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!

Analytical Subjects II

In part 1 I talked a bit about why I think it is that analytical subjects have trouble with hypnosis. In this post I will talk about where I think most hypnotists go wrong in trying to hypnotise them and what the most common mistakes are.

Hypnotists who understand the issue with analytical subjects least fall broadly into two categories.

Firstly there are the hypnotists who are good subjects themselves and thus have difficulty comprehending how anybody could find trance difficult, which is quite understandable. In this case it is not so much a case of the blind leading the blind, rather a case of the sighted teaching the blind to play darts.

Actually no, that's an awful analogy but I'm sure you get the point. People who find it easy to be hypnotised often find it hard to explain just how they do it because they take so much of what they do for granted, like knowing where the target is.

Secondly there are the hypnotists who are not themselves good subjects or who are unwilling to even be subjects. These are often the worst offenders, because they have little or no understanding of what the experience of trance is really like and develop all kinds of misconceptions based on the reactions of their subjects. Don't get me wrong, some of the world's best hypnotists are no doubt poor subjects themselves, but it can lead to a complete lack of understanding about what the subject is experiencing.

Hypnotists who have themselves never been hypnotised will see subjects appear to fall like dominoes in their wake and think they're dealing out dynamite. Perhaps they are, but the point here is that that it doesn't always feel like that for the subject; as a general rule I think the subject nearly always underestimates how much hypnosis is really affecting them.

So the hypnotist will think that trance is this magic state and all that they have to do is get the subject there, get the subject into it and they've onto a winner. This is often a reason why such individuals have trouble experiencing hypnosis themselves; they go into a light trance with no trouble at all, but it feels so distinctly unimpressive that they believe it hasn't worked. The experience doesn't meet the expectation.

Mistake 1 - Trance or bust

Mistake, or indeed major misconception, number 1 is the nature of trance as an experience for the subject. Both of the above types of hypnotists expect trance to have some profound and, frankly, incapacitating effect on their subjects. Not only that, this expectation is picked up upon by the subject. Both parties in the hypnotic contract, hypnotist and subject, expect something astounding to happen when the word "sleep" is said.

Analytical subjects "don't get" hypnosis. They think critically by nature, thinking uncritically does not come naturally to them and especially not when they are required to do it on demand. However, having said that like anyone they do actually enter trance; they will have their eyes closed with their attention completely focused on the hypnotist, which is more than what's needed for trance. The important thing to understand though is that don't realise they're entering trance. Analytical subjects only go into a very light trance so they will not see or feel any evidence of anything unusual going on, and so they won't believe anything has happened.

This is where I think the build up of anticipation, which is usually very important for hypnotists, actually works against them when working with an analytical subject. The experience doesn't meet the expectation.

If the hypnotist expects trance incapacitate or at least impress their subject and it doesn't they will believe that they have failed to induce it. They don't recognise that, although the subject may not be convinced, trance is happening nonetheless and give up.

The hypnotist gives up, and of course that is the point at which they fail.

Mistake 2 - Special inductions

Mistake number 2 is what seems to come naturally after mistake number 1; the idea that there is a special induction out there that will work. They think their first induction failed to produce hypnosis, but if they use the right induction the magic will happen.

Many hypnotists will at this point start trying all sorts of special inductions. I lose count of all the times that I've heard of hypnotists saying words to the effect that "Oh, an analytical subject eh? You need an instant/confusion/overload induction for them!" Sure enough, the hypnotist will soon have the poor subject hopping up and down on one foot singing the national anthem backward whilst balancing a fish on their head, all so that this time when they say "sleep!" it will work!

As a subject I went through a phase of trying all sorts of inductions in the hope that something would work on me and a number of hypnotists, most notably Darren, have performed many instant and confusion inductions on me. Anyone who knows Darren will know how good he is at these, and when he demonstrated them on me he executed them flawlessly. However, none of these inductions produced a trance that was different to any of the others I'd already experienced, and as I didn't recognise that I really was in a trance I thought they hadn't worked.

