The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Adult Education

by Wiseguy

Meg had one of those mischievous smiles on her face; that should have been my first clue, but I missed it. I let myself get distracted by the newsprint booklet she was waving in my face instead.

“What’s this for?” I asked, taking the booklet from her hand. A quick glance told me it was the summer course catalog from our local community college. You probably get them too: a variety of short enrichment classes in various things from cake decorating to small appliance repair, all offered for a nominal fee to adults in the community. Meg and I had both taken classes there before, so the college had us on their mailing list.

“Look at this one,” she said, pointing to an entry circled in red pen:

Hypnosis for Couples

Learn to experience increased pleasure and intimacy through mutual hypnosis. Includes discussion of induction techniques, formulating effective suggestions, and a practical demonstration. Couples only. Instructor: Carol Sherman, CCHT. 3 sessions.

I looked back at Meg with raised eyebrows. “Are you serious?”

“Of course.” Her green eyes sparkled back at me. “Doesn’t it sound interesting to you?”

I read the entry again. “I suppose so,” I granted, “It doesn’t really say much.”

“Increased pleasure and intimacy through hypnosis,” she quoted in reply. “Couples only. How much more does it need to say?”

I handed the booklet back to her with a shrug. She whacked me playfully over the head with it and gave me an exaggerated scowl. “Don’t play innocent with me, Patrick,” she scolded. “You spend as much time on the hypnoerotic story sites as I do, if not more. I dare you to look me in the eye and say you haven’t fantasized about learning to hypnotize me.”

Well, she had me there. We’d only been living together a few weeks when I came home one evening to find her on my PC, surfing my favorite hypnofetish story sites. For a few seconds my life flashed before my eyes: I braced myself for a tirade about what a pervert I am, how sick I must be to find that kind of depravity entertaining, etc. I think she read that in my face, because she immediately jumped up and hugged me tightly. “It’s okay,” she whispered into my ear. “I have most of the same sites bookmarked on my laptop.” That’s when I knew this relationship was going to work.

Meg was still waiting for me to respond to her dare. I looked up into her eyes and thought yes, it would be so cool to see those eyes closing on my command, to take her into a deep sleep and know she will obey my every wish. “You know I do,” I answered.

Taking my head into her hands, Meg treated me to a kiss that put a lump in the front of my shorts. “I do too,” she replied. “That’s why I’ve already signed us up. Don’t make any plans for Thursday the 18th, lover.”

I reached up to her and cradled a breast in my hand, squeezing just the way she likes. “You’ve got a date,” I said, pleased to hear the hitch in her breath.

“Maybe you’d better take Friday off too,” she added, reaching down to open my zipper.

On Thursday the 18th we set out to find the location listed in the course pamphlet we’d received with our confirmation. Not surprisingly considering the expected content, we quickly discovered that the class was not being held on campus; instead, the pamphlet directed us to a martial arts studio a few blocks away.

We arrived 10 minutes ahead of the 7:00 scheduled start time. A young woman met us at the door and led us to the practice room. She looked to be in her early thirties, with chestnut hair and the deepest brown eyes I’ve ever seen.

“Hi. I’m Carol.” Her voice was rich and sensual, and her hand as it touched mine sent a small shock through my system.

“I’m Patrick, and this is Meg,” I replied weakly.

Carol flashed us a thousand-watt smile. “It’s great to meet you,” she said. “The others are already here. Come on back and get comfortable.”

We followed Carol into the studio. Her thin workout clothes displayed a beautifully proportioned figure. Meg nudged me a little to make sure I wasn’t paying too much attention to those proportions.

The idea of holding a hypnosis class in a dojo seemed strange to us at first, but once I saw the place it made perfect sense. There was lots of floor space to work with, for one thing. A generous supply of folded wrestling mats was stacked up against the far wall, and I saw that five other couples had already made little nests for themselves using some of those mats. A giant mirror, presumably for the benefit of karate students practicing forms, covered the long wall.

Meg and I followed the others’ lead and helped ourselves to a few of the folding mats. They reminded me of my college wrestling room pads—thick, dense, vinyl-covered, and extremely comfortable for sitting, standing, or lying down.

While Meg and I were getting situated, Carol stood apart from the group and made a few notes in a personal organizer. Nodding to herself, she closed the book and tucked it into a slim portfolio case. “Everyone’s here now,” she announced, “We can get started.”

Call me an idiot if you like—until that moment, I didn’t connect “Carol Sherman, CCHT” with that voluptuous creature. I was expecting some scholarly, kind, Angela Lansbury type. The reality turned out to be more like Catherine Zeta-Jones. Not that I minded, of course.

“I want to thank you all for coming tonight,” she began, that silky voice grabbing our collective attention easily. “I’m your instructor for this course. To my patients and colleagues, I am Dr. Sherman; in here, though, I like to keep things casual and friendly, so please just call me Carol.”

I felt myself nodding automatically as she continued.

“As you know from the course description, this workshop is about hypnosis for couples. I’ve been a practicing hypnotherapist for about five years now, and for the last two I’ve specialized in treating sexual dysfunctions in both men and women. In that time it’s been my pleasure to teach hundreds of couples how they can use hypnosis to enhance their love lives. If you stay with me and work together over the three sessions in this class, I promise you that the experience will change the way you think about sexual pleasure.”

A quick glance around the room showed everyone nodding, their eyes focused directly on Carol. My cock stirred a little as a small part of my mind connected Carol with sexual pleasure.

“But first,” she continued, “I need to make sure that you all understand some important things about what we will and won’t be doing here. You will be practicing hypnosis on each other, learning to use the hypnotic state for erotic purposes. Each of you will learn to drop into a deep trance on command from your partner. Sharing that power brings a new depth of intimacy to relationships, but it requires absolute trust. If you don’t share your partner’s interest in erotic hypnosis, or if you are not sure you want to let your partner guide you into a trance and give you suggestions, then you should not be here. I’d rather see you invest your time in improving your relationship or at least doing something you can both enjoy.

“At the same time, there are limits to what I can teach you in three evening sessions. Don’t imagine that having taken this class qualifies you to start hypnotizing people at dinner parties. If you’re going to do that, you owe it to your friends and yourself to get proper training first.”

Carol paused a minute to let it all sink in. “Now listen to this very carefully,” she continued. “The hypnotic suggestions we use in this class will be limited to things that have proven safe and effective for our purpose. They will involve creating and controlling desire, causing or enhancing physical sensations, and overcoming inhibitions. I’m sure you are all aware that hypnosis is also used medically to help people lose weight, stop smoking, and things like that. That’s called hypnotherapy, and it takes years of practice to become proficient at it. We will not be conducting therapy in this class.”

Carol’s eyes swept sternly over us all, making contact and asking an unspoken question. Each of us nodded while meeting her gaze. “I am very serious about this,” she added. “Just because your partner agrees to go into trance for you, that does not give you license to try and ‘improve’ his or her personality. If you do try, the most likely result is that it won’t work and the violation of trust will seriously damage your relationship.”

The point made, Carol seemed to relax. The smile returned to her face as she moved on to the last item. “Finally, I noticed some of you looking nervous when I mentioned that we would be combining hypnosis and sex. Let me assure you that my lesson plan does not call for anyone to have intercourse during the class. The idea is that what you learn here you take home and use in private.”

I took a quick look around the room and saw several people looking relieved. The idea had never occurred to me, but apparently it had to them; I guess that proves I’m on the wrong side of 35.

“So much for the preliminaries,” Carol said. “Does anyone have questions before we go on?”

The question was barely out when a voice from across the room shot out, “What if you can’t be hypnotized?” We all looked at the speaker: a slim blonde woman, early twenties, in a designer warm-up suit. The man next to her sat perfectly still and watched her, almost seeming to fade into the background. Her voice was strong and sure, causing me to wonder if she was asking or challenging.

Carol turned to face the speaker. “You’re Ellen, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a fair question, Ellen,” Carol replied diplomatically. “Every so often in hypnotherapy, a patient comes along who is highly resistant to hypnosis. Most of the time the resistance comes from misconceptions about what hypnosis is, or fear of losing control. Some people are just very analytical by nature and have a hard time letting their subconscious take over. It’s been my experience that once a patient has been educated about the hypnotic state and any latent fears or doubts have been put to rest, anyone who is willing can enter hypnosis.”

“You mean you’ve never had someone you couldn’t put under?” Ellen’s tone was openly skeptical now, but Carol seemed unconcerned.

“It’s not really a question of putting someone under,” she explained patiently. “Going into hypnosis is a process that happens entirely within a person’s own mind. I can’t make you or anyone else enter a hypnotic state. What I can do, what I will do, is teach you how to enter that state yourself or in response to a suggestion from your partner. If you want that to happen, Ellen, it will happen; if you don’t, it won’t. The outcome is always what you want it to be.”

Nice, I thought. Now if she doesn’t go under, it’s her own fault.

“Are there any other questions?” Carol asked. When nobody spoke, she continued. “Okay. Now I’d like to take a break. I’m asking each of you to please go and use the bathroom, I want you comfortable with no interruptions for the rest of the session. Be back here in ten minutes, please.”

It was closer to fifteen minutes before everyone had taken care of business and settled back into their chosen spots. There was a lot of nervousness on display, as well as anticipation. Ellen, I noticed, was the quietest of us; she simply sat and waited, arms folded, with a closed look on her face.

With the buzz of a half-dozen whispered conversations in the air, Carol stepped over to a small side table and pressed a button on the boom box that rested there. From the box came a strange sound: light, airy, yet very soothing, it wasn’t really music but it wasn’t just a simple tone either. We all fell silent almost immediately, feeling the odd series of notes flowing around and through us. Carol gave us a few moments to adjust to the change, then turned to address the class.

“I suppose I could start out by giving you a long, technical lecture on how to help someone enter hypnosis. In doing these classes, though, I’ve found that it all makes much more sense if you actually experience the hypnotic state first. I’d like for everyone to lie back and get comfortable, please.”

There was some shuffling around as we adjusted ourselves into position. The ceiling, I noticed, had a number of colorful dots on it. “Choose a spot on the ceiling,” Carol’s voice told us, “and focus on it.” There was a dark blue dot near the middle of my field of vision, so I fixed my gaze on it and waited for more instructions.

Carol’s voice grew smoother, softer, more seductive as she began to talk us into trance. “Everyone take a nice, deep breath now. Hold it ... hold it ... and now exhale, completely, slowly, and let yourself sink into the mats. Very good, everyone. Now breathe in again, deeply and slowly. Hold it. And exhale, slowly, completely, feeling yourself sinking a little further into the mats.” She had us do this several times, each time exhorting us to relax and let the mats support us.

“Notice how very settled, how very comfortable, you feel right now,” she continued. “Pay very close attention to your body right now. Notice the feel of your clothes against your skin, the softness of the mat below you, the gentle motion of the air around you. Concentrate on these sensations, just concentrate and listen. Think of relaxation only; any other thoughts that might come to you, just let them come and pass like a summer breeze.

“Notice that you can still hear the music playing in the background. It’s a special rhythm designed to help you relax. If you like, let the music enter your mind and soothe you, relaxing you by degrees as you float along on the waves of sound. You can concentrate on that if you like, listening closely to the music, and to my voice. Listen, relax, and enjoy.”

The music was enticing, I decided, and vaguely noticed myself letting out another deep breath as I focused my attention on the strange, comforting sounds flowing out of the boom box. Carol’s voice faded a little, but I could still hear her clearly.

“As you watch your spot on the ceiling, you will find that your eyes become tired from staring so long at one place. They begin to water, to strain, to blink. That’s perfectly okay. Eyes get tired, especially when they are focused so well in one place, as yours are now. It’s okay to feel tired, sleepy, groggy, drowsy. Okay to feel the lids growing heavy, trying to blink, trying to close. Soon you will find that you can no longer hold your eyes open; they will blink, quickly at first, and then more and more often, until they simply no longer wish to remain opened at all. And that’s fine too. Don’t make any deliberate effort to close your eyes or to keep them open; just let them close or blink whenever they want to, and you’ll drift into a wonderful, pleasant place of relaxation. Just let yourself go.

