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Sustaining Trance
🕑 Added 2023-06-30 13:58:53 +0000 UTCSustaining Trance
Many subjects have issues “staying in trance” when they are hypnotized, especially if they are instructed to do something more active. If they are newer to hypnosis, this can even give the illusion that maybe they weren’t deep enough to begin with or in trance at all. However, there are a ton of fun tricks we can use to help our partners experience more persistent trance.
Why Does This Happen?
Ultimately, understanding why someone feels as though they are popping out of trance will give us some insight into how to make trance feel more sustainable. It is always good to ask your partner what their subjective experience is with these moments -- but this is also a case where you may be able to identify more than they can.
In many cases, trance is a perceptual experience -- we’re using a lot of “feeling” language because the feeling of being in trance is the part that matters most in terms of someone having fun. It’s true that a lot of times someone may feel like the trance is lifting when in actuality it may not be, but a more intense trance from an experiential perspective will correlate to a more intense trance “objectively” (as objective as it ever is).
We are going to talk about this in the context of “action” -- such as if you ask someone to move, speak, or otherwise do something active. However, this really broadly applies to any sort of change that makes someone feel as though the trance is “breaking.” This tends to be a switch in some way between the feeling of being passive to active, which could even be something as simple as passively listening to actively having to consider what the hypnotist is saying. But everything we’re talking about can also apply in other contexts when someone feels like trance is a little bit inconsistent (and the tricks we will talk about are fun and useful for anyone).
- Action is associated with “awakeness”
We know that hypnotized people can easily do things actively, so it isn’t that action is breaking the trance, exactly. It’s generally that action happens and it “feels like” awakeness, which messes with the trance experience.
- Action triggers “checking”
Something else that might happen in tandem is that the change in baseline from action causes a person to try to reevaluate “am I still in trance?” And that questioning itself can feel like awakeness (“I wouldn’t ask if it was true”) or they start finding things that feel like awakeness (“xyz is different, so I must not be in trance anymore”).
- Distraction
Trance is at least partially a matter of focus, and having to change focus abruptly in trance -- especially in a way that is about creating action -- can break that focus. Often a hypnotized person is focused on the trance feelings themselves, the hypnotist’s words, or some other very hypnotic aspect of the trance. Moving away from that can be distracting.
- Scope of trance is limited
A subject may feel that they have a grasp on hypnosis in a pretty specific and limited way: “trance feels like I am relaxed and breathing slowly and it’s hard to move.” Anything outside of their personal understanding or definition of trance doesn’t fit their model.
- Mismatched expectations
All of the above can happen even if the subject logically understands that they can be active in trance, move, speak, think, etc. But some subjects don’t even have that starting point and believe that trance must be a completely passive experience.
Tips and Tricks
We’re going to go through a list of fun techniques to use and talk briefly about how they work and how you can do them.
- Fix expectations
First on the list is to always make sure your partner’s expectations are managed. Have a conversation with them before and especially during trance -- tell them that they can learn how to be active in trance but also that it’s normal to feel like they have moments where they pop out right now. You want to make sure they know they’re not failing, and also that this is something that they have permission to experience and experiment with as you work on it together.
It can help to explain to them why they might be feeling this, such as the things we talked about above and especially your take on what they’ve told you about their experience -- it shows that you are striving to understand what they are feeling.
- “You don’t have to know”
A very effective framing to introduce into any trance is the idea that the subject isn’t fully aware of all aspects of the experience they are having. This is great for trance in and of itself -- while we often have a pretty rigid idea of what trance is like, the reality is that we aren’t really great at identifying all the nuanced aspects of it, even if we’re very practiced.
More experienced subjects might generally have an easier time understanding this, and you may need to spend some time selling this idea to people whose concept of trance is more limited. You can do this in various ways:
- Explaining to them logically that there is no way they can be fully aware of all of the ways their body/mind understand trance (because it is impossible to be conscious of it all at once, because there are always new things to learn about their responses such as the last time they learned about a response, because trance is very subtle and no one is a perfect expert, because it operates partially on processes we are not aware of and not used to paying attention to, etc)
- Pacing/leading and leading by suggesting new trance experiences to prove to them that there are things they don’t know/notice
- Suggesting to them an experience of their awareness of trance broadening just a little bit so that they experience a greater depth of nuance
Another suggestion to add onto this is the framing “you don’t have to know” -- implying that they can relax and simply be confident that things are happening outside of their awareness. No rush to identify every aspect of trance and an ethos of curiosity; they can simply just know that they’re experiencing things even if they can’t really find the signs of it. This is great for all kinds of suggestions and can make trance feel very sustainable because it releases a lot of the pressure to codify it and find rigid “proof” of trance in the way that a person might be used to.
