A change in the winds

This is just a short message to explain a few things.

The last month or so has been quite a difficult one for me for a number of personal reasons, which I won't go into. Suffice to say that I am feeling a lot better now and a lot more positive about the future.

However, I also feel as though I am entering a new phase in my life and I don't think that BlackMeridian is going to feature much in it. Hypnosis is part of who I am now, just as anybody who has learned how to use and experience hypnosis will understand, but even with this being the case I don't feel as though I will have much time or energy to keep this blog up to date in the way I have in the past. There are other writing projects that I want to pursue.

I hope that the words I have written here will continue to be the help and inspiration to others that many generous people have said that they are.

Who knows, I may pop back long enough to write a word or two in the future, but for now this is farewell!

I wish you all the best.

Parkey

Helping the hypnotist

I have, on a few occasions, heard hypnotists saying this their subject:

"Don't try to help me, let it happen automatically"

Some of these times the subject has been me, and my own experience was that this instruction was very unhelpful, and even restricting, until I figured out a way to get past it.

I have said before that the biggest misunderstandings that some hypnotists have come out of their either being no good whatsoever as a subject themself, or else being a very good subject. This is, to my mind, another of such misunderstandings; a result of said hypnotist not appreciating what a subject with only mild abilities is experiencing.

Consider something like the magnetic hands set piece. You place your hands straight out in front of you, hands facing each other, close your eyes and imagine that there's a magnetic attraction between your palms.

Now, as you do that, consider this: Don't try to move your hands, let them move automatically.

Not that the exact phrasing of the statement isn't that important, it's more about the suggestion that there is a specific way in which the subject should respond. If you're anything like me you will be asking yourself the same question that I was, which I think is implicit in the statement: "Am I doing this consciously, or not?" The statement also gives the impression that consciously responding is something that the subject shouldn't be doing. "Am I doing something wrong by having my hands come together in this way?"

Now obviously this isn't the case for all subjects but the result for me, and for many subjects I've seen hypnotists fail with, is that the subject stops moving their hands together, or the equivalent thereof, consciously holds them exactly where they are, and stops to wait for hypnosis to move the hands instead.

My response to hypnosis is improving gradually but continuously and now I know how to respond to that kind of suggestion, which is to consider the question as to who or what is moving my hands to be unimportant, and appreciate that all that matters is that they are moving. To start with my response to many suggestions has felt very conscious and deliberate, but as time has gone on I have gotten better at responding and the process has felt more automatic.

This is why the learning analogy is something that works for me. The process by which my response to hypnosis has improved reminds me most, of all things in my life, of my experience of learning to play the piano. This started with me poking gingerly and very deliberately at the keyboard, but over time the process became much more natural and, if you like, "automatic". Conscious incompetence to unconscious competence is a gradual process for most people. It's now easy enough for me to find my way around a piano keyboard, play back tunes from memory, and sight read music, although I will confess I rarely practice these days. The one thing that was always guaranteed to throw a spanner in the works for me and bring any recital of a piece of music to a keyboard mashing halt was to try to think too consciously about the process, or worse question whether it was a conscious process.

I can easily picture a well seasoned pianist, who can barely remember when they were learning, or who was a child prodigy, telling a beginner to not just let their hands press the keys automatically; after all it's what works for them. I can also imagine someone who has never actually played a piano themself, but has heard that same mantra said by an expert, repeating that mantra because it works for someone who can play the piano very well and thus must be good advice.

This comes back to my feelings about that group of people that I have decided to call "undeveloped" subjects ("analyticals"). It is my belief that there is nothing wrong with these people as such, with respect to their apparent inability to go into trance, but that they simply lack certain important bits of information and practice with that information.

Many hypnotists, and as a result of my cynicism and the difficulty I had whilst starting out as a subject I would be inclined toward saying most hypnotists, do not know this information or how to teach it because they only work with subjects who already know it.

So in summary I would suggest this to you: You and your subject should not care what part of the subject's brain is responding to the suggestion; all that matters is that they're responding.

"Analyticals"

Something that has really been getting at me recently is the way in which the term "analytical" is applied to a certain group of subjects by hypnotists. I think it is high time for me to challenge this expression and question exactly what it is supposed to mean.

It seems to me that the term "analytical" is generally used to describe subjects who are difficult to hypnotise; people who are at the opposite end of the scale to those somnambulistic subjects who are an absolute gift to any hypnotist. There are some well known supposed percentages to quote here; setting willingness aside, 20% of people are easily deeply hypnotised, 60% of people are capable of basic hypnosis, 20% are very difficult to hypnotise. It is this latter group that are usually branded as "analytical" subjects.

I have talked before about why I think some people, despite being equally willing to cooperate, are more hypnotisable than others. I think it comes down to being able to think in a certain way, in an uncritical way. Somnambulists can do this well; anti-somnambulists, if you'll pardon the expression, cannot do this or at least not very well in the right context.

The very term "analytical" is, I think, inappropriate when describing these hard-to-hypnotise individuals, because it carries with it a lot of implications that are in themselves quite misleading. The biggest red herring is the idea that a difficult subject is troublesome because they are analysing the suggestions they're being given, which is can lead to a profound misunderstanding of why the subject may be finding hypnosis difficult and how best to proceed with them.

Everybody is "analytical" if by that you mean they take in what's going on around them, including what the hypnotist is saying, and consider what they think about it. Something that I think illustrates this well is one of the better subjects I have worked with and what they said to me after the first induction I did on them. I was feeling confident so I went straight in with a hand drop induction, which actually induced fits of giggling but those soon melted from her face as I continued to deepen. Afterwards she told me that she remembers questioning whether that was really all there was to it, thinking how funny that the whole situation really was, then being surprised by how much she was relaxing because she never relaxed like she was in that moment, and then her memories of what happened next were a bit fuzzy.

Now it seems to me as though there's a general expectation that the word "sleep" is supposed to make something dramatic happen by both hypnotist and subject alike, like for example stop the subject thinking, knock them unconscious or shift them to a different astral plane. Something that is irritating for me is this pervasive received wisdom that the best way for a hypnotist to deal with an "analytical" subject is to use a shock, confusion, or overload induction. The subject might analyse your suggestions if you go slow, god forbid, so hit them hard and fast and knock them out before they have chance to start computing what you're doing. I really don't think that this does anybody any favours because this approach only serves to accentuate the above expectation, and for certainly the majority of people who experience hypnosis that isn't really what the experience is like for them at all.

There are hypnotists who claim to have zapped "analyticals" into somnambulism with a shock induction, who like patting themselves on the back for being so clever. I'm afraid my answer to this is that if the subject did go into a deep trance from those sorts of induction I cannot see how they can be one of these lower 20% anti-somnambulists, and thus described as an "analytical". To me the implication being made here is that if a subject does not know how to think uncritically telling to them to do so more suddenly will suddenly enlighten them; of course in practice that can't and doesn't work.

A lot of hypnotists subscribe to the view that the subject is either in hypnosis or out of it and that every induction is an instant induction because there is a specific point in time when a subject goes from not being hypnotised to being hypnotised. So, get the subject "there" and you're home and dry.