“As we go along, I want you to be aware of your breathing and each breath you take. Each time that you exhale, let your neck relax, let your shoulders drop, let your hips and thighs go loose. It will feel wonderfully good.”

My head was full of the music from the boom box. The tone had changed slightly, I thought—the rhythm had slowed ever so slightly, the pitch lowered just a hair. A warm, comfortable feeling began to flow through my body.

“I’m going to count to three now,” Carol’s voice continued, “and when I reach three, if you haven’t already closed your eyes down, I want you to close them at that time. You will always be able to open your eyes again if you really want to, but please leave them closed until I ask you to open them. One ... two ... and three, everyone let your eyes close now, let your neck relax, let your shoulders drop, just letting everything go. As we go along, you’re going to find that your mind starts to wander around to other thoughts and other places, and that’s okay. Any time you find your mind wandering about, simply bring it back and focus your attention on my voice or the music, and you’ll drift a little faster and a little more deeply relaxed than you were the moment before.”

I had a pretty decent buzz going already, thanks to the music and the soothing tones of Carol’s voice. My body was heavy and limp, but I could feel the wrestling mat underneath me supporting me, making it possible to let every muscle go. My mind wandered for a second, then I realized Carol was speaking again.

“...I’m going to mention several muscle groups of your body, and as I mention these groups of muscles I want you to focus your attention there, really concentrate, and relax each group of muscles that I mention.”

Starting with the face, Carol called out every major muscle group and body part from head to toe. For each group she told us to concentrate, focus, relax this and that part, feel the part becoming heavy, loose, and lazy. I kept drifting off to some other place, only to catch myself and refocus on Carol’s instructions.

Once she had gone through all of the muscle groups, Carol led us in another series of slow, deep breaths. Each breath in filled my body with peace, and each breath out let me melt down farther and farther in to the soft, safe, comfortable mat.

Carol’s voice had become so distant I found it hard to make out what she was saying. Something told me that was okay, though, so I simply let her voice merge with the low, thrumming tones of the music in my head. I felt my various muscle groups relaxing again, head to toe, like the lights being turned off in a skyscraper floor by floor.

A pattern of colors began to swirl before my eyes, and I felt myself floating down into the middle of whatever it was. It turned out to be a hammock, stretched between two trees, waiting to be occupied. I was in a small woodland, with grass under my feet and enough trees to provide pleasant shade. There was a small stream nearby; the bubbling sound of the water running by made the place all the more peaceful. I climbed into the hammock and lay back, swaying slowly in the warm breeze. I watched the tree limbs as I rocked back and forth, the sounds of the water still in my ears, feeling safe and comfortable.

Perfectly contented, I closed my eyes and let out a long, slow breath. From somewhere right behind me Carol spoke some more. Firm, gentle hands pressed down on my shoulders and the world melted away.

My rest was rudely interrupted by the familiar BWAAAP of my alarm clock. Instinctively I rolled toward the sound and reached out with an arm to silence the obnoxious little box, only to realize that it wasn’t there. My mind cleared, and I saw that we were still in the dojo. The alarm sound stopped before I could locate the real source of the sound.

“Welcome back everyone,” Carol said. “Take your time, don’t be in a hurry to start moving around. Take a minute and pay attention to how you feel: peaceful, relaxed, at ease.”

She was right, I felt as if I’d had a long afternoon nap. I looked over at Meg and took her hand; her face radiated a kind of serenity that echoed my own feelings. A slow, easy look around the dojo told me that the other couples were experiencing the same thing. Well, all of them who were left—the skeptical Ellen and her companion were gone, their mats returned to the pile at the back of the dojo. “What happened to them?” I asked, pointing toward the empty spot.

“Ellen and Matt have decided not to continue,” she explained without explaining. “I agree with their choice. And now that you’ve all had a chance to get reoriented, let’s talk about what you just experienced.”

Carol then launched into an informal lecture on the basic theory of hypnosis. She described how people actually go into and out of various trance states normally every day when they drive, watch television, read, dance, or do almost anything that requires concentration. “That ability to focus on one thing or sensation, so that other sounds and stimuli are blocked out or ignored, is what a trance really is,” she told us. She went on to explain some of the more important principles regarding the hypnotic state: that people can always choose to end the trance if they wish; people can also choose to reject a suggestion if it conflicts with their moral sense or doesn’t feel safe; and that post-hypnotic suggestions wear off if they are not used regularly. “We’ve all read or heard of stories in which someone drops into a trance by hearing some random phrase that they were conditioned to years before,” she said. “It makes an interesting fictional device, but it could never really happen.”

Next we discussed how hypnotic inductions actually work. Carol went over the major modes of perception—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. “Visual people,” she explained, “have a strong ability to see things with their imaginations. They can invoke an image and describe it in great detail. Auditory people are very attuned to sounds. Kinesthetics are very good at focusing on their own bodies, sensing their own movement, position, and location. During the induction we used earlier, I included elements of all three. Unless you are very unusual, each of you should have found that one type of instruction seemed to work better for you than others. Maybe you found the rhythmic sound from the CD player particularly soothing; maybe staring at the dot seemed to focus you more; maybe it was easiest for you to focus on the various sensations around your body. Everyone is different, but knowing how a person perceives the world makes it much easier to help them into hypnosis and to form workable suggestions.” Then Carol turned to me. “Patrick, what elements in the induction today worked best for you?”

She had caught me off guard; I had to yank my eyes back from the graceful curve of her shoulder and think fast. “The auditory,” I answered. “The visual imagery of the hammock and the wood were also pretty vivid, but it was mostly the music and your voice that really put me away.”

Carol smiled approvingly and looked to Meg. “The sound was okay,” Meg offered, “but it didn’t really do much for me. The whole relaxing thing, concentrating on specific body parts and noticing all the different sensations, that was the thing that really worked for me. I had a hard time visualizing the woods, but I could feel myself swinging in the hammock very well. I guess that makes me a kinesthetic, right?”

Carol nodded and turned to the next couple. We watched and listened as the other couples related their experiences. Most of them turned out to be visual types, plus one or two auditory. Meg was the only kinesthetic in the group.

“Before we end the session for tonight,” Carol continued, “I want to demonstrate for you one more principle of hypnosis: it gets much easier with practice. Everyone close your eyes and think back to when you were hypnotized earlier. If you are visual, remember the images you saw and how you felt as you looked at them; if you are auditory, try to recall the sounds from the boom box and let them take you back into deep relaxation; if you are kinesthetic, remember the sensations of your body relaxing, melting into the mats, growing heavy and loose. Relax your feet everyone, your feet and now your calves ... let the relaxation spread up your legs ... to your hips ... " Her voice dropping back to the low, sensual tones of a while before, Carol guided us all through another progressive relaxation. I was gone before she got all the way through, the memory of that sound replaying through my head.

When I woke up again I felt invigorated. My body tingled with a quiet excitement. I looked over at Meg and noticed, as if for the first time, the delightful curves of her breasts under the sport top she was wearing. I put a hand on her back, partly to draw her to me and partly to find out if she was wearing a bra underneath. She wasn’t, I concluded as out lips met in a hot kiss that put Miracle Grow in my shorts. I was only half aware of Carol’s voice in the background. “Our final item tonight is a small demonstration of post-hypnotic suggestion,” she was saying. “I planted a fairly simple suggestion; you should be feeling its affects right now, so I don’t think I need to tell you what it was. Please try to remember this one thing, though: if you possibly can, I’d like each of you to find some quiet time each day and practice putting yourself back into hypnosis. You’ll find it gets easier if you practice every day.”

Carol saw us all nod, but we weren’t really paying much attention to her. With a light sigh and a broad smile, she dismissed us. “Everyone drive carefully, and I’ll see you here next Thursday.”

Meg and I separated reluctantly, our eyes wandering back to each other’s bodies often as we gathered our things and put away the mats. I did look around enough to notice that we were not the only couple acting this way. The ‘small demonstration’ was clearly working in a big way.

As we headed out the door, Carol stopped us for a quick aside. “It’s unusual to have only one kinesthetic person in a group,” she said to Meg. “I’m a kinesthetic too; remind me next week and I’ll teach you a couple of special techniques.”

We thanked Carol and said goodnight, our minds mostly occupied with our own special techniques, which we intended to put into practice as soon as we got home.

The drive home was interesting, to say the least. As I drove, my eyes kept wandering over to Meg in the seat next to me. I saw the outlines of her nipples pressing against the sports top, and her tulip shorts had spread open when she sat down in the car seat, showing me lots and lots of lean, sexy upper leg. Somehow I managed to tear my eyes away enough to watch the road.

“So what did you think of the class?” Meg asked with forced nonchalance.

“It was ... interesting,” I said. “I wonder what all she told us while we were out of it.”

Meg moaned a little when I said that. “I think we know at least one thing she did,” she replied, as her hands cupped her breasts through the stretchy top. “I can’t believe how randy I am! Does it show?”

“You mean your flaring nostrils, the rising color in your cheeks, and the way you keep looking at me while you grope yourself? No, I hardly noticed at all.”

Meg let out a Bronx cheer, then reached over into my lap. “Feels like I’m not the only one whose boiler pressure is rising,” she said as her hand clamped down on my straining cock. “How does this feel, wise guy?” With a deft movement, she pulled down my zipper and started stroking my shaft through my briefs.

My field of vision narrowed to just the road in front of me as I tried to ignore the exquisite sensations in my crotch. Finally I gulped and found a couple of words. “I’m speechless,” I confessed.

With an evil laugh, Meg withdrew her hand. I was both relieved and disappointed. “Are we even going to make it home?”

“Probably,” she answered. “But if I don’t get that dick of yours firmly implanted at the first possible moment, I think I’m going to burst.”

“You’re not driving,” I pointed out. “Go ahead and come if you want to; blow off some steam.”

“Great idea!” Meg’s right hand dove through the waistband of her shorts. From my vantage point I could just make out the shape of her hand as she curled her fingers to reach into her seam. Her breathing quickened and deepened, and I felt my own body reacting to the low, growling moans that escaped her lips. After a very long few minutes, she groaned loudly. “Shit—I can’t come!” she shouted, her eyes still shut and her fingers still working. “All this diddling is only making it worse!”

“Making it worse for me too,” I replied with feeling, painfully aware of my cock pressing against the back of the steering wheel. “Good thing we’re almost home.”

Meg opened her eyes and checked our position: about 3 blocks from the house. “Hallelujah!” she cried. “I knew you had it in you ... now hurry up so you can get it into me.”

A small corner of my mind started laughing. Meg is never shy about letting me know when she’s horny, but I’d never seen her this incensed before. The fact that I was in equally bad shape myself made it all the more funny.

An eternity later, we cruised into the garage. I hit the button to close the door and jumped out of the car, fumbling with my keys to locate the inside door key. Meg was right behind me, her hands running up and down my upper body. I got distracted and dropped my keys onto the concrete floor.

“Forget it,” Meg said fiercely as she grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around, pressing me against the doorframe with her sweating body. “Right here, right now,” she added, then locked her mouth onto mine for a sweltering, deep kiss.

In moments I felt my pants fall to the floor, followed immediately by my briefs. Not to be outdone, I lifted Meg’s sports top enough to expose her breasts and caressed them, noticing with pleasure that her nipples felt as hard as my cock. Meg dropped to her knees, pulling herself out of my hands, and brought her tongue to bear against the sides of my shaft. She licked me slowly, sensuously, up one side and down the other, tracing rings around the head with the tip of her tongue. One of her hands reached around me and started stroking my balls. We were both breathing in heavy gasps.

My head jerked back as Meg squeezed in just the right place; I felt something hard behind my head move, followed immediately by the sound of a small motor. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the garage door start to lift.

