Hypnosis and Stories

DISCLAIMER:

Okay, now bear with me. I am doing something a little unconventional with this blog. This semester I am taking two English classes, Oral Traditions and the Lit Seminar with Amy Thomas. She has asked us to keep a regular schedule of reading and writing so we don't get behind on our research. Since I am bad about putting things off for later, I thought I would start posting some of it here. I will still write a new blog for every class period in Sexson's class, but also post a single entry each week pertaining to my research topic, which I am still trying to narrow down. I know the general theme at this point (how media affects identity), but I am trying to figure out what I actually want it to be on, in a more focused, pinpointed way. At first I considered using video games and the internet. How does being masked behind an avatar affect how people react--how does the anonymousness affect our reactions to things and how does it shift our identity? Do we become who we wished we could be without physical social pressure? But being more literary focused, I will also turn my attention to how stories affect us. Why is it so easy for practically anyone on Earth to relate to a robot (WALLE), an alien (Avatar), even a moving image like a cartoon? In a sense, I think we actually become these characters, we aren't even being empathetic, we are them. Our identities are flexible, and many have debated that on a day-to-day basis we are all putting on a show, a play, and that who we are is not who we think we are. So, like I said, I think I will start posting these here as to motivate myself to focus and get things done. I plan to use a variety of sources so if you do follow along I hope it is interesting for you--enjoy if you do. Beware, I am not sure where this is heading or if it will relate to Oral Traditions. Perhaps I will try to sync it in with this class somehow to not come off as entirely irrelevant.



The first idea I wish to explore at the onset of this research is hypnosis and how it relates to reading, and in a sense, letting go of reality and identity. Earlier this week, I was walking back to the Grant Chamberlain from campus. This time always gives me a chance to think. Sure, there are a few roads in between, but cars don't strike down walkers right? Especially not walkers with big things on the brain. My thoughts turned to 'letting go,' and how this is a tenet of several Eastern religions. You have to let go of the physical world to be truly happy, and both hypnosis and getting into a story deal with this. My interest in hypnosis began a few years ago and was recently revived and agitated by a conversation I had with a fellow dish rincer in the Harrison cafeteria. The discussion led to new insights about story and identity, and afterward I wanted to continue with some of these thoughts and apply them to a larger framework. This section will be the opening up of a greater idea--that of free-floating identity and the concept of personality and perhaps even reality itself.



But first, I must begin with a story. A story from long ago in a dirty city not too far away. Billings, Montana. Skyview High School. May 2007 Post-Ceremony. After graduation, any high school worth their salt has overnight parties to prevent kids from doing stupid things in celebration of being done with hell. These 'stupid things' include drunk driving, having unprotected sex, keggers, drugs, and vandalism. An economist would tell you most of the delinquents would set off their drunken galas for the day after and that the party was more emotionally rewarding for the parents; that, in the end, no amount of free stuff was going to affect the ultimate blow-back on the community in the days to come. Somebody would probably tell that economist to shut up. Of course I wasn't one of the dangerous teens anyway, having spent most of my school 'daze' in a delirium of acne, hormones, and unrequited crushes. Oh, how I don't miss those times. At any rate, our party was called "Falcon Finale," in honor of our cherished mascot, the majestic bird of prey. This celebration included the typical things: games where a new graduate received money rewards, lots of food, drawings for bigger prizes like microwaves, computers, and even a car.

However, the most intriguing thing that night was the stage hypnotist. Around one or two, they led us into the auditorium. There had been some buzz, but I can't say what my emotional reaction was before we were brought inside. I know I had little knowledge that these performers existed, let alone their ability to affect people. Once seated, however, the whispers in the audience were starting to sweep over me. I recall people volunteering, the hypnotist bringing them into a trance and then some dancing and others acting embarrassingly like chickens. To help trawl up some past mem-crabs, I asked some friends what they recalled of the experience. One told me, "I don't know that I remember very well either [...]. The hypnotist grabbed maybe about 8 people and of those people, I remember one girl was pretty clearly not hypnotized but was going along with it, but the guy sent her back into the audience. As far as specifics of what they were doing, I don't remember that very well." When I inquired from another, he replied back, "It started with a group of people who sat near the front of the theater and hop[ped] onto stage when he asked for volunteers. Some were disappointed [with] not being picked. Then he 'put them to sleep' and kick[ed] the people who were faking it the most and were not good actors, and that's what I remember because I don't remember what he made the people do." It's semi-interesting none of the people I asked could vividly recall what actually happened in the show, only that people got kicked out for bad acting.

