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.