If you've come to this page, then it's clear that you want to know more.
If it's your first time experiencing this feeling -- let's call it a pull
, yes, that describes it rather well, don't you agree? -- then chances are you're understandably somewhat nervous. How could you not be, when the typical notion of my craft is one of unbridled control?
As for those of you who have prior experience with this pull
: all the information that you will find on this page is information which I assume you've heard before. If any of the concepts which I detail below are new to you, it's likely that you simply forgot them when they were explained to you initially.
With that all said, let's you and me journey together in a discovery of the craft of hypnosis.
No doubt there are times where you go into a sort of "autopilot" mode, conscious but not needing to pay full attention to whatever task you happen to be performing at the time. The most common occurrences of this "autopilot" are "zoning out" during a daily commute and the "mechanical" feeling while carrying out a particularly repetitive task. This phenomenon is known as "dissociation"; severe dissociation can sometimes make a person feel as if they aren't themselves, that they're watching their body from outside, or that the world around them isn't real. What people like me refer to as "trance" is technically defined as "a voluntary dissociative state in which one is more open to suggestion".
Now, that's a lot of word salad, so I'll unpack the meaning for you.
Firstly, trance is voluntary. This means that someone in trance still has a level of control. More specifically, how calm and relaxed a person is affects how easily and how deeply they can go into trance. An important consequence of this is that if at any time someone in trance ever feels uncomfortable, they will wake unless they have been conditioned not to.
Second, trance is a dissociative state. This means that the one in trance is in that "autopilot" mode that I mentioned earlier.
Finally, in trance one is more open to suggestion. This is best explained with an example:
Under normal circumstances, if someone went up to you in-person and abruptly said "poof! You are now your sona", you'd probably respond with "no, I'm clearly not". The idea is that in trance, the instinctual "no, I'm not" is much more easily ignored in favor of a more receptive "sure, why not?"
So you see, hypnosis isn't about limitless control of someone in a robot-like state. If done properly, it's about letting yourself indulge in a bit of reality-bending, letting yourself slide into a calm mindset of infinite possibility, free of the stresses around you...
Ah, I got a bit carried away just now, sorry about that~