(I tagged this under psych and sexuality but if its not supposed to go under that then lmk)
I hope you are all doing well. I don’t post on here frequently given that I feel like I usually do not have much of value to add, but hopefully someone finds something of use in this post.
I’m too lazy to check when I first made a post asking you all some questions about Hypnosis but since then I have done quite a lot of research on and practicing it. I have been spending multiple hours a day either reading something related to it or practicing it, so while it hasn’t been that long since I’ve picked it up I would say I am already moderately skilled at it. That might be dunning-kruger although I think dunning-kruger is BS.
For background, I used to practice meditation as well as ceremonial magick so those skill sets certainly have helped me a lot here, I would consider those two practices to be adjacent in many ways. A lot of people equate meditation to emptying oneself or some sort of mindfulness practice although I was moreso into the vajrayana side of things.
I think the hardest thing has been finding good resources on Hypnosis. The book ‘The Science of Self-Hypnosis’ by Adam Eason is good, so is ‘Artful Hypnotic Anchoring’ and ‘Applied Hypnosis and Hyperempiria.’
Self-hypnosis is not exactly the same as having an actual hypnotist work on you, but most of the research points to both having the same level of efficacy when it came to uprooting or changing habits.
Although both are cool, both stage hypnosis and hypnotherapy are both applications I do not really care for. As it relates to a different project I am working on, I am mainly interested in Hypnosis as a means to induce hallucination and adjacent forms of altered experiences. I feel like a perv mentioning this as a useful information source but there are quite a few Hypnokink blogs on Tumblr, and once you remove the overall use case, they do a really good job at explaining the mechanics of hypnosis from a recreational standpoint. Just to clarify I think Hypnokink is retarded and thats not something I am into.
Anyways. I have always been able to slip into a deep enough level of trance that I can no longer think logically unless I have some sort of external source to ground me. Using a lot of the techniques from the books mentioned above, I have been able to consistently induce a pretty heavy state of trance now in about 2-8 minutes, and if I need to I can maintain and deepen it for hours on end.
Generally speaking, while in deep trance, pairing a verbal suggestion with a manufactured intense emotion, a corresponding visualized scenario, and some sort of physical anchor you can use in your day to day life, repeated over multiple sessions, is enough for me to change multiple circuits of behavior that I have otherwise had a lot of difficulty uprooting.
If you think of the typical, deeply relaxed, sleeplike trance state on one end of a spectrum, on the other side you have Hyperemperia. From my own experience it is more of a hyper-aware state. It feels like your framerate of perception has slowed down. Kinda like you can think more, and more clearly, ‘per frame’ of consciousness. Whereas deep relaxation trance is something you fall into, and once you have some skill at it its actually pretty easy to maintain, hyperemperia feels like something you ascend up to and have to actively maintain.
I have been coming up with my own methods to reach, maintain and deepen this state since there are not a lot of good resources on it. But an example I can give is I can reach a state where all color I can see in my field of vision becomes ‘more.’ Not necessarily more vivid or deep but just ‘more’ of whatever it already is. It is also accompanied by a feeling of my perception being overwhelmed, like what I am looking at is too intense to process. I am not too concerned about my mental health or anything because this is a pretty delicate state to reach and maintain.
Anyways, I have somewhere to go in a couple minutes and I would like to keep this concise. One side note is that the model for hypnosis that seems to be the ‘best’ to me personally is Cold Control Theory, I’m too lazy to link the academic papers but it explains the mechanisms pretty well and also makes a pretty good case for less common altered states like Hyperemperia being real and accessible without using drugs or something.