Full text of the trance, with the time each section begins. Stage directions and pauses are left out.
Before we start
Before this starts, two practical things. Don’t listen to this while driving, or anywhere you need to stay alert. Find a stretch of time when nobody needs you. A bed is ideal. That’s not a hint. Well. It’s a small hint.
Second thing. If at any point you need to be fully awake, you can be, right away. Open your eyes, press your feet down, say your name out loud. And you’re here, clear, and free of everything said in this recording.
Now. The title promised you sex till dawn. And you pressed play anyway, which tells me something about you, and probably something about the title. So let me be honest about the deal. There’s no partner in this. No story about strangers. Nobody is going to undress anybody.
What you get instead is stranger, and, I think, closer to the real thing. Because the real thing was never only about two people. It was always about surfaces. Heat moving from one thing into another. A sheet that remembers where you were. A room that holds still around you. There’s a way of looking at the world that philosophers call object-oriented. It means the pillow, the dark, the glass of water on the nightstand, and you, all count. Equally. Nobody gets to be the only one in the room who matters.
The only rule
You already know how hypnosis works. Or you think you do, and both are useful. So here is the only rule for tonight. Everything I say is also an object. A sentence has a surface, the words you hear, and an inside you never quite get to.
You don’t have to believe any of it. You don’t even have to like it. Some sentences you’ll push away. Fine. Some will slip past and do something before you’ve decided whether to let them. That’s not a trick. That’s just what sentences do in the dark.
You’re lying down. You’re hearing a voice. Your breath goes in and out without asking you. Your body is a little heavier on one side than the other. And somewhere between hearing that and agreeing with it … you’ve already started.
A few questions
So, a few questions. You don’t need to answer them out loud. Just let them go looking. Where does your body press hardest into the bed right now? The shoulder blades … the back of the head … the heels?
And where does it barely touch at all? The small of the back, maybe … the little gap under the knees … Which hand is warmer?
And if you had to say which one is doing the touching … your hand on the sheet, or the sheet under your hand … which would it be? There’s no right answer to that. I find the question keeps working anyway.
Where in the room is the quietest object? The wardrobe … a book … the dark above the door … Something in this room has been perfectly still for hours, and nobody had to tell it to.
The turn at the top
And your breath … that’s an object too. It has a shape. It arrives, it turns, it leaves. Pay attention to the place where the in-breath tips over into the out-breath. That small turn at the top. Most people have never once caught it, and it happens about twenty thousand times a day.
Find it again … the turn at the top …
Your conscious mind can keep watching this. Keep commenting, keep checking whether anything is happening. It’s good at that. Let it. Meanwhile another part of you does the actual work, and you don’t need to know which part, or when it began. Maybe it began during the questions. Maybe with the first sentence. Maybe it begins at the end of this one …
And each time the breath turns at the top, it can go a little further down on the other side.
Watching the suggestions
Here’s something a hypnotist isn’t supposed to say. Right now I’m suggesting things to you. You know that. And knowing it doesn’t stop anything. It just gives your mind something to hold while the rest of you gets on with it.
So you could watch the suggestions. You could catch each one as it goes past … this one … and this one … and the catching is a kind of attention, and attention is what trance is made of, so even watching is a way of going in … and whether you go in because of the words or in spite of them, or because you’ve stopped keeping track of which is which … is a question you can put down on the nightstand, next to the glass …
Put it down there.
Dusk
Now picture the light in your room going down. Not switched off. Leaving. The way light leaves on a long summer evening. First it lets go of the far wall … then the edges of the furniture go soft … then the colours drain out of things, one by one. The red of a book spine goes first. Then the blue.
Each object keeps its shape a little longer than its colour … and keeps its weight a little longer than its shape … until all that’s left in the room is weight and temperature. Things that are heavy. Things that are warm.
And your body is one of them. Heavy where it’s heavy. Warm where it’s warm. Sinking about as far as a body sinks into a good mattress … which is further than you’d guess, and slower … and then a little further, because nothing is asking it to stop.
Check for yourself
Check for yourself, briefly. How is your breathing now, compared to when this started?
Maybe slower. Maybe deeper. Maybe just quieter, or different in a way that’s hard to name. Or maybe the breath is exactly the same, and something else has changed instead … the weight of the arms … the sound of the room … the distance to this voice.
