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.