending outfit, she noticed Carneggy and Kat sitting at a table in the hotel restaurant.

“Can you order me some soup?” she asked. “I’ll just change my clothes while they’re working on food and come back down.”

“We would” said Carneggy, “But they don’t have soup.”

Noelle stared at him, certain he was joking.

“They don’t have…? What kind of restaurant is this?”

“The kind that doesn’t have soup, apparently.”

“All righty then, I guess I’ll eat a yogurt in the room or something…”

And with that, Noelle turned and raced for the elevator.

She had given herself 30 minutes to dress for vending, half of which was taken up by getting into her corset. She’d gotten it as tight as she could manage on her own when Kat came through the door.

“I’m here to help you lace.” Kat said. “Carneggy is still waiting for his sandwich.”

…To Be Continued…



A couple of weeks before Charmed! Pynch asked me would I be interested in being a mindless display model for jewelry at Charmed!.

Well, yes.

As the evening approached, Lee asked the three of us models (hypnosubdude, Calico, and myself) if we wanted to be able to move ourselves or if we wanted other people to pose us. We all opted for that second thing of course.

So after setting up the vending area, I returned to the room to put myself into my official mostly black modelling outfit - black dress, tights with a rhinestone back-seam, and my new (and only) black brocade corset. I have to tell you, I look fucking awesome in that thing. I don’t say things like that about how I look very much, but in this case…I can’t not, I just love the way it looks that much!

After Kat had helped me get my laces tightened, I headed back downstairs - just in time to watch hypnosubdude getting posed. Lee arranged him artfully, then asked me if I wanted to go next.

I elected to go last, so I could see exactly what she was doing. I’d never been a mannequin before; and I’d had practically no experience actually working with Lee directly - so I wanted to know what to expect. This worked against me, because right as she was getting done with Calico people started coming up to the table to buy the book. It worked against me because I didn’t get to be frozen right away, but I would not have missed that 15 or so minutes for the world, because watching Lee and Pynch as people came up to them to get the Book that has been so long in coming signed - watching their faces and how excited people were to be buying it, and how deeply touched Lee and Pynch were by the experience - someone needed to see that and recognize it and I’m so very glad that someone was me.

And then it was my turn.

I will do my best to describe it.

She thanked me for being there to share the occasion with her. She smiled and looked into my eyes and said…something…I’m not sure what. Maybe that I already knew what to do? I do not know. I know she was very emotional, and I couldn’t help but be touched deeply by that…and then she was moving my arms around, shifting my feet to a better stance, adjusting my head, my neck, to a specific angle…and I was left alone, within myself, as people continued to browse the wares around me and behind me.

At first I was incredibly conscious of my breathing - and nothing else. My breathing and a spot in the distance on the carpet that my eyes returned to each time someone moved through my field of vision. As I breathed I went deeper into trance, and eventually I couldn’t keep my eyes open completely, and the world went by around me in a hazy glimmer of shadowed bodies barely seen through my slitted eyelids.

Until someone cracked a single-tail at the neighboring booth.

It scared the ever-loving crap out of me, to use a colorful expression that my Dad loves.  Had I been capable of speech at that moment, I probably would have chosen to exclaim “Jesus Fucking Christ” - so I suppose it’s a good thing that I wasn’t capable. I lurched out of trance, abruptly and completely. After checking on me, Lee declared that it was probably time for us all to have a little break anyway, and we sat or walked a little bit, sipping water, and generally having quiet fun.

I think it was Calico who asked to be repositioned first. I know I was last again, and this time Lee told me that the sounds in the room would be distant and muffled, so that I could stand in peace no matter what might happen around me.

And I fell into the deepest trance I have ever experienced.

I don’t know how long we stood this second time. I don’t know who walked by. I don’t know what was said near me or to me or about me.

This is what I know: I lost my eyes almost immediately. After some period of time I started to feel as if my entire face was turned toward the ceiling (it wasn’t), almost as if I was being pulled upward. I still will swear that I repeatedly felt as if someone were repeatedly and physically pushing my right shoulder down, or rather, placing something heavy on my shoulder than removing it (they weren’t), as well as scraping their fingers across my ribs - through the corset (they weren’t). Eventually I began to feel as if the entire back of my head was missing - you know that sense we all have of where the parts of our body are even when we can’t see ourselves? I lost that completely in relation to the back of my head, possibly to my mind. And the feeling lingered even after Lee invited me back into the waking world.

It was an extraordinary experience, and one I hope to be able to have again.



HERE ENDETH PART TWO

Day Three at Charmed! - Mannequins (Part One)

The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel Part Three

Carneggy and Kat didn’t even budge as Noelle fell out of bed to go to breakfast.  She gathered what she’d need: (room card, tea bags, Carneggy’s hoody, kitty slippers) and slipped out into the hallway. Sometime during the night someone had plugged in a space heater in an attempt to raise the low temperatures to something live humans could tolerate - it was almost successful. If the elevator hadn’t made a noise like a small creature being devoured by a somewhat larger creature being devoured by a larger larger creature she might even have believed that the hotel wasn’t haunted after all.  But it groaned like a wild thing as the traveled down to the ground floor in search of breakfast.

Noelle nodded at the same stoic folk she’d encountered the previous day, noted the same rotting fruit, the no-longer-interesting waffle maker, and decided to settle for Corn Pops and tea, with half a Costco blueberry muffin (stale of course) just because it was there. No one spoke in a voice louder than a murmur; the rowdy comradery of previous events was completely absent, and Noelle finished her food as quickly as she could to return to the room. “I guess I’ll start recapping today” she thought to herself.

