11: Some suggestion ideas and how to do them
Now—outside of just inducing trance with your partner, what kinds of shenanigans can you get up to in hypnosis? In this section, we’ll give some examples of suggestion topics you can play with.
Stay simple
The ideas we’re talking about aren’t too complex, and there’s a few reasons for that. Firstly, working with simple suggestions is great for partners who are new to hypnosis, because they’re easy to understand and talk about, which makes negotiation and informed consent a lot easier.
Secondly, “simpler” suggestions in general make it easier for the subject to achieve a satisfying, intense experience. We can sort of intuitively understand that it feels more realistic to guide someone into feeling frozen or stuck than it is, for example, to totally wipe away a person’s memory. It’s good to get a sense of why that is, and what makes suggestions “easier” as a general rule. (Of course, there is so much variation in different people about what they feel is “easy” that this isn’t hard and fast!)
For the most part, things that a subject can easily imagine or experience in their normal “waking” life is going to be easier to feel in hypnosis. A “freeze” suggestion, for example, is essentially just someone not moving, and we all are familiar with times when our bodies feel stuck—maybe we’re really tired, or really engrossed in something—and so we know what that feels like!
Additionally, we want our subjects to be able to simply believe that a suggestion is plausible. For both of these reasons, it’s great to work in increments—not just immediately suggesting, “Now you’re a playful puppy!” but giving someone the time and context to ease into a) the confidence and feeling of responding to suggestions, and b) the actual suggestion itself.
As we go through these ideas, we’ll break down some elements and concepts to work with in this vein! Each idea will contain little sections of elements to think about—some of them will apply to all sorts of different ideas, not just the ones they’re listed under, so give that some thought!
Freezing/catalepsy
Making someone “freeze” or be stuck is one of the best places to start when you’re giving suggestions. You can give someone the feeling that they’re totally helpless or bound, or you can make parts of their body stiff and unresponsive when they try to move them! This can be exciting for teasing someone, and also it can just generally be a powerful, convincing feeling of control.
One of the best things about this is that sometimes, subjects will naturally go very still and stiff in hypnosis—this is called “catalepsy,” and it can happen to their whole body or just part of it.
We know that the “direction” of someone’s focus is an element to how we make our suggestions—so for stilling the body, we want to draw someone’s attention to the body as part of our hypnotizing. (But—can you imagine a creative scenario where you do the opposite, and “freeze” a part of someone’s mind?)
Metaphors
When giving this or any suggestion, our goal is to be persuasive and “help” our partners be able to experience it. So one option is to use some metaphors (comparisons—we know this isn’t the technical definition of “metaphor” in a literary sense) to give context, such as:
“As though you’re being tightly bound by straps/ropes/etc…”
“Like your body is turning into a statue/doll…”
“Like you’re so exhausted, you just can’t move…”
“It feels like your body is being glued down…”
“Like you’re disconnected from the impulse of moving…”
Detail
Another option is to simply give detail about the sensation itself—taking a little time to “flesh it out” either with a metaphor or without one. It makes sense that we want to give our partners some good content to be able to imagine and feel the suggestion, especially because it gives the effect of an incremental change, such as:
“Feeling that stuck feeling spreading through your body”
“Stillness creeping from your head all the way down”
“Such a small sensation at first, gradually overwhelming your body”
“Noticing the way it feels to not be able to move, getting stronger”
Ratifying
Additionally, especially the first time that someone is going to experience a hypnotic phenomenon, we want to give them a chance to really feel it after we’re “done” suggesting it.
Sometimes this is about giving someone the chance to “test” the suggestion—either when they’re awake or when they’re still in trance. In a case like this, it helps to think about how you present or “frame” this testing. You mostly want to avoid implying that it’s possible for your partner to get out of the suggestion. Here are some examples of ways to do that:
“Give yourself a chance to enjoy struggling against being stuck”
“Can you feel how when you try to move, you notice being frozen more?”