If the subject didn't feel as though they were in a trance the first time they are much less likely to believe it a second time with an even bigger build up to the same thing. Trust me, the momentary confusion passes leaving the subject sat there with the same feeling they had before and when nothing appears to have happened this is when the hypnotist's credibility crumbles into dust.

Don't get me wrong, these inductions do work and they can be a lot of fun but in my personal experience they are less than useless with an analytical subject without also having the right attitude to the rest of the process. I cannot stress enough that to an analytical subject trance simply feels like the unremarkable feeling that they're sat there with their eyes closed. The more dramatic the fashion in which they are put there the more underwhelming the experience will seem to them when they arrive.

I call this approach to hypnotising an analytical subject the search for the "magic bullet" induction. This is the idea that for everybody there is a special induction that will put them in very deep instantaneously, if only it could be found. It is usually touted by hypnotists with little or no experience of trance themselves. It is impossible to disprove this assertion, as one can always insist that the magic bullet simply hasn't been found yet, however I am extremely skeptical.

In my experience if a willing subject is with a hypnotist whose approach they're comfortable with any induction is as good as any other; the subject will perform within the bounds of their abilities, perhaps pushing that envelope outwards in the process. I assert that trance is a skill; everybody has a latent ability when they start out, everybody gets better with practice, and everybody learns at a different rate. A good and experienced teacher with a good understanding of what the subject is experiencing can help this process, but I have seen and heard of nothing that will produce the step change needed to turn an analytical subject into a somnambulist in an instant.

I should stress that it is in my own best interests to be disproved on this point, but sadly so far I have not.

Mistake 3 - Trying to be clever

This mistake is less serious but definitely worth mentioning because it is more common.

The worst offender as far as this is concerned is the hypnotist that's got all the language patterns, all the clever syntax, all the textbooks, and thus all the answers they think they need. "Just say this, because it distracts the critical faculty away from the first statement and then you can confuse them with the next statement which is compounded and forced through by this particular adjective, and then hey presto!" etc etc. Then they pat themselves on the back for being so clever.

If analytical subjects are good at anything it is analysing what's going on. Foremost in their mind is always a sense of wanting to understand what's happening, the process, what the rules are and how things work. If they get the slightest impression that the hypnotist is withholding anything from them, or trying to trick or lead them blindly in any way, they get defensive until they have their answer. "What's the scam here?" sums it up nicely.

This is why overload or diversion tactics are not necessarily a good idea for analytical subject in my opinion. Far from having the desired effect the subject will in fact realise what's happening and instinctively put their attention where it's not being directed to try to understand the nature of the trick being pulled on them.

Analytical individuals do not take anything for granted, may have read up on hypnosis beforehand and faced with the usual pre-talk "lies to children" may also decide to ask difficult questions like "why?". They become suspicious if they believe the hypnotist isn't being sincere, or is unable or unwilling to answer their questions.

A lot of hypnotists simply like to aid the process of hypnosis by setting up a positive context with their subject by selective use of the information, and this isn't a bad thing at all. In such a case it's fair enough and the mistake isn't being too clever, the mistake is not being clever or subtle enough and getting caught out.

There is no need to lie to or patronise an analytical subject, and the hypnotist who does immediately loses all credibility.

Mistake 4 - Giving up

Mistake number 4 is the worst. This is giving up on the subject and writing them off as a lost cause. The belief that a number of hypnotists have is that some people cannot be hypnotised, and that some people simply aren't worth working with because they "won't go". There are some otherwise very talented hypnotists who are included in this number.

What happens is that the hypnotist, having tried and failed with everything they can think of, comes to the conclusion that the willing individual in front of them cannot be hypnotised. There are a number of rationalisations commonly used, one is to believe that some people simply can't be hypnotised, and another is believing that some fear or other form of reluctance on the part of the subject is preventing the hypnosis from working.

This is nonsense. I know this because I was once told such things myself.

There are some people who cannot be hypnotised but these are not intelligent and willing individuals. People with diminished mental abilities cannot be hypnotised. There are people who are simply unwilling to be hypnotised in a formal context, which is fair enough. I am firmly of the belief that anybody who wants to be hypnotised and puts their mind to it can do so.

