Headspace

A short entry, because the site has a full page on this. What a glossary owes you is the definition and the one fact that matters, which is that a person deep in it will agree to almost anything.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

What it means

Headspace is the altered state that sustained, intense physical experience produces. It has two named versions depending on which end of the implement you are on.

Subspace, in the person receiving, is described with remarkable consistency by people who have never spoken to each other. Floating. Warmth spreading. A sense of being some distance from your own body. Words getting slower and shorter and then stopping. Time misbehaving, so twenty minutes reads as five or as an hour. Strokes that were unmanageable at the start becoming absorbable.

Topspace, in the person delivering, is a different shape. Where subspace dissolves, topspace sharpens: attention narrows to the other person and the implement, peripheral concerns fall away, and there is a strong sense of competence. It is much closer to what athletes call flow.

The full treatment, including what the research has actually measured and what it has not, is on headspace: subspace and topspace.

The part that matters

Someone in deep subspace cannot give reliable consent. The state impairs the exact functions consent runs on. Judgement is soft, language is unreliable, the ability to notice something going wrong in your own body is reduced, and pain tolerance is temporarily raised so the ordinary feedback that would stop a scene never arrives.

In practice, a person in that state says yes to things. Not because they want them, but because agreeing is easier and the part of them that would object has gone quiet. They also fail to safe word while in genuine difficulty, and afterwards cannot explain why.

In practice

From the giving side, you cannot rely on being told, so learn what it looks like from outside. Answers arriving late and getting shorter. Eyes unfocused. Losing the count and not noticing. Going limp rather than tensing before a stroke. Agreeing to everything, including things they would normally argue about.

The check I use is a question with a real answer in it. Not are you all right, because yes is automatic. Ask what day it is, or which colour they are on. If the answer takes three seconds and arrives in one syllable, they are further under than you thought.

Coming out takes longer than going in and does not respond to being hurried. Keep them sitting or lying, get warmth on before conversation starts, and do not ask them to make decisions for a while. Language comes back last. Grounding techniques help.

The common misreading

Treating it as the point. Chasing it actively is the surest way to prevent it, because the chasing keeps the self-monitoring switched on and the self-monitoring switching off is the entire phenomenon.

Assuming everyone gets there. Plenty of people never do and enjoy all of this perfectly well. It is not a measure of anything.

And searching for the word. Type subspace into a search engine and you will get linear algebra and then Star Trek. Look for BDSM altered state instead, or the names of the researchers.