I like to see hypnosis differently. To me it's a more like a channel of communication that exists between the hypnotist and subject. This connection, rather than simply being on or off, is more akin to something that is ramped up in intensity along a continuous scale. The "sleep! you are now in a trance" model is still something that can be utilised of course, but as I have mentioned in previous posts it really isn't needed to achieve phenomena. The intensity of this state is of course characterised by the phenomena that one is able to achieve with the subject.

This is the point that I am trying to get to: I don't care how much my subject analyses what I am saying to them, because as far as I am concerned being "analytical" is not a problem. In fact, my best ever subject holds degree in chemistry from Oxford and is currently doing their Ph.D at Cambridge and I don't think I've ever met anyone more analytical.

No, a subject being "analytical" is not an issue whatsoever.

Or rather, to put it more precisely, it's not the issue. So what do hypnotists really mean when they say "analytical"?

Well, I think there are a number of words that better describe a willing but hypnotically unresponsive subject than "analytical". Such subjects could be described as "critical" or "challenging" for example, as in being naturally inclined to challenge what the hypnotist is saying and seeking to correlate it with outside evidence before they believe it. Perhaps "curious" is another word one could use; the subject having a desire to be fully aware so that they can watch hypnosis working on them.

Ultimately though I think that it is better to see an unresponsive subject not as someone who is doing something obstructive to hypnosis, but as someone who is simply not doing what they need to be doing for hypnosis to work. I still see the ability to go into a hypnotic trance as a skill which comes to some people more naturally than others, but is within the reach of anybody given the right guidance and enough practice. This is the premise that best fits my own experiences, and those of others that I have met.

My conclusion here is that I would like all hypnotists to cast off the misleading and inaccurate term "analytical" and refer to difficult subjects by an expression that conveys the impression that like everybody the subject has a latent ability to be hypnotised that, as a consequence of their natural way of thinking, merely remains undeveloped.

That's settled then. Until I find a better word I shall refer to these people as "undeveloped subjects"

Spammers

I wonder if the spammer who keeps gracing my blog's comments with his self-promotional material realises how quickly I am made aware of what he has been doing, and how little I have to do to just delete what he's written.

Just a thought.

Quantum Physics

Something that I like about hypnosis is that whilst some may be inclined to label it as "alternative" healthcare it is different from the rest of this category in one very important respect.

There is a name for the parts of alternative medicine that have been proven to work beyond simply being a placebo, and that is "medicine". In medicine, the effects of any given treatment are put on trial, tested and evaluated to prove that it is effective for the patients that it is used on. If an easily available natural remedy actually works in a true medical sense it is most likely already in use; a good example is the drug asprin, which I believe is derived from the bark of the willow tree.

A placebo is a pill and a suggestion. For the treatment to work you can have the suggestion without the pill, but you can't have the pill without the suggestion. A nice illustration of this was given when James Randi, a stage magician, took a lethal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills on stage at a TED talk back in 2007. The video is definitely worth a watch.

Alternative medicine is the business of selling a diverse range of supposed remedies whose significant effects are derived solely through the suggestion put into the mind of the patient. In this sense I have absolutely no worries about placing hypnotherapy in the same category as homeopathy, crystal energy healing, and so on. They all work in much the same way.

The difference between hypnosis, specifically hypnotherapy, and these other alternative forms of treatment is that hypnosis doesn't need to claim to be anything that it isn't. There's no pseudo-science claiming that shiny crystals have psychic energy fields, or that a medicine is effective even when it's been diluted beyond the point of no longer having any medicine in it. There are no daemons to exorcise or pixies re-aligning your DNA. Nobody even needs to talk of secret ancient medical wisdom of a bygone age (conveniently omitting the bit about how in bygone times broken or infected limbs were routinely sawn off without anesthetic).

Hypnotherapy is simply about making the subject feel better through the power of suggestion, but in a pure undiluted form. The results are subjective, the treatment is subjective, the success is subjective. So many issues that medical doctors have to treat are not so much medical conditions as merely indicators of personal or lifestyle problems, and this is where hypnotherapists are able to help, whilst acknowledging that if a client has a genuine medical problem they should see a doctor.

What has all this to do with quantum physics I hear you asking? Well, whenever I hear a hypnotist start talking about quantum physics I sigh inwardly. I personally, being a mechanical engineer by trade, like to think I have a good grounding in physics, significantly better than most hypnotists, but I will admit that even I don't really have a clue when it comes to quantum theory. Furthermore I have yet to meet or hear from a hypnotist who also happens to be a theoretical physicist. Even then physicists themselves have a saying: "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory"

Talking about quantum physics is just one example of how so many hypnotists fall into the trap of being pseudo-scientists and I find it really depressing when I hear some hypnotist making what I consider to be dubious and untested claims about what one can do with hypnosis.

Seriously. There is no need to drop to the same level as the crystal healers and the homeopaths with their made up science. I have heard of hypnotists who claim they can cure cancer through the power of suggestion, or that they know people who have been able to repair broken bones by going into a deep trance for a couple of days.

Hypnosis can undoubtedly be used to cure phobias and give up bad habits, it can do a lot for pain control and of course positive mindset is most certainly an aid to recovery in any medical patient. However I think hypnotherapists are rather well advised to leave treating the broken bodies to the medical experts.

The same goes for other claims relating to the highly objective world of science. Hypnotists can, and I think should, talk philosophy and consider theories of mind. These are interesting topics about which I and others have talked for hours, but we should also remember that hypnosis is not a science, it is an art. It is by its essence highly complicated, inconsistent and contradictory, and mostly because it involves peoples' minds, which are also highly complicated, inconsistent and contradictory.

I think quantum physics does have one thing that hypnotists can legitimately steal for their own purposes, and that's the following expression:

"If you think you understand hypnosis, you don't understand hypnosis."

The other half

When I first started out in hypnosis I recall making the observation that there are generally two responses someone will give when asked whether they want to give hypnosis a try:

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 have to say that for the most part this simple pattern has held true over the last year or so. What has, however, been far less simple has been the incredibly varied response the potential subject's partner has displayed. In fact there have been such a mixture of responses that I won't even bother to try to list them. Many are positive, others are negative, and others seem to be uneasy but neutral.

Imagine the situation though. You're entering a time in your life where nearly everybody you know is in a relationship. Hypnosis just happens to, admittedly with a little bit of shameless manoeuvring on your part, come up in the conversation. When someone expresses an interest to give it a try more often than not their partner is also around.

How does the partner feel about seeing their significant other being hypnotised in front of them? It's almost certainly a question that they haven't even thought about before, and so I nearly always find myself having to keep an eye on the partner for feedback almost as much as the subject.

The majority of the people I seem to end up hypnotising are female and that means that there's nearly always a boyfriend in the equation somewhere.

Now, my own experiences with relationships do rather lead me to empathise with the paranoia that comes with being with someone very special. When a beautiful creature places unremarkable you within the inner circle of their universe the last thing you want is for anybody to come along and tilt the axes, even gently. Goodness knows I'm still waiting for my own girlfriend to wake up and realise her mistake.