…to be continued…



Saturday was a very full day for me, but oddly after the fact it felt like I’d barely done anything.  I did indeed return to my room and write the first of my Charmed! recap posts, the only time I’ve managed to get one done during the actual event about which I was writing. Honestly, it likely will never happen again.  I did eventually give up and go back to bed, which was warm and cozy and marvelous…which is why I didn’t make to any classes before 11am. To be fair, I could have walked in after the 10 o’clocks had already started, but I have a deeply ingrained distaste of walking into things late. Sneaking in, that’s another thing, but the way the classrooms were set up made it almost impossible to be as sneaky as I would have wanted to be. So I hung out in the hallway until 11, then went (for the third event in a row) to @theleeallure‘s (@hypno-sandwich/Dj Pynchon’s) Hypnotic Amnesia class.

——– A Not-So-Brief Message From My Unconscious ——–

kk Hello there, I’m Noelle. I was very very busy today, and in order to give all of you the correct (that is, interesting) perspective on things, I will be giving my recaps as well. To keep confusion at a minimum, I will refer to the conscious mind as “XXXXX”.

I really enjoy the Hypnotic Amnesia class. It provides me with a perfect opportunity for a little fun at my own expense, so to speak. In other words, I enjoy making sure that XXXXX won’t remember much of what happens in it. One of the techniques that Lee covers has to do with counting down backward from 1000 (or 1001 depending on who’s telling the story that day) and the first time we attended this class I suggested to XXXXX that she try doing it.  It worked so well that we did it again the next time (which account can be found in our WEEHU recaps) with the same successful results. This time around, XXXXX had twigged to the fact that she had been missing a giant portion of the class, and adamantly stated that there would be absolutely no counting.

As if I need her to count to get what I want.

Both of those previous iterations of the class followed the structure of Lee and Dj Pynchon’s book on hypnotic amnesia very closely. (Excellent book, you can get it here. I highly recommend it. In fact, I wrote a review of it. I’m “Amazon Customer”. Honest.)  Now that the book is out, they don’t cover all the techniques (because BOOK.)

But they covered some of my favorite things!

Of course the counting - this time it was Pynchon who brought it up (so 1001, not 1000). They also covered that old favorite “forget to remember, remember to forget” which is pretty much a confusion induction the way Lee approaches it. They also covered things like the “exploding”advertisement and putting things in a room in Dj’s mind to which only Lee (and Id) has access. My favorite part of these classes is when Lee demonstrates the efficacy of her techniques on Dj for us - the split-second look of resignation he gets on his face as he realizes he’s about to be messed with, closely followed by blank incomprehension - this is my kind of porn!

I hope you enjoyed my account of this class; I’ll be back later, but for now, I’ll return you to your previously scheduled programming…kk

Just so everyone knows, I mostly always know when my unconscious has been out and about. I would really like to be able to reach the point where I have no idea when Noelle is front and center, but that’s a work in progress.

With that said…about the Hypnotic Amnesia class.  I did not count. I very carefully did not count. And what I remember of the class is…well…really wanting Pynch’s friend Heel_Edge to enjoy watching him being fucked with. When I close my eyes and try to picture the class in my mind’s eye, what I see is a weird melange of the class as it was at WEEHU and side-eyeing Heel_Edge to see if she was having fun.

So be it.

After Hypnotic Amnesia a bunch of us raced to Subway for lunch so that we could get back in time for the next class (in which a lot of us were participating.) I got to ride with @calamitybrain (who people will remember from her adorable kitty ears and super-cool clawed gloves) and @heraldofthesorceress, with whom I had a great conversation about how being ADHD affects one’s ability to function in a busy society. We rushed back and I ended up in Lee’s room…just in time to comfort @hypnokittencalico as she was struggling with what turned out to probably be food poisoning - right before her first ever presenting experience…

…Sounds of Hypnosis.

She did a fantastic job! She co-presented with Lee, and they went over the different types of sounds that were commonly used by people in tandem with hypnosis, as well as making sure to discuss how important it is to limit sound-based suggestions to very specific times/places/people/etc. At the end Lee and I did a duet version of the musical confusion induction that we performed at WEEHU - and it went pretty well considering that neither of us had really looked at it in 3 months.

The next class was my Creators’ Round Table - we were in a much bigger room than we needed, especially as I had done a really poor job of getting the word out as to what the class was actually meant to be.  So the 6 or so of us who were there had a lot of fun - shout out to Robin, who attended because she likes to read hypno-smut and gave the rest of us someone to focus on instead of constantly talking about ourselves.  I’m going to try this one again at NEEHU, with a much better class description, and I will state it here as well:  the point of this class is for creative people of all stripes within the erotic hypnosis community to gather together to talk about their work, their motivations, and how we can work together as a creative community in order to educate the hapless mundanes in the guise of lovely, smutty entertainment.

After the Round Table, I participated in @HypnoMaestro and @carneggyblog‘s Alternate Personalities class.  @kittykatkatja and I were called upon as examples of alternate personalities so that the attendees could see what differences there were in body language and speech patterns and suchlike.  It was interesting, but I think many of the people there thought it was going to be more of a “how-to” class; there weren’t very many questions at all, which is rather surprising to me given the subject matter and the slight controversy surrounding the idea of alternate personalities in the first place.

———— Another Interlude ———————-

kk Did you miss me?

So I thought this class was no fun at all. I was made into a display model - “See how XXXXX turns into Noelle almost instantly! Isn’t it interesting?” -

No one seemed to care. No one asked me any questions, and when I went back to my seat no one clapped for me. The clapped for Kat. Which makes sense because she went from being “kat” to being “princess”, and princess is a little - and cute and bubbly and very obviously different to Kat. But still. kk

HERE ENDETH PART ONE