Challenging Assumptions

Some people these days have heard of my hypnotic predilections, and sad to say I hardly hear from them. Which is a shame, because for whatever reason I have little or no interest in hypnotising them.

Hypnotists do tend to get a bad press, when you hear of a tist getting into trouble for various reasons - usually, the old "Sorcerer's Apprentice" news article about a tist who puts a bunch of schoolgirls, or a theatre full of people, into a trance - and who then finds he can't pull them out of it.

That's the funny thing about hypnosis. You don't actually fall asleep when you enter a trance. Trance is not the same as sleep. A trance enables your awake mind to access a part of your mind you are normally unaware of - your unconscious. While your conscious is off somewhere, lost in the details of the induction, your unconscious is busy checking out your body, processing information and stimuli it has received and sorting out everything significant into long term memory. This happens all the time in your head when you sleep for real - it is called dreaming.

Trance allows your unconscious mind to be awake at the same time as your body is awake, and enables it to engage in a conversation with the tist. If the tist gains the trust of the unconscious, he can implant suggestions which can either be entertaining, healing, affirming, helpful, interesting or occasionally weird.

Minor suggestions, temporarily implanted, include calibrating and convincer suggestions - such as suggesting that, when you snap your fingers, the conscious mind will come back - but you will be hungry for a hot dog, or a cup of tea. When the suggestion takes root, the tist convinces the conscious mind that hypnosis is real; and the more powerful suggestions, the long-term ones to help a quitter become smoke-free or to help a person saddled with a compulsion to comfort eat to maybe start choosing a more reasonable diet to improve his or her fitness, can be implanted then.

So whether I'm hypnotising you to enjoy an erotic experience together, turning you on with the snap of my fingers, building up your orgasm beyond a point where you ever imagined you could go without coming, or whether I'm just laying the foundations for you to harness your unconscious and your memory to train an eidetic memory into you or something, the suggestions I'm implanting only take effect with the permission of your unconscious minds, and believe me - they tend to have your best interests at heart, so you have little to fear from my piercing eyes and voice.