Quite obviously I am not going out with the intention of seducing other people's girlfriends, and I think I would be giving myself far too much credit if I said I thought that I or my hypnotist routine were especially attractive. No, my sole interest when I have a subject in front of me is in satisfying their needs or curiosity, whatever those may be, because it is through doing so that I get my own enjoyment. This is often enough to sow the seeds of discomfort in a partner though, especially a male partner, because what they see is somebody connecting with their beloved in a way that perhaps they can't or don't, and can also be seen to be quite intimate.

That's one perspective, another is the idea that hypnosis is scary ultimate mind control. This, in my opinion rather absurd, worry is usually easy enough to alleviate in most people although some hypnotists, usually the ones who will never be hypnotised themselves, I have seen refuse to let anybody else hypnotise their girlfriend on this basis. Or they will allow it but will insist on being there so they can hear every word, lest security be compromised.

Safety is quite a legitimate worry, and I do my best to assure everyone concerned that what I'm doing is safe, which of course it is. I don't think doing the "Zap" (throw your subject on the floor and just hope they don't get concussion) induction or anything similar would go down well, and it's completely unnecessary anyway.

There was one hypnotist I met whose girlfriend had a real interest in hypnosis and enjoyed being a subject too, but he wouldn't let anyone else do anything with her. She was a great subject and really receptive to the experience, and yet this guy kept utterly failing to do anything with her because he didn't have the patience or the empathy. That's the final thing worth mentioning here; jealousy. That was an extreme example of course, but I have found that some of the worse culprits for negative feelings about seeing their girlfriend hypnotised have been other hypnotists.

One thing that I think is clear is that hypnosis has a way of bringing to the surface deeper aspects of a relationship in the same way as it does for individual personalities.

A New Look

I've given the format of the blog a bit of a revamp. Hope you like it!

And for an encore...

"I have made your arm completely rigid, stuck the palm of your hand to your head, and stuck your other hand to your thigh. For an encore, would you like me to hypnotise you?"

Recently I carried out my first non-induction hypnosis session with a subject I'd never hypnotised before. I have to say that the experience left me on a complete high as a hypnotist and I am looking forward to trying out on more people. Of course it is a nice demonstration of the view that in hypnosis the induction is more a ritual for the benefit of the subject than anything else.

The way I approached this most recent session was that I dropped my usual routine of trying a new subject out with a set piece like magnetic hands and then moving on to an induction like the rehearsal induction. This time I felt that I should be a lot bolder and just go straight in for some waking hypnosis before I even did an induction.

I should say that my inspiration for my method was mostly taken from demonstrations I have seen done by Simon Goodlad and James Tripp, who writes the Hypnosis Without Trance blog. They really know their stuff, and seeing these guys at work at various hypnosis meets over the last year or so has been absolutely awesome and a real education in itself.

So what did I do? Well, I started with something like this:

"Okay, before I do any hypnosis let's just start with a little exercise. Let's see how good your imagination is. Just go with this and we'll see what happens. Give me that arm, that's good."

I took my subject's arm, supporting it with both hands.

"That's it, just relax your arm, give it to me; That's right, completely."

"Now, I want you to imagine what it would be like if that arm was actually made of something very stiff. What if it were made of wood, or perhaps solid stone..."

At this point I was engaged in the process of putting their arm in mid air. This is the process of inducing catalepsy, making someone's muscles become stiff and rigid, and it is quite easily achieved if you direct someones attention away from that part of the body, whilst at the same time manipulating it ambiguously such that it becomes unclear who is actually supporting it. Obviously I started off taking all the weight of the arm, but by gradually removing that support whilst keeping the arm in place it is possible to get the subject to take the weight back without even realising it. Tapping on the ends of their fingers and along their arm helps this along.

"...just imagine that arm is getting stiffer and stiffer. Imagine what it would be like if you could not bend that arm..."

I kept this up and after about a minute the arm was happily supporting itself and as I tapped it various points along its length I could tell that the muscles were all locked tight. Time to test it.

"In a moment you're going to try to bend that arm and what you're going to find is that you can't; in fact, the more you try to bend it the stiffer it will become."

The arm was locked tight, it didn't bend one bit.

I wasn't even sure my subject was trying, but trying they were. I moved on to say that they couldn't move it, but I could, and it would stay where it was put, which it did. Next I bent the arm and stuck their hand to their head, then took their other hand and stuck it to their thigh. I kept this up for a minute or so, but then I told them that when I snapped my fingers they would come free.

"Well, that was fun. It seems that you have a great imagination. Now, would you like to try hypnosis?"

it was from here that I went into the 8-word induction and my subject dropped like a sack of potatoes. Of course they did; they were already hypnotised.

I think that there is an important lesson here, because I have spoken to a couple of hypnotists in the past who have told me of times that they used a rapid induction like the 8-word induction and that when they did it failed to hypnotise the subject.

Hypnosis isn't about some magic effect generated by a specific set of actions, and it doesn't happen because there is anything special about what is said and done during an induction. Hypnosis is about the relationship between the hypnotist and the subject. It's bond formed from a healthy mix of context, anticipation, expectation, imagination and positive rapport that comes out of every piece of interaction between these two people.

On numerous occasions I have seen both Simon and James have subjects with their hand completely stuck to something, unable to remember their name, and all sorts of other crazy suggestions whilst at the same time insisting that no, they haven't been hypnotised. They demonstrate so well that no formal induction is needed to get these amazing results, and of course you can use it as a springboard to go into a more conventional routine.

I think this approach has several advantages. Firstly there is no pressure on the subject when you induce a suggestible state in them because "this isn't hypnosis, it's just a exercise for your imagination". It gives the subject a chance, that isn't intimidating, to try out the foothills of hypnosis before deciding that they want to take things further.

Secondly it means that when you, the hypnotist, come to do your "induction" you are all but guaranteed an excellent response. You can use a rapid induction and your audience will see you putting someone "under" in an impressively short instant. It's good for the subject too; I got a real kick when a subject once told me that my hand drop induction had been an incredible rush for them, like jumping from a cliff.

There is also, of course, the advantage that if it doesn't work you haven't "failed to hypnotise" anyone. In fact this approach, "let's see how good your imagination is", challenges the subject to use their imagination, and of course the subtext here is that if it has no effect the problem lies with the subject and not the hypnotist.

So for any hypnosis I find it's best to think about it like this: Engage with your subject to achieve the hypnotic state first, and then, only after that, do your induction - if you feel you even have to.

Mmmm, food...

One of my brother's friends spotted this fun sign in Manchester recently. I wonder how well it works...

High five!

I've actually been doing some hypnosis recently, which has been a nice change. As I've had willing subjects I've also been able to experiment a bit, and so I thought I'd share a few of the things I've tried recently.

Here's an induction that I think is brilliant and I've used a few times recently. I was originally shown it by a fella called James Brown in Covent Garden. James Brown, by the way, is an absolutely awesome "close up" magician and mentalist, well worth looking up, and when I say he showed me this induction what I mean is that he needed a stooge to demonstrate it on, and I happened to be nearest.

