The Hypnosis Videos That Promise Sweet Dreams and Darker Fantasies

This article originally appeared on Motherboard

I have never seen the end of a hypnosis video on YouTube.

It's probably best that I confess this now. They work very well on me: I'm suggestible. I fell asleep several times during the writing of this article.

My interest in hypnosis videos developed over one long insomniac summer in London. The zopiclone I'd been prescribed wasn't working: it just led me to stay awake talking nonsense on Facebook, or eating through the contents of my fridge. I'd lie awake for hours listening to sirens and taxis and drunk people outside, wondering how I'd drag myself to work on time the next morning.

In the end the only thing that worked was Jody Whiteley, the prolific online hypnotist whose 329 videos, many of them two to three hours long, have attracted 78,112 subscribers and over 18 million combined YouTube views at the time of writing.

Mostly affirmations spoken in a calm, robotic voice, Whiteley's videos begin with the instruction to make sure you're somewhere quiet and comfortable (and preferably not operating heavy machinery). She informs you that you can break the trance, if necessary, with a sharp intake of breath. Then she tells you to listen to "the sound of my voice," over and over, and you progress to deep breathing, limbs becoming drowsy one by one, eyelids getting heavy, then the countdown to a hypnotic state… It's right about this point I fall asleep.

Looking back over those videos now, I have to cut them short and buoy myself up with coffee, such is the effect of Whiteley's monotone. It's a voice unlike anything I've found on YouTube, an attention economy where increasingly bombastic characters compete. Whiteley works against the trend by actively trying to make her listener drift off to sleep. She'll post lucid dream narratives, visualizations, and sometimes wordless videos with nature sounds or music for concentration, distinguishable by their signature homemade New Age graphics. The comments feature the words "thank you" and "helping" over and over.

Whiteley is among the most popular hypnotists on YouTube, along with the UltraHypnosis channel, which employs a selection of male and female voices. But while Whiteley's most popular videos follow a template of sleep induction and self-help, UltraHypnosis embraces a more diverse range of uses and experimentation. Videos include "Vampire Transformation," "Become a Baby," and their most popular option, "Can't Stop Laughing."

Whereas Whiteley's videos are almost maternal, and devoid of sexual content, UltraHypnosis seems to be more like part of a subculture, one placed between ASMR and the "digital drugs" currently worrying authorities in Saudi Arabia.

Delve further into the online hypnosis community and you will find videos with outlandish titles promising to make you feel high, regress into a past life, cure addictions, forget your own name, or even change the color of your eyes. Over and over, videos claim to be so powerful that they were "banned," though from where it's never clear.

I scan through the most lurid offerings: one claims to induce "minor hallucinations," but turns out to be a tinny audio track paired with optical illusions that make the room pulsate for a minute after you look away. This video does not convince me that I'm drunk. And this one fails utterly at convincing me that my name is Marlon.

And then things get stranger still. It was inevitable that hypnosis would be co-opted by "Rule 34," but it actually supports an expansive and dizzyingly versatile fetish community. Themes include emasculation, "bimbofication" (hypnosis used to turn a woman into a "bimbo," apparently willingly), and use of hypnosis as a kind of pick-up technique.

It's disturbing to think about PUAs turned loose on clubs equipped with something like verbal roofies; these sites fetishize consent as much as the process of hypnosis, but most users make a point of addressing the lines between roleplay, reality, and fantasy. For every man looking for a "dead eyed doll" there's another suggestible soul looking to be publicly humiliated.

It plays on our relation to power, gender politics, and even technology: Videos and audio tracks take away the consumer's autonomy; computers seize control of minds, inspiring slavish devotion and even love… Such ideas bring to life a dystopian dream of being perved on by the Singularity.

It strikes me that hypnofetishists know exactly how unsocial their interests are, as they have developed marginal platforms through which to explore them. Too alternative even for Omegle, the online hypnosis scene has produced an anonymous chat site called SleepyChat. The site offers a "safe and well moderated place to practice hypnosis," where users are anonymously paired based on gender and preferences (subject, or hypnotist, or switch).

Still awake despite Jody's best efforts, it's 4 am when I log on to SleepyChat and am assigned the random name "TheKangaroo27." It takes a few minutes, then it matches me to a male user going by "BadSnake47."

Hello Anyone there?

Hi I think you might be the second person this site has matched me to, ever.

I ask if he's been part of this scene for long, and BadSnake47 tells me his favorite stories are the bimbofication ones. He also asks if I'll Skype, though I dodge the question. BadSnake47 makes no attempt to hypnotize me.

This is dull: I'm starting to feel sleepy, but for all the wrong reasons. A warning flashes along the bottom of the page.

Important! Some hypnotists are using pastebin hypnosis scripts with ill intent. For now, please do not accept pastebin hypnosis scripts.

I make my excuses and leave. Outside my window the sky is getting brighter, and a bird is starting to sing. Back to Jody Whiteley, then.

I click play, and am asleep before I can hear the end of the video.