Boomerang: A Short Story

David and I made a bargain--at least I thought we had an agreement. We’re taking this beginning class in clinical hypnosis. It meets in the evening, from 7:00 to 9:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We happened to sit next to each other on the first night. Well, that wasn’t really accidental. When I walked into the classroom, there were already a dozen people waiting. David caught my eye immediately. I’ve always been attracted to tall, muscular, dark-haired guys. I nodded to him, and he smiled back and said, “Hey, how’s it going?”

I took that as a promising sign. “Doing ok. You?”

“Fine.” He paused for a few seconds to run his eyes over my body as I was sitting down. “Looks like it’ll be an interesting class. I’m looking forward to it. I’m David, David Harris, by the way.”

David had a nice handshake--firm, warm. He held my hand for just a second longer than usual and then ran his middle finger down my palm as he released his grip. His smile was even more welcoming than before. Very relaxing and warm. Sometimes it only takes a moment to get a good feeling about someone you meet. We briefly traded information--our majors, the reasons we were taking the class, etc., but the teacher walked in before we had a chance to talk much.

Most of the first hour was devoted to a summary of the history of hypnosis, what it is and what it isn’t, what it can do and what it can’t, as well as an outline of the course syllabus. During the second hour, the teacher demonstrated a sample induction and then told us to pair off and practice on each other. Everyone was looking around trying to find a suitable partner. All the other men were eyeing the women and wondering which of them would accept their generous offer of themselves. I glanced over at David, and he smiled at me and made this “How about it?” gesture with his hands and eyebrows. I hope my relief wasn’t too apparent.

None of us did very well that night. At the end of the class, the teacher told us not to worry. There was a learning curve to hypnosis. We had to teach ourselves not only how to hypnotize other people but also how to go into a trance ourselves. As we stood up to leave, David asked if I would like to get a soda or a cup of coffee. He knew a good spot on Houghton Street. He said it wouldn’t be busy at that time of night, and we could talk. I liked that. We knew that both of us were gay and that we were attracted to each other. I think we realized that we might end up having sex at some point, but I liked that he didn’t want to rush into it. He wanted to get to know me first.

We hit it off immediately. We just seemed to be able to talk to each other about anything. We didn’t notice the time passing. We were oblivious to everything and totally focused on ourselves. The man who runs the shop finally came over to our table to us to tell us that he was closing and that we had to leave. David walked with me to the subway stop. As we were saying goodbye at the top of the steps at the entrance, David suggested we form a “two-man study group” so that we could practice hypnosis.

That’s how we got started. We arranged to meet every other day or so and take turns hypnotizing each other. I don’t remember who suggested it, but we decided that we would concentrate on learning how to trance deeply and quickly. As the teacher told us, there is a learning curve. Our first attempts were bumbling and often left us laughing rather than entranced. But we kept trying.

My problem with trancing was that I didn’t know what a trance is. The standard inductions in the book had lines like “You are going deeper and deeper into trance.” But since, as far as I knew, I had never been in a trance, I didn’t know what to expect, let alone be able to judge if I were going deeper and deeper. The voice in my head kept asking “Is this a trance? Is this what it feels like? Am I going deeper?”

David and I raised the problem in class, and the teacher suggested an alternative approach. We banished the words “trance,” “focus,” “deeper,” “sleep,” from the induction. Instead the one of us who was the hypnotist rambled on about a topic while the other person lay there with his eyes closed and listened. And it worked. The first time David tried this method on me, I just drifted off. When he woke me up, I did the traditional double-take on noticing the time. An hour had passed, and I hadn’t even realized it. The technique worked equally well on David.

Once we had mastered trancing, we installed triggers in each other to help us achieve a deep trance quickly. At first we just practiced our class assignments--there were experiments in pain management, sensory inhibition and stimulation, sharpening of memory. At first we followed the suggestions in our workbook. But then David surprised me by exhibiting a playful side. I knew he had a sense of humor and could be very sensual, but he had always been so serious about the class. He intended hypnosis to be part of his clinical work. So I wasn’t expecting what happened.

We were practicing the use of hypnosis to increase sensory awareness--the assignment was to develop our ability to sense temperature differences. Nothing exciting--the hypnotist was to measure slightly different amounts of cold and hot water into paper cups. The subject stuck a finger into each and ranked them from hottest to coldest. David went first and arranged the cups in the correct order.

We traded places, and he put me under. When he woke me up, the first thing that I noticed was that I wasn’t wearing any clothes. The second thing was that I couldn’t move. I was lying on my bed totally immobilized. I couldn’t speak or even open my eyes. I could hear David moving about the room and realized that he was getting undressed. He lay down on the bed next to me. He wasn’t in contact with me, but his body radiated heat. It was very pleasant--just this heat that penetrated my body and made me feel warm and comfortable.