Out of curiosity I started watching Youtube videos of stage hypnotists making people do disturbing things. The first I looked at featured a dude who was a little too into public speaking. His name was Justin Tranz (a stage name? I think so). He states at the beginning of his act: "You see there really is no such thing as hypnosis per se, it's all the power of suggestion. It's the power that words have to influence all and the way we all think, behave, respond, react. Look at it this way, you see everybody is suggestible because if you weren't suggestible you couldn't learn." He then slides some of the audience members into a 'trance' and makes them become extremely attracted to him. Both sexes come to lucky Justin, erotically grinding on his overweight gut. Some of the men form a ring, and then an attractive woman straddles him. Justin Tranz has an extremely fun life, I realize, as he makes them pump their arms as if in a muscle man show, and while they are showing off their back muscles, correct a wedgie which doesn't exist. I would fear what I would do under similar circumstances, either as the hypnotist or the hypnotized. His closing act, however, is truly his worst. He makes his captives imagine their chairs as a favorite imaginary pet--one imagines a giraffe, a tiger, a black panther, an octopus and a dragon. He then tells them to hump their dream animal.



Fearfully, I clicked another video. The second turned out to be, if not less creepy, less sexual. The woman's name was Catherine Hickland, a reported comedy hypnotist, and she told people in her show to forget numbers and dance like Beyonce. It's actually sort of demonic the way she has them flip across stage as if in a seizure. I finished up with another hypnotist named Mark Yuzuik, who has men kiss each other. There seems to be a theme through the videos I watched. It is easy for men and women to slip into acting like they are attracted to the same gender.

One could argue that the hypnotist himself is creating an external 'memory palace' for other individuals. He can give them cues to follow, false memories to recall and forget, he can tell them he is a warrior fighting a dragon, or, perhaps, even a beautiful damsel in distress waiting for her handsome knight. He is constructing a mental building, brick by brick, laying a foundation for another person to figuratively walk through, and in this way he is the ultimate storyteller, hacking into someone's mind and not only making them 'know' the adventure, but also 'experience' it. When most people read a book or watch a film, it is fantasy, but in the hypnosis patient's world, he is the characters spoken to him. We can see one of the first layers of identity collapsing. Sheets of fabric are being ripped away to reveal a pea in the center--but the pea may be so small as to be insignificant, with no basis at all to grasp.

Some wrongfully believe that hypnosis is a sleep state, where a person's mind turns off and then a puppet master can influence it. However, psychiatrists have discovered that, in fact, it is more similar to daydreaming, "or the feeling of 'losing yourself' in a book or movie" (hsw). Thus, some everyday forms of hypnosis include reading, driving, mowing the lawn, and watching movies--ergo, your mind is still fully awake, but you hone your attention on one thing and tune out the rest, or in another way, a state between being awake and asleep. I wrote this for another class, but it relates well here: "In phenomenology, the difference between universal and world consciousness is the difference between our headlight eyes and our whole being. In the West, we value our minds and eyes more than any other part of our body. We are constantly told to pay attention in class when we are in school. We are always in our head, bemoaning or lauding our position in life. This is Heidegger’s present-at-hand notion. Opposed to that is his ready-to-hand notion—the part of us which does things without thinking about them. Think of the heart pumping blood or the lungs taking in air as opposed to the eyes scanning the horizon." Another way to remember "ready-to-hand" is subject at hand. Hypnotists know how to control this: they can influence a person to turn off all the external stimuli and focus their attention inward.

