Online hypnosis

Well it's time I posted something.

First, let me say Happy New Year everybody! I wish you all the best for 2010, the last year of the first decade of the 21st century.

This is a post that's been brewing for a while, so I thought I should finish it off and put it up.

Back in 1998 I discovered a curious little application for my parents computer called "MSN messenger". Installing it kick started my own discovery of all that the Internet had to offer, including chatting to people I'd never met before in person. This was in the dark primeval days of dial-up, a time when MSN was a nice tidy little application, as opposed to its latest incarnation which seems to aspire to be the illegitimate lovechild of an advertising billboard and facebook's idiot younger brother.

I now own a Mac and refuse to use Microsoft's own software to access MSN, much to the betterment of my life in general. (In my experience an Apple computer is to a PC what a flying saucer is to an aeroplane: It's faster, shinier, can better everything the plane can do and even do things an plane never even thought of doing, but if you use one people look at you like you're from another planet.)

Even so it is my feeling that even the last twelve years or so the Internet hasn't changed much at all. Yes, I know what you're thinking, back then there was no facebook, no YouTube, I'd never even heard the word "Google", and the phone call to gain access was charged by the minute. Perhaps so, but what I was thinking about was the content written by the other people on there; the online community so to speak.

There are still people trying to sell all manner of things, even if only their own blinkered and misguided opinion. There are still lots of desperate men foolishly trying to find women using the Internet. There are still plenty of amateurishly coded websites that hurt the eyes and crash Internet explorer. There are even a few sepecialist websites with useful information. My point is that whilst the web may have grown by several orders of magnitude the nature of the protagonists has barely changed, and an enormous proportion of what's out there is just junk.

I remember going to chatrooms at the tender age of about 16 in the hope of meeting single women. I wasn't meeting any single attractive women in my day to day life and I made the mistake so many people have made before and since then, which was to see the Internet as a vast reservoir of potential for finding them. I won't say my illusions were shattered, but they were at least bruised by what I actually came across.

Under the banner of anonymity offered by the Internet many people will do things that they will not necessarily dare to do in real life. I remember being asked by others on these discussion forums the question "wanna cyber?", which in short meant whether I wanted "cyber sex", or rather to enter into a text only role play describing a sexual act with the other person. I was a teenager and overflowing with hormones, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the heck I'd want to do that. I had also once witnessed what the other end of one of these supposedly risque conversations was like; a female acquaintance of mine and her friend, sat with about 10 different chat windows open at once, responding to each guy's attention and laughing at how sad and pathetic they all were. The men on the other end of the conversation were, however, quite fortunate as they were talking to actual women (albeit not single or taking anything seriously) as opposed to men pretending to be women, which is also a very common phenomenon.

Now, I have made a number of friends over the Internet, some of whom I have subsequently met up with. I have also used MSN to a great extent to keep in touch with friends whilst at university and of course since then. I won't say that I didn't try to use the Internet over many years to find myself a girl, one interested in conversation not entirely related to body parts, because that would be a lie, but as time went on I became quite disillusioned by the whole thing. They say that you can be whatever you want on the Internet, but what they don't add is that it's only you that sees you that way; everyone else will most likely think you're deluding yourself, to put it politely. It came as no great surprise to me when my first girlfriend appeared in my life in a way that was completely unrelated to the Internet.

Something that caught me completely by surprise much more recently was the concept of online hypnosis, via voice or instant messaging, and just how many people there are out there doing it. It is of course not a topic that I am intimately familiar with, but today I'm feeling sufficiently misguided and blinkered of opinion to pass comment on it.

I realise I've been rambling on about the topic of men trying to find women online, and this is because I feel that there are many similarities between approaching people and hypnotising them and approaching someone one is attracted to and, say, asking for their phone number. It takes confidence and strength of character to overcome ones fear of rejection and to approach someone in person and ask for their phone number; those who don't have these attributes sit at home and go on the Internet. Likewise I think it takes a similar strength of resolve to hypnotise someone who's sat right in front you; but fear not, if you don't dare do that you can always go on the Internet and pretend to be a hypnotist.

The trouble is that hypnosis is based upon hypnotic rapport between hypnotist and subject; it's an interpersonal relationship. I don't think that an instant messaging program is comprehensive enough to convey all that a hypnotist is communicating to the subject, especially tone of voice and body language.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against hypnosis by text and I don't doubt that it works, but I do get the feeling that there are people out there calling themselves hypnotists whose sole body of experience is in that medium, and having seen some transcripts I get the impression those people sometimes forget that there's a person on the other end of it.