Something that is worth considering is the question of what the objective of the hypnosis is, and whether can a particular subject be hypnotised to achieve the right sort of phenomena within a useful timescale. Analytical subjects don't usually give good results straight away and if the purpose of the demonstration is to entertain a group of people it is understandable if a hypnotist concludes that it's not worth the effort and moves on. Stage hypnotists have no use at all for analytical subjects because they are in the business of entertainment, they only want the best subjects they can find, and a stage hypnosis show with poor subjects too dull for words. This is of course entirely different to a one-on-one context where the focus can be focused solely on the subject's needs.

In the event that the hypnotist is having no success it is better for them to explain to the subject that perhaps a different time, a different place, and possibly a different hypnotist might be better for them, than to tell them that they can't be hypnotised. If they are willing, they can be.

...and next...

In my third and final installment I will explain how I would go about hypnotising an analytical subject.

Analytical subjects I

Following on from my recent discussion of the acting dilemma I feel that I should take a while to talk about the topic of analytical subjects.

The lack of decent methods for analytical subjects, as Javier recently commented, quite rightly in my opinion, is something of an elephant in the room that hypnotists seem to shy away from talking about.

What we are talking about in this thread are the people who just "don't get" hypnosis. They just don't respond. You talk at them, give suggestions and nothing happens. There are plenty of people who just don't want to be hypnotised and will simply not go under, in a formal context anyway, and these are usually people who have been pressured into trying in the first place. What I am talking about here, however, are people who want to to be hypnotised but somehow can't seem to manage it.

I don't view my own model as definitive, but I would like it if my views on this stimulate debate. I am speaking as someone who was one of the worst examples of this sort of subject and I have a passionate desire to put across where it was that all of the approaches that hypnotists tried on me were going wrong, and even making the problem worse.

In this post I will talk about my model of hypnotisability. In subsequent posts I shall outline how I would go about hypnotising an analytical subject, or indeed how I would have liked someone to hypnotise me if I'd had access to this model this time last year. I will also explain where I think many hypnotists go wrong.

MBTI

I should talk a bit about the way my model of hypnosis explains the way in which different people respond to hypnosis differently.

My model is heavily influenced by something called the "MBTI", or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Whilst this is not directly related to hypnosis or NLP in any way I do recommend reading a bit about it because it is a very interesting way of evaluating and understanding the way in which people make decisions.

I have mentioned MBTI before in my earlier post entitled "Typealyzer". Put simply it's a model that regards personality type as similar to left or right handedness: individuals are either born with, or develop, certain preferred ways of thinking and acting. In the model there are four opposite pairs of attributes, or dichotomies, which form 16 possible combinations (for example INSF, or ESTJ) each representing a distinct psychological type. The model asserts that individuals will, on the scale between each dichotomy, naturally prefer one type of behaviour over another, just as a right handed person will prefer to write with their right hand over their left hand. Indeed, people often find using their opposite psychological preferences more difficult, even if doing so would be to their benefit.

The four dichotomies are as follows:

• Extraversion - Introversion
• Sensing - iNtuition
• Thinking - Feeling
• Judging - Perceiving

I won't go into the meanings of these scales, interesting though they are, although I expect "Extraversion - Introversion" and "Thinking - Feeling" probably speak for themselves.

An individual's preferred behaviour type is often referred to simply by the four attributes toward which they lean. In my November article last year I subjected this blog to an analysis and the result was "ISTP". Most interestingly, if I typalyze BlackMeridian now I get this:

INTP - The Thinkers

"The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about."

As I said last November "INTP" has always been the result of MBTI tests I have taken in the past and it seems that with more information the algorithms the typealyser uses reach the same conclusion.

It's important to stress that these aren't laws, merely an individuals natural preferences, and something that the letters alone do not indicate is the extent of that preference. It's important to see an individual's relation to each dichotomy as a position on a scale rather than an absolute predilection for one type of behaviour or the other, and as my position on the scale between S and N has always been close to the borderline I was not too surprised when I got ISTP the first time instead of INTP. In truth I think my profile exists somewhere between the two.