This, in fact, is a form of meditation, where you turn inward. The hypnotist's power is making others go into the interior world and experience things beyond the normal domain of senses and experiences, and people have seemingly been doing this since the beginning. Joseph Campbell, in his interview in The Power of Myth, says that "shamans and artists and others who take the journey into the unknown c[a]me back to create these myths" (70). Myths are retellings of stories where interior feelings reflect exterior life. Often these shamanic trances are brought on with the aid of drugs, which break through the illusion of the senses. Shamans and mythmakers were, in fact, the artists of their day because their ears were "open to sound of the universe." "The shaman," according to Campbell, "is the person, male or female, who in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. It's a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up, and the shaman falls into it" (107). He describes how the shaman travels to see the gods, with a Bushman's account after a community gala:

"When people sing, I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. When I emerge, I am already climbing. I'm climbing threads, the threads that lie over there in the south. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it and climb another.... And when you arrive at God's place, you make yourself small. You have become small. You come in small to God's place. You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is, and you hide your face. You hide your face so you won't see anything. You come and come and come and finally you enter your body again. All the people who have stayed behind are waiting for you--they fear you. You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body.... And you say 'he-e-e!' that is the sound of your return to your body. Then you being to sing. The ntum-masters are there around. They take powder and blow--Phew! Phew!--in your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don't do that to you, you die... You just die and are dead. Friends, this is what it does, this ntum that I do, this ntum here that I dance."

Campbell exclaims: "My God! This guy had an experience of another whole realm of consciousness! In these experiences they are, as it were, flying through air" (109). The Shaman belongs strictly to hunting societies and reached his peak during the Paleolithic age. According to Karen Armstrong in a Short History of Myth, the shaman set off into the spiritual air where he communed with the gods and brought the tale back down to his fellow men. This flight upward is depicted, scholars believe, on cave walls in Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain by men adorned with bird masks . Thus self-hypnosis has gone back to earliest man, with Armstrong saying:

"It is highly significant that these myths and rituals of ascension go back to the earliest period of human history. It means that one of the essential yearnings of humanity is the desire to get 'above' the human state. As soon as human beings had completed the evolutionary process, they found that a longing for transcendence was built into their condition" (Armstrong 27).

HowStuffWorks has a fascinating article on hypnosis which gives the reader a quick overview of the field. The fourth paragraph begins: "In the everyday trance of a daydream or movie, an imaginary world seems somewhat real to you, in the sense that it fully engages your emotions. Imaginary events can cause real fear, sadness or happiness, and you may even jolt in your seat if you are surprised by something (a monster leaping from the shadows, for example)." Milton Erickson, a renowned expert from the 20th century, believed that humans put themselves in a self-hypnosis state daily and a hypnotist can twist this natural tendency and make your 'day dreaming' his territory. The article continues, explaining: "In conventional hypnosis, you approach the suggestions of the hypnotist, or your own ideas, as if they were reality. If the hypnotist suggests that your tongue has swollen up to twice its size, you'll feel a sensation in your mouth and you may have trouble talking. If the hypnotist suggests that you are drinking a chocolate milkshake, you'll taste the milkshake and feel it cooling your mouth and throat. If the hypnotist suggests that you are afraid, you may feel panicky or start to sweat. But the entire time, you are aware that it's all imaginary. Essentially, you're 'playing pretend' on an intense level, as kids do." This 'intense level of play' is exactly what story tellers do, and what God did when he created the universe by speaking it into existence. It is near the heart of our consciousness--why we all feel such a tension with being alive, thinking about thinking. Our reality is based around the conscious and subconscious mind interacting. When the hypnotist overrides the 'conscious,' the subconscious takes control, the part of the body which controls breathing, blinking, and the beat of your heart, and is "the seat of imagination and impulse". It reveals the play acting of typical existence.