“Shit!” I cried, stabbing at the switch wildly to reverse the movement. On about the fifth try I succeeded, and the door settled back into closed position. Meg used my distracted time to hastily strip off her clothing; she stood before me in only her sneakers, like a streaker from the 70’s. Pulling one foot free from the entangling grip of my pants and briefs, I grabbed Meg in a bear hug, lifted her up, and set her down on the edge of my workbench about 10 paces away. Lips locked together, tongues wrestling each other to a draw, I tilted her back a little bit and slid into her dripping slit.

“Yes!” she gasped as I buried my cock between her legs. “Oh, this is perfect! Don’t you dare stop!”

“Stop?” I replied jokingly. “I’ve barely started.”

Meg’s legs wrapped themselves around me, simultaneously squeezing my torso and pulling me closer to her center. The rising pitch and frequency of her moans told me she was almost there. I clenched down hard with my groin muscle, lifting my cock and putting a little extra pressure on the top of her canal, and that was all she wrote. Meg shrieked again and again as the orgasm ripped through her body. I was so pleased with her reaction that I barely noticed I was still pumping away. Then, with almost no warning, my balls burst and I came. One spurt after another came flying out like water from a fire hydrant; part of me wondered if I was going to pull a muscle this way. Finally the fury subsided and we collapsed against each other, kissing and stroking as we fell into post-coital bliss. A long time later, we separated. We looked at each other in wonder.

“Wow,” I remarked, knowing even as I said it how inadequate that word was.

“Definitely a wow,” Meg replied. We both had spit-eating grins on our faces as we gathered up our hastily discarded clothes and carried them into the house.

If there’s one problem with having a Thursday night like we’d had, it’s this: Friday can’t help but seem lame by comparison. I spent most of the day glued to my desk, updating some CAD drawings with last-minute changes from the client. Once I’d sent the finished version across the wire to the print shop, it was just after three o’clock—too early to leave, too late to start something new.

I decided that the best way to kill time until I could reasonably go home would be to back up my local data files to the network. Those of us who do design work get the nicest PC’s in the place and have enough storage to keep our files locally so we don’t hog the network reading and writing our CAD data. In exchange, the network administrator expects us to make backups of our drawing files in a special directory on the network, where they can be written to tape for disaster recovery purposes. Things are never that busy on Friday afternoons, so I figured it was as good a time as any to be a good citizen.

As I sat there watching files copy, I thought again about the previous night’s class. Going into hypnosis had been surprisingly easy, especially the second time. I wondered if I could do it again without the extra aid of Carol’s voice. I took a quick survey of the neighboring cubicles; nobody home but me. I already knew the boss was off, so all systems were go.

While I was up, I grabbed one of the high-backed chairs from the team room and dragged it back to my cube. From the progress on my computer screen, I figured I had about twenty minutes to kill.

I sat down in the high-backed chair, stretched out my legs, and put my feet up on the seat of my regular chair. My hands I let fall into my lap. It was almost as comfortable as lying down on the mats in the dojo. I let my eyes close as I took a deep breath in and let it out, slowly and easily, as we had done the night before. In my mind’s ear I imagined hearing that strange musical sound again, flowing through my mind, relaxing me, taking me deeper and deeper. A warm, pleasant feeling crept through me, and I encouraged it, letting myself grow sleepier and sleepier, relaxing, drifting ...

... and waking up suddenly to the feel of a hand on my shoulder. I looked up to see Shirley, our boss’s secretary, looking down at me with an amused smile. “Rough night, Pat?”

“Something like that,” I waffled, trying to get myself oriented again.

“So take off,” she suggested. “Just about everyone else has. I only came over to rib you about swiping one of the good chairs.”

I looked at the clock on my computer screen: 4:18. A full hour, and then a little, had gone by while I was zoned out. Too embarrassed to come up with a clever reply, I just thanked Shirley, put everything away, and went home.

I told Meg about what I’d done over dinner, expecting her to share a laugh with me over getting caught by Shirley. She surprised me by saying that she’d done the same thing.

“I got home at the normal time,” she said—for Meg, that’s about 3:30 because she starts work at 6:45. “I took a quick shower, and when I came out I just had this idea that it would be fun to see if I could put myself under. I stretched out on the bed and just let go, and after a while I felt the buzz and went with it. The phone woke me up—another long distance company trolling for naíve customers—and I saw it was almost 4:30. I must have been really gone, because it only felt like a couple of minutes to me.”

“Another of Carol’s demonstrations?” I speculated.

“I don’t think so,” she answered thoughtfully. “I mean, we were all awake when she told us that she wanted us to practice going under when we get the chance. I didn’t feel as though I had to do it, just that it would be interesting to try.”

“Same here,” I agreed, and let the matter drop. We could always ask Carol about it at the next class.

The weekend was mostly unremarkable. We spent Saturday catching up on errands and odd jobs: laundry, washing cars, a little light household maintenance, that kind of thing. Meg practiced her self-hypnosis in the morning right after her shower, and I did mine after dinner.

Meg had an interesting idea on Sunday. “Why don’t we practice together today?”

I shrugged. “Sure, why not?” After lunch we retired to the bedroom, pulling the shades to filter out most of the afternoon sun. We kicked off our shoes and stretched out on the bed, face up, my right hand in her left. Meg started us on a deep breath, but I stopped.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I answered. I rolled away from Meg and checked out my alarm clock. It read 2:10pm, so I set the alarm time to 3:15. “Just a precaution,” I explained. “As nice as this is, I don’t want to spend the whole afternoon sacked out.”

“Good idea,” she agreed.

The alarm set, I resumed my position next to Meg. We each took a series of deep, slow breaths to get ourselves started. As I relaxed into the bed, I could sense Meg next to me doing the same. We found ourselves breathing in unison without really trying to. Soon I felt the warm, inviting buzz of hypnosis coming over me and I let go into it, confidant that we would wake up at the appointed time.

My eyes opened again almost immediately, or so it seemed. I felt wide awake, at ease, rested. Meg stirred next to me. “What time is it?”

I did a double take at the clock before answering: “Three fifteen ... can you believe it?”

“Did the clock go off?”

“No, it didn’t.” Puzzled, I scooted over and checked the clock. “Shit—I set it to 3:15am instead of pm.”

“It doesn’t seem as though we needed it,” she observed.

“I guess not. The question is, was it dumb luck —”

“—or did we wake up just now because we had already decided to?” We both shrugged at that one. Another thing to ask Carol about on Thursday.

I got into the office early on Monday to get some extra things done before a 9:30 meeting. As luck would have it, though, our LAN team had chosen Monday to roll out an automated update of some sort. They aren’t supposed to do those on the CAD systems because we have different configurations and hardware from most people, but somebody apparently forgot. Seconds after logging in I got a screen message telling me to please wait while my system is updated. A minute or so after that, I got the infamous Blue Screen of Death. After leaving a voice mail for the help desk and a warning for my cohorts Gary and Barbara, I spent the time I had wanted to be working in the cafeteria, drowning my sorrows in hot coffee and a blueberry muffin.

Other than the meeting, the day was a total loss. The first tech that came up took one look at the PC, saw it wasn’t a standard configuration, and retreated immediately. The second one looked at it a bit longer, asked me what I had changed on the system, and looked unbelieving when I explained what had happened.

After the meeting, and a long lunch with Gary and Barbara during which we contemplated various methods of torture suitable for the network administrators, my PC still wasn’t up. Barbara had the afternoon off so I tried to get some work done using her machine, but it was like driving someone else’s car—the controls are more or less the same, but everything is just different enough to be awkward. By three o’clock, with three techs now huddled over my crippled PC scratching their heads, I’d had enough and headed home in disgust.

Meg’s car was in the garage as usual when I got home, but the house seemed quiet. I was still in a pretty foul mood, so rather than go looking for Meg right away I slipped upstairs to the bedroom. Changing out of my office clothes does wonders for my attitude on a bad day.

I found Meg on the bed and started to say something, but I stopped short. She was so still, so peaceful looking. Meg is an active sleeper, rolling around and moving her arms and legs as she dreams; seeing her this quiet was odd. I tiptoed around the bed for a closer look.

Meg’s arms were at her sides, her feet tilted outwards. I could see her eyes flickering around under her closed lids and see the slow movement of her chest as she breathed. She was wearing her white silk robe, closed but not fastened, and nothing else. She smelled faintly of soap and moisturizer, suggesting that she’d had a shower when she got home.

I fingered the edge of her robe, pulling it back ever so slightly, peeking at the line of smooth skin leading between her breasts, to the navel, and down to her thatch. For about three seconds I thought about waking her up; then I had a better idea.

Backing away from the bed, I slipped my own clothes off, being careful to make as little noise as possible. I knelt down beside the bed and gently, lightly, let my hand come to rest on her stomach. The silk moved under my hand as she breathed. Watching Meg’s face carefully for signs of awakening, I moved my hand slowly up toward her breast, using just enough pressure to let me feel her through the silk robe. My fingers reached the nipple and parted, teasing the sides, and I was pleased to feel the nipple stiffen in response even as my palm crossed over it and reversed directions, stroking downward just as slowly and gently.

The next time I applied just a little bit more pressure and lingered over the nipple, squeezing very slightly, letting the silk move a little more under my hand. The gap in the robe widened of course as I moved the material around; after a few minutes I just had to peel it aside the rest of the way. My hand brushed down her bare skin one time as I leaned forward. My tongue contacted her exposed nipple as my hand came to rest on her mound, fingers reaching down to her slit. I felt her breath in suddenly and her legs starting to move, and my eyes darted up to her face. Her eyes were opening, but she still looked dazed.

“Relax, Meg,” I said, trying my best to imitate Carol’s smooth delivery. “There’s no need to wake up yet. You’re about to have a wonderful, erotic dream. Just close your eyes and let it happen, let the dream take your mind to new depths of peace and relaxation even as you feel your body becoming aroused.”

Meg’s eyelids closed down and she sighed a long, lazy sigh as she settled back into the bed. Watching that happen sent a rush of adrenaline to my groin that almost completely derailed my train of thought. I’d had all kinds of fantasies about Meg responding to my voice that way, but seeing it happen in reality was a rush unlike anything I’d ever known. In my distraction—or was it fascination?—I barely noticed that my free hand had taken a firm grip on my cock. I knelt there for several seconds at least, just trying to assimilate the powerful erotic feelings that had erupted within me, before I remembered what I was trying to do.

My cock was screaming for attention, but I willed myself to let go and get back to the original plan. I put my mouth over the nearest nipple and sucked, running my tongue over the extended tip, while at the same time I began probing her slit with my fingers. Meg moaned deeply, and soon I could feel moisture coating my fingertips as they stroked her center.

As delicately as I could, I rose up and climbed onto the bed. I let my left hand take over on her breast momentarily while I kissed my way south, parting her legs as I came to rest between them. I kissed her thighs, her mound, her lips, and felt her hips start to move up and down. I lifted my head long enough to see that her eyes were still closed and her face slack, then dove in to finish the job.

A lick here, a suck there, my hands caressing her legs all the while, I watched and listened for signs of awakening. Her breathing remained deep but the pace was picking up, and each exhale came with a long, sustained moaning sound. Her body felt heavy and loose, but there was no question that she was responding and would be ready to come soon. I thought briefly about trying the “you can’t come until I tell you to” trick that figures into so many of our favorite stories, but I opted not to—I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, and I didn’t want to spoil this by trying and failing.

Instead I put the broad side of my tongue right against her swollen clit and teased it, rubbing against one side and then the other, until the moans turned into passionate cries and then to shrieks as Meg came. I did my best to stay in position, trying to make the orgasm last as long as I could for her. Even in the throes of a climax, she was so relaxed that her legs remained almost completely limp on my shoulders.

When the shrieks had died down to loud, heavy breaths again, I felt more movement on the bed and peeked up in time to see Meg’s head rising up, her elbows coming back to support her. Her face looked dazed, dizzy ... and absolutely beautiful.

“Honey,” I said playfully, “I’m home.”