- Hypnotize while active
One of the simplest ways to make action feel hypnotic is to hypnotize someone while they are being active and take advantage of the motion and action as part of the trance. Certainly we can imagine that there are some repetitive sexual acts (giving oral, masturbating, having sex, etc) that fit very nicely into this box -- but you can really use anything that fits your trance.
For example, you can even train someone towards motion in trance by having them gently sway their body. Direct them to do this consciously at first, and then utilize and contextualize that motion as hypnotic: “That gentle rocking lulling your body down…”
One of the sticking points for a lot of people is trying to maintain that feeling of trance when it feels like they need to consciously control what they are doing or saying -- a lot of the times we put emphasis on the idea that eventually these motions become automatic. And certainly we can keep a little of that, but it’s important to train someone to know that even when they put intention into their actions, they can stay in trance. So continuing the above example, you could add on suggestions like: “And you can experiment with that motion, moving at different speeds and at different directions, and watch how the changes you make in your actions change the nuanced feelings of the trance.”
Talking is another example where this can be used. Notice that we’re not exactly making suggestions like, “Every time you speak, it takes you deeper into trance.” We want to make a case for why talking is keeping them in trance, and acknowledge that it’s going to create a shift in the process that we may not be able to anticipate. So instead, something like, “Why don’t you tell me a little about what you’re feeling in trance, and notice how explaining it to me allows you to transform and broaden those feelings?”
Trances where you hypnotize someone by asking them questions can work very well for this. It might be outside of your (and your partner’s) norm to work in a more conversational style, but you can lead them into saying things that cause them to imagine sensations or fantasies, or cause them to have to look inward hypnotically. Along the way, don’t forget to “ratify” the trance: “That’s right, and you can kind of feel that happening now as you talk, can’t you?”
- Metaphors
An obvious place to go is using various metaphors or comparisons to what a “persistent trance” is, such as creating fantasy scenarios and transformations that allow for hypnosis to be maintained. For example, turning someone into a doll that is always a little bit empty-headed or fuzzy.
Transformations are especially nice for this because maintaining a headspace can sort of be easier in some ways than a blanket trance. We often have a pretty rigid idea of what trance is and how it feels, and introducing a headspace that doesn’t have to play by those rules can help a lot for some people.
Fantasy ideas in general also can help people detach from reality a little (as in, needing less to concretely verify every aspect of what is happening) and can provide a good “grip” for a suggestion of persistent experience to hold. Here are some ideas:
- Implanted with a chip that keeps them slightly blanker than usual
- Wearing a magic necklace that keeps them enchanted
- Bimbofied and air-headed/dumb
- Made into a pet that is more docile
- The air in the room is a hypnotic gas
- A maid who can’t stop being gleeful and thinking about cleaning
- A magician’s assistant who is kept under a spell
Note that a lot of these and other ideas tend to evoke the idea of a full personality change -- but this doesn’t have to be part of it. Make sure you give your partner permission to not have to maintain a full persona, just that these are some detailed ideas they can feel on another level or awareness, or ways to make their brain buy-in to the sensations they’re going to feel. You can even list several examples and see what feels good.
- Parts: face
Hypnotizing “part” of a person can in many ways make it feel easier to maintain. When you use this kind of language, it can have a sort of dissociative effect -- instead of feeling “I am hypnotized,” it might feel like “this part of me is hypnotized.” There’s a little bit of removal of control or agency from that.
A lot of the ways that we experience trance is in our face and head. The majority of our sensory systems are there; it’s where we feel a big part of our sense of balance and sense of self. Really emphasizing elements of this experience as being “hypnotic” can go a long way.
For example, you could say something like, “And your head is the part of you dropping deepest into trance -- your face, your lips, your eyes all getting more deeply hypnotized…” Think about the quality of that experience: how does someone experience their lips and eyes in “normal” awareness, and how might that change in trance?
Particularly, telling someone that their mouth is hypnotized can be intense. Our mouths do a lot of unconscious and small movements, and making someone more aware of those can add a ton of signals to their “Oh, I’m hypnotized” experience. You can be very specific about this: “Your lips and tongue are just subtly more relaxed than you’re used to because they’re hypnotized, moving more unconsciously at the same time you’re aware of them and the effort it takes to make them move, every tiny motion reminding you, pushing trance into your head…”
The eyes and especially vision itself are similar. It can be really powerful for someone to feel like the way they are seeing the world is changed somehow. This doesn’t have to be a grand hallucination -- even suggesting that it’s different in a way that they can’t put their finger on can work very well. You can suggest a subtle fogginess, or a vividness, or a sort of “motion blur,” or a difference in the way their eyes fixate and focus on things. You can use fun imagery as well of having someone imagine that others could tell simply by looking at their eyes that they’re hypnotized -- a glassiness, dilated pupils, or fantasy stuff like spirals that are spinning in their eyes visible to others.
