First success!

How would you react if one of your friends, out of the blue, asked you “Hey, can I hypnotise you?”

I still find that the most challenging part of learning hypnosis is finding opportunities to practice my skills (or read as finding unsuspecting people who are willing to lend me their brain for an hour or so).

With few exceptions I have found that there are two attitudes to the above question:

1. "That's really cool! It's something I've always wanted to try. Yeah, I'm up for that! "
2. "NO! No way! No! No! No! Nonononononononononononono! NO!.... but can I watch you do someone else?"

I am very lucky in that a close friend of mine, a fellow survivor of my university, belongs group 1 and was willing to give the whole hypnosis thing a whirl in exchange for a free dinner. My initial hope was that I could use hypnosis in that first instance to make her forget that I owed her food; but in the event this was not required as she simply forgot on her own and cooked some dinner for me anyway. Wahey!

Anna (I'm not using her real name without asking her) and I met up at her flat, chatted for a bit about this and that as we often do, and then got started with some hypnosis.

On paper the actual process of putting someone into a state of hypnosis is mindbogglingly simple and easy to execute. That said, when you think about it, so is the process of approaching a girl in a bar and coming away with her phone number. There are a lot of parallels between the two.

For starters, if you approach either with the attitude "no way is this ever going to work" of course it won't. Fresh from my success with chatting up women through my time at university, where I usually managed to escape with only severe wounds to my pride and a feeling that the first digit of said girl's number might possibly be zero just like every other UK phone number, I felt good about my prospects for my first attempt at hypnotising someone.

Confidence is always the watch word. If often doesn't matter quite what you say, or how ridiculously cliché it might sound, as long as you believe it's going to work. How do you gain said confidence? Well practice and success of course. How do you gain those? Why, confidence of course. Ahh how I do love a nice paradox.

I have no idea where I managed to find the confidence I did on that evening. I suspect a lot of it stemmed from having read and read and read about hypnosis and the methods I would use to the point where I was completely certain about what I was doing. Anna has since confessed to me that she didn't believe at all that it was going to work. Somehow I was completely certain that it would.

Having warmed up on a few set pieces, which are little tricks of the mind that highlight the power of the imagination to a potential hypnotic subject, I went straight into a routine known as the rehearsal induction.

I'm told that the rehearsal induction is probably the most reliable rapid induction technique there is. I've since used it a few times; usually when I don't feel incredibly good about how things might go. If I pull out this particular tool, you know that I'm feeling down on my confidence. Actually, why am I saying this?! If I do this induction it means I feel that you're a brilliant hypnotic subject! Yes, that's it. That's exactly what I meant to say.

The general idea is that you link going into trance with lifting up the subject's arm in a certain way and practice it a few times with them before keeping them there and deepening the trance. The nice thing about this is that as the novice hypnotist you can keep repeating it until you build up the confidence that the subject really is going into a light trance to take things to the next level. 4 or 5 repetitions is usually enough, I ended up doing about 7 or 8 before I was confident enough to make a leap of faith and start deepening Anna's trance.

It is a wonderful feeling when you see signs that what you're doing is actually working. You see your subject visibly relax and other telltales such as fluttering eyelids and a change in breathing. I saw these happening with Anna as the deepening routine seemed to roll surprisingly easily off my tongue, she was clearly in a trance, so it was convincer time.

A good hypnotist always tests their work with a convincer. From what I've heard and experienced myself so far, being in hypnosis feels so completely, well, un-unusual for most people that they could be hypnotised and not subsequently believe it. A convincer is a little routine, usually quite simple, that convinces the subject that they have, after all, been hypnotised. It also convinces the hypnotist that what they're doing is actually working! If it doesn't work there's always the option of making an exit by diving out of the nearest door or window before the subject wonders why it's gone quiet and opens their eyes.

Having spent a few minutes deepening Anna's trance, and in the process saying "deeper and deeper" far too many times, I then set about a simple convincer. I started to tell her that her arm, on her lap at the time, was getting lighter. Lighter and lighter. To anyone who hasn't had their arm levitated by hypnosis I can say that it is one of the strangest experiences when your arm starts moving, seemingly with an agenda of its own. When her hand reached an inch or so above her leg Anna's eyes snapped open in complete amazement. "That is so weird!" she said.

Over the next hour or I got to try more inductions and more convincers. Looking back nothing that I achieved that evening was particularly amazing in practical terms, for me did feel like my first major milestone and I did go home completely buzzing. I was a hypnotist!

I'm much indebted to Anna for volunteering to be my first victim. I also fear that I still owe her that dinner...