Building Trance Vocabulary

Note: The vast majority of this article was written while in various stages of vestibular migraines(?) which are a “fun” thing I get almost every day now, and they usually make me loopy and occasionally weirdly giddy. It was also finished on under 5hrs of sleep! You can definitely tell, and I think it makes the writing kind of fun and entertaining so I didn’t edit this nonsense out! Enjoy!

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In relationships, individuals form bonds through shared experience that leads them to develop a “private grammar”: they build history together and ways of communicating that help them describe their shared world. Someone who is exploring hypnosis does this with their partners, of course, but also with themselves. They learn what hypnosis feels like slowly, over time -- an unending process of exploration where each new step allows them to be more fully immersed in the hypnotic experience. This is an article geared mostly towards subjects, but if you’re a hypnotist, you should take notes -- all of this is stuff that you can use to teach your partner.

Knowing Hypnosis = Feeling Hypnosis = Being Hypnotized

Hypnosis is a distinctive kink activity because doubt can smother the entire actual experience. A person who thinks to themselves, “I don’t think I’m hypnotized,” is generally not going to have a fulfilling or responsive hypnotic scene. But what leads a person to have those kinds of doubts?

Everyone -- even very experienced subjects -- “check” to see if they’re hypnotized. The issue arises when someone checks and only finds answers in their body and brain that tell them, “You’re awake.”

On the flipside, someone who is very good at being hypnotized knows what to look for and how to recognize the subtle signs of hypnosis. They look inwards and they find a multitude of things that lead them to feel it. Confidence in hypnosis is not the only thing that leads to great hypnotic scenes, but it helps a lot and takes pressure off of the experience to a large degree.

Hypnosis is both perceptual and experiential. A “good” subject hears the words, “go deeper for me,” and that word/concept is connected to an abstract web of perception and sensation that they are familiar with -- and thus is accessible to them. Improving your experience of hypnosis means improving that web.

“Subtle”

There is nothing quite like hypnosis. In pretalks, hypnotists use a ton of metaphors to try to describe to someone what to expect, because having a closer expectation leads to more “success.” Reading a book, watching a movie, driving a car, meditation, sex, dance -- all of these and more can sort of describe some of the experiential ingredients in trance. But all of those perceptual experiences are highly subjective, they may not fit an individual’s experience of trance, and they are not the same as being hypnotized.

If hypnotists can’t plainly lay out what hypnosis feels like to someone, it stands to reason that subjects will find similar struggles in trying to describe what hypnosis feels like to themselves. You can definitely “nonverbally” recognize signs of trance, but we are certainly looking at trance as containing vocabulary and grammar -- and linguistically being able to describe something is an option leading to comprehension.

Curiosity -- beyond any other framing of what hypnosis feels like -- is the most helpful set-up for a person learning how to be hypnotized. Being curious about what these feelings will be and acknowledging that they will be more slippery to identify than other feelings we are used to is a great first step.

Writing and The Courage to Get It Wrong

We will talk about the mental aspects of recognizing these feelings as we move forward in the article, but we should start by talking about writing. Journaling about trance experiences can be helpful -- if nothing else, to help preserve the memories of the feelings. The enemy of all writing (and art) is perfectionism -- the need to “get it exactly right” stops people from finishing pieces and it prevents people from starting them in the first place.

To put it plainly: you will never get it right when trying to describe trance. To put it more flowery: you could try for your entire life to describe what you feel in trance, but you will be climbing an endless mountain -- always getting closer but never reaching the top. You’re encouraged to see the beauty in that, not dwell on the frustration; it is actual magic to have something that is ultimately so powerful and yet completely intangible.

You don’t need to meticulously write about every detail or every scene you have. But when you notice some new aspect of trance experience, or you’re thinking a lot about one particular aspect, give writing a try. Write a bad poem, or a bad song, or a bad paragraph. Maybe even draw a bad piece of art. The private grammar you are developing about this is mostly about connecting things to aspects of your trance experience. Metaphors that “sort of” make sense to you, images, phrases, or words that resonate in some way. They are essentially anchors -- memories and feelings that are associatively conditioned to your hypnotic trances. This is the purpose of writing about trance: refining how you think about it, yes, but mostly creating a more and more fleshed-out concept of it that is personal to you.

Please Tell Me What The Signs Actually Are Already

While self-identification is the best way to create your personal trance vocabulary, it can help to have some context from other places. We as humans are wired to look for patterns and make comparisons to things that we know and have felt before. You’re encouraged to play within different levels of abstraction about what trance feels like -- using vague or distant metaphors versus trying to actually describe feelings in your body and brain -- but we can think about some aspects of the parts of us to give a loose framework to start with.

There are:

• Concrete things that the body is doing
• Concrete things that the brain is doing
• Perceptual abstractions of each

We are familiar with things like finger twitching and eye fluttering as bodily signs of trance. There are probably other physical things you sometimes notice in yourself: places that relax or tense up, eye movement, temperature changes, and etc. Similarly, sometimes it’s easy to notice changes in the way we think -- is there a “weirdness” that your thoughts develop in trance, speeding up or slowing down?

