Sitting up Eye Contact Impulse -- Commentary

The impulse I felt to sit up and open my eyes is probably an artifact of prior hypnotic experiences where I’d be roused from a prone more or less passive state to be sitting and looking into her eyes. She would be maintaining some physical touch, typically her hands on my shoulders, holding my neck or head, or holding my hands or arms (she was a massage person before being a hypnotist, so touch was not a touchy area for her). I would be looking into her eyes and listening to her voice while her words were going straight in – I remember being blissfully happy soaking up the experience and bonding to the experience.

Hypnosis is primarily a narrowing and direction of attention, and looking back at it from an awake prospective I can see that there were several concurrent factors that made this so effective. One was being hypnotized already, so I was receptive. Touch focuses – you can’t help but pay attention to somebody who is touching you, especially if they use their touches to emphasize their points. Eye contact is also intimate and captivating and her closeness made this stronger. Her voice was echoing in my head and her voice tones were ones that commanded attention. Also I was still in the “shock” of a change – moving between passive to active unsets any self-created thought patterns and I’m particularly vulnerable to external direction. With all of these factors working together it seems natural that I was in a blissful state (which I had not yet associated it with Nirvana) and natural that I don’t remember her words. It was in some of these moments that I had what was probably the most profound signs I’ve ever had of being hypnotized – I developed physical tunnel vision where the room would darken and then black out except for a narrow field of vision that generally encompassed her head but sometimes even narrowed to just her face or even to just her eyes. (I wonder what would have happened if it had narrowed even further? Could I have literally “blacked out” in this state and, if so, what hypnotic behaviors would she have seen?) I certainly was feeling profoundly hypnotized at these times and also profoundly blissful/happy.

Typically she would take me from this sitting eye contact reinforcement phase back to a prone passive phase and the oscillations were very effective. It may be similar to the hypnotic deepening that happens with fractionation except that I’m shifting between two flavors of hypnosis rather than between hypnotized and awake. The effectiveness of fractionation may be from the change of state rather than necessarily from the wake up/go under cycle. If it is the cycling that is effective, then this might be even more powerful than fractionation because you are cycling between two hypnotized states going under more deeply in different ways in each.

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