Then he began stroking the ridge of my nose with one of his fingers. Just that. Nothing more. Just a finger lightly tracing the ridge of my nose from top to bottom. It was like nothing I had ever felt before. My nose was so sensitive to his touch. The more he stroked my nose, the more aroused I became. My nose was suddenly the most erogenous zone on my body. And I was responding. I may have not been able to move, but my cock could. It grew hard and rigid, so rigid that it rose up off my stomach. It must have been pointed like a missile launcher toward my chest. Each time David stroked my nose, it throbbed.

I was trapped inside my body. Except for my cock, it was like I had turned to stone (well, my cock had turned to stone as well, but it could move). I was getting so aroused that I wanted to moan, to scream--anything to help release this tension building up inside me. But I couldn’t. I just kept feeling better and better. I soon forgot about the fact that I couldn’t move. All I could think about was the pleasure that was streaming through my body as David stroked me. I could feel the cum accumulating inside my cock, making it grow harder and harder, more and more rigid.

And then David leaned over me and licked my nose. It was incredible. The moment his tongue touched my nose, I exploded. Thick jets of cum shot out of my cock and covered my chest and even splattered over my face. The hot cum falling on my skin released me. I could move again. I was screaming with pleasure, my head buried in David’s chest, my arms tight around him. I’d never had an orgasm that intense. We were both covered with my cum. David had a rope of it across his face. We lay there laughing.

Let’s be honest. Everybody hopes that hypnosis will have erotic potential. I know that improving my sex life was at the back of my mind when I signed up for the course. David and I achieved it. After that initial success, we couldn’t stop ourselves. We had to make every contact between us, even the slightest one, be the most wonderful act we had experienced to date. We tried to outdo each other in thinking up pleasures for us. While walking to class, I might get a text from David saying “U will njoy 2nite. I have plans.” My cock would jump in excitement whenever I got one of those messages. I couldn’t help myself. No matter how many people were around, I would get a hard-on just thinking about these sessions with David. We spent every spare moment in bed, distilling our pleasures and honing our orgasms. It was magic. More often than not, David was the hypnotist, but I wasn’t complaining.

I should have known that it was too good to last. One day between classes, I went into a stall in a men’s room. I dropped my pants and sat down. Suddenly I became horny, really horny--must-do-something-about-this-right-now horny. My hand closed around my cock and I began pumping. Jesus, it felt so good. All I could think about was stroking myself. I didn’t realize it but I began to moan and groan--real loud. By the time I came, I was shouting about how good it was. Cum splattered all over my clothes and the floor and walls of the cubical. I’m sitting there exhausted, and the other people in the bathroom are whooping and clapping and yelling encouragement, and I realize that now I’ve got to clean myself and the stall up and then step out to what promises to be a raucous welcoming committee. My face was burning. I still hear about that episode. Just when I think everyone’s forgotten, someone will bring it up again.

A few minutes later my phone rings. It’s a message from David: “U njoy urself? Windows open, everyone heard.” I realized then that he had programmed me to do this. We had an argument that night. He kept saying it had been a prank--no harm had been done. I tried to get him to promise not to do anything like that again, but he just laughed at me and brushed me off.

That was the start. David began to like the power that hypnosis gave him. It was almost an addiction with him. And it wasn’t just me he was manipulating. After our argument, he backed away from experimenting on me for a few weeks, but he found other subjects willing to undergo his versions of erotic hypnosis. He would begin slowly, seducing them with better orgasms. Once he had ensnared them, he moved on to other, more humiliating actions. He learned one thing from his experiments with me. He began indoctrinating his subjects to want the things he was making them do.

He liked to boast to me of his conquests. He got excited just telling me about what he had done and what he planned to do next. I think he thought I would grow interested too and succumb to the temptations he was placing before me. Sometimes he referred to subjects as his “hypno-slaves” and “hypno-zombies.”

Once he found out how much control he could exercise, he started videotaping the sessions. The first film--at least the first one he showed me--featured two of his “most advanced” subjects. One of the guys was standing with his arms over his head, wrists together, as if they were bound and the rope attached to a beam overhead. The stance of his body made it look as if the overhead rope were holding him up by the wrists. But there wasn’t a rope. It was all in his mind. He had a hard-on. He was one of those guys whose cock sticks straight out when he is standing. The camera circled him, recording every square inch of his body. Then it slowly moved upward to his face. His eyes were closed, and his face was slack. I recognized him as someone I had seen on campus. I didn’t know his name, but others would.

The camera comes to rest off to the guy’s left side. You can see all of his body. On the wall behind him is a large clock. It is 2:07. A second guy walks into the frame, kneels down, and begins sucking on the first guy’s cock. This guy I know. I won’t say his name. He too is in a trance. He turns out to be a great cocksucker. He starts by licking the tip and the shaft. He can stick his tongue way out, and the camera follows every movement. Then he takes the head between his lips and plays with it. The first guy is moaning and begging the second guy to make him cum, but the second guy just keeps teasing his cock. The wall clock appears in many of the shots. The second guy plays with the first guy’s cock for thirty minutes before he swallows all of the shaft for the first time. The first guy is shouting obscenities now and pleading to be allowed to cum. All the muscles in his body are taut and quivering--he’s pulling against that imaginary rope and his body is rocking back and forth. His ass cheeks are convulsing. He’s straining to have an orgasm but can’t. His hands still appear to be bound over his head.