- Parts: body
You can use techniques like this on other parts of the body as well, which is particularly good for doing activities that involve motion. This is a great opportunity to talk about feelings of balance, dissociated effort, and synesthetic qualities.
Moving our bodies is a complex act that we don’t think about very much as adults. But when we move part of our body, the rest of us has to compensate to maintain a sense of balance. Talking about this unconscious quality can again make someone aware of all of the work their body is doing without their awareness, which is a great opportunity to tell someone that their body is doing this in a “hypnotized” way. This is especially true of when we move our heads -- our entire sensory perception changes when we turn our head, and calling all of that sensory input to the forefront as hypnotic can be intense. This also opens up opportunities for a person to feel like their body is moving autonomously, and you can reinforce this: “You simply can’t be aware of all the things your body has to do to move itself.”
It can be fun to play with this by using suggestions like, “It feels like your legs are hypnotized and moving through hypnosis itself” or other abstract sensory feelings. You can certainly suggest things like “it feels like moving through water,” but it can be more intense in a lot of cases to use metaphors that the person can’t directly compare to their past experience -- they won’t be able to really evaluate it in the same way (so it can be less pass/fail).
(This is of course also a great opportunity for regression!)
- Parts: mind
Of course applying this to the mind -- a pretty abstract part of us -- gives us even more room to experiment. When we talk about parts of the mind, we can ostensibly get as creative as we want. There’s no need to stick to ideas that are concretely talked about in psychology.
Here are some ideas for parts that you could talk about:
- A part that listens
- A part that processes
- A part that translates vision/motion/hearing to understanding or action (great to connect to other parts metaphors)
- A part that evaluates or judges
- A part that dreams or imagines
- A part that is “awake”
- A part that wants to submit or go into trance
- A part of you that you can’t fully access
When you separate out or address a part of someone’s mind, it can especially give the sense that it is something they don’t have full awareness of or control over, and it is great to emphasize this through suggestion. Note that this kind of idea shares similarities with the concept of talking about or to someone’s “unconscious mind,” but it allows us more than this: 1) we can be more specific and subtle, which can help with nuanced feelings of hypnosis, and 2) we can address parts that we might think of as “conscious” but we are emphasizing the unconscious parts of them.
Telling someone that a part of them is hypnotized and will stay hypnotized can take pressure off of hypnosis having to feel like some impenetrable, all-consuming thing. Again it relieves a little bit of the capacity to evaluate in a concrete way, and it creates the opportunity for really interesting sensations. What does it feel like if someone’s desires are trapped in trance? What does it feel like if the part of them that translates words to understanding is trapped in trance? And: is that something they can even have full awareness of at all times, or do they just have to trust that it is happening because they can’t fully evaluate it?
- Thought anchor/earworm
Anchors are broadly useful especially for “refreshing” states -- perhaps squeezing your fist creates feelings of a hypnotic drug flowing up your arm and into your brain. We can have even more fun with anchors that are connected to things that happen internally -- things that maybe even happen automatically.
A fun idea is getting a word, phrase, or mantra “stuck” in someone’s head in the same way we might get a musical earworm. Perhaps you give someone a phrase like “I’m so hypnotized.” We can imagine that hearing that over and over in your head would be pretty intense, especially if it also made you feel a wash of hypnotic sensation, a slowing-down, or other hypnotic kinds of stuff.
There are a ton of ways that we can anchor this. We can even use some of the parts language we talked about before: “A part of you that you don’t control, a part of you that you’re not aware of is just thinking to itself about how hypnotized it is, and ever so often you can hear it…” You can make a direct comparison to a musical earworm, or talk about how the words themselves are addictive, automatic, or infectious. It can also be fun to have them repeat the phrase verbally or in text as a way to anchor it: “Your own voice beginning to sink into your head and getting stuck…”
This creates great opportunities for your partner to “remember” the phrase and feel hypnosis. As with the first example, it’s great to explicitly state that they won’t necessarily hear this phrase at all times completely consistently (because of course they won’t be able to) -- so coming up with elegant ways to describe how it will sometimes fade into the background is useful.
- Resistance play
One of the most simple tricks we can use in hypnosis to make something feel persistent is the “try not to x” framing. For people who are interested in resistance especially, this can be remarkably effective.