At the lighter end of the range of such individuals one will find the kind of people who pop up on sites like uncommonforum from time to time. These are the ones who ask others to read through their online hypnosis scripts to check they're using the best possible wording. Treating hypnotic triggers they want to install like programming functions, "when I say 'play hypnogame2' begin this game" and going through all of their syntax to make sure there won't be any errors or ambiguities when the trance code is parsed, like changing "when I say" to "when only I say".

I feel sorry for any subject on the other end of a trance from such an individual, indeed I hope they respond with the vengeful sword of sarcasm; something like "error: float 'tranceDepth' not declared."

(It's fair to say I would have studied computer science at uni, but I really didn't have the social skills)

The more worrying side of these online hypnotists are the ones who are into the whole mind control fetish scene, and have trouble telling the difference between their ill-conceived fantasies and reality. The best place to see the works of such individuals is on YouTube. You can recognise them by their awesome presence, so powerful that they must hide behind the visual of a headache-inducing spiral, and their commanding voice, which sounds suspiciously like the emotionless MS Windows computer voice. The voice tells the watcher that they are becoming a mindless slave, that pleasure is obedience, obedience is pleasure, etc. What a worthy individual for the title of hypnotist... I don't think.

Thankfully hypnosis is not the mind control ray out of the wet dreams of such online perverts, but the disturbing thing is coming across other videos of young girls watching such videos; it's just wrong.

Thankfully hypnosis is, for the most part, fail safe because it is based on trust between hypnotist and subject, and by virtue of the fact that it is really only suggestion, not mind control. Every so often one comes across case of an online pervert trying to use hypnosis like it's a magical power to try to take over and reprogram the mind of some unsuspecting individual, and most likely it doesn't work because becoming a slave or whatever else is being suggested isn't what the subject is interested in, and as soon as they realise what the hypnotist is doing they decide that they really don't want to play any more.

I remember a friend I once had commenting that for every good hypnotist there were 19 evil ones. To me, knowing the individuals I see at the last Thursday group, I found that hard to imagine, but of course those are hypnotists who need to be nice people for the subject that they approach to trust them, whereas it is not hard to believe that sad losers as two-a-penny on the Internet. In a text conversation, deprived of all non-verbal telltales, one is likely to take longer to realise just what the hypnotist is interested in doing, especially if ones own mind is filling in the gaps with what one wants the other person to be like.

Online hypnosis is something which potential subject should approach with caution, unless the hypnotist in question is known to them. To agree to experience hypnosis from a stranger one has met in a pub or bar, face to face and in the presence of ones friends, is more or less completely safe. To agree to the same but over the Internet to a stranger one hasn't met, and alone, is at least a little bit foolish in my opinion.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're one of these people who only does hypnosis online by all means do hypnosis that way with your friends, and use the Internet to make new friends with the same interests, but for goodness sake get out there and hypnotise some people face to face. If you don't do that you may forget that you're dealing with other human beings, and if that happens you don't deserve to call yourself a hypnotist.

Maybe... just maybe...

Well it's nearly mid December so I guess I should write something. At least this time I have something to report.

I have mentioned on more than enough occasions that I have found my inherently poor response to hypnosis to be incredibly frustrating. Well recently it occurred to me that what this reminds me of most is the case of the friend who never gets in touch. The valued friend who one gets on well with and who seems to mutually really enjoy the relationship, but who never seems to make any effort to maintain it. The feeling that if one simply ceased all attempts to contact them that would be the end of it; they'd never be heard from again.

This is exactly how I've been feeling about hypnosis. It's just me keeping it going by constant and awkward effort, and if I stopped trying, stopped making it happen, the whole relationship would simply vanish.

Now of course with the friend, when questioned about why they never make any effort to say hello from time to time, they may of course say that they have been busy, they may say any number of true and legitimate things about their life which of course I would have no reason to dispute. The thing is though that I've always believed that broadly speaking people do what they want to do, and that actions speak louder than words. Regardless of what a friend may say, if they placed any level of value on being in contact they would be anticipating the next time and miss it when it was no longer there.