That week passed very slowly for us. After our little experiment Monday, we were both anxious to continue with our education.

Apparently we weren’t the only ones keen to learn more: when we reached the dojo it was a good twenty minutes before the class was supposed to start, yet everyone but Carol was already there.

Meg and I had our mats arranged to our liking and were just settling in when Carol arrived. Her welcoming smile beamed at us so brightly that it took me a few seconds to realize she wasn’t alone. Behind her was a man of average height, slightly balding, with a neatly trimmed beard and wire-frame glasses. His navy blue warm-up suit hung loosely on his thin frame. He busied himself setting up the boom box while Carol made a few notes in her organizer.

“Good evening,” Carol began, setting the organizer down. “It’s good to see everyone here bright and early. Has it been an interesting week for you all?” She made eye contact with each of us in turn, and without fail each of us met her gaze with a sheepish grin. “Excellent! Before we get started, I’d like you all to meet my husband, Jim.” She indicated the man who had followed her in.

Jim waved to the group. “I’m not a hypnotherapist,” he quipped, “but I’ve been known to sleep with one.” He winked and smiled in a way that made me like him instantly.

“Behave,” his wife scolded lightly before turning back to us. “Besides being a card-carrying wiseacre, Jim is my oldest and best student. He’ll be helping out in several capacities for the rest of the course. He’s very well trained, so rest assured you can trust anything he tells you.

“Now,” she continued, “Are there any questions you’d like to toss out before we go any further?”

“I have one.” Tamika, a twenty-something black woman in burgundy fleece, spoke up. Her head was cocked to one side and her eyebrows rose high on her forehead as she looked at Carol. “What exactly did you do to us last time?”

A group chuckle erupted—the question was on all of our minds, and it was a relief to hear someone voice it. Carol was clearly expecting it and had her answer ready.

“A couple of simple posthypnotic suggestions,” she explained. “One of the keys to using erotic hypnosis is believing that it really can work. Before you try making suggestions to each other, I wanted you to see and feel for yourselves that the results we are going to talk about are possible—not just in the abstract, but for you specifically. The best way to prove that to you was by example.

“Before bringing you out of hypnosis last week, I suggested that upon waking you would be much more aware than usual of how sexy your partner really is, and that this increased awareness would lead to your having sexual thoughts and desires. Then I suggested that each of those thoughts would add to a growing, irresistible lust that wouldn’t be satisfied until you make love with your partner, which you would do at the first safe opportunity.”

As Carol explained what she’d done, I replayed that Thursday night in my mind: the sudden randiness I’d felt when we woke up the last time; the steady buildup of need; Meg trying to bring herself off in the car and failing, and how it that had affected me; it all fell neatly into place.

Meg broke the silence with a question of her own. “Did you make any other suggestions while we were out? About practicing every day or anything like that?”

“Yes, I did. Going into trance is a skill which must be practiced. That’s especially true in this context, where you are all just beginning to learn and don’t have a professional to guide you at home. To help you, I suggested that you would find it easy to reenter the hypnotic state on your own at will, and that each time you try you will go deeper than the time before. I reinforced those concepts several times.”

“Did you tell us we had to practice every day?”

“Not as a posthypnotic suggestion, no. If you remember, I did suggest after you were fully awake that practicing every day would be a good thing. Did everyone do that?” She looked around at us all; everyone was nodding. “That’s very good. Now that you know how easily you can enter the hypnotic state on your own, it will be even easier for you to do it with your partner’s help. And that leads us directly to tonight’s first demonstration.”

Carol looked over at Jim with a slight nod and he joined her at the front of the room. We watched as he stepped behind Carol and put his arms around her, holding her firmly just below the breasts. She pushed her long hair to one side out of his face. He craned his neck forward enough to kiss her lightly on the cheek, then whispered something into her ear.

The effect was dramatic: Carol’s legs buckled and her arms dropped like stones as her body slumped backward. Her head pitched to the right and drooped. Only Jim’s arms, locked firmly around her ribcage, kept her from crumpling to the floor. I stared wide-eyed at the doctor’s limp form, fascinated. Meg’s hand found mine and squeezed, but neither of us looked away from the sight in front of us.

“Rapid induction,” Jim said by way of explanation. “One of the suggestions I always reinforce with Carol is that she will drop into trance whenever I utter a particular phrase. As you can see, it’s a very fast way to take your partner into trance. It’s also kind of fun in its own right,” he added, winking at us.

“Can you do that anytime you want?” I didn’t see who asked; it was one of the men.

“Pretty much. Carol and I have been doing this with each other for a very long time, so we’re both pretty strongly conditioned; we respond without even thinking about it.”

“How long will she stay out?”

“Until I tell her to wake up ... or until my arms give out and I drop her on the floor.” We laughed nervously at his joke. Carol was a good four inches taller than Jim, and strongly built; I wondered how long he could hold her up.

It was a moot point, because as the group quieted down again Jim spoke to Carol. “Wake up on three, darling: one, two, three.”

Carol’s eyes snapped open. Her face looked blank for a second or two, but then she blinked a few times and seemed to reorient herself. “You’re wide awake now, fully alert,” Jim said, but he kept a firm grip on her until she cleared her throat and agreed with him.

“That’s an important thing to remember,” Jim said, addressing the class. “Even though your partner’s eyes are open and she seems okay, always end with the suggestion that she is fully awake and alert. It helps her to focus again on the here and now.”

Carol came forward, looking fully alert again. “Ready to try it yourselves?” She received a general murmur of assent. “Good. Ladies, lie back and get comfortable. You’ll be the subjects tonight. Guys, you are going to help guide your partner into a nice, deep trance state. Jim and I will help you get there. When she’s nice and deep, you will suggest a trigger that will put her back into hypnosis quickly. Then you’ll wake her up and practice using the trigger.”

Tamika’s companion raised his hand looking confused. “How do we do the induction?” he asked. “I don’t remember that long speech you used last time.”

“Of course not,” Carol agreed. “Don’t worry, we’ve got some Cliff’s Notes for you.” Jim reached into the canvas bag they had carried into the dojo with them and produced a number of folded booklets. “These booklets have a number of standard induction scripts in them,” Carol explained while her husband passed out the materials. “You’ll recognize several of the samples in there from last week, because I blended several standard scripts together. Look these over together and pick the one that your partner is most comfortable with. Think about what elements from last week’s induction worked particularly well for her, and choose a script that focuses on those elements.”

There was a general buzz as the couples leafed through the booklet and talked among themselves. Carol came over to us while Meg and I were still looking at the titles. “Would you like a recommendation?” she offered.

“Sure,” Meg answered immediately.

“There’s one toward the end called ‘Hand Breathing’. It’s a personal favorite of mine; it produces great relaxation, and works very well with kinesthetic types.”

Turning quickly to the relevant page, Meg and I skimmed the text. It certainly looked interesting. Meg was up for it, so I began studying the script while we waited for further instructions. It was short and pretty simple; I had it just about down by the time Carol began addressing the group again.

“Just a few tips on how to use these scripts,” she said. “First of all, these are not magical incantations. Just reading one of these out loud to your partner is not going to do anything for her. The best way to use these is to realize that an induction script is little more than a series of suggestions that you are giving to your partner which will result in her entering hypnosis. Don’t bury your nose in the book and read the script verbatim—read a line or two, understand what it says, and relay that to your partner. If the wording feels awkward, go ahead and reword it so that you’re comfortable with it.

“Second, it’s important that you pay close attention to your partner’s body. If you say that her feet are becoming relaxed, look at her feet and watch for a sign that they are doing it. If you tell her that her eyes are getting tired and heavy, watch them start to blink or tear. The more you can pace the patter to what is actually physically happening, the more effective your induction will be.

“Finally, keep your voice natural. A lot of people have this notion that a hypnotist should talk like Bela Lugosi in ‘Dracula’, drawing out every word until it’s almost a chant. In real life, all that will do is make you feel silly and distract your partner from what you’re actually saying. Just speak normally and you’ll be fine.

“Any more thoughts or questions?” When nobody spoke up, Carol nodded. “Okay, then begin.”

Meg had already made herself at home. She had herself stretched out lengthwise on one mat, with another acting as a pillow under her head and a third propping up her feet. Her hands were folded together on top of her midriff, and her eyes were fixed on me expectantly. “Ready when you are,” she said.

I was jittery, anxious, tense. To give myself a little time to settle down I had Meg start with a few deep breaths. Carol caught my eye from across the room and put a hand to her diaphragm. The signal was clear: breathe, Patrick. So I joined Meg in a couple of deep ones and soon I could feel myself growing more relaxed and confident. It even occurred to me that this would segue well into the induction we had chosen. Shifting closer to her side, I started the induction talk.

“As you’re lying there concentrating on your breathing,” I told her, “I want you to imagine a very strange idea. I wonder if you can imagine that you can actually breathe through your fingertips. Just imagine that rather strange idea, that you can actually breathe in through your fingertips.” I gave her a few seconds to think about that before going on. “Imagine that you can feel the air moving in through your hands, slowly at first, with perhaps just a faint tingling sensation as it flows past your palms. And now just imagine that feeling moving slowly up your arms, through your elbows, up to the shoulders. Feeling that comforting flow of air moving through both arms, both elbows, both shoulders.”

I could see Meg’s hands twitching a little, her fingers spreading apart just a hair, and took that as a good sign. “As you feel that slight tingle, that comforting flow of air moving through your arms, you may notice that it leaves the muscles in your hands feeling warm and loose, relaxed, lazy. Just imagine that, imagine the air flowing through your hands, relaxing them, bringing that tingle through your elbows and shoulders, relaxing your arms completely as it flows through. Breathe deeply and feel the flow as your arms relax so completely.” The twitching stopped, and Meg’s arms seemed to settle, rising and falling as she breathed in and out.

After a few seconds, I continued. “As you feel that comforting, relaxing flow of air moving through your hands, through your arms to your shoulders, maybe finding again that faint tingling sensation, perhaps in your elbows or forearms this time, then moving down through your body. Down through your chest and stomach, down through your hips, down through your thighs, into your knees and shins and calves.” The script had the word ‘down’ in italics, so I gave each ‘down’ some extra emphasis. “Again, you might feel that faint tingling sensation just there, just below your knees, moving down through your ankles and out the bottoms of your feet. And you can find a great deal of calmness and easiness in this rather strange idea that you can breathe in through your fingers, that you can actually feel the air moving through your whole body in one single, warming, comforting flow. A unidirectional flow, moving through your whole body in one single comforting flow. The calmness and relaxation you breathe in doesn’t get involved with the tensions and stresses that you breathe away from yourself. With each breath you take, with each word I speak, you find yourself becoming steadily more and more relaxed.”

Something touched my elbow; I turned my head and saw Carol kneeling behind me. “You’re doing great,” she said softly. “Your pacing is smooth and steady, which is good. Can you see how well it’s working?”

I looked back at Meg’s face. Her jaw looked slack and her lips were parted slightly. “She looks pretty out of it to me. But how do I know she didn’t just nod off?”

“Look at her eyes. See how they’re moving under her lids? That’s called REM, for rapid eye movement. It means her subconscious is active. Also, notice how still she is. Watch her breathing, see how slow and easy it is. She’s going to be nice and deep by the time you’re done with the patter. It’s going to take a little longer for some of the others, though, so when you’re finished with the script go into a deepener. The staircase one is simple and works well.”

“Okay.” Carol stood up and moved on to the next couple, and I turned my attentions back to Meg. “Very good, Meg. With each breath you take, each word I speak, you find yourself becoming steadily more and more relaxed. As you relax, you begin to notice the weight of your head against the soft mat, wondering if that weight might seem to gently increase as you relax even more. Feeling also the weight of your feet on the pad, and noticing how that weight, too, seems to gently increase even as you think about it.” I was ad-libbing; the script actually made reference to someone sitting in a chair with a footrest. Remembering how well Meg had responded Monday afternoon, I changed the imagery a little.