Whatever you found, you found it. Nobody had to tell you.
The oldest lover
Sex till dawn. You were maybe expecting candles. Somebody’s mouth near your ear. A story with a lot of breathing in it. That’s sweet. That’s the version everybody already has.
Here’s a less popular fact. The most faithful lover you’ve ever had is lying under you right now. It has held every version of you. Feverish you. Sleepless you. You on the good nights, and you on the other ones. It has learned the exact weight of your hips and the angle of your shoulder, and it has never once asked you for anything.
From where these philosophers stand, the bed is every bit as real as you are. Not furniture. Not a backdrop. A thing with its own inside, its own slow way of being touched. And tonight, for once, the attention goes both ways.
The sheet’s side
So let your attention move over to the other side of the surface. Not your skin feeling the sheet. The sheet feeling your skin.
What would that be like, for something made of cotton? A pressure arriving. Warmth spreading into the weave, thread by thread … the faint damp of breath near the pillow … the long, patient weight of a body that has decided to stay.
You won’t get it exactly right. Nobody can get inside a sheet. That’s the point. But try the angle anyway, and something in the skin answers. Small. Attention arriving from below.
The backs of the legs … the shoulder blades … the heels … all the places being touched by something that isn’t you, and is in no hurry at all. It might show up as warmth. Or a faint tingling. Or nothing more than knowing exactly where you end. All of that counts.
Looking is touching
Somewhere in this room there’s a corner nobody has really looked at in years. Up near the ceiling, maybe. Behind the door. Find it now, without opening your eyes. Just know where it is.
And give it your attention. All of it. Slowly, the way you’d run a hand along a banister in the dark. Attention is a kind of touch. Anyone who has ever been looked at properly knows that. The skin finds out before you do.
So the corner gets touched, for the first time in years … and you get to feel what it’s like to touch something that will never touch back. Never thank you. Never perform. And to keep going anyway, for the pleasure of it. Nothing to prove to a corner.
And maybe, while you’re there, your own skin starts to feel looked at too. Not by anyone. By the room. By the dark itself, which has been watching the whole time with no opinion at all.
What stays back
And here’s the part the philosophers get almost tender about. You never actually touch anything. Not the sheet. Not a lover. Not your own hand. You touch a surface, the side of a thing that happens to be turned toward you. And the thing itself … stays back. A little further in. Always.
You’d think that would be sad. It isn’t. That gap is where wanting comes from. If you could ever reach all of a thing, you’d stop reaching.
So let your fingertips rest on the skin of your own wrist … or just imagine them there, that works too … Warm on warm. The pulse, maybe, if it’s there to be found.
And even here, on your own body, there’s an inside you don’t get to. The wrist keeps something back from the fingers. The fingers keep something back from the wrist. And between them, quietly … a small heat that belongs to neither.
Hours
Let the evening move on. Not by numbers. By hours. Eleven … the street outside gets quieter … one car, then a long gap … Twelve … the radiator ticks as it cools … the house settles on its beams …
One … the darkest part of the room has grown until it fills the room … Two … somewhere a fridge hums in an empty kitchen … Three … and this is the hour when time stops pretending to be a straight line.
A minute can be very long here. An hour can fold down to the size of a breath. You don’t need to know how much of the night has passed. Your body keeps its own clock, and it can be generous with it.
The night is one thing
And now, the night itself. Think how big it is. It’s on your face, and on the roof, and on the field behind the town, and on the sea, all at once … one enormous thing, laid across half the planet.
You can’t see the whole of it. Nobody can. You’re inside it the way a fish is inside a current.
And it touches everything the same way. The glass on the nightstand. The window. The cold tiles in the bathroom. Your eyelids. Equally. No favourites. There’s something almost shameless about that. Something that presses close to every surface in the world at once, and asks nothing of any of them.
Let it press close. Along the neck … the inside of the arms … the softer places where the skin is thinner and the dark is warmer … And wherever it’s warmest, the attention can gather … and stay there a while …
The weather between
Two things never meet directly. That’s another idea from the same philosophers. They only meet inside a third thing … some small shared space where both of them leave a trace. Feel for that space now.
Between your palm and whatever your palm is resting on, there’s a layer that is neither hand nor bed. A thin climate. Warmer than either. Between your skin and the air … between your lips and your own breath … the same thin climate.
