Paper Part I: Hypnosis

I. Hypnosis

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, and 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 sweeping 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 eight 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 the hope that viewing similar shows would spark up my memories, I started watching Youtube videos of stage hypnotists. The first I looked at featured a man 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 slid some of the audience members into a trance, telling them to become attracted to him. The audience giggled apprehensively as both sexes sauntered up to lucky Justin and started to erotically grind on his overweight gut. This spectacle continued for what seemed like far too long, until finally, after much hilarity, the men formed a ring, and an attractive woman straddled him. Justin Tranz has an extremely fun life I realized as I watched as he made the entranced pump their arms as if in a muscle man show and correct a wedgie which didn'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 made his captives imagine their chairs as a favorite pet—one imagined a giraffe, a tiger, a black panther, an octopus and a dragon. He then told 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. She told the people in her show to forget numbers and dance like Beyoncé, flipping across stage as if in a demonic trance, and finished up with another hypnotist named Mark Yuzuik, who had 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 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. The first layers of identity are 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. In fact, according to a Wired article written by Brandon Keim, “Psychologists have used hypnosis to give people the ability to see numbers as colors.” This ability, called synesthesia, occurs naturally in about one out of 1000 people; however, when the researchers asked three women and one man under hypnosis to see “one as red, two as yellow, [and] three as green”, they discovered that that the awoken patients had a hard time seeing the numbers when they were printed in black ink and posted on colors matching what the scientists labeled them. In other words, the figures blended into the background. The hypnotist can literally change what the entranced sees in waking life.

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 it is actually 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. To research this topic further, I interviewed a friend, Logan Garcia, who is a certified hypnotist and received his degree from HMI Hypnosis Institute in Orange County, California. Similar to how synesthesia sufferers see numbers as colors or sounds, different people react to physical stimuli differently. Logan describes how some are attuned to ideas (even senses) in different ways and how this can be used when under hypnosis. For example, a physical person will start to feel hot when the word ‘hot’ is spoken, but an emotional person will know the abstract idea of it better. People who are more attuned with their body’s reactions can thus be activated into a trance with less effort on the hypnotist’s part. A logical person is more likely to step back and resist.



In phenomenology, the difference between universal and world consciousness is the difference between a person’s headlight eyes and their whole being. In the West, sight and mind are valued above any other part of the body. A child is constantly told to pay attention in class; and modern Western man is seemingly always in his head, bemoaning or lauding his position in life. This is Martin Heidegger’s ‘present-at-hand’ notion, or what psychologists might call, ‘the ego’. Opposed to that is ‘ready-to-hand’—the part of us which does something without thinking about it. Imagine the heart pumping blood or the lungs taking in air, as opposed to the eyes scanning the horizon. Heidegger extends this to technology. Tools, he believes, become so engrained into the mind that a person no longer needs to think about using them. “The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” says Anthony Chemero in another Wired article by Brandon Keim. When a person drives a car or ties their shoes, they do not often think about their hands on the wheel or their fingers moving, they just do it. Logan Garcia elaborated on this during our interview, for example, passively riding a long board or lying in bed and kicking a leg in reaction to a dream can also come from a subconscious state. The hypnotist can use this ‘ready-to-hand’ mentality to override a person’s conscious. A story-teller does this too. You are literally putting yourself into self-hypnosis when you insert yourself into a story, a character in a tale. Your own image of who you are and where you came from becomes of little importance and you become this person, or essentially, act the role. 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. 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” (Campbell 107). He describes how the shaman travels to see the gods, with a Bushman’s account after a community ritual:

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.

“My God!” Campbell exclaims, “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 been recorded in some of the earliest records of 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)

Tom Harris, who received his Master’s degree in science education from Florida State University, has a fascinating article on hypnosis on the HowStuffWorks website. Harris’ 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 a person’s ‘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 the Abrahamic God did when he created the universe by speaking it into existence. It is near the heart of the conscious—why we all feel such a tension with being alive, thinking about thinking. Man’s 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 the heart, and is “the seat of imagination and impulse”. It reveals the play acting of typical existence.



Logan goes into detail on how he gets the entranced to create worlds inside their heads. For example, a college student, whom he asked to create a ‘perfect paradise’, witnessed snowflakes falling by the thousands from the heavens—remarkably, the person could hear every single one hit the earth at the same moment. During hypnosis, a person can perceive things which would have been impossible from their normal perceptions, like reading a book or watching a movie. Imagined kingdoms can stretch on forever, populated with beings from the unconscious—ogres, elves, gnomes, knights, and ladies. Logan, relatedly, describes another fellow who attacked a dragon (which in reality was a water bottle) and pretended to wear armor. He barely had to suggest this scenario; the hypnotized filled in the lacuna and did the rest himself. He performed the ‘knight role,’ and the water bottle took on the ‘dragon one’. Things as tacit as the numerical system, our own names, our loved ones’ names can collapse under hypnosis. Pain can too. An article by Jonah Lehrer, posted in the Wall Street Journal, asks the reader to “consider a study by scientists at Wake Forest University. After only a few days of meditation training—teaching people to better focus their attention, concentrating less on the discomfort and more on a soothing stimulus—subjects reported a 57% reduction in the ‘unpleasantness’ of their pain. Such improvements are roughly equivalent to the benefits of morphine” (Lehrer). Gender can also fall away. When people are entranced, they are easily 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. It already exists inside us.

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 hero. 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 Mother Goddess resides.