“It feels good to let go into stillness”
Ways to play
Freeze play can be a lot of fun in many different situations, especially if you make it into a “trigger” where you can freeze and unfreeze someone with a word. We’ll go over more specifics on how to make triggers in another section, but let’s look at some ideas:
Freezing/unfreezing someone to interrupt them when they talk
Freezing someone in order to tease their body
Freezing someone and then hypnotizing them so they “can’t resist”
Freezing someone and taking them through a guided fantasy where they are bound
Safety tip
With any play that renders someone incapable of speech or action—even with hypnosis itself—it’s very important that you give them a way to communicate if something is wrong. With freezing specifically, giving them a way to adjust their body if they are uncomfortable is necessary. We’ll go over this kind of safety in more detail later, but here are some ways you can do this:
“Your body will automatically adjust if it needs to”
“You can feel confident that you’ll communicate if you need to”
Checking in with your partner
Guided fantasy
Another exciting thing we can do with hypnosis is walk our partners through a scenario that we tell them, almost like erotic storytelling—but more immersive! This is especially great if you’re already inclined to be creative—like a writer, or a TTRPG GM. It’s fun to experiment with, and it benefits from a lack of feeling “pass or fail.”
Detail
What makes fantasies immersive is the way you describe them and the kinds of details you add. Some things you can think about in a given scenario are:
The sensory experiences (feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting)
The mental experiences (thinking, feeling emotionally)
The environment
Sound familiar? Those are all the things we might ask someone to focus on when we are hypnotizing them—and the same idea applies: if you ask someone to focus in a given direction, they’ll be more inclined to notice the “modalities” of what they’re focused on!
Don’t get hung up on whether your partner is experiencing everything you describe in a fantasy perfectly—in fact, tell them explicitly that all they have to do is follow along and imagine in whatever way feels right. This takes a lot of pressure off of both of you, and you can be confident that they’re still immersed! Here are some examples of how you can express this:
“All you have to do is follow along in a way that feels right”
“It’s like a daydream—not quite real, but still affecting you”
“You can imagine this the way you might imagine things when you’re masturbating”
“You can let yourself be immersed or distracted in whatever way feels natural”
This idea of telling someone that they should experience something in “their own way” is VERY important in a lot of aspects of hypnosis. We want our partner to feel like they don’t have to “try” to get it right—and besides, their brain is going to do whatever is most familiar to it, and we should utilize that! See how you can incorporate this kind of language in other parts of trance!
Content
You truly are limited only by your own imagination here in guided fantasies. This is definitely a topic where you need to look inside your and your partner’s desires for inspiration—what turns you both on? Is there a hot fantasy they’ve described to you, or one that really gets you off? Maybe a scenario or fetish that you could envision playing out in the theater of your minds? Here are some potential fantasy ideas to get you thinking:
Bound to a technologically advanced “brainwashing chair”
Meeting a cunning, attractive stranger at a bar
Falling asleep and being visited by a succubus/incubus
Masturbating and getting hypnotized by the act of it
Listening to the radio and suddenly hearing subliminal or erotic words
Being a superhero who gets bested by the villain
Safety tip
As with any suggestion, and especially ones that are immersive or transformative, we want to make sure our partner knows that they can express themselves if they need to—especially if they need to communicate any kind of discomfort.
Transformation
A fun way to use hypnosis is to make someone feel as though they’ve been changed—physically or mentally, into a different person, gender, or even creature. Transformation can be the point of a scene, or it can lead to more play with the “role” the person is enacting.
Detail
Transformation is not unlike guided fantasy in some ways, because to make a transformation feel immersive, you need to describe how it happens! You can do it as a guided fantasy if you want to—describing a fantasy scenario in which your partner is transformed.