“You find that sensation of total relaxation, as if you are lying on your own bed after a hot shower, sinking gently into the mattress, letting it envelop you, feeling totally calm, totally safe. With each breath you take, with each word I speak, allowing that feeling of great calmness, comfort, and safety to increase. Feeling that warm, relaxing flow of air continuing to move through your whole body, from your hands, through your arms, down through your body and out through your feet.”

That was the end of the standard script. Meg’s breathing had slowed so much I could barely tell when she inhaled. I watched her for a few moments—she’s so beautiful when she’s asleep—then thumbed through the booklet to find the staircase deepener.

As I led Meg down an imaginary staircase, telling her that each step took her deeper into hypnosis, I watched her. As we got closer to the bottom of the staircase, it seemed as though her face began to flush slightly. Her eyes continued to flit about under closed lids, so I kept reading. When the deepener was over, I looked around for a clue on what to do next. Jim caught my eye and came over.

“Looks like you’re in good shape,” he commented. “Have you decided on a trigger yet?”

“I think so.” I told him what I had in mind; he made a few suggestions, which I gladly accepted, and told me to proceed.

“Meg, darling, you are now in a deep, delicious state of hypnosis. You are more relaxed than you ever thought anyone could ever be. You are completely in touch with every part of your body and mind, and they are all under your complete control. It’s so pleasant, so very pleasant, to let yourself relax this way and let me take care of you, let me take care of everything. Would you like to be able to return to this wonderful, peaceful state of mind again, Meg?”

I waited. Several long seconds later, her lips moved slightly. “You are deeply, totally relaxed, Meg,” I said as Jim had suggested, “and nothing can disturb that wonderful feeling. You will find that you can easily speak to me while you are in this state, and that it will not disturb your relaxation in the least. In fact, speaking while under hypnosis even helps your mind to relax even more, taking you deeper and deeper with every word. Would you like to be able to return to this deep, satisfying sleep again, Meg?

Her whole mouth moved this time: “Yes, please.”

“You can, Meg. You can return to this state any time you wish. In fact, whenever I say the phrase ‘Goodnight, Gracie’ you will immediately close your eyes and relax, letting yourself slide so easily, so deeply back into hypnosis. Every time I say ‘Goodnight, Gracie’ you will find it easier and easier to just let go. Every time I say ‘Goodnight, Gracie’ you will go deeper into hypnosis than the time before. You won’t have to think about it, you will simply let go and trust me to take care of you. Will you do that, Meg? Will you let me take you back into deep, wonderful hypnosis by saying ‘Goodnight, Gracie’ to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s what will happen, darling. ‘Goodnight, Gracie’ will be your hypnotic trigger from now on, and you will always go immediately into a deep hypnotic sleep when I say those words to you. Won’t you?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Very good, Meg. Rest now, darling. Just let yourself drift and relax, rest and sleep, until I say your name again.”

Jim nodded approvingly from his position at Meg’s feet, then went on to another couple. I sat back and watched Meg some more, waiting for the next step. The realization of what I had done—actually induced a deep hypnotic trance, on purpose—started to sink in. Despite all the hypnofetish stories I’d read, I wasn’t really prepared for the power rush that came from realizing I could actually do this. The possibilities were staggering ... not to mention arousing.

The wait wasn’t too long, only about ten minutes. Meg never stirred; in fact, the only way I could tell she was still breathing was by putting a hand just over her face. I wondered how much of this she would remember later. I wondered how much I would remember when it was my turn, and felt my cock grow another inch in response.

“Okay, gentlemen.” Carol was back at the front of the room, speaking more quietly than usual but addressing us all. “Now that you have your suggestions implanted, it’s time to exercise them. In a few moments, I’m going to have you wake your partner up. Some of these ladies are pretty deep, so it may take a few seconds for them to come out of it. That’s okay. As soon as they seem awake to you, I want you to say the trigger phrase. She should go back down pretty easily; if not, then tell her to relax, let go, feel herself slipping back into hypnosis even deeper than before. That will probably do the trick; even after waking, people tend to stay very suggestible for a while. Once she is back down, I want you to reinforce the trigger suggestion, then wake her up again. Keep doing that until I tell you to stop. Every time you take her back down, keep telling her that she is going deeper than before. Questions? ... Then go ahead, wake her up.”

Here goes, I thought to myself, and turned back to address Meg. “Time to wake up, Meg. I’m going to count to three, and when I reach three your eyes will open and you will be fully awake. One ... two ... three.”

Meg’s eyes opened very slowly, taking several seconds to finally focus. “That was ... interesting,” she remarked as she met my gaze. She started to rise up.

“Stay down,” I said, and was somewhat surprised to see her drop back against the mat immediately. I think Meg was surprised too; her face took on a vaguely puzzled look.

“I must have been really out of it,” she remarked. “What happens next?”

“Goodnight, Gracie.” The eyes that were watching me glazed over, and the puzzled look deepened.

“Huh?” She was struggling to keep her eyes open.

“Relax and let go,” I said soothingly. “Don’t fight it, just let it happen. Let the trigger phrase take you swiftly, easily down into your deepest, most comfortable sleep.” As Carol had predicted, Meg gave up the struggle immediately and sank back into the cushions below. I repeated myself several times, encouraging her to sink deeper and deeper, then ran through the trigger suggestions again. It took all of my concentration to focus on that instead of the growing lump in my pants. When Meg had again agreed to respond to the trigger, I counted to three and woke her up again.

She came to more quickly this time. “Hey,” she started, “What did you d—”

“Goodnight, Gracie.” Meg didn’t finish her question; her face blanked as I said the magic phrase and this time she dropped on cue. I gave her the generic deepening suggestions again anyway, just to help things, and went through the sequence with her several more times. After about fifteen minutes of this Meg was dropping like a rock.

One time as Meg was waking up, Carol came over. “How are you doing?” she asked, looking at Meg.

“Don’t ask me,” she retorted, “I can’t seem to get up off my back.”

“Can you sit up?”

“I think so.” Meg pulled herself gingerly into a sitting position.

“Is that better?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Looking back to me, Carol added, “Go ahead.”

I put an arm around Meg’s shoulders. “Goodnight, Gracie.” I was expecting her to fall backwards, but instead she tipped to her left, landing mostly in my lap.

“Start giving her a little more time between triggers,” Carol told me. “And keep reinforcing the suggestions and the deepening. You’ll notice that it starts taking her longer to wake up as she goes deeper. Just lengthen the awake time by a few seconds each cycle and you’ll have her well conditioned.”

I followed her instructions as given, letting Meg have a slightly longer ‘awake break’ between triggers each time. Carol was right again; Meg did seem to need more time to come out of it as we kept going. I started letting Meg get up and move around during her awake times, but I made sure I was in position to catch her before giving her the trigger again. By the time Carol called an end to the exercise, Meg and I were able to duplicate what Carol and Jim had done at the beginning: I could stand behind Meg, give her the trigger, and catch her as she let go.

Meg was stunned when she saw how much time had elapsed since the start of the hand-breathing induction. She had been more or less out of it for the better part of an hour. “How much do you remember?” I asked her.

“Not much,” she answered after some thought. “I remember the hand breathing bit, although I sort of drifted off once or twice during that. At some point you shifted into something about a staircase. I half remember other voices, but they were distant—I didn’t try to make out the words. And then you started doing the yo-yo thing on me, waking me up and sending me back down again right away. After a bit of that I got completely lost. All I knew was that you kept putting me under, and it felt good and I didn’t want to keep waking up.” She took a quick look left and right, then lowered her voice and added, “And the more I think about it, the more my juices get flowing, if you get my drift.”

“I get it all right,” I confessed. “It’s pretty hot from my end, too. The power rush I get from watching you zone out on command ... there’s no way to describe it. You’ll see what I mean.”

“I can’t wait.” We pressed each other tightly in a hot, passionate kiss that promised more at the evening’s end.

Jim and Carol had shooed us out of the main training room for our break; when the second half of the class started, Carol explained why. “While you were taking your break, Jim took me back into hypnosis and gave me a series of suggestions designed to illustrate some of the simple but effective things you can do with partner when you use hypnosis at home. We’re going to describe some basic types of suggestions, and then you are going to develop one or two of your own and try them out.”

Meg and I exchanged intrigued glances as Carol continued.

“First, there is the type of suggestion you experienced last week—one that stimulates desire. The subconscious mind takes everything at face value; if you tell your partner under hypnosis that something is very sexy to her, it will be. Even something as commonplace as a fire hydrant can become a highly erotic image if you suggest to her that it is. As you all felt last week, desire-enhancing suggestions are very powerful.”

I had to agree with that one; the suggestion had certainly been effective on us.

“Another type of suggestion with good erotic potential is one that manipulates physical sensations. You may have heard of people using hypnosis for pain management during dental procedures, for example. Hypnosis can be used in those cases to lessen sensation, but it can also be used to heighten it.” As Carol finished her statement, Jim reached over silently and stroked her left arm. Carol’s eyes opened wide at his touch and she drew in a sharp breath. “For example,” she continued in a labored tone, “one of Jim’s suggestions was that my left arm has become an erogenous zone. Whenever he ... oooh ... touches my arm ... oooooh ...”

“Her subconscious causes her to react as if I’d touched her somewhere much more intimate,” Jim concluded for her, still lightly stroking her arm. “You can also use suggestion to make the touch more or less sensitive. For instance, I suggested that a touch on her elbow would be twice as erotic as anywhere else on the arm.” With that, he tweaked the point of her elbow between his fingers.

“Yes!” Carol gasped heavily, the truth of Jim’s statement evident in her face. “Yes, it is.”

I felt Meg’s hand pressing against my thigh and noticed that once again I had a first class hard-on in progress. I wondered how far they would take the demonstration.

“This is a great suggestion for a number of different situations,” Jim continued. “Believe it or not, it is possible with practice to bring make your partner come just by casual touch this way.” Looking at Carol’s face, I had no trouble believing him. Rather than prove it, though, Jim stopped stroking his wife’s arm.

She paused a few moments to regain her composure, then continued the talk. “Another, closely related technique is to invoke what we like to call body memory. Just as your mind can recall facts, sounds, and events, your subconscious can also recall physical sensations.”

“A posthypnotic suggestion can cause you to experience those sensations again at a later time and place,” Jim added. “Like this.”

On the word ‘this’, Carol closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. Her arms dropped loosely to her sides and she sighed contentedly. “For our last anniversary, Jim gave me a full day at Elizabeth Arden,” she explained. “It was wonderful. Right now I’m re-experiencing the full body massage.”

“This isn’t a full-blown hallucination,” Jim added. “Carol is fully aware of where she really is and what she is really doing.”

“That’s right,” she agreed. “But at the same time, I’m getting the physical sensation of a skilled masseur working on me. I can feel the warmth of the massage oil, the pressure of his hands, the softness of the towel over my bottom. And my body is relaxing in response, at least as much as it can while I’m standing here talking to you.”

She certainly looked relaxed. Then Jim snapped his fingers and Carol stood up straight again, the playback apparently over.

“That was a relatively modest demonstration of body memory,” she said. “But with practice, you can make it work for any memorable physical experience.” Her tone of voice made it quite clear that we could take “any” literally.

Carol cleared her throat before continuing. “And finally, the one I suspect you’ve all been wondering about.” She stepped back against the wall again and nodded to Jim.

“Yes, Virginia,” he said, “you can use hypnosis to induce an orgasm.”

The effect on Carol was electrifying: her thighs closed down tight and her arms pressed folded closely together under her breasts. She began to pant loudly, then progressed into moaning through a slack jaw. All of a sudden she threw her head back and cried out something unintelligible. She rocked back and forth a few times, then fell to her knees with a heavy, happy sigh.

“The subconscious can control almost any bodily function,” Jim explained while Carol recovered, “even those that we think of as involuntary. Before you get grandiose ideas, though, let me tell you right off that it takes a very experienced subject to be able to orgasm on command. Don’t even try it until you are both doing well with the simpler suggestions.”