My interpretation of this is a little different from James', but the principle is the same. Basically the idea is to create a pattern interrupt much like with the handshake induction, but instead by getting the subject to "high five" you and surprising them. It's a splendid induction to use with anybody who is reasonably suggestible and not suspicious, and it also works well as a re-induction off the back of the previous routine.

"Hey you did great! High five!"

So what do you do? Well basically what I do is a high five with my subject, but when my hand meets theirs I grab it and pull it toward me, simultaneously telling them to sleep. I should stress that, if you try this, no extra points will be given if you yank the subject's arm out of its socket or throw them to the ground. Just grab their hand and pull it a few inches away from them and that will be enough of a surprise for it to work! This works best if you're both standing, but be ready to catch them if they are the sort to fold up when they go into trance.

Some of you might have already spotted the flaw of course. "My friends won't shake my hand, so I doubt they will trust me with a high five" might be the obvious comeback.

Well, how about this then: If your subject is the suspicious type and doesn't go for the high five give them the compulsion, as a post-hypnotic suggestion, that they will instinctively go for the high five immediately if it comes up again. Move on with your routine and re-visit the high five later. This works as a nice convincer because hypnosis works best for some people if it catches them off guard. Your subject will be responding and then back into trance before they even realise what's happening.

Great fun!

The May '10 Meet

Well as there wasn't a meetup last month I was just a little bit keen to head into London and actually do some hypnosis this month. I made sure that there was a Last Thursday meet this month, got out of work early and made my way to London. Very few people actually turned up this month, but it was still a lot of fun.

Arriving shortly before 7pm I met up with Chris and we were joined shortly afterwards by a guy we'd not met before called Wayne. Shortly after that we were joined by a newbie by the name of James and his girlfriend Lucy.

Wayne turned out to be quite the amateur magician, the kind who makes coins appear and vanish from his hands and conjures small jars of jam out of thin air. Yes he really did produce an actual jam jar, which begs the question whether he goes around with jam in his pocket just in case anyone asks him to do a trick.

As I had a salt shaker and napkins on the table I took the opportunity to do the disappearing coin trick. Somehow I got it to work and didn't embarrass myself either. Excellent!

We'd been looking around for groups that might be good to approach, but I didn't feel particularly good about any of them to be honest. It seemed that Chris and Wayne felt much the same. Thankfully Lucy volunteered to be hypnotised, and so our hypnosis meetup actually featured some hypnosis.

Approaching Lucy as a subject had several advantages, not least that I knew she'd already been hypnotised by James and so I was completely confident that I could get her to go under, even stood up in quite a noisy bar. I also had some areas that I knew they both would like to work on; for example, he'd been unable to stick her to something in the past.

Something I really need to work on is my standard approach to a new subject. Often I end up winging my induction, instead of following a familiar route. In many ways my usual approach of trusting my instincts to bring out the appropriate words and actions in the moment works quite well, but I find it works better once I'm in the zone. Trying produce an induction on the fly before I've warmed up a bit seems to take me aback somewhat; I hope it doesn't show.

The induction I winged was sort of based on the magnetic hands set piece. Basically I had her hands come together and had her imagine they were getting bound tightly together. I could see she'd already gone from the way she was responding, so I simply said that in a moment I would tap her on the top of her hands and when I did she'd let her arms drop to her sides and go deep into hypnosis. As I did so, saying "sleep!" at the same time she went completely limp, though still standing, and I was able to deepen her whilst gently rocking her from side to side.

So I deepened her, gave the suggestion that she'd go back under if I told her to sleep. Brought her back up, checked she was comfortable, took her arm and went into an Ericksonian handshake, letting her arm become cataleptic as her eyes glazed over. I let her hang there for a moment or two, and then with "sleep!" she was going deeper again.

This was when I decided I'd have a bash at sticking the unstickable person to our table. I'm firmly of the opinion that any hypnotic phenomenon is a skill which some people may already have, but others simply have to learn; they have to be shown how. I've taught a few people to stick before and Lucy was quite clearly a better subject than many of them, so I was pretty confident I could stick her by showing her how, but first I thought I'd try a more direct method.

The way I approached it to string it off another suggestion. I took Lucy's arm and had her stare at it as I straightened it out. I got her to close her fist and focus on it as I tapped up and down the length of her arm and gave appropriate suggestions in a way I knew would induce catalepsy. I could feel her arm becoming stiffer and stiffer and told her that her arm would become completely locked rigid, that she wouldn't be able to bend it, that it'd be frozen in space etc. Sure enough she became completely unable to move her arm.

Next I kept her focusing on the stiff arm, but told her that in a moment her other hand would stick to the table, where I'd put it, and that just like her arm now she would be unable to move her hand. Then I told her that when I tapped her arm it'd come free, which it did when I tapped it, and then I said that was because her hand was now stuck.

And so it was.

As she looked at her immobile hand in complete and utter amazement I reflected on just how smug it is possible to feel as a hypnotist. I reinforced the suggestion by explaining that the more she tried to overcome that mental block that stopped her moving her hand, the more impossible it'd become, and what's more now she'd learned how to do it she would find such locks completely inescapable.

I felt sorry for James, who had tried to do this to her himself several times, but to be fair to him sometimes subjects just need a slightly different approach sometimes for them to make the right mental connections. I'm sure he will be able to get her to stick to things in future.

I tried some other suggestions on Lucy, such as making her laugh every time I clicked my fingers, and freezing like a statue below the neck if I said the word "freeze". I also demonstrated a few other inductions; I especially like doing the hand drop induction on good subjects because they all say it's quite an exhilarating experience. I also showed off a version of the "high-5!" induction, which I've been tinkering with recently.

Something that we have definitely found is the best way to find groups to approach is to hypnotise someone, ideally someone standing up in a prominent location, and to look around to see which groups are paying attention. Often there will be people who can't stop watching, and these are the people to approach and see if they're interested.

I'm not convinced that the current venue is the best place to be honest, and I have an idea for a more studenty area for the next meetup.

A good evening out though!

A Truly Hypnotic Relationship

Having spent quite a bit of time around hypnotists something that I have noticed is that one topic of conversation that rarely seems to come up is the hypnotic relationship between a hypnotist and their significant other. By that I mean do they do hypnosis with their partner and if so, what do they do? Now, whilst this is not a blog about my relationship with my girlfriend, and I won't be discussing my own relationship here, that doesn't mean that it isn't a topic that I've not given some thought. I have the accounts given by a few who have been successful with their partners to go on, but of course no names will be mentioned.

So here my thoughts on the hypnotic relationship, by which in this context I mean a romantic or sexual relationship that involves hypnosis.

When I ask other hypnotists about whether they've used hypnosis with their partners the majority of responses are that it's either something that they've not really tried for whatever reason, or that it is something they tried and their partner didn't "go under".

This is something that baffles me, because to my mind the interpersonal connection between two people in that sort of relationship is already hypnotic.

