It was funny, Jameson thought sometimes, but... nobody really knew how hypnosis worked. Oh, it was definitely a real, provable phenomenon; scientists had done tests with magnetic resonance imaging and studied subjects in and out of trance and detected distinct, measurable differences in the brain patterns of hypnotized people. There was proof that telling someone to pretend that they couldn't move their arm was different from a post-hypnotic paralysis suggestion, a definitive shot across the bow to every skeptic who'd ever challenged the validity of mesmerism as a mere aspect of social conditioning.
But ask a hundred experts what was actually going on in a subject's head when they used a hypnotic induction to lull them into a deep, placid, thoughtless state of trance, and they'd give a hundred different answers. None of them would be scientific; descriptions of 'relaxation' and 'focus' and 'disassociation' were vague and impossible to pin down with any kind of rigor, and even though all of them agreed that the unconscious mind was processing the suggestions that bypassed waking awareness, none of them could agree on what an 'unconscious mind' truly was or how it mapped to the brain that it supposedly rested in. 170 years of formal study, and literally nobody had progressed beyond a trial-and-error recognition of the effects of hypnosis. Some of them, at any rate.
The idea of the subconscious was really nothing but a useful metaphor, but it was so useful that it persisted long past the point where neuroscience should have rendered it obsolete. It formed a model that predicted the outcome of most attempts at hypnotic suggestion reasonably well, despite being little more than a construct that described the vast, unfathomable workings of a complex biological machine with computing powers far beyond anything Silicon Valley ever dreamed of. Jameson sometimes likened himself to an ape that stumbled onto a supercomputer built by aliens; he was never going to have a hope in hell of figuring out how it worked, but he could at least figure out what some of the buttons did when he pushed them.
And the recreational hypnosis community? The hypnokink community? They were all simian hackers, pushing each other's buttons in every way they could think of to see what kinds of results they could get. It sometimes resulted in secret little surprises, fascinating interactions between hypnotist and subject that couldn't be easily explained to someone who didn't experience it for themselves. That was how Jameson thought of it, anyway.
But not right now. Because right now he was making his good girl cum for him, and he was too deeply hypnotized by her pleasure to think of anything else.
It wasn't hypnosis the way a normal person would recognize it. They'd reserve that term for Summer, the woman slumped back against the pillows with her eyes rolled back until only the whites showed and drool spilling down her slack pink chin to drip down onto her heavy breasts. They'd see her with her eyelids fluttering and her body unable to do anything more than twitch in ecstasy despite Jameson's thumb skating repeatedly over her clit and his voice coaxing her deeper and deeper into orgasmic bliss, and they'd immediately assume she was the one who was in a trance. And Jameson was the one entrancing her. He was entirely in control of her empty, obedient mind. Assuming the idea didn't horrify them, they'd never suspect for a moment that he was anything but wide awake.