Much of this post is ripped off my ramblings on a thread on UncommonForum, but I feel it's something I feel I'd like to write more about here, not least because it's such a difficult thing to do.
When I first started wanting to experience hypnosis for myself I performed all manner of internet searches looking for a good written account of what the experience is like. This turned out to be an incredibly difficult task I was amazed and I take real pride in my webcrawling ablities. I know now that such accounts do exist, but they are few and far between.
The question is, what is it like to experience a hypnotic trance?
Well, I have a personal theory that the people who really ask themselves that question are going to be the ones who find it most difficult to access trance, and certainly on the first attempt. I have so far found that the people I have hypnotised who went deepest first time seem to be those least able to put the experience into words, whilst awkward individuals who want to experience something so that we can describe it at great lengths in a blog, such as myself, find it most difficult. This is an adverse consequence of having an analytical mind I guess.
In any case this is just my theory.
So to describe my experience so far as best I can I would say that I am able to identify three "levels" of trance, although the boundaries between them are indistinct and blurred. All three feel very good, and it gets better the deeper I go, but it's enjoyable in a very intangible psychological sense; it's not like, for example, the physical euphoria one might feel after a massage. It feels good, but I can't put my finger on why, although it is also addictive and I will confess that I am fast becoming a trance junkie.
So the first level, light trance, I would say feels amazingly unremarkable. It feels like I'm sat there with my eyes closed with the hypnotist talking to me. I've had people tell me "Wow! You were completely under then!", to which I've thought "I was, was I? It didn't feel like it". The only thing about this state that confirms to me that I'm in trance is my willingness to stay in an unusual physical pose, and the way in which whenever the thought of something that I think is witty to say crosses my mind I don't do my usual thing of just blurting it out.
The second level of trance feels much like the first, except that it feels like my ability to follow what's going on beyond my own thoughts seems start slipping from my grasp. It's the "hang on, I wasn't fully paying attention to that last bit" thought, where what was just said is fuzzy or sometimes I can't even remember it. Daydreaming in school or university lectures is the closest parallel I can think of. My conscious inner monologue also feels like it's slowing down, or becoming more sparse, which may sound odd, but that's the best way I can describe it. A strange line of thought is whether it's possible to quantify how much one is consciously thinking, and that it's impossible if one has stopped consciously thinking because both require conscious thought surely?
The third and final level is when I feel as though I've stopped thinking entirely. My thoughts seem to wind down to a complete halt, leaving me in a kind of black nothingness. The one time I have thus far been able to achieve it that felt very good, but the very moment I realised I had gone that deep by sheer definition I no longer was. It took about 30 minutes of deepening to get me there, and much to my disappointment I have not been able to get back there since.
Now I am starting to build up this body of experience it seems to me that expectation of something far more profound and Earth shattering seems to be a barrier to a lot of analytical individuals experiencing being hypnotised. Or rather such individuals are actually experiencing trance but simply don't realise they are because it doesn't meet those standing expectations.
The lesson for those people, as it was for me, is that if you have confidence and believe that you're going into trance you will go into trance.
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