That’s where everything you’ve ever called intimacy actually happened. Not in you. Not in them. In the weather between.
And weather can build. Slowly. The way a summer night gets heavier toward midnight without anyone deciding it. A little heavier … a little warmer … a pulse that maybe quickens, or just becomes easier to hear … or the warmth spreads out, slow and wide, and nothing needs to quicken at all.
Wanting is an object too
And now the wanting itself. Whatever is there … a warmth, a restlessness, a slow pull somewhere, or only the memory of one … treat it as an object too. A thing in the room with its own size, its own temperature, its own weight.
Where is it? How big? A coin. A stone that’s been lying in the sun. Something larger than that.
Most people treat wanting like a bill. Pay it fast, get it off the table. They call that sex. Tonight is the other thing. You don’t have to spend it, or fix it, or get to the end of it.
Hold it the way you’d hold a warm stone in a closed hand. Turning it a little. Finding a new side. And behind every side you find, there’s another one … turned away, and inviting you anyway. Till dawn is a long time. Plenty of time to want something without needing it to stop.
This voice
I should tell you something about this voice. It’s an object too. It isn’t touching you. It can’t. It’s a pattern of air pushing against a small drum in your ear, and everything else … the warmth, the closeness, the sense of someone near the pillow … you made that.
Feel what you just did with that. For some people the spell breaks for a second … and then comes back thicker, because now they know they’re the ones building it.
That’s the part nobody in this trade likes to say out loud. You were never being seduced by the words. You were being seduced by your own ability to do this. And that ability doesn’t need me. It doesn’t need anyone. It needs a surface, and a little dark, and the willingness to let a thing stay back … and keep wanting it anyway.
No words
So for a while … no words. Just the weight. The warmth. The weather between things.
And whatever wants to happen in that quiet … happens at its own speed.
The grey hour
And somewhere, a long way off, the night starts to thin. Not light yet. Just a greyness at the edge of the window, the way paper looks before anything is written on it.
Objects come back one at a time. The shape of the chair. The door frame. The glass on the nightstand, catching the first grey. And they come back changed, a little … as if they’d been somewhere too.
Now, while this is still here … all of it … the weight, the warmth, the weather … lay one palm flat on the sheet beside you. Flat and slow. And breathe out once, all the way.
That’s yours now. Palm flat on your own sheet, one long breath out, in your own bed, when the window starts to go grey … and this comes back. Some of it, or all of it. For the next thirty days. After that it fades on its own, unless you decide to keep it. And if you decide sooner that you don’t want it, thinking that once, clearly, is enough. It belongs to you. Not the other way round.
Try it once
Try it once. Lift the palm a little … lay it flat again … and breathe out.
Maybe it comes straight back. Maybe it takes two or three nights before it really holds. Both are normal. Both work. And it only answers to your bed, your hand, and that grey hour. Nowhere else.
Coat back on
And now the daytime version of you comes back into the room. Say your name, inside. Your real name, the one on your post. Your age. Just the number. The town you’re in. The street. Today’s day of the week.
Feel how much you weigh. The full, ordinary weight of a person on a mattress. And your feet. Find your feet. Press the heels down, so they know where the bed ends.
The sheet is a sheet. The glass is a glass. The night was the night. Everything that happened here belongs to this hour. You can look at it the way you’d look into a lit room from the street … and leave it there.
A small respect for things
And maybe some time in the next few days, in an ordinary moment, you’ll pick up a cup and feel the warmth come through the porcelain into your fingers … and for a second you’ll know the cup is touching you back.
Or you’ll sit on a bench that has been in the sun all afternoon, and feel how long it has waited. Nothing more than that. A small, private respect for things.
And at night, in your own bed, when you want it … you know where to put your hand.
One to five
In a moment I’ll count from one to five. With each number you come back a little more, and at five your eyes open and you’re fully here.
One … the weight of the body, all of it, yours … Two … the room around you, the air on your face, cooler now … Three … fingers moving, toes moving, the sheet just a sheet, ordinary and friendly … Four … everything from this hour stays in this hour, except what you choose to take … a fuller breath in … Five … eyes open. Awake, clear, here.
Welcome back. And if it’s still dark outside your window … well. You know what a bed is for.