Waking hypnosis

Just a few words about what I've been up to recently and a new concept that I've been enjoying exploring.

I've heard it said that there are two types of people. There are those who will say that their glass is half full, and there are those who will say it is half empty; optimists and pessimists. This may be so, but as I've gotten older I've started to realise that in truth the world actually belongs to the small group of people who have the shameless bloody cheek to hold out their glass and ask for a top-up!

In my university days when I was free and single, painfully so, I used to harbour enormous quantities of envy and loathing for the guys I saw around me who seemed to have some mystical ability to win female attention. I've never considered myself unattractive, but at the time I did feel as though there was some inherent invisible property that those other guys had that I didn't because all the evidence for it was there; they were getting all the attention and I wasn't.

If only, at the time, I had known about the NLP concept of modelling behaviour. The thing to do would have been to ask myself what those other guys were doing that I wasn't. Why were they being so successful at getting female attention when I wasn't?

The answer, of course, was that they were going out and finding it, whilst I was practically waiting for it to come to me. These guys were daring to ask for that attention, not just in words but in their actions, and daring to step up and make themselves known. They weren't wasting time pondering over what their chances might be if they asked, or when might be the best time to ask, they were just asking. Chances are that the answer was no for quite a lot of the time, but if someone actually dares to ask and does so enough times the answer will be yes, and for someone with the confidence to ask it seems the answer is yes more often than one would expect.

Nowadays of course I am older, wiser (hah!), and have found myself a very nice "yes" in the female department, which of course though Murphy's laws dictates that I am qualified come across the above knowledge on the basis that it is now useless to me.

That said the same lesson, to be cheeky and just ask, can apply to all aspects of life. For example, anybody who is buying a guitar from a shop should know to say "I could do with some spare strings" to the shop assistant. Just put yourself in that situation, or one that's analogous. What's the worst thing that can happen? They might then tell you how much spare strings are, but on the other hand they might just throw them in for free.

Perhaps you've read someone's blog or seen their YouTube channel and thought that you'd really like to talk to that person because they seem really interesting. Is the thought that they might not want to talk to you or might not find you interesting enough to reply reason enough not to try getting in touch? Nothing bad will happen if you do send that message to them, so try and they may just reply. You may even become friends or more; it's been known to happen.

Then, of course, one could try asking this of someone: "Hi. have you ever been hypnotised?"

In any of the above situations the worst thing that can happen is a simple "sorry, no". This may result in a temporary disappointment, and let's be honest that isn't really a disaster is it? A volcanic eruption, a tsunami, a plague of locusts, an escaped pack of velociraptors, Beyoncé Knowles, all-out nuclear war or an asteroid impact; these can all be classed as disasters, but not "sorry, no".

So the lesson is, don't ask, don't get!

How does all of this apply to hypnosis, and specifically what I've been up to recently?

Well, as we know there is nothing at all arcane or magical about the words or the actions taken by a hypnotist in order to induce trance in their subject, and there's nothing stopping anybody else from saying or doing exactly the same thing. What makes the hypnotist different is that he (or she) actually has the gall to do it and take it seriously.

The hypnotist dares to ask.

So using this gung-ho and sometimes downright cheeky attitude the hypnotist can pitch up in front of a new subject, give the spiel, zap them into trance, and they do this by daring to ask.

We can take this idea further though. The usual format for hypnosis, the one that everyone is familiar with, is this: The subject goes into trance, the hypnotist gives suggestions, the subject comes back out of trance and acts on those suggestions, the hypnotist then puts the subject back into trance, gives the next suggestion, and so on. This is quite an obvious way to proceed, and of course giving suggestions to someone who is obviously zoned out in a deep hypnotic trance doesn't really take any more nerve than getting them there in the first place.

Consider this though. What happens if the hypnotist actually has the nerve to start giving someone suggestions when they're out of trance?

A few weeks back a friend of mine asked me to help her with her university studies. She was having trouble concentrating on getting her work done without getting distracted by other things, and so she asked me to have a quiet word with her subconscious to tell it to get its act together. This friend responds best to a more indirect approach and doesn't like rapid inductions, so I went for a nice gentle and progressive approach and after about 10 minutes or so I thought I had her nice and deep so I went into giving her my suggestions. In total she was probably under for about 20 minutes.

Upon waking her from the trance she had absolutely no memory at all of anything I'd said beyond a short way into my induction. In fact she was convinced that she must have fallen asleep on me, and she was almost apologetic about that.

I have no idea what possessed me at that moment, but I simply said "If you weren't hypnotised why is your left hand completely stuck?"

She was absolutely amazed to find she couldn't move her hand.

I was even more amazed given that I'd not made any suggestions to that effect when she was in trance. I've done some waking hypnosis before of course, but in the past it had always been off the back of a suggestion in trance. For example, freezing someone's arm whilst they are in trance, then having woken them up, after a short while, telling them they can move it again, then freezing it again, and so on. i felt that this simple trick was a completely different order of magnitude though. I surprised myself with the impromptu nature of it, and the fact that it worked was a real buzz.

As I told my friend that her hand had now unstuck, but that was because her other hand had stuck instead, much to her bemusement, I resolved there and then to try more waking hypnosis in future.

A routine, which I think I saw first on YouTube but can't remember where, that I have since done a couple of times and taken a liking to is to give the subject something to hold such as an umbrella or a beermat. I've found it's easy to tell them they can't let go of it, and then have it become too heavy to lift, and then too light to hold down, having it draw their hands and arms down or up with it. All through waking suggestions alone.

My best effort so far in terms of an impromptu suggestion has been an occasion this weekend when I asked a friend, whom I'd hypnotised on several hours before, to place her hand on top of mine. I asked her to focus on her knuckle for just a moment and imagine her hand becoming completely stuck there. It was a bit of a long shot, almost a joke, but I was amazed when it actually worked!

Needless to say not everything I've tried has been successful, but the fact that now I'm sat thinking about it I can't remember specific examples of it failing I take to be a good sign. No hypnotist has a 100% success rate, and so I think the best approach is to learn from the times something doesn't quite work properly and just move on.

So there you have it. If you're a hypnotist and you're not sure whether you can give someone a waking suggestion, or indeed any suggestion, and have it work... well, have you asked?

Give it a try. I think more often than not you'll be pleasantly surprised.