My preference for Introversion and Thinking are, however, at the extreme ends of their respective scales. This would seem to indicate that I nearly always prefer to be in quiet surrounds and not be the centre of attention and that I usually like to think logically instead of emotionally, a generalised indication that is in fact very true to how I am.

MBTI is far from being a complete model of a person's brain, but it is a useful tool for understanding people and it's something that I believe in quite strongly. I feel the same way about the way my own model, which I will now explain, relates to hypnosis.

Critical or Uncritical?

So how does this relate to analytical hypnotic subjects?

I should say that I actually hate the term "analytical"; I prefer to use the term "critical", but the meaning in this context is much the same.

In my model of hypnosis I like to employ another dichotomy which, although completely unrelated to MBTI, borrows from it the idea of representing an individual's natural preference with a position on a scale. Such a scale, which I will call "U-C", or "Uncritical - Critical", would place natural somnambulism at one end, and at the other the behaviour of a willing but completely unresponsive subject - an "antisomnambulist" if you like.

The position on a scale does not state how someone will always behave, merely how they prefer to behave, what's instinctive to them. Also as with MBTI an individual's position on the scale may move depending on time, experience and context.

For the sake of my model I assert that there are two kinds of thought, critical and uncritical. Uncritical thought is when someone thinks and accepts something because it feels right to them, it's irrational and instinctive. Critical thought is the opposite of this, it's about reaching a conclusion through a logical, analytical thought process.

Uncritical thought is the kind of thought required to be in the state of hypnosis, Critical thought is the kind of thought that can be used to block hypnosis.

Needless to say everybody thinks with a mixture of both of these thought processes, but what we could do is plot a position on the U-C scale for each individual that would reflect which kind of thought process that they have a natural inclination to favour over the other.

What this means is that, in my model at least, an individual with a preference for uncritical thinking will make a better hypnotic subject than someone with a preference for critical thinking because when thrust into the unfamiliar territory of hypnosis they will favour their uncritical thoughts over their critical thoughts. Indeed, the more someone prefers to listen to their uncritical thoughts the more likely they are to listen to them to the exclusion of critical thoughts that contradict them. Their hand might, for example, get stuck to a table. Likewise the more someone favours being critical the more likely they are to shrug off such crazy irrational thoughts in favour of evidence and reasoning; of course the hand can move, what's stopping it?

Needless to say most people are nearer the middle of this scale, but some people live at the extremes. For example, one could argue that people who have "permanosis" (a term I have heard Anthony Jacquin use to describe being in a permanent state of trance) are people who are at the uncritical end of the scale. They have critical thoughts, but their thoughts are dominated by uncritical thoughts.

My assertion is that an analytical subject is someone who is well toward the critical end of the scale. Whilst they have uncritical thoughts their thought processes are dominated by critical thinking. They like to analyse, examine, reason, and will have a mistrust of how they simply feel about something if they can't find a logical reason to explain it.

Why be analytical?

So why analytical subjects analytical? I contend that they are critical simply because that's who they are, and frankly it's not as of itself a bad thing.

I said above that critical thinking can be used to block hypnosis, and I think it is this that leads many hypnotists to conclude that an analytical subject, who can't help but think critically, is someone who is afraid to go into hypnosis, or that they are resisting. This is an assertion that the completely willing subject will find at least confusing, and possibly baffling or annoying, because they know that they are doing everything they can to cooperate. They know it's nothing to do with fear.

If we stretch the definition of "fear" a little we could perhaps consider the way in which someone with a preference for a certain kind of behaviour might feel when faced with the opposite sort of behaviour. This is more a kind of awkwardness or discomfort and feeling out of place than actually being afraid. For example, an extreme introvert in a nightclub would feel very uncomfortable. A creative logical thinker in an art lesson might draw up the design for a helium-filled trans-Atlantic giant rigid airship passenger liner, complete with buoyancy and fuel consumption calculations and then feel very awkward when trying to explain their work in artistic terms to the rest of the class, who have drawn pretty flowers.

