Topspace

What is topspace?

Topspace is the English word for the peak concentration a top can drop into during a scene. Everything outside the action falls away, and the clock stops working. Research uses this form; the Dutch scene usually says domspace.

What topspace looks like

Like someone who says little and no longer sees anything else. Take an evening with a flogger. After ten minutes or so the rest of the room disappears, and what stays is the rhythm, her back, and the sound of her breathing. You no longer hear the neighbor, or your phone, and you have no idea what time it is. Afterward you know in sharp detail what she did, and no longer in what order you did anything.

From the outside topspace looks like doing nothing, and that is why the scene uses the word for the receiving side far more often. With a bottom there is something to see; with a top there is not.

Where the word topspace comes from

From the users themselves, and it is the only word in this family with a real dictionary entry.

Wiktionary lists topspace as a compound of top (“dominant”) and space (“state of mind”), and describes it as “the psychological state of the dominant or top during sadomasochistic activity”. It gives domspace as a synonym, and there are three dated citations. The oldest is a post by Laura Goodwin in the newsgroup soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm.femdom from October 8, 2001: “Most of the time I take care of other people, and when I get into topspace I just like to be selfish and ‘cruel’.” The other two come from novels, by Cherise Sinclair (2011) and Laci Paige (2012).

That is the whole written trail: one newsgroup post and two novels. Dutch-language material does not exist at all. The newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek returns zero articles for topspace, while topdrop pulls 690, and Green’s Dictionary of Slang is empty too. So it is not street slang; it is trade jargon that the practitioners wrote down themselves. The research world took over exactly this word. Ambler and colleagues use topspace in Psychology of Consciousness for the state on the giving side. What was measured there, and how firmly it stands, is on domspace.

Why time speeds up in topspace

Because a distorted sense of time is not a side effect of flow but one of the features that define flow.

The measuring instrument is the Flow State Scale by Susan Jackson and Herbert Marsh in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. It runs 36 questions across nine scales of four, developed through interviews with elite athletes and tested on 394 athletes. One of those nine is about the distortion of time.

How that distortion plays out has been measured separately. Hans Rutrecht, Marc Wittmann, Shiva Khoshnoud, and Federico Alvarez Igarzábal had a hundred participants play the rhythm game Thumper for twenty-five minutes, half in virtual reality and half on a screen. The game produced flow in both versions, and the result reads: “the more flow participants experienced the less they thought about time and the faster time passed subjectively”. The same participants also played better.

For a top that is an unfortunate combination. The state in which you perform best is the same one in which the clock stops working, and the clock is precisely what you are supposed to keep track of. That this research is about a video game and not about BDSM is part of the picture; the application is my own inference.

Why people seek out topspace

Because in that state no room is left for anything else.

• For the one who acts, the payoff is that no second thought runs alongside. No agenda, no self-criticism, only the action and the response to it.
• For the one who receives, it counts indirectly. Someone who is deep in it watches more closely.
• For two people together, the evening keeps its shape, instead of thinning out halfway through because someone is only half present.

Topspace is no proof that things are going well. In Rutrecht and colleagues’ work, more flow went together with better play in a game where the only stakes are points. In a scene the stakes are another person, and your feeling that it is working is no measure of her.

How people get into topspace

Not by playing harder but by doing something that demands your full attention. What helps is a task with a clear goal and direct feedback, two things the Flow State Scale lists as separate scales. Rope work delivers that on its own. Every wrap answers back at once. Someone who has to search halfway through for where something is drops out, and getting back in costs more time than the search did.

What topspace is not

“Topspace and domspace are two states.” It is one state with two names; Wiktionary lists domspace as a straight synonym. The difference is in the origin. Topspace is the form with a dictionary entry and the form research uses; domspace is the scene’s own language.

“Someone in topspace keeps close track of time.” The opposite has been measured. In Rutrecht and colleagues’ work, more flow meant participants thought less about time and time went faster subjectively. Being sharp and keeping the clock are two different things, and in topspace only the first one runs.

“Topspace is a Dutch word.” No, and there is nothing you could infer that from. The WNT has no entry, the newspaper archive has no article, and Green’s has no slang sense. Look it up on Wikidata and you land somewhere else entirely, because the only item with this label is Q135044509, a video game from 2023.

