Thursday
Flew in to Midway in the mid afternoon. MEEHU actually had activities scheduled for daytime Friday and I had promised to be on hand early. The trip was a little bit of a bummer because, for the first EEHU ever, my sweet Dani was not with me. She had to miss this one for work reasons, breaking her record of perfect EEHU attendance stretching all the way back to NEEHU 1.
I met up with Setsudo at Midway. We were supposed to also meet a friend of mine from Abu Dabi, but her flight was severely delayed -- as in, about 3 hours delayed. We drove to the hotel and she ended up taking a cab later.
We arrived just in time to meet up with a large group of fellow attendees and join them for dinner at a nearby German restaurant. Great food, authentic German music -- including, at one point, an Alp horn (huge wooden horn; you may see one and think "Riiiiiiiicolaaaaaaaaaaa!") -- and, as you'd expect from this group, awesome company. I got to meet some people whom I'd only known online and reconnect with old friends. It was a great start.
Friday
The hotel provided breakfast after a fashion. People filed down, more now than there were for dinner. My friend Rita was there, recovered from her flight ordeal, and I enjoyed introducing her around and seeing her connect with people I like and admire. Then, a rare treat for me, an opportunity to attend the first unofficial class of the weekend, led by HypnoMaestro. We riffed with hypnosis, played with hypnotic strawberries and Nutella, until it was time for lunch.
A large number of the group went out to lunch in Naperville, which is about 20 minutes away. Things took a bit longer than expected, as can happen when 25 people converge on one spot and the staff isn't expecting it. My 1:30 class, "The Art of Teaching Hypnosis," didn't actually have an audience until about 2:25. So we did a compressed version of it so that we could hand over the room to Spiral Turquoise on time.
Turq led a very interesting discussion on the subjects of modeling consent and the relative merits of using pre-screened, pre-negotiated demo bottoms for demonstrations vs. picking volunteers on the fly. There are, as you might expect, pros and cons to each and in the end the conclusion, as so often happens with hypnosis, was "it depends on the circumstances." But talking about those circumstances, and having different experiences and ideas come out, was highly valuable.
I started to go to the Mentored Trance Practice to help out as a mentor, but part way up the hallway I encountered someone who was in a visibly agitated state. She was having an anxiety incident and needed care, so I took her into a nearby room, sat her down in a comfy chair, and went into hypnotherapist mode until she felt better.
In between all this, a plot was formed. Miss Sasha, an old friend of HypnoMaestro's and someone I'd met a couple of years ago, was at her first EEHU and had an idea for a role-playing scene she wanted to do. She needed two men she felt comfortable enough with to describe the scene, and she chose me and LeadPrism. The scenario sounded fun and interesting -- an interrogation scene, with Prism and myself as the interrogators. We went out for dinner to discuss and negotiate details.
We got back to the hotel just in time for HypnosisEnthusiast's stage show. Eighty people packed into the room for the show, which was up to HE's usual standards of quality and fun. And, to makes things that much better, Sasha was in the show. So when it ended she was highly fractionated; Prism and I took advantage of this to hypnotically waylay her (with prior consent) and do the interrogation scene.
That scene blew my mind, in the best ways. It was my first experience co-topping with a male, and his first as well. We played off each other quite successfully, with me as Bad Cop and Prism as Worse Cop. We had a list of Sasha's hot buttons, pressed them all plus discovered a couple of new ones, and the result was a scene that left us all very happy.
After the scene and aftercare I was going to join people in the social space, when I encountered Confessor_K in the hallway. We'd talked the night before at dinner about hypnotic amnesia; she was interested in experiencing that. So we ducked into my room, leaving the door open, and had some fun with memory play. K is amazingly talented, and took to short-term amnesia easily. We had a great time playing Pop Quiz, teleporting her around the room, and causing my shirt to change colors spontaneously. It wasn't an illusion -- I actually had several shirts of the same style but different colors; I simply froze K's mind in mid sentence, changed my shirt, moving my pen and glasses to the pocket, returned to my original position and unfroze her. To K it appeared as if my shirt kept changing color.
We did ultimately join the larger gathering in the social space for a bit and then I called it a night. A freakin' AWESOME night. ;^)
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