These are examples of when someone "doesn't get" something that the others around them are finding easy and natural simply because of the way they are used to thinking.

Analytical subjects just "don't get" hypnosis. It's not a defense mechanism; they just aren't accustomed to listening to the right part of their mind.

Now I have heard some people contend that young children don't have trouble with uncritical thinking and go easily and deeply into trance all the time, so therefore adults must also be able to. Perhaps so, but young children are also known to wet themselves or fall on their faces without putting a hand out, something that adults would find very difficult. Many people could put their foot in their mouth when they were children but most can't now. People grow up and develop as individuals; an adult's mind is very different to that of a child.

This is all about who someone is, and not what they were.

The good news?

The good news in all of this is that analytical subjects can be hypnotised; anybody who is willing can be. In parts 2 and 3 I will talk about the mistakes I think many hypnotists make when trying to hypnotise analytical subjects, and I will outline how I would go about it.

The acting dilemma

On a couple of occasions over the last 9 months or so I have mentioned something that I have come to know as "the acting dilemma". This is a name that I believe Liz first coined, and I think it fits it very well because it is a real dilemma that doesn't seem to ever go away.

I should say if hypnosis is working for you as a subject just fine look away now. To know the acting dilemma is to become part of the acting dilemma!

It seems to me that the dilemma is what holds back an analytical subject from knowing how to be hypnotised, and that overcoming it is the only way to move forward. You see, to a great extent hypnosis works through belief. The "normal" (if there is such a thing!) subject extends their belief to the premise that hypnosis is going to work and as a consequence they find themselves responding, which then supplies the proof. Analytical subjects suffer from a critical outlook that requires proof to be provided before anything can be believed. They have it back to front, and it causes no end of trouble!

If an analytical subject can be persuaded to have a bit of faith and persistence they will soon find a seldom heard part of their mind, an irrational part that wants hypnosis to be real, calling out to them compelling their conscious mind to follow the suggestions being given. This may cause the subject to decide to play along.

It is this which poses the acting dilemma, which is as follows:

"Am I doing this because I'm hypnotised, or am I just pretending that I'm hypnotised? Am I not just acting?"

I wrote about this back in June in a post entitled "How to be hypnotised", in my answer to question 4, and in that post I explained the solution to the acting dilemma. This is not to worry and to follow the suggestions even if it feels as though you are consciously doing so. The idea is that soon enough you will find that responding becomes second nature and in effect the process becomes a subconscious one. "Fake it 'till you make it".

This works; trust me, it does! For example, initially when I was told by the hypnotist to "sleep" I would consciously close my eyes, consciously relax my body, and try to go into a trance, which frankly always felt as though I was just sitting there like a lemon with my eyes closed; nothing special at all. As I mentioned in my last post I have now reached a stage where my response to such a suggestion can feel completely involuntary and I have been in trances recently where my awareness of the world outside has fluctuated whilst a haphazard assortment of irrelevant thoughts have bounced around the inside of my mind like golf balls in a blender. It feels good, and it's definitely worth the months of "pretending".

Using this solution also becomes even easier if you use the rationalisation that telling yourself that you're only acting is in itself a rationalisation, and the real reason you're following the suggestions is hypnosis.

The problem is that using this solution to escape the acting dilemma is a bit like signing a pact with the devil, as I will explain in a minute. There is more to it, and it is news that is probably more depressing for the hypnotist than the subject.

The question is how does an analytical subject go about achieving the twin pinnacles of hypnosis, namely amnesia and hallucination? It's something that's been nagging at me for a while, but something happened recently that brought it to the front of my mind, and a recent conversation I had with Liz confirmed my suspicions.

At the last meet in London Darren hypnotised me and as part of the routine he was doing gave me a direct suggestion that I'd have amnesia for what he'd just told me. Now the fact that I'm writing this now will tell you that I did not forget Darren telling me to choose the five of spades from the deck, but that's not the point. The point is that I felt an incredibly strong urge from deep inside telling me to lie to Darren and to act as though I had forgotten!