At 3:00, the clock buzzes. The first guy cums--an enormous load--and shoots all over the second guy’s face. The second guy stands up so that his face is next to the first guy’s mouth, and the first guy licks the cum off his face and body. Both of them are moaning and groaning.

I’m no angel. The film aroused me. When it ended, I was ready to play the role of the first guy. Maybe that’s what David wanted. I wondered later if there hadn’t been subliminal triggers in the film that made me so willing to duplicate the actions of the first guy. The second guy was even better in person than he was on film. I practically had a second orgasm when I licked my cum off his face. It was still so hot. I couldn’t stop until I had cleaned all my cum off him.

There were other films. One showed a line of five guys, all wearing white tees, jeans, and white socks, all standing relaxed, with their arms at their sides. All of them were staring blankly ahead. Again the camera showed their faces. No one who knew them would fail to recognize them. The camera pulls back so that all five guys appear in the picture. A bright light shines on the face of the guy on the left end of the line. Nothing happens for a second or two. Then a dark spot appears in the area of the guy’s groin. It grows larger and larger and spreads down his right leg. One by one, the light is shone in each guy’s face and each wets himself. The expressions on their faces never change. It’s like they’re oblivious to what’s happening. David must have had each of them drink a couple gallons of water beforehand. One of them is pissing so hard that a jet of liquid gushes through his jeans, and it goes on and on for a long minute.

When the film finished, David shone a flashlight in my eyes. I suddenly felt free of all restraints. The taboos no longer mattered. The only important thing was that I respond the way that David wanted. The warm flood of piss down my leg was a badge of freedom.

David was laughing. He started talking about setting up a website to market the videos he was making. He had all sorts of ideas for films he could make. He was certain that he could make a lot of money. And then he says, “Of course, that’s in addition to what these guys are paying me to hypnotize them.”

That’s how I found out he was charging these guys. “Professionals should get paid the going rate” was how he put it. When I protested, he defended himself by saying that he wasn’t charging me--“even though I could make you pay.”

He was becoming a monster. I had to stop him before I found videos of me all over the Internet. Our class had just finished several units on behavioral modification, and the teacher had emphasized that we had to provide both negative and positive reinforcements. So I knew he needed to be stopped in a way that would reinforce good, and discourage bad, behaviors.

My opportunity came a few days later. We were still practicing hypnosis on each other for our course assignments. I had David lie down on his bed and close his eyes. I said the series of triggers that led into a deep trance. This time I took him even further. “Down and down. Your conscious mind is a small circle of light on the back of your eyelids. Just a small circle of white light glowing on the back of your eyelids. As you watch it, the light grows dimmer and dimmer. Fading away. Dimmer and dimmer. It’s just a tiny dot of light now. The dot grows smaller and smaller, harder and harder to see. So dim. Almost invisible now. Your conscious mind is fading away into nothingness.”

I kept repeating those themes until all the tests showed that he was deeply entranced. “Your conscious mind is totally asleep. It feels so good, so warm, so comfortable. You feel so good, so warm, so comfortable. Just drifting. Peaceful, relaxed, just floating. Totally blank.” Spiraling downward until he thought nothing but the thoughts I gave him, his own mind gone and replaced by my words.

I had tranced David so often that he trusted me completely. I used that trust to change him, just as he had abused the trust others had had in him to betray them and misuse them. “From now on, whenever you start to hypnotize someone, you yourself will fall into a deep trance. You will hear a voice—a warm, comfortable, strong voice. You love to listen to that voice. It makes you feel so good and so warm and so comfortable to listen to that voice. You love to follow that voice and do what it tells you to do. It makes you feel so warm and so comfortable and so good to follow that strong voice and do what it tells you to do.”

Over and over I instilled obedience to the voice into David. Whenever he heard the voice, he would become submissive and obedient. It made him feel so good to do what the voice told him to do.

“The voice will speak through you to the person you have hypnotized and tell him to sleep deeply and pay no further attention to what you are saying until you awaken him. The voice will tell him that when he awakens he will feel refreshed and full of energy. Then the voice will continue speaking to you, only to you. You had plans for your subject. The voice will speak to you of those plans. The voice will tell you to do what you intended to tell your subject to do. And you will do it. It feels so good to obey the voice and do what he tells you to do.”

I repeated those commands over and over. Then I wiped all conscious memory of those commands from David’s mind and brought him out of the deep trance into a state where he could be aware of the content of the trance. I returned to the assignment and took him through that before awakening him.

So it’s up to David now. He’ll do whatever he intended to hypnotize his subjects to do. If he wants to make his subject do something humiliating, he’ll end up being humiliated. If he wants to give his subject pleasure, he’ll end up feeling pleasure. It’s up to him. I think he’ll soon learn that it’s better to opt for the pleasure.

Near the beginning of the first meeting of our hypnosis class, the instructor introduced the old rule “All hypnosis is self-hypnosis.” David will soon be able to write the book on that subject.