“Besides,” Carol remarked, “There’s something a little hollow about a climax induced by nothing more than hypnotic suggestion. To me, it’s like cheating at Solitaire; you might win, but it doesn’t mean as much because it came too easily.” We all groaned at the unintended pun.

“In fact,” Jim added, “this would be a good time to admit that I cheated with that last demonstration. Carol and I have experimented before with a purely physical orgasm, and frankly the results have been underwhelming. So to make the demonstration a little more dramatic, I added some body memory elements to the suggestion: I told her that the next time I said the word ‘orgasm’, she would actually experience all the physical sensations that accompanied her last orgasm. The use of body memory along with the autonomic control gives a better result than just saying, ‘You will have an orgasm.’”

Carol had one more point to add. “Another thing you should make note of on that last suggestion is that it wasn’t left open-ended. Jim specifically said that I would respond the next time he said the word ‘orgasm’. If he had simply said, ‘When I say the word ‘orgasm’ you will have one,’ I’d be passed out on the floor by now from the exertion. That may sound pretty erotic to some of you but trust me, it gets old fast. Always think about that when formulating suggestions.

“Also, be very careful in choosing your language. The subconscious takes everything you say literally; it doesn’t process slang, euphemisms, sarcasm, or humor the way the conscious mind does. A suggestion like, ‘The sound of my voice makes you hot,’ might get your partner to take her clothes off, but she won’t be feeling very amorous if she’s sweating like an ox and guzzling ice water. Using the clinical terms for your genitals may seem cold and unsexy now, ladies, but it’s better than having your man get an erection whenever he spots your cat.”

We all had a good laugh, but the point was well taken. Carol reminded us again about some of the basic rules we had discussed at the previous class, then announced that we would now try an erotic suggestion of our own devising.

“Use your imagination,” she urged us. “Ladies, don’t be shy—if there’s something you want to try, tell him now.”

I looked at Meg. “Any preferences?”

“Surprise me,” she said, lying down on the mat.

I had a pretty good idea in mind already, so I said the magic words, “Goodnight, Gracie,” and watched her fade out. I took her through the usual deepeners, making sure she was way under. After all the earlier practice, the words flowed straight from memory to mouth; I fancied I was getting pretty good at this. Since the trigger suggestion had worked so well, I decided to frame my new suggestion in much the same way.

“Meg,” I said softly, “I want you to think back to last Monday afternoon, when you were practicing your trance and I brought you to orgasm. Did you enjoy that experience?”

“Oh, yes,” she breathed.

“Would you like to experience that again?”

“Yes, please.”

“As you wish, darling. Your body remembers all of the sensations, all of the feelings, all of the sights and sounds and smells, of that experience. Your body remembers, Meg, and when I give you the signal you will experience the relaxation, the pleasure, and the orgasm in every detail, as though it were happening again. You will again feel the softness of the bed beneath you, the sexy smoothness of your silk robe against freshly showered skin. You will again hear my voice and relax, just as you did Monday. You will again feel the weight of my body on yours as I spread your legs apart and position myself between them. You will again feel my kisses on your thighs and your groin, my tongue touching all of your private parts one by one. You again will feel yourself growing more and more aroused, even as your body relaxes under my touch, and you again will react exactly as you did that day. You will let the pleasure build inside you until you have an orgasm, and when you do that orgasm will be as strong and as satisfying as any you can remember having. All of this will happen when I give you the signal. Do you understand, Meg?”

“Yes, Patrick.”

“Good. The signal that will cause you to re-experience that memory is the word ‘anticlimax.’ Later tonight, when you are fully awake and alert, I will say the word ‘anticlimax’ to you and that will be your signal. Your body will respond automatically to that signal, just as it does when I give you the signal to go back into trance. You won’t have to think about it, you won’t want to resist, you will simply allow yourself to experience those wonderful feelings again. Okay?”

“Okay.”

It was a pretty complicated suggestion, so I went over it with her a few more times. Once I was sure I’d covered all the bases, I woke Meg up. Her eyes fluttered open and she sat up. “What now?”

I shrugged. “We wait for further instructions, I guess.”

Carol noticed Meg’s rising and came over to check on us. “Done already?”

We both nodded. “What’s next?” Meg asked.

“That’s up the two of you,” she replied. “You’ve got ten or fifteen minutes to kill while I finish up with the others. After that, just a few closing remarks and we’ll call it a night.”

Meg looked at me expectantly after Carol left us. “Well, aren’t you going to try out whatever surprise you’ve planted in my psyche?”

“I thought I’d save it for at home, when we’re alone.”

“Oooooh,” she cooed. “It must be a goody. What is it?”

I was feeling playful. “Don’t you remember? I didn’t tell you not to.”

“No, I don’t,” Meg complained after thinking. “I guess I was too out of it to remember. But you don’t want to do it here, so it must be pretty explicit.”

I just shrugged and smiled mysteriously. “Could be.”

“It’s a blowjob, isn’t it? You’re going to say a magic word and I’ll feel compelled to go down on you.”

“You do that anyway when I ask nicely.”

“A strip tease, then.”

“Nope.”

“Lap dance?”

“No,” I laughed. “But thanks for all the good ideas.” That got me a raspberry and a light smack across the leg. The guessing game might have continued, but just then we both heard a loud ‘Whoo!’ from nearby:

Tamika was awake, we saw, and had a shocked look on her face. Her companion held one of her hands and was watching her face. He petted Tamika’s hand lightly and she whooped again, her mouth falling open and eyes bulging. Her other hand dove between her legs as if she had dropped an ice cube down there. A few more light strokes and her expression gradually changed from surprise to lust.

“That looks like fun,” Meg remarked, but I didn’t bite.

The other couples were finishing up soon, too. One woman giggled and squeezed her legs together every time her mate said a trigger word. Another seemed unable to take her eyes off her husband’s crotch. The most surprising moment for me came when a willowy blonde—I think her name was Pam—stood up, turned to face the whole class, and lifted her top. She stood there, bare breasts exposed, for a good five-count before covering up and sitting back down. Her stunned expression told us that she hadn’t planned on doing that; her erect nipples when she did it again a few seconds later told us she was getting quite a charge out of it.

“Sure you want to wait until we get home?” Meg asked again.

“Would you rather do it now?” The other couples’ antics had gone a long way toward easing my inhibitions; compared to Pam, what I’d set up for Meg seemed relatively tame.

“Why not?”

“Okay,” I replied, feigning reluctance. “After what we just saw, though, I’m afraid this may be a bit of an ... anticlimax.”

As I expected, Meg’s body relaxed on cue. I was able to catch her as she pitched forward and hold her more or less upright against me. Her eyes were closed, but I sensed she was still awake.

It didn’t take Meg long to realize what was happening. Her eyes came open for a second, just as they had on Monday. “You bastard,” she murmured, and then programming took over; her eyes closed down with a contented sigh.

“Relax and enjoy the ride,” I told her, easing her down onto the mat. The first moans came shortly after, and that brought Carol over to our side.

“I see you’ve found something to do,” she observed, winking.

“Body memory,” I explained. “We tried a little independent study activity a few days ago.”

Carol looked closely at Meg. Was that a gleam of excitement in her eye? Meg’s legs had spread, and she was moaning freely as her body reacted to the memory of my lips and tongue. “It appears you’ve learned well,” she allowed.

Meg’s physical responses matched what I remembered from Monday, sound for sound. Her moaning grew louder and faster as she became more and more aroused. I watched alternating between fascination and a strange kind of envy -part of me wished that I were the one draped across the floor wallowing in sexual bliss. I had a feeling we were beginning to attract attention, but other than a quick peek in Carol’s direction I didn’t dare check to see who else might be looking. The crescendo continued to build just as I remembered it until Meg went over the edge into an orgasm that, from the looks of her, was every bit as powerful as the original.

When it was finally over and Meg’s labored breathing was the only sound I could hear, I looked around: Carol, Jim, and all of our classmates were staring, spellbound, at Meg’s quivering form. Soon Meg opened her eyes, noticed the crowd, and realized she was the center of attention.

“Oh, shit!” she groaned, dropping back down to the mat and covering her reddening face with her hands.

There was a quick wave of nervous laughter, then Carol and Jim began to applaud. The rest of the group joined in quickly. Meg started to laugh too, and soon her hands came away from her face to reveal a healthy grin. “I’ll get you for this,” she promised me as I helped her back up to a sitting position.

“Me?” I mock protested. “I’m the one who wanted to wait until we got home, remember?”

Meg hugged me tightly. “We can still do it again at home, right?” she whispered hotly into my ear.

“Any time you want.”

Circumstances conspire now and again to frustrate us. So it was that weekend. Meg was on call and ended up working both days because the MRI tech who was supposed to be on duty quit suddenly. I found out Saturday night that some clueless VP at our firm had graciously agreed to let a client push up a deadline by three weeks, which pretty much killed my schedule too.

By Tuesday afternoon I was sufficiently caught up that I could seriously entertain the idea of going home a little early. I was tired and burned out, and I hadn’t seen Meg much since Friday. It was 3:20, so I dialed Meg’s cell phone.

She answered on the first ring. “Hi, honey.”

“Hey. You almost home?”

“Almost. Why?”

“I’m having evil thoughts.”

I could imagine the sly smile coming over her face. “Oh really? Anything you’d like to share?”

“Call me when you get home, okay?”

“Sure thing.”

A long fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. I made sure that our home number was on the display before answering. “Hello there,” I said. “What phone are you using?”

“The bedroom phone. Why?”

“Are you laying down?”

“No, I’m sitting on the edge.” She chuckled softly, then in a sexy voice she added, “Do you want to know what I’m wearing?”

“First things first,” I replied. “Put me on speakerphone, then lie down on the bed.”

I took a quick peek around to see who was within earshot. Greg was out at an appointment; Barbara was on the phone herself and looked pretty absorbed. A clicking noise told me Meg had switched to speakerphone.

“Okay ... now what?” Her voice sounded hollow and distant thanks to the speakerphone.

“Goodnight Gracie.” I listened for some kind of response, but there was none—the trigger must have worked, I reasoned, or Meg would have come back with some kind of remark. “That’s it, darling, relax for me. Slide way, way down into your deepest, sweetest hypnotic trance for me.” Without being able to see her I had no way to gauge her depth, so I repeated variations on that deepening theme for a minute or so to be safe. Then I put my ‘evil thoughts’ into action.

“Meg,” I said in what I was beginning to call my hypnotist’s voice, “when was the last time we made love?”

“Saturday morning,” she answered sleepily.

“That’s right, Saturday morning. Over three days ago. That’s a long time for us, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“A very long time,” I agreed. “So long, in fact, that it’s difficult to imagine going much longer. You’re a healthy young woman with an active libido, Meg. It isn’t natural for you to be deprived of sexual pleasure for so long. In fact, even now you can feel the craving for sex beginning to color your thoughts. Your body wants its pleasure, and it will not be denied. With every passing minute, your sexual desire increases. It will not be satisfied until you have made love with me and we have both had an orgasm. Do you understand, Meg?”

“I understand.”

“Very good. As your desire builds, you may find that you want to do things to please yourself. You may do anything you like in that way as long as you don’t leave the house. The energy, the passion, will continue to build within you right up to the point of orgasm, but you will not have an orgasm until I tell you to. Is that also clear?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. I am going to count to three now. When you hear me reach the count of three, you will turn off the speakerphone, resume sitting on the edge of the bed, and awaken. Your conscious mind will not remember this call at all, but your subconscious will remember and follow all of my instructions. One ... two ... three.”

I heard a faint rustling sound, then a click as the speakerphone was shut off. I imagined Meg sitting up on the bed with a blank expression, then suddenly snapping awake. Sure enough, a few seconds later the phone rang again and our home number showed on the display.

“Hi, Meg,” I answered in my best nonchalant voice.

“Hi again. I’m home ... what’s up?”