Traditionally I have always been one to derive my own sense of self-worth more from evidence than self-assertion, so I'm sure that what I describe above is something that used to upset me. More recent times and a better sense of self have brought me to realise that some friendships do just naturally fade out and there are better things to be doing in life than try to force things. Forcing makes things worse, because there's nothing more awkward than someone being friendly to an uninvited guest because they feel obliged to do so. Overall it's better to see a lack of response, over a period of time, as a signal to move on and find other people who do want to know.

I guess ultimately what I'm getting at here is that in assessing my relationship with all things hypnotic I have to try to avoid the trap of seeing it as an entity in itself, and applying the same rule to it. It would be so easy to see hypnosis as an acquaintance with whom the relationship just isn't working and thus to just leave it and move on. So much of the time it does feel as though I am just forcing the interaction, that it's just me pretending something is there.

Fortunately I have been able to recognise the difference, that hypnosis is an intrinsic part of my personality, and to press on. This is all just as well, because the other day hypnosis got in touch with me.

What I mean by that, as I try to keep this increasingly fragile analogy going, is that recently I was given a post hypnotic suggestion without being aware of it, and not only that, I also unwittingly followed it.

To the reader who doesn't know what a post hypnotic suggestion feels like I shall try to explain it. Those who are expecting mystical external forces to seize their limbs and make them move uncontrollably in true zombie fashion will perhaps be disappointed. I find a post hypnotic suggestion doesn't really have any particular "feeling" associated but the effect is actually very familiar.

Try to imagine a situation where you feel inclined to do something but have to intervene with reasoning to stop yourself from doing it. A classic example, and one well related to impending festivities, might be being offered more chocolates from a box and finding your hand already in the box picking one before you've even considered whether you've already eaten far too many chocolates already. Indeed, it's not an unusual situation for the subconscious part of the brain to have taken action before the conscious mind fully appreciates what's going on. Indeed, one might even eat the chocolate without giving it a second thought.

The above is of course a suggestion which one gives oneself, especially if one likes chocolate. The thing is that if someone else has given you that suggestion, under hypnosis, and you have no memory of it the experience of following that suggestion is the same. You find yourself idly doing something and not knowing why, or indeed you don't even notice what you're doing because your mind is elsewhere. There is no "feeling" as such.

Then there's the other level, which is being aware of a suggestion and yet following it anyway, and the best comparison I can think of regarding that is lying in bed in the morning and resolving to get up, and yet staying in bed anyway.

So as I was saying I was recently given a suggestion in a trance that I was completely unaware of, which I subsequently followed without knowing.

How on earth did I get the suggestion without noticing? Well, when I told the friend I've been practicing with that they should consider me fair game little did I realise how inventive they could be. Catching someone completely unexpectedly is a great little convincer that hypnosis is working, as the subject will be unprepared and delighted to find that they've responded to the suggestion before they even knew what was happening. However, my friend in this case took the idea a little bit further and caught me when I'd fallen asleep! (Yes, the parties I hold in my flat are just that exciting!)

I remember a snap of the fingers, which I thought I had dreamed, but nothing else hypnotic. Apparently my eyes were fluttering like mad and I was twitching.

It's interesting because it suggests to me that the dreaming state that exists on the edge of sleep is not dissimilar to a hypnotic trance. How's that for a completely non-scientific piece of reasoning.

So yes, upon waking up I had absolutely no reason to believe anything had been going on. Until, that is, I found myself stuck where I was. What's more, I'd become stuck without even giving it a second thought, and it wasn't until my friend commented "try and move" before I realised that I was trying to and failing. It all happened in such a way as to remove any doubt as to whether it was something I was simply pretending to do.

So yes, something happened without any deliberate effort from me. My relationship with hypnosis, as a subject, is not simply wishful thinking and mindless persistence on my part.

Yay!

This was a couple of weeks ago. Needless to say my restored and limitless enthusiasm for hypnosis drove me to procrastinate over blogging about it for all this time.

I really should feel more positive than I do at the moment, but none of this has brought me out of the doldrums I've been in over the last few months. Perhaps I will find some opportunities to practice some hypnosis over Christmas.

Who knows, I might even finish "Analytical Subjects III"!

We'll see...

Disillusionment

Well, I very nearly made it through the whole of November without writing anything!

I would like to be able to report that my lack of posts over the last month or so has been down to my being extremely busy hypnotising lots of people. Truth be told this couldn't be further from the truth and whilst I have been busy with things such as work and my girlfriend, I have also been suffering from a complete lack of enthusiasm for all things hypnotic.