I know I've said in the past that hypnosis certainly isn't an outside force, but as time goes by I'm increasingly finding that there are occasions when it seems that way. In this situation it was as though hypnosis was inside my mind, like a cliché demon on my shoulder, imploring me to lie against all common sense. Anyone who has experienced a post hypnotic suggestion that they're consciously aware of will know what I'm talking about, that almost instinctive desire to do something that doesn't make sense. It's a bit like the feeling that tries to make you have a little bit more of something you know you've had enough of, such as sweets, cake, ale, roller coaster rides or Scandinavian symphonic power metal.

The urge to just go along with the suggestion, even though the rational part of me was insistent that of course it could remember Darren telling me which card to pick, was very strong. I muddled through the routine with Darren, my head spinning from the dilemma, sort of saying I could remember but perhaps not, maybe; I did a very good job of confusing both of us.

Now if we go back to the dilemma and apply the same solution we reach the conclusion that to learn how to achieve amnesia it becomes necessary to follow the suggestion sincerely and pretend that it's working, even though it appears not to be. To do that though it becomes necessary to lie to the hypnotist! Likewise with hallucinations.

When I asked Liz about this she said that I was quite right about this, and that her success rate with difficult suggestions like amnesia and hallucinations was far from 100%, and certainly less than it might seem to anyone watching.

A list of all the embarassingly silly weird and wacky hallucinations I've done with her ran through my mind, and I found myself wondering which, if any, she had actually experienced as real.

"You'll never know" she said, with a grin.

I appreciated that she was sabotaging her own battle with the acting dilemma by admitting to me that she didn't forget or hallucinate everything she was told to, let alone admitting to it at the time. It occurred to me that I could use a hypnotic truth compulsion to get her to truthfully answer whether or not she was really pretending, but as I thought Liz's boyfriend wouldn't appreciate it if I destroyed her brain with a logical paradox I restrained myself on that one.

What I also realised, with some horror, was that the only way I have of telling whether someone is hallucinating, as a hypnotist, is what they tell me. It's their subjective reality after all. How do I know they aren't all lying to me! Is that all that hypnotic hallucination really is? Merely an overwhelming urge to insist that it happened when it didn't?

"I don't like to talk too much about this" Liz commented, "because it tends to depress people."

Too right, but even so I cannot conceive of any reason why Liz would persist in pretending her hallucinations exist if none of them ever did. At the end of the day she has a pain-in-the-ass analytical mind, and she'd simply give up and focus on other stuff that does work. I believe her when she says she really can hallucinate, bless her fibbing socks.

My own experience of amnesia suggestions do seem to suggest that it can be more than just an elaborate lie. I know I said I could remember the trance I mentioned earlier, or rather my rational mind was instant that it could remember. What I did find though was that when I tried to access those memories to any significant amount it was much more difficult than it should have been. It was like trying to reach out and grab a handful of smoke. It was a lot fuzzier than it should have been. Hmmm, interesting...

The trouble is that as far as I can see there is only one way in which I can find out for certain whether true amnesia or hallucinations are really possible or not and that's to keep going. I should keep walking down this path, paved with lots and lots of little white lies, getting better as a subject to the point where I can achieve these phenomena.

When I do, dear reader, rest assured that you should not believe a word I say!

Click

Last November, only a month or so after I'd started out being a hypnotist, I asked the following question in one of my earliest posts, entitled "Sleep!".

"What does the experience of being zapped back into trance in an instant feel like? This is where I guess I have to ask for answers on a postcard."

I wrote it long before I actually tried hypnosis properly and had my bubble burst a bit by my apparent complete lack of receptiveness to it. That was last December, but of course since early this year I have been working hard to improve my abilities as a subject. Last night I had an experience that made me realise just how far I've come since those early months, and which I would like to share.

My response to the instruction to "sleep" so far has been one best described as "yeah, okay...". It's felt as though I have made the conscious decision to close my eyes and go back into trance, partly because I enjoy being in trance and partly because it's something you agree to do when you volunteer to be a subject. More recently I have come to accept that the above is probably more of a conscious rationalisation of what's really happening, which is probably a more subconscious process.