The other pieces of this are things that are harder to describe -- more abstract feelings or things you notice in your body and brain. For example, it is probably easy to notice when your eyes are fluttering, but do you ever have a sort of weird sensation that settles in right behind your forehead -- or have you ever noticed anything else like that?

The concept of submodalities is going to help a lot with these. To recap, submodalities are the descriptors for various sensory feelings -- how “bright” or “vivid” a visual is, how “firm” or “feathery” a kinesthetic sensation is. Here are a bunch of words that might help you:

• Bright/Dark
• Vivid/Fuzzy
• Tingly/Still
• Numb/Intense
• Warm/Cool
• Soft/firm
• Ethereal/concrete
• Abstract/specific
• Buzzing/rumbling
• Vibrating/humming
• Magical/mundane

As always with signs of “trance,” we know that these kinds of feelings are very individualized (your brain is your own) and different hypnotic experiences can evoke different feelings. Thinking about “What is different from my baseline?” is one of the best ways to frame this to yourself -- if “awake” feels like something, any change in that means there’s a change in your experience.

Body/brain scanning “targets”

We have talked to some degree about “body scanning” before -- when you intentionally make your attention travel down your body and notice what you’re feeling, either quickly or slowly. Awareness and familiarity of your body is invaluably helpful for developing a colorful picture of your trance experience.

Something that can really make your body scanning work effectively is having places that you “zoom in” on -- places on your body that naturally evoke a hypnotic affect. If you tend to have trancey feelings in your eyes, for example, making that one of your “targets” for scanning is going to help you get more deeply familiar with those feelings -- and it trains you to look there when you go into trance, which can make trance more accessible.

Everyone is different, but here are some common places that might show you particularly noticeable signs of trance:

• Eyes
• Lips/tongue
• Jaw
• Behind eyes
• Back of head/neck
• Shoulders
• Small musculature in chest/ribs
• Legs

The same can be said for how you notice your thoughts, although trying to notice your internal experience feels a little less concrete than just scanning your body. You’ll have to get creative and come up with some metaphors, visualizations, or ways of thinking about what’s going on inside of your head. Here are some ideas:

• Inside head (where is the feeling/thought?)
• Pace, content, tone, “volume,” “shape” of thoughts
• Boundaries between your thoughts or between your thoughts and your head
• A sensory hallucination of the thought (visual, kinesthetic, auditory)

How to stop worrying and love your analysis

We’ve talked before about the value of analysis and the fraughtness of the term “analytical-minded.” Body/brain scanning isn’t necessarily analytical -- it’s observational -- but it can be, and it does key into the sensation of analysis that most people refer to as getting in the way of trance.

Analysis -- in the sense of “feeling like you’re analyzing” -- is at its core an awareness of your internal process. There are lots of different ways that that can be useful for developing trance, but getting into the habit of familiarizing yourself with your trance vocabulary is one of them.

You are essentially training yourself to look for the things that tell you, “Yes, I’m in trance.” What’s happening is that you’re developing anchors in the hypnotic sense -- you look inward to your body or mind, what you see are signs of trance, and you are hypnotized. The difference between this and any “traditional” trigger or anchor is that by building recognition of a well-rounded and extensive set of trance signs, eventually, there will always be something when you look. There isn’t a singular pass/fail condition or sign.

This can, over time, change the entire way that you “analyze” or check for trance -- and the way that you experience trance as a whole. It becomes less that you’re looking for boxes to check off and more of a holistic thing to explore -- “What am I experiencing?” instead of “Am I experiencing?” This is one way to co-opt the pesky checking/analysis -- essentially, you’re replacing that (conditioned) behavior with one that is more productive.

Observation

There’s a concept in quantum mechanics that describes how you can’t observe something without changing it -- the process of measuring, bouncing light off of particles or whatnot inevitably alters what you’re trying to observe. The same is true when we are looking inward in hypnosis, meditation, or other kinds of internal processing.

In meditation, there are techniques that try to teach you how to observe your body and thoughts without judging or affecting. This can be useful for certain things, but as a general rule, even this kind of internal focus changes the effects. When you notice a thought, your perception is changed by the act of noticing -- you think differently and you go through a pattern for it, and the thought itself is subtly changed by your attention. Your memory and history is changed by the experience.

There is no need to think of hypnotic responses as fragile -- more so that they are flexible. They won’t “break” if you notice them -- they simply change. These changes are responses and signs in and of themselves. Not only is trance vocabulary about some static, concrete trance signs, it is how those signs respond to your attention and to other things that affect them in many different ways: a fluid and dynamic experience.

If you notice that your legs are relaxing, what changes? Do they tense up a little or go still in response? Do they relax further? Do they develop some other characteristic sensations the more you pay attention?

Part of your journey with this is exploring those feelings and questions. One thing that tends to happen is that self-hypnosis becomes very easy over time -- when you’re used to looking inward and seeing signs of trance, they will emerge simply when you look for them. This is fantastic for both solo and partnered play. And in the same way that you’re replacing the “checking” response with a more productive one, the more you understand how your responses change when you look at them.