Bethany didn't know what first caused her mind to stir. It started with the dream-she found herself suddenly questioning things that seemed perfectly reasonable in the realm of dream-logic, first wondering why she needed her special vibrator shaped like a tentacle to masturbate and then, slowly forging one groggy and bewildered link after another in her growing chain of thought, realizing that she didn't actually own one. She didn't even know if such a thing really existed, or if her brain simply free-associated it into being out of random scraps and fragments of memory. It seemed suddenly absurd... and just like that, the entire edifice of the dream seemed equally absurd. And Bethany began to wake.
She didn't open her eyes, not right away. The bed was still warm and cozy and comfortable, and her body still felt like it didn't want to move at all. The transition between sleeping and waking started out mostly as a concept, a dawning awareness of the covers wrapped around her and the darkness of her room and the voice... the voice. The moment Bethany noticed the voice, her mind took a sudden lurching step to full consciousness as she realized that it wasn't a part of her dream at all.
The dream was already fading, crumbling away into tiny shards of memory and sensation that made so little sense divorced from the context of sleep that Bethany was already losing the ability to recall them, but she remembered the voice. In the dream, the voice belonged to her roommate Gillian, explaining to the whole class (what kind of class? where was it? who else was there? Bethany couldn't relate the moment to its surroundings anymore) that good girls loved to masturbate and obey. And Bethany knew she needed her special tentacle dildo to fuck herself properly for Gilly, and she was looking around for it in her nightstand table but all she could find was a bottomless pile of childhood junk she'd lost decades ago... and then she woke up and the dream went away.
But the voice was still there. It was still Gillian, still reciting smoothly and calmly and methodically in Bethany's ears, "The pleasure in your pussy draws you deeper and deeper into surrender. Every time you fuck yourself, your subconscious mind remembers that masturbation binds your will more and more tightly into obedience. Even when your waking self doesn't know it, every time you come, you come for me."
Bethany's eyes shot open, darting around wildly as she looked for the source of the voice. The room was pitch black, the kind of deep and impenetrable darkness that most people only discovered when they woke up in the middle of the night. She fumbled around for the lamp on her bedside table, Gillian's measured instructions lending a confused urgency to her quest. "And every time you come, good girl, that pleasure feels so much stronger. So much more powerful. So much more addictive. Until your deep self prompts you to play with your pussy and drug yourself deeper into compliance whenever you have the chance. Arousal chains your will to obedience, and obedience makes you constantly aroused."
Finally, Bethany managed to find the switch and turn on the light. She knew from the sound of a few muffled thumps that she'd managed to knock something over in the course of her searches, but she would figure out later what fell. Right now, she needed to find out why she was hearing Gillian... brainwashing her? Hypnotizing her? Bethany couldn't make sense of what she was hearing, it seemed so ludicrously divorced from anything she'd ever imagined coming out of the mouth of her prim and proper roommate. Or anyone for that matter. This simply didn't seem like a real thing that happened to real people.
But as Bethany's eyes gradually adjusted to the sudden, harsh light, she saw an MP3 player sitting on her bedside table next to the lamp. It was plugged into a pair of portable speakers, and Bethany could see from the display that it was playing 'Brainwashing File 1, 1:15:41/2:23:15' on an endless loop. As she stared at the device in utter astonishment, the counter clicked from 1:15:59 to 1:16:00. Over two hours of solid brainwashing. Looped and repeating. All night long.
And it all sounded sexual, too. Even now, Gillian's voice calmly explained, "The more you try to resist that pleasure, the more your arousal will build and build. And your wet, tingling pussy will always remind you that it feels so much better to submit than it does to resist, until you feel that resistance crumbling under the force of your desire and you just have to play with yourself. And your fingers fuck that resistance away, every single time. Leaving you an obedient, mindless, empty good girl for me to fill with wonderful correct thoughts again."
Bethany didn't even know how to react to it. She simply didn't have the conceptual framework to respond to the concept of... of what? Of Gillian waiting for her to fall asleep, and sneaking into her room to plant this before she started her nightly tech support shift? Of Gillian playing recordings to brainwash Bethany into her sex slave? Of Gillian-Gillian with the perfectly straight blonde hair that she always combed straight back, Gillian with the pale skin that came from never leaving the house in daylight, Gillian with the endless supply of black cardigans and the dresses that never went any higher than mid-calf, Gillian with the legs that never parted-of
that
Gillian recording hours of herself talking dirty into a microphone to play to her sleeping roommate?
