The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

She stands by the wide bay window, looking out at the harbour as dusk falls. Her reflection in the glass is pale and indistinct, transparent in the fading light, and looking through herself she watches the last low sun glinting on silvery grey water. Fifty miles or a thousand years north lies Helsinki. At midnight, when the moonless sky is clear, she can sometimes almost see its glow on the horizon.

Is this happiness, she wonders? A day, an hour, a moment; a blurred snapshot to treasure? She wonders when she will see the man with green eyes again. It is only a matter of time, she is sure. She is certain he will come back to her; or perhaps it is the other way around.

As night falls, the Milky Way begins to glimmer and brighten overhead, an endless path of snowdrops winding around the world.

She lays down her head on the soft pillow and sleeps, and she dreams of the forest.

In her dream, the forest is warm and sunlit. She comes to a clearing; dappled gold through green. In the clearing sits a woman she has never seen before, although somehow she feels her to be familiar. Vines wind around the woman’s naked body, her arms, her legs; she seems literally a part of the scenery, a natural, voluptuous and inevitable creature of the forest itself. There are flowers in her white blonde hair; her eyes are cornflower blue, and her lips are full and red. The woman smiles at her.

The scent of elderflower and meadowsweet is strong. At the woman’s shoulder sits an owl. The owl regards her curiously. Gibbous eyes, crepuscular.

She wonders: who are you?

The woman replies to her unvoiced question in a burble of foreign syllables that slip past her leaving no trace. “Born of flowers, as in the story,” adds the woman, equally meaningless to her.

She thinks: why are you here?

The woman smiles. Her mouth is wide and sensual. She walks over to where the woman is sitting. The smell of flowers is sweet and heady. In the dream, she leans down tentatively, and her lips brush the other woman’s. She closes her eyes.

In the way of dreams, something changes: perspectives shift, and when she opens her eyes again she, herself, is the one sitting, her face upturned, her mouth seeking the other. With a thrill she feels herself receive her own kiss, tastes her own sweet mouth, tongue darting faster, urgently. She closes her eyes and, unbidden, her mouth opens to the other woman’s, and they kiss, long and deep and slow. Her lips are soft and warm, inviting, and she does not pull away.

She moves to embrace the other, to pull her closer, but her wrists are bound and she can’t move at all. She feels the tug of vines, and they will not let her go.

They kiss, and the woman caresses her breasts, gently at first, and then harder. She throbs at the woman’s touch, and moves helplessly against her hands.

The other woman kneels in front of her. Her legs are apart, bound by vines. She wriggles, wondering; the woman’s—her—face is flushed. “Thank you,” says the woman, quietly, with her voice, now. The woman bends down to her. She feels the stroke of a tongue against wetness, and she gives herself to it completely.

At last the woman stands and steps back.

Sitting now, she looks up at herself, standing there in the clearing. The seat beneath her is comfortably mossy and she is aware of the embrace of the vines at her wrists and ankles. She pulls at them again, testing, and the vines tighten around her pleasingly. She feels a new vine snake around her thigh, securing her more thoroughly. She does not feel alarmed.

Her-not-her regards her. Then, ecstatically, the other closes her eyes, throws back her head and runs her hands slowly over her body, from breasts to thighs and back again. “So good to be free,” she murmurs.

She, herself, can see her own body language is different now, somehow more sensual. It is fascinating, looking at herself this way. She apprehends in a way she has never truly known before that she is beautiful. The woman smiles wider, beatific.

“Yes. Yes, you are truly beautiful, now,” she says. “Now I have to go. To him.”

“Who? Who?”

She replies, another incomprehensible name. Woozy from the kiss, she wonders when she will be coming back.

“Who? Who?” she says again. It seems to be all she can say. Her-not-her doesn’t answer. She turns and walks from the clearing. The owl at her shoulder hoots once, softly, then shakes itself and flutters away behind her mistress.

The forest is quiet. Constrained, she feels sexually charged beyond the limits of her body. Every sense is alive; ambiguous, complex, powerful, vulnerable, strange, wonderful. At her thigh a flower buds and blooms.

Oak blossom, primrose, and hawthorn.