But it's always felt as though I've had time to think: "Trance? Yeah, okay. Why not. Let's just do that." Or indeed, as I confess I'm a bit of a junkie, sometimes: "Trance? Did someone say trance? Where? I want! My trance! Gimme!"

In either event I will allow myself to go limp, feeling compelled to go for maximum dramatic effect.

My experience last night was rather different. The friend I was with had given me the suggestion that I would go back into hypnosis whenever she clicked her fingers. On the face of it this might not seem any different from her simply saying "sleep", but for me the experience was something else entirely. This was especially as it caught me completely off guard; I did not see it coming at all. We were mid-conversation, I was in fact mid-thought when it came.

*CLICK*

It was like my reality hit a brick wall.

That's the best way I can describe it. There was no warning, no build up, no time to think about what I was doing. One moment I was sat there eyes open, chatting and thinking away, and the next everything had just stopped. For a split second the click was the only thing in the world and it seemed in the same instant that my eyes were already closed. Before I had a clue what had happened I was already in the warm darkness of trance and didn't care about the outside world. Don't ask how my body reacted, whether or not I flopped like a rag doll, I honestly don't remember noticing!

The change of state from alert wakefulness to the fuzziness of trance happened so instantaneously that there was absolutely no question whether I'd chosen to or pretended to follow the suggestion. It was all over by the time I had a clue what was happening.

It was, on balance, one of the most awesome experiences I have ever had.

The September Meet

Cognitive bias, I thought to myself, is an interesting thing.

Thursday found me looking out of a train window watching the beautiful Thames valley whizzing past the window at 125mph. I had left my flat in order to make a brisk walk to the railway station to catch my train to London. I had discovered on arriving at the station that my train was running 15 minutes late. The train ahead of it, which would also have gotten me to London, I had just seen pulling out of the station as I arrived, on time to the nearest second.

"Bloody typical" would be the obvious response.

Is it typical though? Had both of the trains been on time, or if the earlier one had been late enough for me to catch and I'd gotten to London earlier than planned I probably wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Over 90% of trains in the UK arrive within 10 minutes of their scheduled time, but of course it's the occasions when they don't that catch our attention. What percentage of car journeys into urban centres can be said to suffer less than a 10 minute delay, especially at busy periods?

Best to appreciate the good things when they are present, as opposed to by their absence. So I thought as I appreciated being able to sit back and watch the mesmerising experience of the countryside rolling past. Train travel trances are much better than car travel trances I thought; you can go much deeper and there's no risk of causing an accident.

We'd agreed on a change of venue for this meet, nearer to Covent Garden, as well as the unusual date so on arriving it took me a while to find Ben, who'd found us a table in a cramped corner of the pub.

We chatted for a bit about magic tricks, and Ben told me how he'd spent time recently watching Peter Crossland and Marcus Lewis, hypnotists we know through the MMH group, working the crowd and he reckons that a couple of magic tricks are easily the best way to break the ice with strangers. Ben then demonstrated a really cool card trick to me, and I felt the need to redouble my attempts to learn a few magic tricks.

As if on cue Marcus joined us at that point, followed by Darren, and then followed by numerous phone calls from others trying to find out where the venue was. It turns out that as I had been the person to alert the Last Thursday Group to the date and venue, and as facebook in their continuing quest to evolve their interface into one that is utterly incomprehensible and impossible to use, it seems that the invites I thought I'd sent out hadn't gone out, and so only a few of us made it, and most of the others had to call us to find out where the heck we were.

After showing us a few impressive magic tricks Marcus asked if he could hypnotise me. I was actually about to ask him the same question, but I didn't especially mind going first. He used an eye fixation induction that had me staring at a playing card held in my hand, which seems to be quite popular at the moment. He then did a number of simple routines with me such as sticking me to my stool (which in this case didn't actually feel like sticking, but rather had me insisting that I was absolutely fine sitting where I was thankyou!) and having me forget my name.