I interviewed a hypnotist for this project and you can watch it in the videos below. I highly apologize for the proliferation of the word 'like', I didn't like realize I was like using it so much:





I interviewed Logan Garcia, a certified hypnotist who received his degree from HMI Hynosis Institute in Orange County, California on the topic of Hypnosis. He describes how people are attuned to ideas in wildly different ways and how this can be used to influence identity during hypnosis, explaining that the word "hot" will have varying reactions in people. For example, a physical person will start to feel 'hot' from the word, but an emotional person would have to be influenced into it, you have to suggest it more. In other words, a physical person will 'experience' the world in a very sensory way, but an emotional person will know the abstract idea of it better. Logan also elaborates on the idea that humans put themselves into a state of hypnosis every day. The example he uses is his riding of a long board or laying in bed and kicking his leg in reaction to a dream. I discussed this earlier in my example of reading a book, watching a movie, driving, or mowing the lawn. The hypnotist can use this "ready-to-hand" mentality and override a person's conscious. In this way, I hope to later discuss the breakdown of personality which both story or masks of any kind can give us. You are literally putting yourself into a self-hypnosis when you insert yourself into a story, a character in that tale. Your own image of who you are and where you came from becomes of little importance and you start to become this person, or essentially 'act' the role. Logan describes this in good detail in the videos above. It is easy for almost anyone to perform the role of a dog, rock, or celebrity. Why is this? Why are we all such good actors?

Logan later describes in the interview how he puts people into hypnosis and gets them to create their own worlds. For example, a college student he hypnotized saw snow flakes in the blissful world Logan asked him to imagine and could actually hear every single flake hit the ground though they were falling at the same time. Logan says another friend attacked a dragon (which was a water bottle) and pretended to wear armor under his influence. I found it interesting that he barely had to suggest this scenerio; the hypnotized friend filled in the lacuna and did the rest himself. He performed the 'knight role,' and the water bottle took on the 'dragon' one. It brings to light the performance we put on not only for others, but also ourselves. Logan calls this a 'schema.' He also explains how things as tacit as the numerical system, our own names, our loved ones names can collapse under hypnosis. Things which we so identify with ourselves are free floating, and your name, the most pure representation of who you are, can be taken from you. Is there a switch in your mind that you could flip and turn off the bite of stubbing your toe? Hypnotists would suggest yes. Gender is also shown as a possible illusion of the conscious mind (in a Judith Butler sort of sense) because people can be manipulated into acting gay, their sexual identities morphing under the puppet master's strings, changing their concept of sexuality just by the hypnotist touching his chin. This comes back to the power of imagination, of acting, of letting go--we can become anything we want to. Why? Because we are everything.

One of the most important ideas I discussed with Logan was the power of abstract images. It is much easier for a person to mimic a pure idea like 300-Gerard Butler, a celebrity, or even a rock--things that are perfect images. These objects can be symbols for a perfect idea. Leonidas is ultimate masculine bad-ass. Rocks are perfectly stagnant, never changing. Jim Carrey is a strange court jester. Homer Simpson is the holy idiot. The power of images, which each and every one of these words are, can stand as a stagnant profound object, something none of us can be when we experience reality on a day-to-day basis. Everything contains a spirit (these perfect ideal images); however, the bodies we use have been compared to computers. It is when a person starts to associate too much with his emotions, narratives, and ego that he begins to become truly dangerous. His reality is no longer 'playful' but extremely personal. Hypnosis enlightens a casual viewer on the existence of the morphing identity and how we can be influenced into fearing death. If our lives are not an illusion, a 'grand play', but the only time we will have to prove ourselves to God or experience life before the great Atheistic sleep, then this life becomes terrifyingly important. The West, the realm of the city and high culture, has become dramatically active because of its beliefs. Americans especially fetishize death because of its constant pushing by the political elite and media. However, if it is all a great play, a 'lila' as the Hindus call it, then we have all been deceived. What is the importance of hypnosis in this paper? It shows how easily our identities are bent, how easy it is for us to become something else, how every evil, good, and sublime exists inside us already, it just has to be activated. Narrative is important to our lives because it gives us meaning in an Atheistic universe. The great dichotomy I shall set up in the section on myth will be between the left and right brain and how they have been at war inside all of us. Written culture has influenced these various battles throughout the ages, but through hypnosis and reading a novel (such as fantasy), we can truly commune with the subconscious where the right brain, the Mother Goddess, resides.