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02 - About Hypnosis

So what’s hypnosis, anyway?

To me - hypnosis is two things.

  1. Something to do on Tuesday nights.
  2. An argument trap that prevents me from writing more useful guides. Or getting things. Like. Sunlight.

If I was a plant I’d be dead by now.

If I’m being less cheeky about it, I’d call recreational hypnosis a ritual of suggestion where you collaboratively modify top down processing. When we try to put clinical, recreational, erotic, stage, street, and (ugh) covert hypnosis all under the same umbrella, it becomes a mess to label without just calling it a persuasive conversation. Despite that, here’s some definitions that I like.

Hypnosis is a combination of guided meditation and the children’s game Simon Says.

-Binaural Histolog - Introduction

For the more academic…

“Volitional actions are experienced as involuntary… and imagination is experienced as reality.”

-Zoltan Dienes (Lecture Available Here)

Or, a more inclusive view of the ritual…

Hypnosis is the engagement of beliefs and imagination, via verbal and nonverbal communication, to facilitate an altered state of reality.

However, your role in all this is as follows…

Understand—your job is to turn a doing into a happening.

Jacquin, Anthony. Reality is Plastic. The Art of Impromptu Hypnosis. (p. 36). (Function). Kindle Edition.

You’re here, so it’s likely that you already have an idea of what it is you want to do. While your understanding of hypnosis will change how you interact with it, it’s not necessary or even helpful to do a deep dive starting out.

Optional Reading - More on what hypnosis is. Already want to dig deeper? Cool!

A social psychologist griped about the number of different ways hypnosis could be approached. In this paper, he later tries to propose a solution to make hypnosis easier to study, removing the presupposition of the existence of trance.

Hypnosis… has been treated as a social construction, a form of discourse, a set of practices, a belief system, and a form of therapy. Forecasts of the future would follow one path if I defined the subject matter, for example, as a set of practices designed to influence psychological change and a different path if I focused on the mentalistic construction of hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness.

-Theodore R Sarbin https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/10282-004

As a social dynamic, Anthony Jacquin defines hypnosis with this…

For practical purposes as The Hypnotist, think of it this way:

The Hypnotist presents suggestions to the subject and the subject experiences the effect of those suggestions with a sense of involuntariness.

Understand—your job is to turn a doing into a happening.

-Jacquin, Anthony. Reality is Plastic. The Art of Impromptu Hypnosis. (p. 36). Anthony Jacquin. Kindle Edition.

Rambling on, state theorists will say hypnosis is an observable state of focus and suggestibility, and people coming from a cognitive-behavioral perspective will say that all we’re doing is phenomenological control, directly suggesting feelings, and the trance is a subjective experience.

If you’re not a researcher, pulling this apart is like trying to scientifically make the purest cookie. In searching for the purest application, you’re going to remove all the flavor and fun from this ritual of suggestion.

So, my suggestion to you is to spend some time as a subject and experiencing hypnosis. It’s fine to just be straight-up and explain your curiosity at a meet. A lot of folks in the VR hypno community will be happy to give you a first session - especially if you present yourself with an open, respectful, and appreciative attitude.

If you want some DLC, I rant even more about what hypnosis is in the Mind Play Bonus Bits guide, The Fuck is Hypnosis.

## Your Job Let's get to doing this making this doing in to a happening, shall we?

On the surface - it’s simple. All we need to do is CREAM.

  • Context - Give your subject a safe space to explore their imagination and responses.
  • Rapport - Through your role, give them a reason to follow your instructions. (For example, through your authority as a hypnotist, or a friend as a collaborator.)
  • Expectation - Gradually build up hypnotic phenomena, where small changes grow in to massive shifts in perception.
  • Absorption - Keep them absorbed and engaged with the experience, and work with them to maximize their immersion. (Nothing is going to happen if they’re on their phone.)
  • Motivation - Work with their emotional engagement. Manage expectations so that when something happens, they’re excited and amazed that their arm can’t move, rather than disappointed they didn’t spontaneously hallucinate transforming in to a werewolf. If you overhype them going in, the law of reversed effect (short video) will fuck you.

(This structure is ripped off from Wordweaver’s The CREAM Session. He has a newer writeup on it here.)

Being a bit whimsical, you’ll be helping your subject experience magic. You’ll coach them through an experience and make it real. Without uh, the coach McGuirk vibes.

Explaining Hypnosis

Section titled “Explaining Hypnosis”

Let’s take a look at an unlikely hypothetical conversation.

Potential partner: “What’s hypnosis anyway?”

Potential hypnotist: “Ah, hypnosis is a ritual of suggestion, where we attempt to reduce activity in the mid dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, making actions feel automatic and imagination becomes reality. Of course, as you’re likely aware, there’s been a long-running debate between state and non-state theorists for more than half a century. The state theorists suggest-”

Potential partner: *blinks, staring blankly*

Potential hypnotist: ”… Did I do something wrong? Are you already in trance?”

Potential partner: “What I meant was - what do you want to do with me?”

Clueless Hypnotist: ”… Oh.”

Most people don’t care about the speculative research on this stuff, and often if you’re in a hypnosis community people already know what to expect. What people do care about is what it’s like. Thankfully, you don’t need to do a ton of work to explain that. Here’s a few angles:

  • Like watching a movie. You know it’s not real, but you still get involved in the story, or sometimes feel yourself shivering in cold winter scenes. Unlike a movie, you get to actively engage with the suggestions to make it better.
  • Like if I described eating a [pick their favorite food]. You’d probably feel little bits of that happening, or your stomach grumbling. It’s like that, but making it as real as possible.

Often, you should ask them what their views on hypnosis are and just listen. You might want to make sure their views are in line with reality. If you don’t know something, go look it up. If you have no interest in being hypnotized yourself, you might go through the subject’s guide to see what it’s like.

Having first hand experience on the other side will always be better than just reading about it. Personally, if a hypnotist wants to do something to me and has never been hypnotized, it raises a red flag. It’s like they’re too afraid to take the ride they’re providing, and don’t understand how real things can feel.

When you have the skills for it, you can offer to do a demo like Magnetic Hands and ask them what it was like. (Just skip the part from their guide where they turn it into a full blown induction.)

Additional Resources

Section titled “Additional Resources”