“I was thinking about sneaking out of here and taking you out for an early dinner.”

“I like the way you think,” she responded. “In fact, I know a way we can work up a nice, healthy appetite first.”

I could hear the lust in her voice already; this was going to be fun. “I’m sure you do. See you soon, love.”

I almost made it, too. Within 20 paces of the elevators, I turned a corner and ran smack into Marty, my boss.

“There you are!” he said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I need you on a conference call with Henderson and company.”

Henderson was the client who’d screwed up my weekend. My heart sank. “When?”

“Now—Shirley’s got ‘em on hold for me.”

I put on my best I’m-dealing-with-another-crisis-right-now face and checked my watch for effect. “Can we do it tomorrow instead?”

“I tried that already.” I suspected as much—Marty’s a pretty decent guy and hates like hell to ask anyone to jump through a hoop. “They say it’s only a few questions, but they’ve got trades waiting on the answers.”

Big sigh. “Let’s do it, then.”

As often happens in these cases, a few questions led to a few follow-up questions, which led to several other people joining the call. By the time we had everyone convinced that the new drawings really did depict what the client had asked for, an hour had gone by. The second Marty hung up the phone I bolted for the door and didn’t look back. Still, by the time I got home it had been over 90 minutes since I’d talked to Meg.

I opened the door slowly, not sure what to expect. From the living room I heard grunting and moaning, loud and insistent. I locked the door and headed that way.

I was totally unprepared for what I found there. Meg lay buck naked on the couch, her knees drawn up, one hand at her crotch with three fingers buried in her slit. Her other hand was working at a breast, squeezing furiously. I must have made a noise, because her eyes wrenched open and fixed on me. “There you are!” she exclaimed.

“I’m sorry,” I began, but got no farther. Meg bounded up off the couch and body-checked me into the bookcase behind me. She pressed her sweating, heaving body against me, put her hands on either side of my face, and kissed me harder than I’ve ever been kissed before. For a split second I flashed back to an old horror movie and imagined Meg was some kind of demon trying to suck the soul out of me. I decided I deserved at least that.

“You’re just in time,” Meg said intently after breaking off her lip lock. I felt her hands begin clawing at my belt buckle. “Let’s see what you brought home for me.” Before she was done speaking, my pants were hitting the floor and her hand was reaching through the front slit in my briefs. I was about two-thirds erect and growing. “Attaboy,” she said, her hand starting to knead my burgeoning member. “That’s just what I need, lover. Just exactly what I need.” I cupped a hand over one of her breasts, but she pushed the hand aside. “No need for that, I’m way, way ahead of you. But I know just how to help you catch up.”

Dropping to her knees, Meg yanked my briefs down and squatted a little, putting her face at the same level as my cock. One hand reached up behind it and cupped my balls while the other worked to spread my legs apart some. She started kissing the sides of my shaft while her finger traced up and down the back of my scrotum, stroking that highly sensitive line leading backward. I moaned helplessly as my brain turned to mush and my cock felt like it grew another two inches.

“Ah, he likes that,” she remarked between kisses. “Let’s see how he likes this.” Her tongue reached out and slowly, sensuously traveled up and down the underside of my shaft. My legs got weak; I grabbed onto the bookcase for support. Meg chuckled again as her free hand traveled up and around my thigh, then spread out over most of my buttock and squeezed. My body told me I was about 20 seconds away from one hell of an orgasm, less if I didn’t get that tongue off my shaft.

Summoning all of my strength, I grabbed her under the armpits and hauled her back upward, spinning around at the same time. Now it was Meg jammed against the bookcase, and at almost the perfect height. I jacked her up a little more and positioned my cock between her legs. She got the message and reached down between us to guide me into her as I lowered her down. Her legs crossed behind my back and her arms went straight out to hold onto the bookcase. I put both hands on her butt and pulled her to me, working her up and down on my shaft. Meg picked up on my rhythm and started working with me, using her grip on the bookcase to help lift and drop, lift and drop. Her breasts bobbed tantalizingly close to my face, but I couldn’t quite reach them without breaking contact and I wasn’t about to do that.

Meg was babbling incoherently. Her pelvic muscles squeezed down against my iron rod. I felt my entire body tensing: T minus 3 seconds, I guessed. I held out as long as I could, then just as my cock burst I grunted, “Meg, come now.”

My eyes rolled back into my head as I came, feeling and hearing Meg at the same time. My arms and legs were locked while my cocked pumped and fired. At some point Meg started to relax against me, and I somehow managed a controlled fall backwards onto the living room floor before passing out.

When I came to, Meg was unconscious on the floor next to me. Creaking a little, I rolled partway over and kissed her forehead. I went on to kiss her nose, her closed eyes, her cheek, then as I reached her lips they parted and welcomed me. We kissed slowly, lovingly, for who knows how long. Finally we came up for air.

“So,” Meg sighed. “Are you hungry yet?”

By Thursday afternoon Meg was thoroughly keyed up. The pizza delivery guy was right on my heels, and I was amused to see that Meg had already set the table with disposable plates and cups. “Quick, easy cleanup,” she explained.

“A little eager, are we?” I teased.

“You bet I am,” she replied. “Tonight it’s my turn to have fun.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. I thought I’d been pretty careful about making sure Meg enjoyed our encounters. True, I had really left her hanging on Tuesday afternoon, but that had been an accident. I’d confessed to the whole thing over dinner that night; Meg was pretty annoyed at first, but in the end she said that all was forgiven. Was it really?

My face must have given me away. “That didn’t come out right,” she said quickly, dropping her pizza and fixing her eyes on mine. “The things we’ve done so far have been ... intense. It excites me knowing that with two simple words you can put me under a spell and make my body do these incredible things. I love giving up control to you.”

“But ...” I prompted, knowing there had to be one coming soon.

Meg thought a little more before continuing. “But, so far it’s been one-sided. I want to know what it’s like to put you under my spell and watch your body obey my commands.”

“I understand, honey,” I said truthfully. “Last week when you were responding to the ‘anticlimax’ trigger, I was a little bit jealous of how easily you were able to just let yourself go. That’s something I want to experience first hand.”

“You will,” she promised. “I owe you a payback or two,” she added, grinning slyly.

“Be gentle with me,” I pleaded jokingly.

“Eat your dinner,” she replied sternly. “You’re going to need your strength later.”

We ate quickly and cleaned up even more so, no major feat considering all we had to do was put away the leftover pizza and toss everything into the trash can. We were underway soon after, in plenty of time to get to class.

On the way over, I wondered to myself what suggestions Meg might use once she had me under hypnosis. I floated an innocent query, but she wasn’t talking. “You’ll find out in due time,” she teased.

Part of me kept thinking about Tuesday. She’d used the word ‘payback’ at dinner; I wondered if she had a big-time tease in mind, something like what I had accidentally done to her. The idea was actually a little arousing, but then in a flash I had an interesting idea of my own—sort of a preemptive strike.

I looked over at Meg. She was sitting in the passenger seat quietly, looking out the side window. “Goodnight Gracie,” I said.

Meg’s body slumped down in the seat. Her seat belt held her more or less upright, but her arms hung limply from her sides and her head flopped to the side against the headrest. “Meg,” I said quickly but deliberately, “listen carefully. Hypnosis is very sexy to you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” she answered distantly.

“That’s right. In fact, Meg, you will discover tonight that hypnotizing me is a very powerful aphrodisiac for you. Seeing me go into trance is the sexiest, most arousing thing you can ever imagine. Every time you hypnotize me, you will feel a rush of sexual excitement at the power it gives you. That excitement will continue to increase, leading to a natural desire to use your hypnotic power to seduce me and bring pleasure to us both. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. At the count of three you will awaken. Your conscious mind will not remember anything about this conversation, or even that you were in trance at all tonight, but your subconscious will remember and you will react accordingly. One ... two ... three.” I kept my eyes fixed on the road, but in my peripheral vision I saw Meg’s head jerk as she awoke, then settle back into its original position. “You okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” she answered off-handedly. “Just wool-gathering, I guess.”

Inwardly, I grinned.

As usual, all of the students were settled in at least 15 minutes ahead of our scheduled start time. “The great thing about this class,” Carol remarked wryly when she and Jim entered the dojo and saw all of us waiting, “is that we never have a problem with late arrivals.” The ensuing group chuckle was interesting, in that it had a mixture of nervous and eager components to it.

“We don’t need much in the way of preliminaries this week,” Carol began after noting the attendance in her book. “We’ll start out pretty much like last week, except in the opposite roles. Men, go ahead and get nice and comfortable and start to relax. Ladies, you will choose an induction and guide him into a nice, deep state of hypnosis. Once you’ve got the guys nice and deep, we’ll go over how to establish a trigger and reinforce it, just like they did with you last week. Any questions from last week before we start?”

Pam, the lanky blonde who had been flashing us the previous week, put her hand up. “Are these triggers permanent?”

“Good question. The answer, as in so many cases when you’re dealing with the mind, is that it depends on the individual. Post hypnotic suggestions have a lot in common with classical conditioning, in that the learned responses have to be reinforced periodically or they will be forgotten. Exactly how long that takes depends on how strongly the suggestion was reinforced, and how willing the subject is to respond. For example ...” she looked over at me. “Patrick, what was the trigger phrase you used last week to put Meg in trance?”

Without thinking, I answered. “Goodnight, Gracie.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Meg’s body sag and realized my mistake just in time to catch her and ease her down onto the mat.

“Very good,” Carol remarked. “When was the last time you used that trigger with her?”

“About half an hour ago,” I answered sheepishly. “In the car on the way here.”

Carol grinned. “Were there other times between last Thursday and tonight that you used the trigger?”

“A couple.” I felt the blood creeping into my cheeks as I thought about Tuesday afternoon again.

“Okay,” Carol said. “As you can see, if you practice using the trigger it remains strong. Is there anyone here who has not used their trigger at least once since last week?”

Nobody raised a hand. I was amused to note a couple of the women looking at their mates suspiciously.

“Very good,” she affirmed. “Just for argument’s sake, though, suppose one of you hadn’t. The chances are good that with no reinforcement for a week, you might find that just saying the trigger is no longer enough to get the quick response you were getting last week. She may react slowly, perhaps going into a light trance only. You may have to say the trigger several times, or start an induction patter or deepener in order to persuade your partner to let go to you. Leave it unused for a longer time and the response will continue to weaken until the trigger has no affect at all. With a little practice, though, you get the result we saw with Meg. You might want to wake her up now, by the way.”

I grinned and woke Meg while Pam asked a follow-up question. “So if you don’t use it, it wears off after a while?”

“That’s right.”

“So how often do you have to practice to keep that from happening?”

Carol shrugged. “Again, it depends. For most people, a couple of times a week is a good idea for a new trigger. Once it’s been well established, you can probably ease off a little without losing much effectiveness—say, down to once a week, and then maybe twice a month. Everyone is different, circumstances change, so there’s no hard and fast rule. Trial and error will tell you what works for you.

“But don’t let yourselves get hung up on that,” she continued. “Very few of the triggers you use will be things you want to keep long term. Your rapid induction trigger, and perhaps one or two favorite tricks that you both enjoy, would be all that you really want to hold onto. Use your imagination to come up with new things rather than repeating the same old suggestions. Make love without hypnosis as well—variety is still the spice of life.”

With no more questions forthcoming, Carol instructed the women to begin their inductions. Meg leafed through the booklet of inductions with a gleam in her eye while I settled myself down with extra mats under my head and feet.

Meg started out with a standard progressive relaxation induction. Starting at my toes, she told me to relax each body part in turn, working her way up through the legs, stomach, chest, arms, neck, etc. I tried my best to follow her instructions, but something wasn’t right. Beyond the basic stillness and a general feeling of laziness, I wasn’t getting anywhere. Meg tried harder, making her voice deep and smooth and sexy, but it didn’t seem to help.

I could tell she was getting frustrated when I heard Carol come over. “How are we doing here?”

“It’s not working,” Meg complained.

