can you send that file to me arania? [email protected]

CC: [email protected] ( pretty please...? )


Careful what you wish... You just might get it.

I had a go at hypnosis about 10 years ago when I was doing a course in psychology. Let me let you into a couple of secrets...

firstly, they say "you have to be susceptable" for hypnosis to work. Well in a way this is true - you have to be open to suggestion, reasonably self-confident and able to relax. However when hypnotists tell you this they say it in such a way that makes you think "oooh can I or can't I" which adds to the whole "mystery". In reality hypnosis is just a form of deep relaxation, not unlike meditation states.

The idea is to try and create the state of mind that you are in when you have just woken up in the morning or just tired enough to flake out at night. The reason for this is not actually to make you more suggestable, its to put you in a state that you actually believe that you could be more suggestable. There is a distinct difference.

The kind of people that quit smoking or lose weight with hypnosis, are the kind of people that could do it anyway, but are just lacking the self confidence. By telling this person that you can cure all of their ills, then making them drowsy to reinforce the thought, creates an artificial form of self confidence.

Its exactly the same as an ancient soothsayer who probably had no other skills apart from being a pretty good gardener (), making you smoke a joint then waving his hands in front of the "believer" and saying "bish bash bosh - you're cured - give me all of your goats". The belief is so strong that the person's subconscious refuses to acknowledge the possibility of it not working - and therefore the body follows suit.

Hypnosis is suggestion in its purist form - however suggestion can be applied without the need for hypnosis, the later is simply a more obvious form. Derren Brown demonstrates suggestion perfectly, "hypnotising" by merely touching the person or looking at them in the eye, using unconscious body language to control what you think or do. He is a master and I envy his skills massively...and if you have no idea who I'm talking about, get yourselves over to Amazon and order the DVD...he blows every common hypnotic belief out of the water and often explains how he has done things.

@Grom

Did you see the seance that Derran Brown did on channel 4 a little while back? That was fantastic.

yep certainly did. I loved the way he blew away about 100 different kinds of psychic, medium, hypnotists and reality tv "horror" programmes all in one hour And it was really obvious how he was doing it when shown from that perspective, don't you think?

I had seen so many of his shows before and when my brother and i both got the same girl on that card thing where he asked them to look out photos of the "dead" girls i thought hang on he's placed them so that you are almost guranteed to chose the girl who he is supposed to be contacting. I have to say it still scared the s**t out of me! Until the end anyway. With regards to the hypnosis though he put a girl into a trance in like 5 seconds at the beginning. How the hell did he do that?