30 Days of Hypnosis: Day 11(a)
Favorite experience as a hypnotist?
This question is asinine, because picking a favorite experience as a hypnotist is bordering on impossible for me. So there will be a few of these, which I shall scatter amidst the days to come.
But let's start with what was, for a long time, my favorite trance story ever: the mutual trance.
I had just finished college, and was living at home before heading off to grad school. A dear, dear hypno-friend from online found out she was going to be in my hometown for a conference, and it was fate: we would meet up, and hang out.
She was one of my first really close hypno-friends, a bond forged in the AOL chatrooms, which should tell you something about how damn old I am.
Anyway, our interactions all had to be a little cloak-and-dagger, as my folks would not remotely be okay with me meeting someone I met online because OMG murder, etc. So we hung out at her hotel or in places that I knew friends and family didn't frequent, and it was so nice. We did no hypnosis, at all, for a couple of days, which was crazy in retrospect, but neither of us had done anything like this before, so we were as nervous as two humans could possibly be.
Eventually we start hypnotizing each other, and to her hotel's credit, they had a really comfy recliner in the room! For both of us, it was the first time we'd ever tranced a fellow hypno-enthusiast in person, so that alone was pretty mind blowing.
The week went well, in a lot of respects, and it was lovely. And on the last day she was there, she wanted to do mutual hypnosis - essentially, we'd both hypnotize each other at the same time.
The logistics of this require a certain intimacy, so we laid next to each other in the bed, and held hands. She proceeded to bring me under and deepen my trance, then suggest that when she squeezed my hand, I'd proceed to put her into trance and deepen her, and then I'd suggest she continue with me when I squeezed her hand.
I'd contrast this to the idea of a hypnosis "duel" or whatever - where people are trancing one another at the same time in a competition - the goal here was to both drop into trance and see what might unfold.
The back-and-forth was amazing. There's something genuinely incredible about being hypnotized by someone who's in trance, because they are so singularly focused, and hypnotizing someone while in trance is equally amazing. I must confess that my memory of this experience has always been really fuzzy, and 15 years worth of time don't help.
What I do recall is that there was some point where it was less a back-and-forth and more of a conversation between two very deeply hypnotized people. I liken it to a shared dream, almost, as we were talking through places we were and things we saw. It was a wildly, wildly intimate act that was not at all (overtly, anyway) sexual. I never knew what we talked about, and neither did she, at least at the time. I should ask her about this. We've fallen out of touch as years have gone on.
What I do recall is waking up four hours later (!) and feeling like I had been asleep for days or maybe a couple of minutes. We sat quietly for a while, and we never did try to find out what happened. We don't know if there were shared suggestions or just a sort of trip together. Either way, it was a very meaningful thing.
I get that I'm cheating a bit in that I was a subject here as much as a hypnotist, but the whole thing blew my mind. It was a very creative experience, and while I tend to shun the woo-woo around hypnosis with a religious fervor, it was definitely something.
I've never had an opportunity to do that since then, and there's a part of me that wants desperately to do it again, and another part that thinks it was best as a one-time thing. For one, the intimacy level of it was... really, really powerful. We definitely liked each other, so that had something to do with it, but it remains striking, even in retrospect. If I'm going to do that again, it will need to be with someone I really, really trust, because there's a lot happening. That said, it also gets my hypnotist side going to think about. In case you haven't noticed, dear readers, I'm probably a little more a fan of being hypnotized on the whole, and also don't have near enough of that in my life.
But this is a good reminder of how fun it is to also be someone who can help people get to have amazing experiences like this. I do love that part of hypnosis.
Anyway. That's my favorite hypnotist story. What's yours?