Hypnosis and Ordinary Trances

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The hypnotic state clients experience in my office as a result of a formal trance induction is just one of the many different trances they experience throughout their day. Subjective experience emerges from the Psyche’s attempt to interpret sensory input. The interpretations are biased by a range of factors, including beliefs. For example, skiers with different beliefs about their abilities may experience different subjective realities on the same slope.

There is nothing unusual about hypnosis—everything we experience is trance phenomena. You can evoke one kind of trance by listening to a trance formation audio file, but you don’t need a formal hypnotic induction to change your experiential state. Consider the following thought experiment:

Thought Experiment: The Emergency. Imagine that you just got a message that someone in your family had been seriously hurt in an automobile accident and you must get to the emergency room right away. Your biological state would change immediately and you would run or drive there as fast as you could, heart pounding, thoughts racing, and experiencing great distress. When you got there and discovered the report was untrue, you would experience relief, a very different trance. Objectively, the report was never true, yet it had a great impact on your physical and emotional state.

State-dependent phenomena—including motivation, perceptual bias and response probability distribution—are determined by the subjective reality that existed in your mind, not by what was objectively true.

Your subjective reality is a creative fiction that you are continually inventing. To be sure, your overt behavior becomes part of world history (and so can never be undone), but the trance that gives rise to it is purely subjective and does not exist outside your consciousness.