Don't believe me? Consider it this way: When a person is intensely attracted to someone else they tend to focus their thoughts on that individual, become detached from the rest of the world and accept anything about or from that person seemingly without rational thought.

Does that sound familiar?

What got me thinking along these lines was recent discussion about the state of "permanosis" (a Jacquinism for a subject being in a permanent state of hypnosis). I agreed that some subjects will enter this state of continuous hypnotic receptivity during a hypnosis session, but I added that I think permanosis is a state that can and does exist for most people in certain circumstances.

The circumstance that immediately came to mind for me is the way that someone will react when faced with someone they are extremely attracted to. Men are probably the worst at this as far as I can see, but women are also susceptible. Over the years I've seen guys become obscessed with a particular woman, follow them around and do practically anything they ask in a seemingly trancelike state. Afterward they may even say to themselves "That was stupid! Why on earth did I do that?!"

Now that's hypnosis if ever I saw it! 

So the impression I get is that many hypnotists I get fail to recognise this pre-existing hypnotic effect if try to do hypnosis with their partner. Going on what I've heard I get the impression that what they usually do is run through their normal routine, often set pieces then a rapid induction, and more often than not nothing happens.

In my opinion this is indicative of just how little understanding some otherwise brilliant impromptu hypnotists have when it comes to trance from the point of view of the subject. True it is said that close friends and family can be the hardest people to hypnotise because they may have trouble seeing someone they already know as the hypnotist, but there can be advantages too such as trust, rapport, and in the case of ones partner the pre-existing state of hypnosis I already mentioned. Hypnotists should have no excuse when it comes to hypnotising their partners, and yet so many seem to fail.    

This is of course assuming that they aren't all really giving their partners orgasm handshakes every evening and just not telling anyone.

So where are they going wrong?

Well I think the biggest mistake they make has to do with context. As I have said before hypnosis is subject oriented; it is dependant on what the subject wants to get from the experience. Now in the case of a hypnosis show on stage, or a performance in the street, establishing this need is very easy; the subject is there to be entertained and the hypnotist has quite a broad remit to try whatever they want. When, however, they sit down with their partner the context is entirely different and I think difficulties occur when they don't adapt to meet these new circumstances.

"What does my subject want from this experience?"

This is by far the most important question any hypnotist should ask, and it isn't asked often enough in my opinion. This process is two way though; not only should the hypnotist make every effort to find out what it is that their partner wants, but they should also make the effort to explain what is on offer.

Both hypnotist and subject should got into the session knowing what sort of thing they are trying to do. The trick is to discover exactly what the other partner wants, and then to use hypnosis to give that to them, or enhance it.

For example, when one considers that all aspects of intimacy come under the umbrella of the rapport between a couple and the trances they are in when they are giving each other their complete attention the mind boggles at the wealth of possibilities that present themselves when they recognise that state for what it truly is, a hypnotic one. Everything from intensifying or triggering emotions or sensations all the way through to manipulating a person's sexual response, which I am told on strong authority works very well.

I know that a lot has been said about those who have a mind control or domination fetishes or other kinks, and certainly those sorts of games are possible applications of hypnosis, but I have also talked to couples who have used hypnosis in a more conventional form of intimacy, and not necessarily sexual intimacy either. So much is possible I would need hundreds of blog posts to cover them all; I don't have the time, and I really don't want to feel that jealous!

In conclusion what I would say to the impromptu hypnotist is this: Throw out the rulebook, forget your normal routines. Discover what it is that your partner wants, have them close their eyes and listen to you, and go from there.

Don't blink!

A short post today. I'm sat at a coffee shop in Manchester Piccadilly station enjoying a hot chocolate before I catch my train back to Oxford. I love travelling!

Anyway, I thought I'd write a few words about an induction I've been experimenting with recently.

A year or so ago I remember Darren telling me about an induction that he had been shown by the legendary hypnotist John Cerbone on a course in Manchester. Darren was in fact the person that John used for his demonstration in front of the group, and luckily for those of us who weren't there someone was filming at the time.



This is what I have heard referred to as a "power induction", an induction that works purely on the effect of the hypnotist's projection of their confidence and their intent to hypnotise. I would also argue that a subject's willingness and ability to go into trance plays a part of course, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a poweful induction if one feels confident enough to use it.

Cerbone's induction basically establishes expectation by telling the subject they'll go straight into hypnosis the next time they blink, an action which is of course inevitable. He contends that blinking represents a natural pattern interrupt, a moment between thoughts into which a hypnotist can push a suggestion. He also, of course, hammers it home by shouting "sleep!".

I like this induction but I've been approaching it from a slightly different direction. I've only really used it as a re-induction with people I have hypnotised before, but perhaps one day I might try it as a first induction if I feel confident enough.

What I do is look the subject in the eye and say "look at me. That's good. Now, as you look at me try not to blink."

What this does is focus the subject's conscious attention on something, which is the effort required to not blink. From this point on they aren't giving everything I say their complete attention. 

Keeping my eyes locked on theirs I then say "In a moment you are going to blink. When you do your eyes are going to stay closed; you'll let your whole body relax and go into a deep trance."

From this point on it's simply a case of meeting their gaze and waiting for them to drop like a sack of potatoes when they inevitably have to drop their eyelids, which is fun because it's hard to anticipate the exact moment. The hypnotist's stare is useful - focus on the bridge if their nose, not their eyes. You can also help by nodding almost imperceptibly every time their eyes almost close.

I haven't needed to cry "sleep!" at any point, which is good because as I said guessing the right moment can be difficult.

Give this induction a try. I think it's brilliant.

Negative Hallucination

Or, a cyclist's anecdote about how the psychological phenomenon of negative hallucination is ever present in our lives.

I'm not going to the Last Thursday meetup this month for several reasons, but I thought I would share a short story about something that happened to me yesterday.

First though, watch this video.


My story starts as I was cycling home from the training course I had been on for a couple of days. The course was at a place only a few miles from my house so I decided that I would make the trip on my folding bike. It was an easy ride and I was glad of the fresh air and the exercise.

About a mile from home my route required me to cycle straight on at a roundabout. I should explain to my American readers that a roundabout, sometimes called a traffic island, is a popular kind of road junction in Europe. The principle is very simple in that traffic already on the roundabout has priority over approaching vehicles, which give way to their right (left on the continent). This constantly flowing arrangement can have many advantages over the alternative of, say, a traffic light controlled intersection.



The statistics show however that roundabouts can be very dangerous for cyclists and I think my misadventure illustrates this very well.

My ride home required that I cycle straight on and, being an experienced and confident cyclist, I proceeded to negotiate the junction in textbook fashion. I moved out to a position in the centre of my lane, waited for a gap in the traffic coming from my right, accelerated quickly out keeping well toward the centre of the roundabout, signaled my intention to turn left into my exit... and nearly got wiped out by a car.

I should make clear that the majority of bicycle accidents are what cyclists call SMIDSYs - "Sorry Mate I Didn't See You" - caused by the driver of a motor vehicle being in complete ignorance of the cyclist's existence, for whatever reason. This, and the fact that bicycles can negotiate junctions at much the same speed as other traffic, is why good cyclists take the centre of their lane when they have to manoeuvre. They need to be visible and act like the other traffic because being seen by motorists and lorry drivers is absolutely crucial to not being hit by them.