After a while, the forest begins to darken, and lulled by warmth and silence she falls asleep, and in the dream she dreams.

In the dream within the dream, she is sitting in a meadow, waiting in the shade of the trees, far away from the war of men.

As he approaches, she lies back on a carpet of primroses, inviting him to her, and her eyes never leave his. The man with green eyes comes to her. She opens to him, completely, with the warmth of the earth itself. It is the first time. She trembles and cries out as they come together. She has never felt anything like this before. She knows she is loved. She knows she will always be loved.

Afterwards, sated, she sleeps, and she dreams.

The dream within the dream within the dream is more urgent; somehow more real, more vivid. She is running, terrified, and behind her she hears the implacable flap of the wings of what she somehow knows to be a huge eagle, bigger than the sun. Her breath catches in her throat. Wide eyed, heart pounding, she pushes herself on, faster. Twigs and thorns scratch at her bare feet.

She knows there is war, and someone is dead—truly dead—and it’s all down to her, but she can’t remember who it is.

She bursts through undergrowth, and he is there in the clearing, waiting for her.

She turns to run, but the sight of the eagle stops her in her tracks. She knows its name, of course. It stares at her, baleful and unblinking, and she is chilled. She turns back to face the man with green eyes.

The man with green eyes looks at her and speaks, love and anger and regret mingled in his expression. “Flower Face. It’s all gone too far this time.”

“Please!” she cries, “my name is —”

“I know your name.” He silences her with a gesture, and the next sound she makes is the inarticulate hoot of an owl.

“Who? Who?” he mocks.

She cries and hoots in fear as the vines wind and tighten around her body. No matter how hard she struggles, the vines are stronger. Their embrace tightens and tightens further, until she is splayed, immobile and helpless. High above her, the eagle circles once, and then swoops away. She hoots desperately for the man with green eyes, but he is gone, vanished into the forest. Surely he will not leave her like this? She knows he loves her. Surely he will return and free her?

But the story is the story. It never changes, and he doesn’t come back to her. After a while, night falls and she is overwhelmed by hopelessness.

Words come to her from somewhere, whispers in the forest: I was a string in a harp, a phantom for years, foam on the waters; I was a spark in the fire, I was a log in the blaze.

There must be a way to get free, to be real again. Why hadn’t they made her stronger?

After a while, she cries herself to sleep, and she dreams.

She has lost her way on the descending staircase of dreams-within-dreams, but she knows she dreams of war. The trees themselves have thrown themselves into the fray; all the alders and oaks and pines of the Old Country, running riot in the company of men.

There is always something coming through the trees to take her, but the trees are her friends, sometimes.

Long days pass in the clearing in the forest. Maybe years, maybe more. But eventually, someone always comes; perhaps a woman—a girl, really—gathering flowers or fruit for her table. And when they do come, she knows what to do to be free, because that is what happens in the story.

She waits, and sleeps, and dreams.

She dreams of war. An empire surges irresistibly north from the warm southern sea, from Rome itself, they say. The man with green eyes tells her to run, to hide, but amidst chaos, they take her as a prize. She is sold to the household of a powerful man; he is struck by her looks, her body, her blue-eyed pallor, the alien clarity and candour of her gaze. “Exotic, like an unknown flower,” he tells her. He doesn’t understand her language, or her name, which he calls gibberish, but she knows Latin well, and she has a new name now.

At first he says she is his property, his animal, and he says he will use her in any way he sees fit. But after the first time she pleasures him at his command, he lies back, stunned by the experience, and declares himself renewed, beholden to her, and she knows exactly how she will free herself, as she has always freed herself before.

She sleeps, and she dreams.

War. The new religion is coming, this time, and the old spirits seem to have fled. The man with green eyes explains that something bad is coming to the Old Country, whether from Riga to the south, or from Copenhagen or Stockholm in the west, or from who knows what madness now lies to the east, and they must head north again, over the sea. The forests are deeper and wider and wilder there, he says, and he will be able to keep her safe from harm. Otherwise these new priests may burn her as a witch.

She doubts that. But will she be able to keep him safe in return, she thinks?

He gives her snowdrops for luck and memory. He was always mad, of course—a star for danger. He still is.

