Hypnosis may just be a mind-job.

For instance, someone could hypnotize you to paralyze your hand, and you could try to move it just to find that you couldn't.

Then again, I could say to you, "Pretend you've just been hypnotized by me and that I've given you a command you cannot resist. That command is you cannot move your hand."

Now, in the second case you'd pretend it, and to the extent that you could really get into it and keep pretending, you could find that, wow, this thing has sorta taken a life of its own, and you really could try to move your hand and fail to move it.

That's hypnosis, as far as I know.

Stage hypnotists find people, so I am told, with the best imaginations, who can really get into something, and make believe it's true ... so much that it has an effect upon them.

Someone could make suggestions that produce real physiological responses. The question is, how much of it is them doing it and how much of it is you doing it to yourself? In my experience, it's great when there is a little of both.

Someone can set up a situation in which certain responses from you are very likely to occur, and they can use their voice (tonality, tempo, etc) to evoke emotional, physical, and psychological responses from you. All of this is geared toward convicing you that hypnosis and the hypnotist has power over you.

In short, you are doing it to yourself. It's like ritual magick. You create a scenario in which certain things are likely to happen. You modify your environment such that certain attributes, qualities, behaviors, etc. are evoked within you. Then you mobilize some ritual that engages the forces within you that are necessary to help bring about some change.

That's it.

You're doing it to yourself.

A hypnotist can influence you, bypass you conscious mind, or whatever, in so far as you really, really believe, pretend, fool yourself (or whatever) that he or she can.

So, knowing this, pretend with all your might that your conscious mind has been bypassed. Dedicate yourself to acting as if you have been completely hypnotized and given whatever suggestion it is, and go with it all the way.

As Milton Erickson said, hypnosis is primarly concerned with the communication of ideas. Stephen Gilligan's take on that is that the ideas are communicated to the experiential self or unconscious.

So, you have a bunch of words, some ideas, some made up stuff, and you translate them into their embodiment in your life. That's hypnosis.

You feed the ideas and give them power by acting as if.

People who were hypnotized and carried out the crazy suggestions of a stage hypnotist reported stuff like, "A part of me knew that I was just acting out on suggestions and it wasn't real, but another part of me really believed it was true." Isn't that interesting?

[This message has been edited by babayada (edited September 25, 2005).]