Think about what parts of the person are being transformed, and what that would feel like. Even a physical transformation will affect the mind, and a mental transformation will make someone feel sensation responses—but which one are you emphasizing? Does one lead to another? And remember: make this a process that is gradual enough for your partner to experience it, but not so gradual or repetitive that they get bored! It doesn’t take too long to let someone’s attention get engaged in the change you’re describing! Here are some ways you can talk about transformation language:
“Feeling it spread through all the parts of your body, one by one, from your head moving down”
“Like a magic spell is overcoming you, feeling the tingly feeling get more intense”
“Watching your mind transform, almost watching your thoughts change”
“Waves of it going over you, subtle at first and then getting stronger, wave after wave”
“Like watching yourself in a mirror, slowly changing and shifting”
“I wonder which part of you is going to feel it first, and how intensely?”
Ways to play
There are so many possibilities for transformations—anything that changes a person’s perceptions of their brain or body. There are some common “tropes” that people tend to enjoy playing with, but feel free to experiment! Ideas like:
Dollification (objectified and meant to be played with, like a porcelain, clockwork, or ragdoll)
Dronification (part of a hivemind, automated thoughts and sleek body)
Bimbofication (dumber, sluttier, and potentially more exaggeratedly feminine—you can of course do other gendered versions!)
Pet play (a puppy, kitten, bunny, someone who acts only on animal instincts and wants petting and attention)
Personality play (a character from a series, or someone who is more dominant/submissive, innocent, lewd, nerdy, confident)
Gender transformation (becoming more masculine, feminine, or androgynous in body, mind, or mannerisms)
Safety tip
Transformation is infinitely customizable! Even one idea can have a ton of different nuances to it. This is one area that’s especially good to talk in-depth with your partner about if you don’t know each other very well and don’t know what they might expect from a given transformation goal—you don’t need to hammer out every single detail if neither of you want to, but some baseline understanding will help guide the scene to be the most enjoyable it can be.
Obedience play
One of the sexiest draws of hypnokink for some people is the fantasy of power exchange and control—making someone feel submissive and obedient to you. We can say this is an extension of “D/s”—domination and submission—and besides being suited well for it thematically, hypnosis is functionally great for creating these kinds of feelings and scenes.
Submission is both a nuanced emotional feeling as well as something with concrete behavioral effects. This means that you have various options in how you might suggest it—do you suggest the kinds of subtle mental feelings, or do you suggest the behaviors? This is a “chicken and egg” situation, and you’re encouraged to experiment, but remember that they go hand and hand—you are ultimately doing both!
Context
As we know, giving metaphors or context for a suggestion can make it feel more real. This is a great opportunity to be introspective about your and your partner’s fantasies about obedience and submission as a whole. Think about where those fantasies come from—is there an attraction to “servant” style submission like maids? What about making someone submissive in a slow and seductive way?
In essence, ask yourself: “What drives this feeling of submission?” Here are some possibilities:
Being obedient feels good; a drive for pleasure
Being obedient feels right; a drive for self-fulfillment
Being obedient feels transgressive; a drive for sexual taboo
Being obedient feels liberating; a drive for sexual freedom/expression
Being obedient is a long-held fantasy; a drive for getting what you both want
You can very easily combine this with guided fantasy or transformation—what kinds of fantasy transformations could make someone feel more submissive and obedient? What kind of fantasy scenarios would lead someone to feel that?
Detail
A lot of what we’ve talked about already could be said to be about the mental or emotional aspects of submission—or why someone would be attracted to being obedient. But once you’ve created the context, it’s time to think about what the feelings actually are so that you can give your partner more detail.
Psychologically, feeling obedient might feel like:
Paying closer attention to your words
Feeling “ready” to obey
Subtle feelings of pleasure inside someone’s head
Hearing your voice or words echoing
Wanting to please you and make you happy
Thinking of you as important, dominant, and/or attractive
Feeling like their inner voice is more “quiet” or subdued
We also have to think about what obedience might physically feel like—feelings we have emotionally have physical components too! Sometimes these seem subtle to us because we associate them with the emotion—like the pit in your stomach when you’re disappointed. Here are some potential ideas:
Sexual arousal
Physical excitement or tension
An easing of muscle tension (like relief)
Feeling like the body is acting more automatically
Ratifying
Especially with this kind of suggestion, you want your partner to really be able to feel obedient! In fact, ratifying this suggestion is often just part of the play. It makes sense that after we make someone feel submissive that we want them to—well, obey!