The first issue I've had is the age-old one. I simply haven't been finding the opportunities I need to get hold of people to hypnotise. Going out an finding people in Oxford would be the best idea, but I'm really not so keen on the idea of going it alone. There are regular meet-ups in London of course but to go there takes quite a long time, costs too much for me to go more than once a month, and in any case the atmosphere in central London isn't one I feel particularly comfortable in.

I think the biggest issue however comes from my own experiences of hypnosis.

As subjects some people seem to be able to get incredible experiences out of hypnosis, but the more I do this the more rare those people seem to be. For the majority of people the experience is more lukewarm, and for the unfortunate few like myself those experiences don't even exist, at least to start with.

When I first discovered hypnosis I was very excited by all of the possibilities it might present in terms of things I could experience through it, as well as what exeriences I could give to others. The reality for me has been extremely disappointing, and the rewards I have reaped for months and months of working at being a better subject have been tiny.

How the hell am I supposed to go out and sell this to people I approach if my own belief in what hypnosis can really do is so compromised?!

Hypnosis without trance

I feel I should give a plug at this point for James Rolph, who has recently started his own blog about his own unique approach to hypnosis. James has often come to the meetups in London, has a style of performance that I find extremely enjoyable to watch and from whom I have learned quite a few fun waking hypnosis tricks.


James' blog and videos can be found at http://www.hypnosiswithouttrance.com/

From my own perspective I think that "hypnosis without trance" is a bit misleading. I would personally say that trance is very much present during waking hypnosis, where a subject has their attention focused and is accepting suggestions. I suspect that James' definition of what constitutes "trance" (ie the eyes closed apparently sleep-like state) is different from mine.

Whatever one decides to call it, there is no denying the impressive results he is able to achieve through his methods. His site is definitely worth a look!

Man flu

Yes that's right, I'm not in London this evening.

As my girlfriend has observed I have the dreaded "man flu" and find myself confined to my flat feeling sorry for myself. I have a head that's completely bunged up and for the last couple of days I've been occupied with the arduous process of trying to sneeze and cough the deeper sections of my lungs out of my body.

I'm absolutely gutted that I can't make it to the meet this evening because as always I've been really looking forward to going. Nevertheless, in my current state there's no guarantee that if I tried to go to London I'd get there, and even if I did manage to find the place I know very well that someone with my symptoms traveling on the tube would be extremely popular... not.

So I'm going to sit in tonight and concentrate on not getting any sicker.

What I have been doing all day today is watching hypnosis videos on YouTube, of varying quality of course. One that I particularly liked was this one, taken from the beginning of a Las Vegas stage hypnosis show. The optical illusion is impressive and a nice way to get the audience's attention for the more hypnotic context of the later suggestibility test.


Some good ideas here for the magnetic hands set piece. In particular like the action of rubbing hands together, which of course aids in encouraging the hands come together. I'm also beginning to like the idea of my own hypno-assistant, although I doubt my girlfriend would approve.

How not to do it!

One thing about having hypnosis as a hobby is that subjects rarely, if not never, come to you. If you want to hypnotise people you have to ask them, or at least bring the subject up.

It rather reminds me of my experience of being male and being in my late teens to early twenties. I desperately wanted attention from women, but I learned the hard way that no amount of being an honest, considerate, and kind individual would make women notice me. Somebody, I forget who, told me "nobody is going to give you a girlfriend", and this turned out to be even truer than I cared to admit at the time. To this day I still hold to the belief that generally speaking the idea of single women is a myth perpetuated by wishful thinkers.

It is much the same when it comes to finding subjects to hypnotise. No amount of knowing how to be a good hypnotist will make the subjects come to you a bit of honest hypno-fun. The challenges are much the same. First it's a case of knowing where to go to find subjects, and secondly, if the potential subjects are strangers, having the confidence to approach them.

These musings are foremost in my mind at the moment because this weekend I was doing what I haven't done enough of recently, which is shamelessly leaping on any opportunity to bring hypnosis into the conversation when with friends. As I said before, if you never bring it up you never get the opportunity to practice.

I learned two lessons that evening, and both left me feeling rather foolish.

During one of these conversations a friend of mine, who as it happens I'd not seen in a few years said that he'd like me to hypnotise him. I was delighted to have the opportunity, so I went straight into magnetic fingers and then on to magnetic hands.

No response. The hands were rock solid in mid air.