Unfortunately given the small number of bicycles on the road in the UK, and the even smaller number who actually display any understanding at all of good roadcraft, the bike awareness of motorists is often not especially high. Hence, when a motorist comes to a junction and gives way to traffic, in their mind what traffic means cars, lorries and buses. Did you spot the moonwalking bear the first time? Chances are you didn't, and that's because you weren't looking for one.

The motorist who pulled out from my left as I passed and nearly knocked me off my bike had been waiting in that spot for several seconds and just prior to pulling out had been looking right at me. I had, after all, very deliberately positioned in the place where I would be most visible. Cyclists often talk about the importance of getting eye contact with other road users for the very reason that knowing they've been seen is important, but as this case shows one can never be absolutely certain. As it turned out in this driver's field of view I wasn't a car, a lorry or a bus, I was the invisible moonwalking bear.

My point here is that all of us are capable of the phenomenon of negative hallucination, that it's happening all the time and that we simply aren't aware of it. If the brain doesn't believe that something is there we don't see it, it's that simple.

I could go on to talk about how, but for my taking evasive action, I would have easily been knocked off my bike. I could also go on to talk about the driver's response, which was to come alongside me a few seconds later and declare "I never hit you!" through an open window. I think human beings behind the wheel of an automobile can turn into such horrible individuals, and in this case it was his mission to prove to himself and others that he'd done nothing wrong. I could even recount exactly what I said in reply, although I'm not proud of my choice of language.

I will finish on a positive note however. I have cycled thousands of miles in the last few years and in my experience encounters like this are incredibly rare. This is in fact the first time that I have ever really felt in danger of being physically hurt by another vehicle. The vast majority of the time I find cycling to be a very enjoyable and rewarding activity, and I can't recommend it enough.

As an aside, if anyone is interested in learning about good cycling practice I can recommend the book cyclecraft by Jon Franklin.

Inside knowledge

I've just realised that this is my 100th post! Wahey, go me!

Recently I did some hypnosis with a friend who had never been hypnotised before. This was quite a special session for me because it made me realise just how what I've learned during my own efforts at improving my own abilities as a subject is transferrable to taking the role of the hypnotist, and so I will share some of the highlights with you here.

My friend, whose name isn't Sarah, had expressed quite a strong interest in hypnosis ever since she heard about the time about a year or so ago when I hypnotised the guy who is now her boyfriend. It was clear to me, from the particular way in which she insisted that I simply had to hypnotise him again in front of her, that she really wanted to experience it herself at the next opportunity.

As we live quite a distance apart the opportunity was several months in coming, but recently on a holiday with a group of mutual friends I got the chance. You'd think that the chance to see some real hypnosis first hand would be a popular party trick but amongst our friends, a group of pilots, it turned out that this simply wasn't the case. Sarah, her boyfriend and I went back to our cottage, sat quietly by the roaring open wood fire and I took things from there.

I have found that pilots, by the way, are just about the worst bunch of people to try to pedal hypnosis to. There's an aura of egotistical control-freakery that seems to come hand in hand with the skills required to fly an aeroplane and this is added to the analytical mindset of the usual type of individual who decides to learn. This is not an ideal peer group of a hypnotist, much as I like my friends, but there is perhaps at least some consolation, which is their lack of desire to spontaneously close their eyes, go completely limp, and fly into the side of the nearest hill.

So anyway, I opened the session with my usual introductory routines of magnetic fingers and magnetic hands. Sarah did what quite a few people tend to do with magnetic fingers, which was to try to physically hold her fingers apart and I did what seems to work best in such cases, which was to tell her not to force it, but relax and go with it.

"Relax and just go with it, trust your instincts" is a good phrase I think.

You can always tell when someone is forcing their fingers apart simply by virtue of the fact that their fingers aren't moving together. When they relax simple physiology causes the fingers to move together on their own; hypnosis has nothing to do with it. Indeed, when a subject has done magnetic fingers I usually explain this, that it's not hypnosis, but what it has just done is show me that they are able to follow instructions and concentrate.

Next I moved on to magnetic hands. I like this because it follows on nicely from magnetic fingers, but it does rely on suggestion to work. Sarah responded well, always a good sign, and I made sure I continued to encourage her and pre-empted her hands touching. Pace and lead.

It's been a while since I hypnotised a new subject and so I decided that in light of this, since I wasn't feeling amazingly confident, I'd use the rehearsal induction next. I'm not such a fan of the term "induction" because from my own experiences I'm more inclined to see hypnosis not as something that one is in or not, but as a continuous scale from fully aware to deep trance. Sarah was a subject who was enthused about hypnosis, her hands had come together pretty quickly so she was clearly already in the foothills of hypnosis and I thought the rehearsal induction would be the best way to intensify the state.

I find it amazing how naturally the patter comes to me in the moment, and it's a good feeling when the words simply roll off my tongue with little effort. I explained to Sarah that as I raised her arm she would let herself relax and go into trance, and as I brought it back down she would come back to the room, and went through this process several times. I like this induction because it is a nice progressive progress which allows for plenty of feedback, and I was able to judge that Sarah was responding well and went into deepening the trance. Her facial muscles loosened and her breathing became slower and steadier, then she laughed.

Novice hypnotists take note here; a laughing subject is a good thing. This is a point worth mentioning because I've heard hypnotists say that they've had to re-start their inductions because their subject was laughing.

When, as a hypnotist, you are hypnotising someone what you are trying to do is get them into a state where their conscious mind is giving way to their subconscious mind. Assuming this, how can it be a bad thing if they are unable to hold back their own instinct to laugh? When a subject is amused, or if they start laughing, it means that the right part of their mind is calling the shots; they are letting their subconscious dictate their behaviour. This is exactly what you want to see from your subject! Commend them, and utilise it!

"You're laughing, that's excellent! Your instinct was to laugh and you went with it, you couldn't stop yourself doing it. That's exactly what we're looking for!"

One could even go further and tell the subject that they can't stop laughing, and challenge them to try to stop laughing. It is a good convincer, especially if you follow that by saying "okay, now become calm, let all your muscles relax, and go deeper" and the forced grin simply melts from their face.

With Sarah I actually tried to get hand levitation from her instead. Frustratingly, whilst I felt her hand getting lighter, I never really managed to get it to levitate. This was quite unusual because otherwise all the signs were good. I decided to switch to making her arm too heavy to lift instead, and this was where my inside knowledge as a subject proved to be quite invaluable.

I told sarah she could not lift up her hand, that it was stuck to her, and sure enough when I challenged her to lift her hand up she did not. Excellent, I thought, and so I told her that any time I told her to sleep she would go straight back into trance, reiterated that her hand would remain stuck to her leg and then brought her back up.

Her hand was indeed still stuck. "But," she said, "I can still do this."

And then lifted her hand up.

