Asimovs and Pied Pipers

Something I have to share with you here.

I regularly use two kinds of instructions on my clients - Asimovs, and Pied Pipers. Both are fun in their own way.

The term "Asimov command" comes from the TV science fiction show Babylon 5, where the Psi Cop Alfred Bester implanted a deep-seated Asimov command inside Michael Garibaldi's brain, blocking him from killing Bester. Think about Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but applied to humans.

An Asimov is a basic mental block; an inhibition against a specific kind of activity. A simple, and amusing, Asimov is to block knowledge of the number six from the subject's mind; he knows there's a number between five and seven, but when it comes to remembering, or articulating, that number, his mind's a blank; the word itself just "on the tip of the tongue."

Your subject would begin counting "One, two, three, four, five ... seven, eight ..." and be totally unable to articulate the number six. Ask him how many eggs are in a box; how many apples are left if you take one away from seven; even the number of the Beast (666); he'll be unable to answer the question because the subject will always feel as if the cat has got his tongue.

This was featured in the episode of The Prisoner where the unnamed prisoner, played by the late Patrick McGoohan, had the number "six" erased from his mind during his torture session known as "Degree Absolute." Bester's inhibition that prevented Garibaldi killing him in Babylon 5 was specifically referred to as an Asimov in the show, but it has been used plenty of times previously.

So, then, what are Pied Pipers?

A Pied Piper is an instruction activated by a very specific kind of trigger - music. Linking an action to a piece of music allows you to activate that behaviour at your leisure, simply by inserting the soundtrack into a playlist on a computer, MP3 player or similar. You could expose the subject to the track during the trance, and instruct the subject to perform that behaviour pattern once they hear that tune or track.

It doesn't have to be music - you could trigger the effect with a sound effect file, the sound of rain or breaking waves upon the shore - but music provides the most satisfactory trigger because so few people actually sit and listen to the music in the background.

Think about the times you've sat in a waiting room, or a garage waiting for your car to be rolled out, or browsed in a shop, or stood in a lift with the muzak humming in your ears. If someone came to you and asked you "What tune was that?" how many of you would be able to identify it, or even realise that there had been music playing at all?

The ideal, of course, in the context of erotic hypnosis would be an Asimov that inhibits orgasm, delaying it until and unless you give the word that ends the Asimov, permitting the pent-up orgasm to be released (which works - I can confirm this through personal experience). And the ideal Pied Piper would be an instruction applied to your victim that would trigger, say, a compulsion to remove all of your clothes and dance erotically when a certain piece of music plays. Again, from practical personal experience I know this does work; I've triggered intense hunger, desperate sexual arousal and other passions from playing sound tracks that I've sent to my clients by email.

The fantasy ideal of the Pied Piper, of course, would be to tie feelings of erotic arousal, nudity and the suppression of inhibitions in a crowd of people working together, then slip triggering tracks such as Suvaco do Cristo, Tafi Maradi or Whimsy Groove into the playlist and let it run ...

So, then, those are Asimovs and Pied Pipers. The former is triggered by a behaviour and activates an alternative behaviour (usually inhibitory); the latter is triggered by an external trigger, activating a dormant behaviour pattern. As long as you can control the conditions of activation, these are both very fun triggers to program.