What is hypnosis?
You get distinctly different answers from the hypno-therapy community and the recreational hypnosis communities. The difference in focus is also reflected extensively in how different texts warn for or dispel myths about hypnosis.
Hypno-therapy Perspective
Phillips et al. (2022) cites the American Psychological Association’s definition:
- hypnosis
- a state of consciousness involving focussed attention and reduced peripheral awareness characterised by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion
- hypnotizability
- an individual’s ability to experience suggested alterations in physiology, sensations, emotions, thoughts or behaviour during hypnosis’
It is central to hypnosis that the subject feel that behaviors are involuntary. There is also significant evidence that reacting to hypnotic suggestions goes beyond pretending: functional MRI shows brain activations more consistent with actual experiences when suggesting pain sensations, and subjects will keep on following suggestions when left alone to a larger degree than non-hypnotized experiment participants. (Phillips et al. 2022)
If (as is common in hypno-therapy) the goal is an increase in suggestibility, then a trance (or altered state of consciousness) is not actually required - and some research shows that subjects may have an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion even though they do not experience a trance state. (Lynn et al. 2020)
Recreational / Erotic Hypnosis Perspective
In recreational hypnosis, and even more in erotic hypnosis, the trance is part of the point of the exercise. A hypnotic trance can feel very similar to sub-space, or to a gentle marijuana high. While in a hypnotic trance, you get much more susceptible to suggestions, which can impact surprisingly low-level processing in the brain - to the point where hypnotic suggestions can sometimes create sensations without them being physically produced.
A good hypnotic trance experience can be relaxing, and focusing (even quiet down a busy brain), and can both be a shortcut to sub-space and a way to intensify stimulation.
Trance can be pleasant enough that just staying in this state for a while, and not actually do much of anything is a quite pleasant experience - sometimes referred to as drifting.