Now, back when I started out as a hypnotist and such phenomena were just things that happened to other people I would have become upset and demoralised by this response. I would have felt that the magic clearly wasn't working with this subject and given up. This time, however, having been through that experience, I knew I could hazard a pretty good guess at what she was thinking and carry things on.

"Ah!" I said, "but it took you a while to move your hand didn't it!"

She smiled.

I said, "A lot of people expect hypnosis to be very unlike what it actually is. You found it difficult to move your hand then, you had to resolve to do it, and what you're going to find from now on is that it becomes increasingly more difficult."

Then I told her to sleep.

As with a lot of new subjects she closed her eyes as though instinctively, but quickly opened them again. This is another of those situations where I know, as a subject myself, that what is usually going on in the subject's head when they do this is simply that they are looking for confirmation from the hypnotist. Of course the hypnotist who knows this, has confidence and keeps going will win through.

"See how your eyes closed then?" I said, "You're good at this, now let this happen, I can see you want to close your eyes."

Am I a mind reader? No, but I've had these experiences myself. I appreciate that the mind has to recognise, and to learn, how each phenomenon works in order to do it. Sarah's brain was actually very quick on the uptake especially, as she told me later, once she realised what it was I was trying to do as I deepened her. As soon as she made the link between states of mind she'd experienced in the past and hypnosis she was able to embrace the process and go into a deeper trance much more easily.

Something I may have said before is that I don't think it is ever necessary to feel that one should have to "trick" or otherwise deceive ones subjects into hypnosis. All you need to do is be honest, understand what they are experiencing, and use feedback to give them suggestions that work for them. In Sarah's case she even commented that in the past she'd visualised things to help her relax, like walking down some steps into water, so I immediately took notice of that and used it to deepen her.

We returned to the hand sticking suggestion a few times and, whilst on a couple of occasions she was able to lift up her hand again, it became a more and more difficult process each time to the point where she genuinely couldn't do it. Likewise the instruction to sleep became more effective each time. I also did a few fun suggestions such as getting her to laugh uncontrollably when I clicked my fingers, and took her to quite a deep level of trance.

If anything this episode revived my enthusiasm and confidence as a hypnotist, and I am very grateful to Sarah for letting me borrow her mind for an hour or so. Most of all though, it has strengthened my belief that the best thing hypnotists can do to understand the hypnosis their subjects are experiencing is to go there themselves and experience it first hand. It's the inside knowledge every hypnotist should have.

The March Meet

There's not really much to say about the March meet. We, the last thursday group, are still meeting each month and once again this was a fun social occasion.

There was a lack of hypnosis, generally speaking, and I think we're all looking forward to warmer months when we can go out and perhaps approach people in parks. Crashing people's after work drinks and trying to do hypnosis in a loud bar doesn't seem to be quite so good.

The guys are meeting up again next week, but unfortunately I am going to be away on holiday. Ho-hum...

Legal clarification

You may recall last summer the slight stir that came out of a certain hypnotist trying to cast the legality of street hypnosis into question.

Recently Jonathan Chase wrote this article on his website, explaining that he'd contacted his MP, who then in turn contacted the house of commons library for clarification.

To quote Jon:

"The general conclusion seems to be that street hypnosis is busking and as such does not need a licence – unless there is a local by-law specifically insisting on one and that calling it research in a pub would be seen as dubious by the courts."

So the word here from central government is that, subject to local bylaws of course, hypnosis on a public street probably does not require a license.

The second point in that statement refers to performing formal hypnosis stage shows without a license on licensed premises and calling it "research" in order to circumvent the licensing laws. This is something for which the hypnotist who was trying to stir up the trouble is known to do. My feeling after reading the above article is that this particular loophole is one that would be likely to close like a noose around his neck if he ever had to put any weight on it, something that would be immensely satisfying to watch.

I would like to thank Jonathan Chase for doing the obvious and clarifying this point for us all.

Also, whilst we're on the subject, be sure to tune into his new podcast radio show, the first episode of which is today, and can be found here.

The February Meet

This month I made it to the meetup in London, which was great because it's been a long time since I met up with the London hypnosis crowd. Far too long.

We've chosen a new venue recently and it seems that our choice is also the choice for a lot of people to meet up for a drink after work. I managed to find Ben, who had found a table and was sharing it with a nice couple of young women, and about 15 minutes later I was even able to get us some drinks. It was pretty crowded

Later on however, once the surge in work leavers was over, this began to feel a bit less mad. I was able to catch up with Ben and chat with the ladies about hypnosis, to the usual interested but wary response that a swarm of hypnotists will tend to get, and a swarm we were, well a small swarm anyway, when Chris, Darren and Pete showed up.

Sometimes attractive women in pubs are really up for trying hypnosis, but sometimes they aren't. Ben settled for getting a phone number instead.

Overall the feel of the meetup was social rather than all of us feeling the immediate intention to go forth and zap people. The general feeling was that wandering around in parks in the summer when people are lazing around in the sun is better than disturbing them over dinner, although Darren and Ben did have a go.


The only hypnosis really worth mentioning was when Darren caught me musing about the hand clasp and managed to stick my hands together, dammit! He then proceeded to stick my drink to the table and to tell me that the drinking straw was white hot and would burn when I touched it. This had a fairly interesting result, which was that I went out of my way not to touch it, even though I knew I probably wouldn't feel anything if I did. As the conversation went on, I picked up one of the menus on the table, folded it, and used it to carefully lift the straw out of my drink and discard it onto the table.

The only other thing really worth mentioning happened later when Ben was explaining something to Darren. Ben likes to go into talking about deep concepts - in this case "everything we think is a metaphor" - and Darren likes to be perplexed by such abstract wordy... ness. Chris was looking on.


Here I saw an interesting pattern of behaviour that gets repeated at all of our meets, the Ben-Chris-Darren triangle, which I like to call the "that's bollocks!" exercise. Ben (B) stands facing Darren (D), whilst Chris (C) stands between them a couple of steps back, listening to the conversation. B explains something highly conceptual and confusing to D who protests that he is just talking nonsense. C stares into middle distance with one eyebrow raised and a half smile on his face, then chuckles when he judges that the conversation between B and D has become incensed.

Good to see everyone again. Same time next month then!

Curious minds

It's time for a quick update about what I've been up to recently.

I'm pleased to be able to report that I am definitely improving as a subject. It's a slow process, but I am definitely getting somewhere. If you recall, back in December I was able to report that I had successfully been given a post hypnotic suggestion that I had no conscious awareness of and of course I'm not the kind of person to leave it there.

A friend and I have been able to successfully repeat the experiment several times since and confirm that yes it is absolutely possible to give me post hypnotic suggestions that I'm not aware of, which I will act on.

Who would have thought it? Me of all people!

It's worth mentioning that the process of hypnotising someone whilst they are on the edge of sleep seems to be quite effective. The lesson here is to be careful who you share a bed with; indeed one would imagine that this is knowledge that most people wouldn't want their partner to know about. Well, unless they rather like the idea of their partner messing with their head as they sleep; I've met a least a few people who fall into that category.