What I make of it myself

I’m Victor, gigolo and psychotherapist, and I rarely say the word topspace out loud myself. It is here because it is the word you can read about it under.

What I notice it by is not what I feel but what is missing afterward. I can tell you in fine detail what she did and which moment tipped. What I no longer know is the order of my own actions.

That is exactly why I no longer leave the timekeeping to myself. Not a clock I have to look at, because looking is what you forget. An alarm that goes off.

What you can do yourself

• Use an alarm, not a clock. In topspace you forget to look; a sound is something you do not have to remember.
• Lay everything out before you start. Searching pulls you out, and getting back in costs more than the interruption itself.
• Agree on a fixed check-in point, so that checking in does not depend on your feeling that something is needed.
• Count on the dip afterward. The state you lose is what topdrop explains.

Further reading on topspace

Within this glossary, domspace carries the measurement itself, subspace describes the receiving side, and topdrop explains what happens when this state ends.

Beyond it, the article by Rutrecht and colleagues is under an open license and is surprisingly readable for anyone who wants to know why an hour sometimes lasts twenty minutes.

Where this fits on this site

If you are the one on the receiving side, this is the state I am in while you do not have to watch anything at all. How I keep track of time is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Time Speeds Up During Flow States: A Study in Virtual Reality with the Video Game Thumper. Hans Rutrecht, Marc Wittmann, Shiva Khoshnoud & Federico Alvarez Igarzábal, Timing & Time Perception 9(4), 353–376, 2021 (DOI 10.1163/22134468-bja10033; author names, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref). Published under a CC BY license, per the license field in the Crossref record; the publisher’s own page refuses automated requests and returns a 403 to a script. Provides the setup with a hundred participants who played the rhythm game Thumper for twenty-five minutes, in virtual reality or on a screen; the finding that the game produced flow in both versions; and the core result “the more flow participants experienced the less they thought about time and the faster time passed subjectively”, together with the finding that more flow went with a higher score. The research is about video games and not about BDSM; the application to a scene stands on this page as my own inference.
• Development and Validation of a Scale to Measure Optimal Experience: The Flow State Scale. Susan A. Jackson & Herbert W. Marsh, Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 18(1), 17–35, 1996 (DOI 10.1123/jsep.18.1.17; checked against Crossref). Provides the instrument the BDSM literature works with: 36 questions divided over nine scales of four questions, based on earlier flow research and on interviews with elite athletes, administered to 394 athletes, with confirmatory factor analyses that supported the nine scales and a hierarchical model in which one overarching flow factor explains the coherence among those nine. Only the abstract was read.
• topspace. Wiktionary, accessed August 9, 2026. Provides the spelling variants top space and top-space; the word formation from top (“dominant”) and space (“state of mind”); the description “the psychological state of the dominant or top during sadomasochistic activity”; domspace as a synonym and bottomspace and subspace as sibling words; and three dated citations, the oldest from October 8, 2001 by Laura Goodwin in the newsgroup soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm.femdom (“Most of the time I take care of other people, and when I get into topspace I just like to be selfish and ‘cruel’.”) and the two others from novels by Cherise Sinclair (To Command and Collar, 2011) and Laci Paige (The Silken Edge, 2012). Alongside that, the negative Dutch finding, measured with the three services this list uses for that as standard. The WNT has no entry, the SRU service of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek returns no newspaper article at all (with topdrop at 690 as a positive control), and Green’s Dictionary of Slang returns zero.
• Consensual BDSM Facilitates Role-Specific Altered States of Consciousness: A Preliminary Study. Ambler, Lee, Klement, Loewald, Comber, Hanson, Cutler, Cutler & Sagarin, Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 4(1), 75–91, 2017 (DOI 10.1037/cns0000097). Used here solely for the fact that the research literature adopts the word topspace for the state on the giving side and links it to flow. The measurement itself, with fourteen participants and its limitations, is worked out on domspace.

Related terms

Topspace is the state of the one who acts, and it is the word you can read about it under.

• Domspace. The same state under the name the scene uses, with the measurement attached.
• Subspace. The mirror image, the same kind of name but for the one who receives.
• Rope space. The same kind of word for the one in the rope, and the only one without a dictionary entry.
• Topdrop. What happens when this state ends.
• Top. The role in which topspace occurs.
• Topping. The act in which this state arises.