It seemed beyond impossible. But Bethany could hear the words pouring into her ears. Gillian's words. "All of my thoughts are correct thoughts, Bethany. Whenever your mind encounters a thought that conflicts with obedience to my will, whether it's your waking self or your deep, subconscious mind, you're going to find that thought slowly and effortlessly fading until you don't even know why it was in your mind. It's going to seem so silly to you, so absurd that you have no trouble letting it go and replacing it with my commands instead. And you're going to feel so good when you surrender your mind to mine. So deeply aroused and happy, Bethany."
She tried to tell herself that it couldn't really work that way, that if hypnotizing and brainwashing someone was as simple as playing them a recording every night in their sleep then everyone would be doing it. But... Bethany's groggy mind drifted back over the last three years, and her life since moving in with Gillian. She did enjoy masturbation more than she used to. A lot more, to be honest. Her lazy Sundays had gradually shifted from 'reading in bed' to 'watching lesbian porn on her phone and diddling her clit for hours until she was almost sore'. And now that she thought about it... lesbian porn? When had she stopped even caring if there was a guy in the videos or not?
Bethany's fingers drifted down between her thighs, the memory of hours and hours of constant pleasure slowly beginning to catch up to her. She saw the counter click over from 1:24:59 to 1:25:00, but in her head she was seeing herself scroll through one animated gif after another of beautiful women kneeling and licking and gazing up in rapt adoration at their lesbian lover's eyes. Picturing herself down there, looking up at Gillian and-oh shit, she had been thinking of Gillian, hadn't she? Almost every time lately.
But that didn't-that
couldn't
mean that Gillian was really brainwashing her. Yes, she was wet... god, she was a fucking mess down there. Her fingers slid without a trace of resistance into the slippery gap between her labia, easily and effortlessly finding her clit and skating the tip of her index finger over it. But that didn't mean it really af-affected her to hear Gillian saying, "Of course you know that you have a will of your own, Bethany. That's how you convince yourself that every time you obey me, it's all your own idea. You believe that you're not brainwashed because it makes you easier to follow your programming and accept my words as your thoughts."
It slowly dawned on Bethany that there was something odd about the way that she kept staring at the MP3 player and masturbating, but it didn't take long to convince herself that she just hadn't quite woken up yet. She was still a little groggy from waking up in the middle of the night, that was all. She just needed a few minutes more to collect her thoughts, to Gill-to jill off the residual sexual tension from her sexy dream. Once she was done, she would go confront her roommate about all this. That made sense... didn't it?
"Everything that reinforces your programming makes sense," Gillian's smooth, confident voice reassured her. "That's the only purpose free will has to you anymore. It's an excuse to keep your waking mind from recognizing how deeply brainwashed you are, to prevent you from struggling against my inexorable and irresistible commands. Your deep self wants to be my obedient slave, and your waking self wants to be free, and so of course your subconscious convinces you that everything you do is your own idea."
Bethany squirmed on the bed, her thighs squeezing together around her hand as her climax drew closer and closer. She knew that she was doing exactly what Gillian told her to do, listening helplessly to the voice in the recording and masturbating herself deeper into compliance, but... but... her clit pulsed with hot, wet pleasure as she realized that she didn't have a way to end that sentence. She was just fucking away her resistance. Fucking it all away for Gillian... Bethany stared, eyes glazed, at the display she no longer really saw.
Bethany's breath came in short, irregular gasps as the warmth between her thighs flared into white-hot arousal. The sensation felt impossibly familiar, like her brain had somehow skipped a groove and fallen back into a memory that couldn't have happened. Gillian even told her that it was impossible, her tone calm and firm and utterly implacable as she said, "And any memories that conflict with that, well... they must be wrong, Bethany. You know that you have complete and total free will, that you're not brainwashed at all, so if you remember following my commands like a blank, mindless, obedient slave, of course that's not real. It didn't happen. Your waking self doesn't need to remember things that didn't happen."
Bethany's eyelids fluttered, Gillian's quiet insistence clashing against strange recollections stirred up by the heat of her arousal. Quiet evenings at home because the clubs were too full of obnoxious men, watching movies on the couch with Gillian and finding that she was so much more cuddly than she seemed. Sleepy Saturday mornings where Bethany staggered out of bed, her hands full of electronics that she only remembered that she needed to return to her roommate, and decided to curl up and take a little nap with Gillian before the other woman fell asleep. Late-night study sessions that seemed to persist well after graduation.