Text Hypnosis

Well, another week has gone by and I have another hypnotic experience to describe.

At my current age of 26 I see myself as one of the first of a generation that can say that they have always had a computer in their house, and I have fond memories of sitting playing wonderful games such as Space pilot and Granny's garden on my dad's BBC Micro. Interacting with the world inside a computer through a screen and keyboard is a concept that is as familiar to me as a a pencil and paper because I have not known a world without it.

Having said that it was only about 10 years ago, towards the end of my teen years, that I discovered the internet. I'd seen it before then of course, but I was never interested until I started to realise that it was a way in which I could reach out to the world and meet other people of my age group with similar interests. I think it's fair to say that I have been a very regular user of MSN messenger ever since that time, and instant messaging has become something I've taken for granted as a part of my day-to-day life.

When I first started to learn about hypnosis something that did come as a complete surprise was that it is actually possible to perform hypnosis over an instant messenging program in the form of text. It was quite odd though to think that MSN, something that I have used routinely more days than not for the last decade, could actually be used for such hypnotic purpose. If I'd actually known more about hypnosis and how it works I wouldn't have been so surprised. Most people can probably remember a time when they became so absorbed in the book or magazine that they were reading that things would happen in the world around them but completely escape their notice, and of course in such a situation the time seems to fly by really quickly. This is an example of a naturally occuring trance.

For me the best example of this was in my second year of university when I simply couldn't put down the Lord of the Rings. This was, of course, after I'd gotten past the bit in Lothlorien, which doesn't induce trance but actual sleep through unrelenting boredom. Books do tend to draw me in and especially if they are set in a fictional world, which of course allows me to engage my imagination and picture the scene portrayed.

I also vow, at some point in the not too distant future, to reverse the process and put the fictional products of my own imagination onto paper by writing a fiction novel. Maybe I will mention this idea again at a later date.

Anyway, I had heard of text hypnosis but I was a little skeptical. Not skeptical that it would work, I believe other people when they say it has for them, but more that I wasn't ever sure that this was something that would work for me. Of course none of that meant I'd turn down the opportunity to give it a try if it came along.

Enter, at this point, the hypnotist who offered to give me a demonstration.

I tend to have my computer on in the evenings after work, even if I am doing other things at the time, and of couse MSN is always running in the background. Thanks to this for the last couple of weeks I've been chatting on and off to Liz, the expert to whom I referred a few posts ago, and when the subject of text hypnosis came up she indicated that she'd done it before and was more than willing to satisfty my curiousity.

So to set the scene, there I was sat in a comfy chair with just the one MSN conversation window open and maximised on the screen. Liz had assured me that all I needed to do was just relax and follow her instructions as she typed them to me.

The induction that Liz did was much the sort of thing that I've done before when I've done more traditional inductions. I don't know if it was the type of induction or some mystical ability to empathise on Liz's part but it did seem as though she knew a lot about me and what I was thinking at the time. Probably something about being female, which I swear is always dangerous in a hypnotist. In any case I was focusing on the words and each line came a bit too fast for me to deliberate on how she was managing to do that.

After a while she went into a guided imagery routine, which I was just about able to follow, based on lying on a beach and then swimming out to an Island. I could definitely relate the memory of the kind of whole body fatigue that comes from swimming to what we were trying to achieve and remember what that was like for me. What was interesting was that even though I couldn't actually feel it I was easily able to pretend that I was.

A couple of months ago if I had been faced with such suggestions I would have sat there, read the text, and felt upset because nothing was happening. Now that I understand that the best way to describe hypnosis isn't some outside force making things happen, but rather a deep willingness to imagine and pretend, I genuinely felt as though things were happening. I could have stopped at any point, but what mattered was that I didn't.

A good example of this was when Liz told me that I couldn't take my eyes off her words. I knew that there was nothing at all stopping me from looking away, so I let my eyes wander up to the menu bar at the top of the screen. "Aha!" I thought triumphantly "I can look away! She's not the boss of me!" Then I felt guilty and checked back to see if she'd written anything else.

In the next few minutes my eyes wandered as far as the windows "start" button and even on one occasion my keyboard, but they didn't stay there for long. There was no outside force at play here, at any point I could have looked away. I just didn't want to.

Whilst I was completely focused on the flow of Liz's words it wasn't as though I didn't notice things beyond my laptop screen either. I could still hear people moving around in the flat next door. I could hear dogs barking. I could even hear that accursed ice cream van driving around. Do they really expect to sell ice creams in mid February?! They drive around every day, every week, every year playing that awful tune but I just can't imagine how on earth they manage to stay in business! And why on earth can't they at least invest in a different tune to play once in a while?! Oh dear I've gone off one one...

The above paragraph describes well what entering a slightly more intense state of trance seems to feel like for me. My train of thought will fly off tangentially like the spark off a Catherine wheel, diverging from the other ongoing processes, getting slower, and then finally dying out. It is at this point that I realise I've not been consciously paying attention to what the hypnotist has been saying to me, even though I have never stopped listening, or in this case reading.

I have to say that the most difficult thing for me about text hypnosis came a little later when I was imagining swimming to my island. I was imagining the tiredness to the extent that I was actually having difficulty keeping my eyes open. I didn't feel tired as such, but it did feel really good just to rest my eyes. For some reason it just seemed like the thing to do at the time. At one point I blinked and upon opening my eyes realised that at least a minutes' worth of messages had appeared and I'd lost my place because it'd been pushed off the top of the screen!

It's really difficult to describe how the experience felt, because in many ways it didn't feel unusual at all. My eyes were quite insistent that they'd like to be closed, and yet I didn't feel tired. My arms were acting slow and clumsy on the keyboard when Liz asked me to type responses to her, but I didn't feel fatigued. At one point, in typing "yes" I even managed to get a key stuck down so it came out as "yeeeeeees", but I really didn't feel motivated to try to delete it and start again, it was just too much effort.

My best attempt at describing my mental state would be "not feeling dazed, but pretending to be dazed, and also dazed. I was thinking throughout, but just seeing things in this blurred and blinkered way just seemed the thing to do at the time.

It was very odd. A description which I had to later assure Liz didn't mean anything negative, in fact the whole thing was a very positive experience for me.

I'm afraid that I'm turning into a bit of a trance junkie.

Liz didn't do much beyond just the induction and deepening me with her island routine, but what she did do was give me a re-induction trigger, which we tried a few minutes after she'd brought me back. That was also an interesting experience because when I read it I didn't feel as though anything had changed at all.. but hey, why shouldn't I just close my eyes and zone out for little bit, just as she suggested? So I just sat there, closed my eyes and just daydreamed for a few minutes.

So there it is then. That's what it feels like to hypnotised via MSN. Part of me is a little disappointed that as an experience hypnosis isn't the cliché flashes of lightning, invisible forces, fuzzy vision and sudden dizziness, all topped off with a good measure of involuntary limb flailing, but the more I experience it the more I do enjoy it and I definitely want to continue my learning experiences on both sides of the swinging pocketwatch.

If nothing else this served as a bit of an eye opener to me for how far I've come in terms of my response in the last few months. I am definitely getting better at being a hypnotic subject, and that feels good.

I really owe Liz a debt of gratitude for this very interesting and positive experience. "It were champion!", as they say in Yorkshire. Perhaps sometime soon I can show her the wonders of the Ericksonian handshake...