I have nearly always found that an individual's response to magnetic hands is indicative of how good a subject they are going to be for me. It shows me how willing they are to follow suggestions and engage their imagination. Having known this person as long as I had and knowing very well that he is extremely suggestible I was frankly shocked at his lack of response to my suggestions.

I like to make a point of asking subjects who I fail with what it is they are thinking afterwards, and it was then that I found out why it hadn't been working. He told me that he was only doing it because his girlfriend had asked him to and that he wasn't expecting that it would work anyway. After I heard that I wasn't so bothered about my abilities, I just wished I'd been more perceptive about how willing my subject was.

A string of successes in front of friends is something that will build a reputation and expectations. I can't help but think that bad choices over when and who to try to hypnotise seem to have locked me into the opposite spiral as far as they are concerned.

This certainly wasn't helped by my second attempt at hypnosis that evening. Later on we were stood in a club in Oxford and a friend commented to me that I probably wouldn't be able to hypnotise her because it was too noisy. I told her that I didn't need to speak to hypnotise her. Intrigued, she asked how I would do that. I obliged by showing her a non-verbal Erickson handshake.

A non-verbal Erickson handshake is, for the practiced hypnotist, probably the most effort-free induction there is. To do it I ambiguously hold the subject's arm, making it unclear as to who is supporting it, and effectively stare out the subject until they go into trance. All I need to do is look them in the eye and give a barely inperceptible "that's right" nod any time they exhibit any signs of behaviour that is trance-like, such as blinking.

The first time she was distracted by a view of our friends over my shoulder, so I took her by the shoulders and gently turned her to face away from them so we could start again. This time her eyes closed and her head dropped forward in less than 30 seconds.

Just as I was feeling the elation that it had worked, and I stepped around to the side to talk into her ear to deepen, everything went horribly wrong. She snapped out of it suddenly with a squeal. Why? because being the clumsy idiot that I am I'd trodden on her foot!

I of course apologised immediately, but that was it for the evening as far as hypnosis was concerned. I am extremely glad that I learned this lesson on a friend and not a stranger who I'd approached, but I'm still kicking myself that I could be so stupid as to not think about where I was putting my feet!

I don't feel like a complete amateur at the moment. Really I don't.

Fun in Camden

I decided that this month I would like to turn up to on of the MMH meets in London, so yesterday I booked the afternoon off work and headed down to Covent Garden in London.

The MMH regulars are a great bunch of people who are at least as adept at impromptu magic tricks as they are at hypnosis, and they often have me completely in awe when they make cards, coins and rubber bands in their hands do all sorts of crazy things.

I am currently working very hard on making a coin vanish. Ben endorsed my efforts by saying that it "works well... on 12 year olds maybe".

For the most part this was for me a Social meetup, at least for the first half. We all sat in the pub and chatted for most of the rest of the afternoon, and then went for dinner.

After much procrastination we decided that we should all head off to Camden, or rather some of us. We made our way to a very nice studenty bar in Camden where we caught up with Darren.

It was at this point that Pete Crossland asked if he could hypnotise me, a consequence of my gaining a reputation as an easy subject I suspect. He used a hand-to-eye fixation induction and tried a few tricks like sticking me to my stool, which of course worked, and then told me that Darren was invisible so I couldn't see him, which worked only in so far as that I couldn't look at Darren directly, but of course I knew he was still there and could see him in my peripheral vision.

Pete's routine certainly turned a few heads nearby. I came out of trance to find several bystanders staring at me intently as though they expected me to explode or something similar at any minute. It was the foot in the door that all impromptu hypnotists like to get, so soon two girls were being shown hypnosis.

Pete handed me over to Darren, who did a routine with me that felt rather groundbreaking in terms of my experiences as a subject. He told me that I would not be able to answer any question regardless how easy or trivial it was. In the past I have found my reaction to such suggestions to consist of hearing the answer loud and clear inside my head, but I simply cannot bring myself to say the answer out loud.

This experience was very different. I found myself completely unable to think about the question at all. Each question simply threw my mind into confusion as it scrambled around in the dark trying to find the meaning of it and follow it through. It was a very new experience for me and I was genuinely speechless!

It just goes to show how quickly response to a certain type of phenomena can actually develop once the brain actually discovers how to do it! When it comes to amnesia that is something that is genuinely quite exciting, if a little scary. Rollercoaster scary.

Once again I found myself heading off just as things were starting to kick off properly with the local students. Great to see everyone again though!