The Tide Comes In

"Imagine you're lying at the beach. You can feel the warm sand beneath you. You can smell the salt in the air. And you can hear the sound of waves coming in."

Sam struggled to contain the excitement in his voice. He'd been so happy when Emily had agreed to let him hypnotize her, and now she was responding even better than he'd expected to his induction. Almost as soon as they'd started, her eyes had slipped shut and she had begun the relax back into the couch. Now, just from the way she was lying there, he could tell that the beach was more real to her than the room around them. Still, he managed to keep his voice steady as he continued the induction.

"It's been a long day; you must be tired. Your arms and legs feel so heavy now, so heavy that you can't imagine moving them at all. But, as a wave comes in, you can feel the water just reaching your feet and, for a brief moment, that feeling of heaviness leaves them. Your feet feel completely weightless, and you just know that you'd float in this ocean."

It had certainly been a long, exhausting day - for both of them. Emily had looked like she was ready to collapse when she'd finally come home from work, and Sam hadn't felt much better himself. And yet, all that seemed so far away now. When they'd come into this room and sat down, her on the couch and him in the chair, he'd found it was easy to forget everything else and just focus on his induction. Now, seeing how well she was responding, thoughts of his job couldn't be further from his mind.

Maybe that was why she'd agreed to let him hypnotize her. The thought of just letting all that stress go and not thinking about anything for a while could certainly be tempting.

"The water comes up a little higher with each wave, now coming up past your feet to your ankles. As it does, you start to breathe in time with the waves. With every exhalation, the feeling of weightlessness comes a little higher, and your body relaxes deeper."

Even as he was saying it, he could hear the change in her breathing. It became slower, deeper, and each exhalation had a slight attack, just like a wave breaking. Normally, he might avoid using waves as a focus for an induction. For some people, the idea of waves breaking was a bit too violent to be relaxing. But, just from the sound of Emily's breathing, he could tell it was working as intended, that each time a wave broke, it only caused her to drop deeper into relaxation. And, from the ever-so-slight shift in her legs, he could tell the exact point where the water was reaching as she was immersed, literally, in the vision.

It was funny, he thought. It working so well that, when he listened to her breathing, he could almost hear the waves himself.

"All your tensions, all your worries, all your thoughts, they're just shapes drawn in the sand around you. And, with each wave that comes in, those lines slowly get more and more blurred, less and less distinct, until you can hardly tell they were there in the first place. As each wave comes a little higher than the last, now reaching your knees, a little more of those lines starts to get washed away. And, if any of those thoughts ever come back, just imagine another wave coming in and washing over it, leaving the sand completely smooth when it recedes, as though the shape was never there."

Sam could tell from the dreamy expression slowly spreading on Emily's face that it was working perfectly. He smiled; the best thing about using waves this way was that, while they could wipe things away, they could also uncover other things. He could tell her to imagine all her memories of their session as a shiny, smooth pebble, leaving it safely buried in the sand when they were finished, until their next session when the tide came back in and uncovered it again.

But now wasn't the time to do that; not yet. They hadn't discussed using amnesia suggestions, and he suspected that Emily would want to remember their first session. Maybe next time. For now, he would just focus on bringing her even deeper.

"The waves are coming up to your hips now. You can feel the water flowing under you, feel as it pulls sand out from under your body as it recedes. And you realize that your awareness of yourself, like the indentation made by your body in the sand, is just another one of those shapes in the sand, slowly being washed away by the waves. You know it's only a matter of time before a wave comes up high enough to wash it away completely, pulling you out to sea with it and leaving the sand where you were completely smooth. When it does, you know you'll float on the surface of the ocean, completely weightless, just letting the tides take you where they will."

By this point, Sam knew he didn't have to say anything else; Emily's breathing and her imagination would continue taking her deeper and deeper into trance all on their own. And so, he stopped talking and just waited, watching the rise and fall of her chest, listening to her breathing, and picturing the waves washing over her in his mind's eye. It took a while for him to notice that his breathing had fallen into the same rhythm as hers. It took even longer for him to realize that, even though Emily had hardly said a word since he'd started his induction, he could still hear her voice in his head.

"Feel the waves reach your chest now. With each wave, there's less and less holding you down on the sand as more and more of your body just floats on the water."

It was strange, he thought. Even though this was his first time hypnotizing Emily, it felt as though they had done this many times before. This room, the couch and the chair, even the sound of the waves (of her breathing, he corrected himself), they all seemed so familiar. But it also felt different, somehow, as though he were in the wrong place. He could almost picture Emily in the chair, looking over at him sitting slumped on the couch, as she said:

"Picture the wave that will take you away. It's currently far out at sea, but even from this distance, you can tell it's taller than the waves around it. You can see it slowly getting closer and closer to the shore as the waves reach up to your shoulders now."

And yet, every time he felt like he was coming close to figuring out what was missing, felt like he could just make out the light glinting off of a smooth, shiny pebble in the sand, he'd see another wave come in as both he and Emily exhaled, and the thought would slip away as the pebble was buried again.

"The waves are coming up to your head now. There's just one point, right at the top of your head, that hasn't been touched by the water yet. That's the one part of you that the feeling of weightlessness hasn't reached, the one part still holding you to the shore."

Even though he was the one saying the words, it was Emily's voice he heard in his mind. He knew that wasn't right, and yet it all felt so natural to him. Why, though? He tried to think of what was going on, tried to think of why it was so hard for him to think, but...

"...now that wave you've been picturing is reaching the shore. Feel it wash over you...now."

They both exhaled in unison, and then Sam stopped thinking completely.

They both sat there a while, floating in the warm blue waters of the sea that existed only in their minds. Then, after several minutes, Sam's arm lifted up, slowly, as if pulled by a string, bringing his hand next to his ear, his thumb pressing against his finger. His fingers snapped, and they both blinked awake at the sound, then stared at each other for a few moments, as memories and understanding slowly returned to them. Then they both burst out laughing.

"I guess you were right about the safeguard," Sam said when they finally stopped.

"Well, better safe than sorry, right?" Emily had almost felt guilty for insisting on it at the time. Sam had seemed so excited when he'd asked if he could be the one to hypnotize her this time, rather than the other way around; she hadn't wanted to dampen his enthusiasm.

Still, it was a good thing she'd implanted him with the suggestion to snap himself out of trance in case something like this happened. If not, they both might have been there for a while; she knew from experience just how deeply Sam could drop into trance, and just how long he could stay without something to bring him back. And even though she'd been reluctant to do anything that might affect Sam's confidence in himself, well, it wasn't like he had to remember that the safeguard was there when he was doing the induction.

"Anyway, do you think the amnesia helped, at least?" she asked.

"Well, I think it did help that I couldn't remember what our usual roles were," he said after some thought. "But it did also mean that my conscious mind wasn't prepared for when my subconscious decided to drop along with you."

"I'm more impressed that you and your subconscious managed to remember the wave induction at all. I made sure to bury that pebble deep last time. Anyway, it'd probably be best to avoid using any inductions I've used on you in the past. Speaking of which..." She smiled at him. "What do you say? Do you want to try again? We can do it with or without amnesia this time. Or maybe..." She already knew what his answer would be.

"Well...if my subconscious is so insistent on going into trance...I guess it can't hurt to indulge it a little."

She fixed him with her gaze and said softly "Sam, the tide is coming back in now."

Then she watched as his breathing slowly settled into the rhythm of waves.