Being “trapped in trance” can be very appealing for some people, and it’s useful to us because if you can get buy-in to that belief, it causes a subject to notice trance more readily and in places they may not have noticed before. For example, someone who tends to rely on feelings like relaxation around the eyes and face might find that even if they don’t feel those sensations, they still feel like they’re in trance because they “can’t” come out -- so then they have to identify why they feel that.
Before we talk about some methods, it’s important to mention here that this is an activity where you should pay special attention to safety. Some people may be stressed out by the idea that they can’t come out of trance if they try, and it’s generally good practice to throw in some reinforcement that if it’s necessary, they will. (This is good to remember for all types of persistent trance, but especially in a resistance play context.)
Here are some ways you might suggest this:
- “If you try to come out of trance, you just find that you can’t quite get all the way there, like a part of you that you can’t control is just hanging on”
- “You’re too addicted to the feeling of being hypnotized to be able to fully escape it”
- “The more you try to wake yourself up, those attempts cause you to get hit with more of that hypnotic drug”
- “Even if some part of you is unconsciously trying to wake up, the way it struggles to do that causes you to slip a little bit deeper”
- “Like trance is the status quo, so when you try to come up a little bit, you sink right back down, helplessly”
- “As though you’re completely locked in, in a way that you don’t even fully understand, unable to access the key yourself”
- Conditioning
Conditioning is where we can retrain a huge amount of the roadblock-y responses someone has as well as add new and helpful responses so that they feel they can maintain trance more easily. It is very broad -- we can easily use associative conditioning to train any number of things on this list to feel more habitual, familiar, and automatic.
Specifically, we might want to look at the “am I in trance?” impulse. We can think about it in a few ways:
- Something is triggering the question “Wait, am I (still) in trance?”
- The answer to that question isn’t confident or is “no”
So we can use our usual little tricks to take care of that, but make sure we work in the context of this kind of action we’re working with.
- “When you move, and it triggers your brain to check to see if you’re hypnotized, you feel this little ‘yes’ response in tandem with each breath”
- “Any time you find yourself wondering if you’re still deep in trance, a little flood of hypnotized feelings gets released inside of your brain”
- “It’s easy to go so deep because even that wordless impulse to check gets blunted every time with your mind sighing, ‘I’m going deeper’”
It’s easy to see how we can connect this to all sorts of mantras and anchors, the concept of fractionation, and any kind of action. You can make suggestions around that conditioning becoming more persistent as well: “As this happens over and over, you may notice the entire response changing, those impulses blunting and transforming into things that just keep you deep.”
- Anchor everything as hypnotic
Something else that you can do that is fun to build off of this is to ostensibly anchor hypnotic “feelings” to everything you can think of to describe about someone’s experience. This can help really broaden someone’s sense of what can be an “I’m in trance” feeling (and can be very intense in a ton of different hypnotic scenes).
You can use framings such as:
- “It feels so hypnotic to…”
- “Getting that pulsing feeling of trance when…”
- “Feeling hypnosis connect to…”
- “Anchoring your trance with…”
You can be more specific about what those trance feelings are:
- Tingliness
- Heaviness
- Fuzziness
- Relaxation
- Fogginess
- Enchantment
- Sparkliness
- Docility
Here are some ideas of mundane things about someone’s experience that you can anchor:
- The feeling of the air around them
- Their body posture
- The feeling of their tongue in their mouth
- Their eyelids
- Motion
- Settling
- Speaking
- Falling silent
- Their hands
- Their breath
- Their thoughts shifting
…And really anything you might pace them about or use in a progressive relaxation. This is ostensibly a sort of overload, and most people will notice several of the things you list as being more pronounced than others (which you can say explicitly if you think your partner might worry about feeling everything you suggest equally intensely). It is also good to encourage the idea that this is partially about your partner noticing things that neither you nor they are at first -- this is about building up their “trance vocabulary.”
Comments
Wordweaver
I quite like this approach, it's very different from mine. I think I don't tend to run into the popping out of 'trance' problem as much because I focus more on alteration of state/experience along specific dimensions, say - Pleasure, arousal, dominance (PAD model) for the emotional base or interoceptive vs exteroceptive for the orientation of focus or how cognition changes (DFT model) say in coherence of thought (mind wandering vs flow) or number of thoughts (fixation/mind blankness/zoned out) and sensory/perceptual changes, dissociation, agency etc. Having a broad palette to work with kinda helps me figure out individual proclivities and I tend to call any change along any of those dimensions a win as an alteration in state/experience without having to deal with binary pass/fail condition 'in or out of trance'. I also took to a phrase you used in a podcast ep that I have often referenced since about 'trance having an ebb and flow to it' which I think is quite appropriate here