This could lead to paranoia of course, and causes me to recall someone I met in the past who insisted that people were sneaking into his house at night and hypnotising him in his sleep. Perhaps a good subject for a horror movie, but in my opinion pushing paranoia into the lands of delusion. This individual got rather angry when he was asked "Why don't they just give you complete amnesia and program you not to get suspicious?" and extremely angry when asked "Do you have any evidence, other than your belief, that they were there at all?"

I'm diverging from my theme so I digress.

What does it feel like to follow a post hypnotic suggestion without knowing what it is? It's actually quite bizarre and yet like most hypnotic phenomena I find it's very familiar too.

Everybody has occasions where they just do something on impulse, especially those who are used to acting spontaneously a lot of the time. I'm prone to thinking things through before I act, but even I have such "act now, think later" moments - a bit like rationality on credit. To me that's what an un-known PHS is like; I'll think "I know! Let's just do this!" and do it. It's only later I'll be told that the idea wasn't my own.

I've found that learning to be a good subject means learning to trust ones instincts a lot more. Why do that? Well, that's how in my experience hypnosis seems to manifest itself; following a suggestion is a kind of pseudo-instinctive behaviour. One could indeed argue that the kind of people that hypnosis works better on are people whose behaviour is more instinctive.

I heard Darren recently refer to the conscious mind as the "Curious mind" and to me this is something that makes a lot of sense. One way of looking at the process of going into a nice deep trance is see it as stripping away all of ones curiosity. I can feel myself getting better at that, and it feels good.

Why am I motivated to seek out this state? It almost seems paradoxical to seek out a state of zero curiosity for the sake of curiosity.

Perhaps I just think too much, and this is the backlash.

Against their will

Another month, another rambling post I'm afraid. I was looking forward to the meet in London last month but I managed to catch the dreaded man-flu and couldn't make it.

This post is about something on which I feel I have been misquoted, which is my answer to the question that is often asked of hypnotists, namely this:

"Can a person be hypnotised to do things against their will?"

If you ask a stage hypnotist the answer will almost certainly be "No, of course not. Hypnosis is only suggestion and the subject can say no at any time."

It's a useful answer that I believe is true for most people. I think it is also a nice safety net in that it is arguably self-fulfilling if you suggest it to a subject before the formal part of the hypnosis begins. If you subsequently bring a subject up on stage or approach them in the street and hypnotise them for the sake of the experience of hypnosis they will probably be quite happy with the idea of being unable to speak, or being stuck to the floor, or such gimmicks. If you tell the same subject to strip off all their clothes or give you all their money the chances are they will refuse. In my experience at least the subject will come to their sense and say something along the lines of "Eh what? No!"

However, as this is a question about the very nature of people and how they act I don't think there can be a definitive answer to this question and the more you look at it it's easy to see it as a grey area. People are by their very nature varied and to say that people are incapable of acting in any particular way would not be very reflective of the real world. If you look for long enough there are people who would indeed rip their clothes off if the hypnotist asked them to, or likewise be trusting enough to hand over their wallet.

Making accurate generalised rules about what it is possible to influence people to do through hypnosis is, I think, analogous to making generalised rules about what it is possible for people to believe, and what some people will believe never ceases to amaze me.

In any case I think this question, like the acting dilemma, is intrinsically flawed. To me at least it conjures up images of a hypnotist clicking his fingers and the subject being forced by some sinister outside energy to dance and cluck like a chicken. They don't want to do it, but hypnosis forces them to do it, against their will not to.

To me I the flaw is that the question presupposes the assertions that free will is something that is firstly definitive, and secondly that it is a fixed point in space, neither of which I think are true.

I think that "free will" is a bit of an idealistic concept, to my mind idolised by those who like to believe the myth that all of their decisions are rational. I personally see behavioural decisions as being some kind of tug-of-war between a whole mish-mash of different and often contradicting internal arguments, some rational and some irrational.

So imagine, when someone is offered a bar of chocolate various thoughts bounce around inside their head such as "I'm hungry", "mmmm chocolate tastes nice!" and the perhaps more rational "but it's nearly dinner time". I believe that the final decision is a product of the balance between these factors. The individual wants to eat the chocolate bar, but they also don't want to lessen their enjoyment of their dinner by already having eaten. On some level they are willing to do either course of action, but in practice they have to choose one or the other.

Hypnosis does certainly have the power to cause people to act in a way that they normally wouldn't because, as I understand it, it influences the above decision process and can make less rational courses of action seem more attractive. A useful hypnotic principle to remember is that people do things because they want to do things, and because doing so will make the feel good. People will not do what they don't want to do; things that will make them feel bad. What I am saying here is that whilst a hypnotist can influence what somebody chooses to do, they can only choose from the menu of things that someone is willing to do.

Sometimes of course hypnosis will provide an extremely shy or repressed individual the excuse to vent something that they have always wanted to do. I think it is a common mistake of hypnotists to claim to have created it, rather than simply releasing it.

On a darker note I know of at least one hypnotist who insists that it is possible to hypnotise someone to make them do anything, even something horrific like killing their own child. My answer to this extremely distasteful proposition is the same as above, hypnosis will not make someone go against their will.

The only way it would theoretically be possible would be to arrive at the outcome through a circuitous means, such as giving the subject a gun and convincing them that it isn't loaded, or that it's only a toy like a water pistol. In such a case it isn't hypnosis as such that has caused the harm, rather it's a case of deliberate deception and violation of trust.

Consider this scenario. The same subject comes to the hypnotist and asks to borrow some sugar so they can make sweets for their child. The hypnotist, without using any hypnosis, gives them lethal poison in the form of a white powder and tells them that it's sugar. Same principle, same effect, and probably easier to achieve too.

The subject is most definitely not willing to shoot their child or feed that child poison, nor are they willing to be hypnotised by or to accept food from someone they know to be a murderous psychopath. Their mistake is misplacing their trust, and I'm glad that most people have enough intuition to recognise the warning signs before anything like the above could happen.

"Come into my bunker. Could you switch the light on please? It's the red button on the wall there. Thanks... Haha! Fooled you! That button doesn't turn on the light, it starts World War III! You pressed it, so it's all your fault!"

To anyone who read my last post (the one in which, by the way, I advised caution anybody wanting to take part in hypnosis online to be careful when putting themselves in the hands of an anonymous stranger) and came to the conclusion that what I'm telling people is that hypnosis is harmless so go nuts I say this. I will say it again, hypnosis in itself is harmless but as with any activity involving trust the laws of common sense apply when choosing who to do it with.

To those who think hypnosis is a way for people to take over the minds of others, in true Svengali style, I say this: Where are all the brainwashed hypno-slaves? Surely whoever could do such a thing would have taken over the world by now?

The truth is that in practice during a trance the vast majority of people do seem to maintain the ability to become suspicious of what's going on or to snap out of it if they start hearing things they aren't happy with. Of course that's not true for everybody, but with people no form of behaviour is universal.

Of course, incessant suggestion over longer periods of time will influence people and start to change their world view. I can think of two names for this form of legalised brainwashing and these are "Advertising" and "Religion". Note the lack of mind control rays; fiction has a monopoly on those.

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.