That night, as the boat forges on across the wide cold sea, she sleeps, and she dreams.

There is war. There is always war, but this time is worse. She doesn’t know if the man with green eyes will come back this time. To the south and west looms an implacable empire of men and machines and lunatic, incomprehensible fixations; to the east, another. It is slaughter. The flowers do not bloom. No good can come of this, she thinks, and instinct tells her that good will be a long time returning.

He tells her that she needs to stay here, in the north, and learn the language of the east, just in case. If the worst happens, she will be able to pass for one of their own. She nods, acquiescent, but she knows they, whoever they are, could never hold her for long. Whatever else they may be, they are only men.

After he has left, she sleeps, and she dreams.

There is war, of a febrile, chilly variety, fought by proxy and remote control. To the west—far away over the wider ocean—looms an implacable empire of men and machines and lunatic, incomprehensible fixations; to the east, another. To the south, in the deserts, a third. The man with green eyes said the whole world had turned into a game, and he would need to adapt.

It has been a long time since she’s seen him, now. She’s adapted too. She’s a working girl now, it seems, in the service of men, although she knows it is the other way around. She does not feel this is beneath her; she’s always been a free spirit, after all, and she is particular in her choices. Her clients are generous in their gifts and energetic in their attentions. She is free from constraints in this new world, and she no longer feels the vines at her wrists at all. Until the green eyed man comes back—and he will come, she knows he will—she can express herself in any way she wishes without consequences.

She wanders the wide avenues of the city, wondering at the height of the buildings here, trailing the scent of flowers in her wake.

One night, as she waits at the bar in a hotel she has come to know a little too well, a man approaches her. He is tall and dark haired, and his movements are graceful. He tells her how he wants her, murmurs how he had wanted her from the first moment he saw her, and he asks her to come with him to his room.

She takes what she needs from him, and steals his wallet, but no more than that; he is only a man, and his eyes are not green.

Afterwards, she sleeps, and she dreams.

She sleeps, and she dreams. There are recursions and iterations, dreams to the power of dreams, spiralling down, and it seems entirely irrelevant to try keeping track of them. She remembers a picture she once saw, years ago now, an artist named Escher, which had fascinated her with its endless staircase, ascending and descending forever.

And here, now, she dreams she is climbing the stairs again to go playing in her mother’s bedroom. A liminal time; not a child any more but not yet quite a woman, trying on her mother’s clothes, blossoming; practicing for what she will soon become. A radio plays in a distant room of the house. Always, everywhere, the scent of flowers.

In a favourite white dress she stands between two mirrors and plays a favourite game. Turning and turning, reflections upon reflections, infinite selves telescoping off into darkness. She imagines a man with green eyes, watching her. She raises her hand to him, and watches every self do the same, over and over into the dim distance. She takes a white flower from the vase on her mother’s dresser and tucks it into her hair.

She imagines the past lies to the left, the future to the right, each becoming more shadowy and indistinct the further she looks; eternal selves, all of her, really, sleepwalking back across the years. She waves at them, and they all wave back.

After supper, she sleeps, and she dreams.

As always, she first comes upon the green eyed man in a café by the waterside. It is a warm spring day, and the air is filled with possibilities. The firm pull of predestined logic tells her she must approach him, smile at him, speak to him, entice him, because that is the story of this dream; and later, after a due interval of foreplay and anticipation, they will go to her apartment and make love until the sun begins to fade. This is how things always happen.

Afterwards, as always, she stands by the wide bay window, looking out at the harbour as dusk falls. Her reflection in the glass is pale and indistinct, transparent in the fading light, and looking through herself she watches the last low sun glinting on silvery grey water. Fifty miles or a thousand years north lies Helsinki. At midnight, when the moonless sky is clear, she can sometimes almost see its glow on the horizon.

Is this happiness, she wonders? A day, an hour, a moment; a blurred snapshot to treasure? She wonders when she will see the man with green eyes again. It is only a matter of time, she is sure. She is certain he will come back to her; or perhaps it is the other way around.

As night falls, the Milky Way begins to glimmer and brighten overhead, an endless path of snowdrops winding around the world.

She lays down her head on the soft pillow and sleeps, and she dreams of the forest.