Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis by Robin Waterfield

put my hands on my knees and to feel the palms melt down into the flesh of the knees. After a short time it became impossible to feel what was hand and what was knee, while miles away in the distance rich, sonorous Hungarian tones told me how pleasantly relaxed I was beginning to feel and how leaden and heavy my eyelids had become. It was a little like being lowered down a well, with the hypnotist's voice as the rope that kept me from any feeling of abandonment or panic.
    Or here is Whitley Strieber's account:
    The process of becoming hypnotized was pleasant. I sat in a comfortable chair. Dr Klein stood before me and asked me to look up at his finger, which was placed so that I had almost to roll my eyes into my head to see it. He moved it from side to side and suggested that I relax. No more than half a minute later, it seemed, I was unable to hold my eyes open. Then he began saying that my eyelids were getting heavy, andthey did indeed get heavy. The next thing I knew, my eyes were closed. At that point I felt relaxed and calm, but not asleep. I was aware of my surroundings. I could feel my face growing slack, and soon Dr Klein began to say that my right hand was becoming warm. It got warm, and then he progressed to my arm, and then my whole body. I was now sitting, totally comfortable, encased in warmth. I still felt as if I had a will of my own, a sensation that was never to leave me.
    This well highlights the essential difference between real life and fiction. Modern hypnotism is consensual and permissive, gentle rather than authoritarian. All hypnotism must be consensual to a degree: you cannot be hypnotized unless you want to. In fact, it is arguable that the hypnotist's role is not to
do
anything as such, but just to facilitate your own spontaneous entry into a trance state. All hypnosis may be self-hypnosis. A light trance is perfectly sufficient for most therapeutic purposes, so that you will easily remain aware of what is going on. It is all rather relaxing and comfortable, like falling asleep in a warm bed as a child.
    There are phases to the induction. First, the therapist will put the client at his ease and allay his doubts and suspicions, by discussing what he wants and expects to get out of the treatment, by explaining what is involved in hypnosis (especially if the client has expectations based on TV and fiction), and generally by establishing rapport with the client. Then he will ask the subject to be quiet and to focus on his voice. This is an important part of the induction procedure: as the famous Russian psychologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936) found, the exploratory apparatus of animals, including humans, is essential to maintaining a state of general alertness and to orienting oneself within reality. So the hypnotist must close down our exploratory apparatus somehow, in order to reduce our alertness. Since the eye is the basic human exploratory apparatus, eye-closure is generally the first milestone in the induction of hypnosis. At the same time the hypnotist is ensuring that the input received by eye and ear is monotonous, because if we know what is going to happen next – if the input is boring enough to be predictable – that relaxes us, in the sense that we feel no sense of expectation, and our sensory sentinels can doze. The hypnotist may also get the client progressively to relaxhis whole body, starting with his toes and ending with the head. He may arouse the client out of his light trance and get him to talk about it, inspiring confidence, before repeating the procedure.
    At some point the hypnotist will apply one or more tests to check whether the client is hypnotized; the most common tests used are the eye-closure test, hand-clasp test, postural-sway test and hand-levitation test. These are perfectly straightforward: in the hand-levitation test, for instance, the hypnotist suggests to the subject that his hand is so light that it floats up into the air. If the subject's hand