6: Try self-hypnosis
Hypnosis, at its core, is about understanding how someone feels and thinks so that you can play with those feelings and thoughts. For this reason, this section contains some hypnotic tools to help you explore your OWN psychology, so that you have a baseline for what that stuff feels like. It’s very important to remember that everyone experiences trance (and everything!) differently, with their own nuance, but this is a good starting point.
This isn’t a “hypnotic script” in the traditional sense—it’s more a set of building blocks and instructions you can use to start playing with your head. Feel free to read it over and experiment with some of the ideas. There’s no right or wrong way—you’re just looking to observe your own experience a little. And don’t worry about whether or not you’re “going into trance”—the elements of your psychology that you can feel are more important than that!
Doing self-hypnosis or meditation is a great way to get acquainted with the inner aspects of your head, which will help you think about how to do that with other people (and what they might be experiencing). Consider doing this every so often as a practice, and trying out different things!
Step-by-step:
Before you start, just know that it’s very normal to get distracted and feel your focus drift elsewhere, or if some things don’t feel very “vivid”—you’re not failing or needing to start over. Just keep experimenting.
Hypnosis is about changing focus and attention, so one of the things you can do to explore it is very concretely focus on something outside of yourself (like a spot on the wall) and then switch to focusing on what your body is feeling. What sensations are you noticing? The weight of your body, feelings in your muscles, your breath? What else?
See if anything changes if you go back and forth between that external focus and internal focus a few times. Notice anything new?
What happens if you then start to lead yourself into a daydream? Anything you like is fine, or you could use a stereotypical scenario like walking through a forest.
Experiment with toggling between your different senses of the daydream—the sights, sounds, feelings. Is there a difference between imagining the scene as a whole versus details? Can you make some of them more or less intense by changing your focus?
You can turn your attention to your thoughts, as well—what are you thinking about, and what does it feel like to think in the way that you’re thinking? Can you make your thoughts louder or quieter? Slower or faster? And then how does that change the way you feel? If you refocus on the daydream, how does that affect it?
You can “wake yourself up” or ground yourself out of the experience by focusing on and interacting with the environment around you in your “usual” way.
There are several other resources for self hypnosis on this site—a very short “zine” with a couple of techniques, and an in-depth guide to creating your own ritualized self trance practice.
