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abilities, environments. We enter the dungeon and become our “other selves,” then leave it and become our day-to-day selves again. Our time agreements may be our form: we’ll play until 3:00, then go get something to eat. Or we may agree to play until one or the other or both of us has had an orgasm, or has reached some mutually agreed upon level of stimulation.
    All these structures are there to help you get as big as you can, and your bottom as small as he can, while ensuring your safe return to your normal size when you need to go back. Like Alice’s looking glass, they enable you to wander safely through the topsy-turvy dreamscapes of fantasy, where pain is pleasure and cruelty is love.

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    W HAT D O T OPS D O ?
     
    F INDING Y OUR T OP P ERSONA . As a top, you might be a sadistically vicious interrogator, or a sweetly sorrowful parent who’s only spanking this naughty boy for his own good. You could be a mad scientist out of a horror film, an eight-year-old girl blackmailing her babysitter, Simon Legree, the Phantom of the Opera, or the evil caliph keeping his harem in order. You could be Captain Bligh, Captain Picard, Captain Hook, Captain America or even Captain Kangaroo, because the ways to be a top are limited only by your imagination.
    Most of our fantasies come from very deep places inside us – Janet blushes to admit that she still has toppy fantasies about the villains on the old campy “Batman” TV show that aired in her impressionable adolescence. We draw our fantasies from the powerful archetypes found in popular culture, like movies and TV shows; from the real-world torture and rape that simultaneously fascinate and horrify us; from well-thumbed reminiscences of our own childhoods – in short, from almost any place our monkey curiosity carries us.
    Fantasies are seldom sophisticated, ambiguous or even very pretty. They almost never contain negotiation or safewords (these are “safety nets” that get built into our real-world play to help make our fantasies safer to enact). For these reasons, and because we know that wanting to hurt, control or humiliate people is not OK, we may feel very ashamed or embarrassed about our fantasies. But once we overcome that embarrassment, and discover how many other people have similar feelings, our fantasy world becomes a hot and happy playground.
During one of our play dates, we originally had no particular scenario in mind. But during the one-hour drive between our houses, Janet was idly fantasizing about being the matron in a Victorian workhouse full of girl orphans. With no small embarrassment, she shared that fantasy with Dossie over lunch. Dossie happened to be wearing a sundress that made her look about fourteen, and the roles and scenario fell easily into place from there: Dossie became the new little orphan recently brought into the workhouse, and “Miss Janet, ma’am” spent a happy couple of hours showing her “how things is done around ’ere,” and demonstrating the dreadful canings she would get if she ever misbehaved.
    Advertising people refer to radio as “theater of the mind,” because a few well-chosen words and sound effects are all it takes to create an entire scenario inside the head of the listener. We think S/M is theater of the mind, too. It’s a rare treat when you can set up a scene with full props and costumes and dialogue; more often, a couple of items – a dashing hat, say, or a flogger that looks like something Basil Rathbone might have used on Errol Flynn – is all it takes to create and maintain an illusion. And, as the top, you get to be playwright, set designer, costume designer, director and audience.
    D O Y OU A LWAYS H AVE TO H AVE A R OLE? A lot of our best S/M scenes have been done without recourse to any particular role – we’re not Harriet Marwood or Ming the Merciless, we’re simply us.
    Still, any given scene has a “flavor” that can often be described by describing a role. A harsh scene in which limits