“What are you feeling, Patrick?”

I opened my eyes to answer. “Something isn’t quite right, but I don’t know what. I’m trying to focus, trying to make myself relax, but I only get so far and can’t seem to keep going.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she replied. “Start over for me.”

I shrugged and closed my eyes again, and Meg started reading the induction script again. After a minute or two, Carol stopped her.

“How does that feel, Patrick?”

“About the same. I can tell my body is relaxing, but only to a certain point.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s make a couple of changes. Meg, start with your voice. It sounds like you’re trying very hard to keep it smooth and low. That creates tension, which Patrick can hear. Try to just relax along with him, even let yourself slip into a light trance if you want to; the relaxation will come out in your voice and help put him at ease too.

“As for you, Patrick, I suspect you’re thinking too much. I’m catching some eye movements that look as though you are trying to evaluate how well you are doing. Are you?”

“I guess so,” I admitted. “I’m just trying to help.”

“Don’t help,” she said firmly. “That’s not your job. In fact, let’s give you something else to do.” Carol left us long enough to pick up her organizer and retrieve a small laminated card from a section in the middle. She handed the card to Meg. “Try this one, it’s very good for situations like this.”

Meg took a few minutes to get familiar with the text on the card, then started talking. “Close your eyes now, Patrick, and just allow yourself to be as lazy as you can be. Listen quietly to the sound of my voice, and while you’re listening quietly to the sound of my voice concentrate for a few minutes on hour breathing. Breathe slowly and steadily, just as though you were sound asleep, or pretending to be sound asleep. Imagine, as you breathe slowly and steadily, just how comfortable you might look while you’re relaxing there on the floor, using the power of your mind to do whatever has to happen to make you look even more relaxed, all the while still thinking about your breathing, making quite sure that each breath in lasts the same length of time as the last breath in, and each breath out lasts the same length of time as the last breath out. And while you’re thinking about your breathing, also notice the weight of your head against the pillow, and keep listening to the sound of my voice.”

This was getting complicated. I tried very hard to focus simultaneously on Meg’s voice, on the feel of the mat under my head, and on trying to look as relaxed as possible, and it occurred to me that I might be forgetting something.

“And while you’re listening quietly to the sound of my voice,” Meg continued, “it may be that you’ll realize you’ve forgotten to think about your breathing. But that’s all right, you can just simply start thinking about your breathing again while you’re listening quietly to the sound of my voice and what I’m saying to you here. In psychology, there’s a rule called seven plus or minus two. That means that most people can think of seven things at once, plus or minus two. So you should be able to think of at least five things all at the same time: the sound of my voice, the steadiness of your breathing, the weight of your head against the pillow, and how you might look from the outside as you relax. That’s four things, so you can think of all four of those things while at the same time you remember the sound of the music Carol used the first night when she took us all into hypnosis. Remember that strange sound that flowed through you, captivated you, and carried you off into deeper relaxation. That’s five things now, Patrick. And I wonder if you can think about those five things and then, at the same time, notice the way your feet feel on the extra mat underneath them, and perhaps how your arms feel resting against the floor. That’s seven things now, darling: the sound of my voice, the weight of your head against the pillow, the music Carol played the first night, the way you look while you’re relaxing, and your breathing, and your arms, and your feet on the mat. I wonder if you can now add an eighth thing into all of that. I wonder if your mind is powerful enough to think of seven plus one things, adding in, perhaps, an awareness of the temperature of the room, and then just testing to see whether you can add yet another input to your senses, so that you’re thinking of nine things all at once, thinking about all those eight inputs to your senses and then maybe adding an awareness of the way your eyes feel while you’re thinking about all those other things: the weight of your head, your breathing, the music, how you look from the outside, the temperature, your feet, your arms, the sound of my voice, and how your eyes feel...”

She kept on going, but I was too preoccupied to keep processing the words. My mind was awhirl trying to juggle all those different memories, awarenesses and thoughts—which, I would realize later, was the whole point. I kept trying my best to remain aware of all of those things while Meg spoke. Finally I gave up, dropped every thought except one: how good it felt to relax, just relax and think of nothing whatsoever ...

“... Wake up now, darling.”

My eyes opened and there was Meg, her eyes shining down at me. “Was I —”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Lights out, darling.” My eyes fell closed again and I felt myself drifting away.

“Wake up!”

My eyes jerked open again, but it took me a second or two to before I could comprehend what was happening. “Wow,” I started to say, but then I heard Meg’s voice and felt myself dropping into the darkness again.

Things are kind of a blur at that point. I know I woke up several times. Well, my eyes opened several times, anyway—after the first couple I don’t think I was ever completely awake. I remember seeing Meg’s face hovering over me, and it seemed as though it was coming closer and closer each time I saw her. Her face appeared to be flushed, her nostrils flaring, and on some level I remember thinking that she was enjoying this a lot.

I remember a tugging sensation around my waist, and the feel of warm vinyl against my buttocks. The next time I opened my eyes Meg’s face was more distant, as if she were standing over me instead of sitting close by. I had a tremendous hard-on and a sensation of fingers playing with my balls. Realization started to set in. “Meg, what the h—”

“Lights out, darling...”

The next thing I knew, Meg was on top of me. I was fully erect and buried to the hilt. Her face looked wild as she rode me, rocking on my hips. I opened my mouth to say something, but Meg spoke again and I passed out.

At least a half dozen times I’d find myself waking up to the sight and feel of Meg riding me hard. I’d start to move, to speak, to do anything, but as soon as Meg saw me she’d say “Lights out, darling” and I’d fall back into nothingness.

Finally I woke to the distinct sounds of Meg having a really big orgasm. Her head was thrown back and her chest heaved as she grunted her way through it. I could feel the contractions in her groin and for a few moments I completely forgot that we were in the middle of a class. Meg recovered enough to look down at me, and her eyes captured mine. I thought she was about to put me to sleep again, but instead she gave me a different command: “Come for me.” That sent me over the edge into spasms of my own. Meg stayed with me, riding me as I bucked underneath her, milking me for all I had. When it was over I let myself sink into the mat, spent. I saw Meg give me one of her mischievous little smiles as she said the magic words again and sent me off into oblivion.

I came to this time on my feet, standing in front of a small pedestal sink and mirror. I recognized the room as a small powder room off the main room we were using for class. Meg was behind me, looking over my shoulder with a huge grin on her face. “Can you say ‘somnambulist’?” she teased. “I knew you could!”

All I could do was laugh. “Have we been kicked out of class yet?”

“Not quite. Carol called a discreet break when she saw me pulling your pants down. They’re waiting for an ‘all clear’ signal from us.”

We were both clean and dressed, so I volunteered to do the honors. When I opened the door from the main training room to the lobby area, my classmates gave me a standing ovation. At first I wanted to find a corner and just disappear, but they were all very good-natured about the unscheduled interruption. Carol led them all back into the main room for the rest of class.

While they were getting settled, she took me aside. “Can I persuade you to share with the class what suggestions you and Meg were acting out? I’ve got a pretty good idea what must have happened, but I think several of them are interested in hearing it from you.”

I checked with Meg and she didn’t object—“It’s a little late to get modest now” was her reasoning—so I took the floor and explained what had happened. I told them a short version of the Tuesday afternoon story, emphasizing the suggestions I had made over the phone and the accidental delay. Then I related the idea I’d had in the car, and the suggestions I’d given Meg during the trip.

“It wasn’t supposed to turn out like it did,” I explained, silently begging Meg to forgive my latest hypnotic screw-up. “I had no idea the suggestion would be that strong.” Then, to Meg, I added, “I’m sorry, honey.”

Meg came up and hugged me tightly, which brought another round of applause from the group. Under cover of that sound, she whispered a quick message into my ear: “I’ll get you back, my love. Count on it.” I could see the wheels turning when I looked into her face a moment later.

Carol took over again, running through a review of the different kinds of erotic suggestions we had discussed the previous week. “Any questions?”

“Can I make him get hard whenever I want?” Tamika asked, prompting a buzz of chuckles from the rest of us.

“Probably. Assuming there isn’t a physical problem that would prevent it, the male erection is a simple matter of blood flow, which is certainly something the subconscious mind can control. But you still have to watch your language—don’t just tell him to ‘get hard’, he might just stand there and clench all of his muscles. Tell him that he will feel highly aroused and develop a stiff, firm erection. ”

“How about delaying his orgasm?” My ears burned as I heard Meg asking that question.

“You can do that. If you tell Patrick that he won’t be able to have an orgasm until you give him a trigger, that should be highly effective. There may be some reluctance at first, but most men are very willing to accept a suggestion like that, especially once they realize how much more intense their orgasm becomes when it finally happens.”

Meg nodded thoughtfully. I’m in trouble, I thought to myself.

With no more questions, it was time for the women to put their mates back into trance and try their own erotic suggestions. Meg jumped up first and went over to Jim. I started to join her, but she waved me away. They spoke quietly for a few minutes, then Meg gave him a quick peck on the cheek and came back to me grinning ear to ear. “Ready?” she asked tauntingly.

“Would it make any difference if I said no?”

“Not really. Lights out, darling...”

I came to in more or less the same position, lying on my back on the floor. From the various groans and muted voices around, I could tell that my classmates were trying out their suggestions. I rose up and looked around.

Tamika had her man lying on his back and was rubbing his smooth, bald head with her hands. He was reacting as if she was actually stroking his cock—his hips were gyrating up and down, and I could see the bulge like a tent pole pushing against the front of his sweat pants. Pam’s companion had a hand inside his shorts and was clearly pumping himself while she watched, a satisfied look on her face. The other two guys were also sporting major wood, it seemed.

Carol saw that I was awake and came over. “Are we going to see a demonstration?” she asked Meg.

Meg shook her head. “I think I’ll let him stew a while.”

Carol nodded, grinning, and called the class back to attention. She wished us all well in our relationships, passed out her card in case we wanted to consult with her in the future, and pronounced class dismissed.

Meg grabbed the keys out of my hand as we approached the car. “I’m driving,” she said firmly. I agreed and slid into the passenger seat.

Meg got us on the road quickly. “Have I stewed long enough yet?” I asked, wondering what she had in store for me.

That maddening, naughty grin swept over her face one more time. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “Would you like a virtual blowjob?”

My body reacted instantly to Meg’s cue. I knew it was impossible because I was sitting in the car fully dressed, but I felt the unmistakable sensation of a soft, moist tongue caressing the sides of my cock. In a split second I was hard as a post. The sensation continued and grew. I felt fingers playing with my balls, lips closing over the tip of my swollen cock and a tongue playing across the skin. Suction, strong suction, as my unseen lover took me deep into her throat.

It was Meg at her artful best, without doubt the most intense, arousing thing I’d ever felt. That Meg was not actually sucking me off, but rather sitting in the driver’s seat chuckling as she listened to my moaning grow more and more out of control, actually made the situation more erotic for me. “Oh, God,” I breathed, “This is unbelievable!”

“Glad you like it,” she said smugly. “Let me know when you’ve had enough.”

I held out as long as I thought I could, reveling in the exquisite feelings. Then I felt the telltale pressure in my groin and knew that I was close to coming in my pants. “Better stop now, honey,” I said, “or this will be over before we even get home.”

“There’s no danger of that,” she said, and fell silent for a while.

The trip was taking forever. The sensation in my genitals kept getting stronger, taking me further and further into a sexual frenzy, and I was starting to lose the ability to think clearly. “Come on, Meg,” I pleaded, “You’ve gotta stop this. I’m gonna cum in my pants any second!”

“No you won’t,” she said calmly. “Trust me on that one.”

All I could do was groan loudly as another wave of incredible, almost painful sensations washed over me. “Please!” I begged.

Meg put a real hand on my leg, then slipped it over and gave me a quick stroke across my bulging cock. “Relax, darling,” she said. “You’ll be well taken care of as soon as we get home.

“Incidentally, I’ve got a few stops to make on the way...”

-wg

3/16/00