The trick here (and with a lot of other things we ratify) is to keep suggesting feelings when we “test out” the suggestion itself. Basically, we say, “Here, go ahead and try out and see how it feels—doesn’t it feel so x?”
In the next section, we’ll talk about some fun activities that you can do with an obedient partner both as play and as ratifying, but here are some ways that you can make these suggestions.
“The more you obey, the more you can feel your sense of submission growing”
“Now when you do what I want, you can think about how it feels different”
“Obeying feels more intense than your everyday experience, doesn’t it?”
Ways to Play
Making a scene have more D/s can be a way to set the stage for more, or it can be fulfilling in and of itself. But what are some concrete activities that you can have your partner do to take advantage of or reinforce their feelings of submission? Here are a few:
Sitting in more submissive positions like kneeling or fixing posture to sit up straight
Saying mantras or repeating sexy words like “I obey” over and over, perhaps as “call and response”
Calling you by an honorific
Service acts like helping you with a task, making you food, or creating writing/art for you
Writing lines
Sexual activities like masturbating or giving you sexual attention
Sensory Play
Hypnosis gives us the exciting possibility that we can simply suggest something to our partner and they experience it—things like intense visualizations or suggestions of feeling pleasure and arousal. This is especially great for playing at a distance, but don’t knock it for in-person play as well!
Hypnotic suggestions mostly don’t feel 1:1 with reality—that is, most people are not going to exactly feel your caress or completely hallucinate a spiral in front of them. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be immersive and intense experiences—especially if we acknowledge this principle and work with it to make them so!
Framing
Tell your partner up front that you don’t expect them to 100% believe and experience the sensory stuff you suggest—at least, not in the same way they would experience something in their “waking” reality. You don’t need to say “It’s not going to feel real”—you can use metaphors and framings that tell a more helpful story, such as:
“The suggestions I give you might feel like a weird kind of dream”
“Your brain is going to imagine this in intense detail”
“It’s almost like an immersive daydream, like an illusion”
“You can accept that the things you see and feel are created by your mind”
Detail
With sensory suggestions, giving more detail often leads to more immersion (and intensity of sensory stuff). This is sort of like when you’re reading a book and the author describes something in more detail so you can imagine it more fully.
Think about how you’d describe a sensation, a vision, a sound, a taste or a smell. How would you communicate the qualities of it like color, intensity, vividness, pressure, temperature, or other details?
Additionally, one of the best ways to make a sensory suggestion feel more real is to think about the other sensory aspects of the thing. If you’re describing a physical feeling, what would that make someone feel emotionally, and is there a sight or sound that might come up as well? For example, describing a touch might also involve feelings of excitement, or being able to picture the touch itself.
(Some sources on hypnosis use a model for the five senses that asserts everyone has one “primary” sense—we the authors find this approach limiting/outdated in current science, and encourage you to see how each sense connects to the others!)
One of the most interesting ways to play with this for many people is with physical pleasure, and this is an opportunity for you to really think about all of the qualities of physical pleasure and arousal. What outside of trance makes someone feel pleasured or aroused? How many subtleties can you identify about an experience of pleasure? How would you describe pleasure, whether more abstract or through a specific physical act?
Ways to Play
Ideas like these will help you (and overlap) with things like guided fantasies and transformations. Here are some potential ideas that you can suggest someone to experience in a sensory way:
The familiar way that you smell
A tingling and growing sensation of arousal from a magic spell or masturbation
Staring at a screen feeding subliminal messages
Vividly seeing themselves kneeling or doing something submissive
The sensation of being immersed in warm water
Feeling encased by latex
Feeling a body part grow or shrink