Next I took a turn hypnotising Marcus. I already knew he was a highly responsive subject, so I felt confident using the Erickson handshake on him. What I wasn't prepared for was the way in which, just as I was starting, his head dropped and his legs nearly gave way under him I was already feeling very rusty with my patter, not having zapped anybody in a while, and in the noisy crowded space it seemed that it was all that I could do to keep him upright.

I tried a few suggestions, but when I brought him back from trance it didn't feel as though he was completely back, he was completely dazed and barely responded to anything I or anyone else was saying or doing. I tried patter to the effect that he would feel lucid and wide awake when I woke him up, but it really didn't seem to make much of a difference. Perhaps the situation was getting away from me simply because I was beginning to feel as though I wasn't fully in control. Whatever the reason, I wasn't feeling happy and decided to leave things there. I did a wake up and bought Marcus a drink by way of apology.

Next Darren had a go at hypnotising me with the old classics like sticking my hand to my drink and making me unable to say my name. I got my revenge by hypnotising him afterwards and having him split his sides laughing whenever I showed him a beer mat. After this I took some time out and just watched what everyone else was doing.

Darren came to me again later on and chatted to me saying that the trances I'd done with him were great, but I needed to work on my wakeups because he and Marcus had both been very groggy after I'd brought them back up from trance. I appreciated the advice from Darren and I take such comments completely seriously, they mean a lot to me, but at the same time I felt a little bit amateurish and out of my depth.

He then offered to show me a card trick. I knew he was up to something immediately; Darren doesn't know any magic tricks.

He had me staring at a card in a way that was not at all unfamiliar from the way Marcus had done to me, and I'd done to him earlier, then sure enough I was down and into trance. This time Darren tried a reverse mind reading trick on me, which I believe is taken from Anthony Jacquin's Manchurian Approach DVD. Basically it's a card trick where the subject is simply told which card to choose by the hypnotist, and then given amnesia for the suggestion.

This was the first time someone has given me an explicit instruction to forget that something has happened; Darren is just cheeky and confident enough to give something like that a try even if it probably won't work. My response to this routine made me feel closer to getting full amnesia, but very it's very hard to put the experience into words. I felt an overriding desire to go along with the routine and to lie to Darren that I couldn't remember being told which card to choose. At first that might seem like I was just pretending, and perhaps so, but the crazier thing about it was that whilst I knew very well that I had the memories of being given that suggestion I found actually getting at those memories to be very difficult! It was like trying to reach out and grab a handful of smoke, I could see what I was reaching for but when I tried to grab something for a closer look my hands were coming back empty. This hasn't really happened before.

I am getting better as a subject. Definitely.

Marcus had been chatting to the barmaid, who was interested in hypnosis and wanted to give it a try. Hypnosis wise he didn't seem to be having much success, although she clearly enjoyed having his full attention.

After hypnosis didn't really seem to work for her with Marcus, Darren stepped up and had a go.



This all led up to what I think is probably the best reaction to an induction I have ever seen, although not in hypnotic terms.

Darren had already tried one induction and she'd not "gone under", to her satisfaction, so Darren tried a hand drop induction on her. He had her push down on his hand, take a deep breath... that's right... push harder... take another deep breath... SLEEP!

The girl's eyes popped open wide in an expression of complete shock, showing white all the way around her pupils, and she recoiled as though Darren had suddenly turned into a poisonous snake. It's an image that will stay with me for a long, long time.

She clearly wasn't going to go under but Marcus used his initiative at this point. He offered to hypnotise her later, got her to write down her phone number on one of his cards, and then proceeded to do an awesome card trick routine by stringing effect after effect. It was incredible to watch.

I made it back to Paddington in good time to catch my train home. It was on time too, but then thinking back I can't remember any train back from London after a meet running late.

I'd had a good evening out, but all in all my feelings as I sat staring through the window at the blackness outside were not especially positive. For the first time at one of these meets had I managed to make myself feel like a complete amateur. Everyone else at the meets seems to be making more opportunities for themselves to get out and hypnotise people and they are absolutely awesome to watch, whereas I felt incredibly rusty and no better at this than I was many months ago.

I really need to start finding more opportunities to get out and zap somehow.