Distraction or Dreaming? An Exploration of Erickson

Distraction or Dreaming? An Exploration of Erickson by sleepingirl

Hypnosis is young -- at least, the western discipline that we call by that name. Despite only being in the public consciousness for a couple of centuries, it’s gone through an enormous amount of evolution. Even in the last 50 years or so, how we understand “what hypnosis is” has changed a lot.

In my opinion, Ericksonian hypnosis has a quality of timelessness to it -- Erickson is one of the few practitioners from the 20th century who really had a handle on what it is that we do. He brought ideas to the field that pushed it into the future -- such as utilization and indirect methods of suggestion -- and that we still use today.

Still, Erickson was a product of his time (think 1950s-70s as his “peak”) and was limited by those historical conceptions of psychology. Some of Erickson’s assertions, such as his reliance on ideas about the right and left hemisphere of the brain, don’t hold up. However, there are other ways that he defines hypnosis that are not limited per say -- just curiously different to what we are familiar with now.

As I read through Hypnotic Realities again, something that sticks out to me is just how much Erickson wants his patient to be daydreaming during a trance session. In modern hypnosis, and specifically within the kink community, we have a fixation with undistracted focus -- so many subjects feel as though they are “failing” if their mind wanders for even a moment. But Erickson didn’t rely on some laser-like hyperfocus on his words -- as we’ll explore through text sources, he saw “dreaming” as a characteristic of trance!

Through this article, we’ll look at a number of excerpts that serve to explain how he supported this concept -- and whether we can take from it in modern hypnosis.

• Internal Focus

Erickson: The average hypnotherapist says, "Look at this spot," and tries to focus the patient's attention to the spot. But it is easier to deal with the images the person has in his mind. There's a large variety of images in his mind, and he can slip easily from one to another without leaving the situation.

Rossi: So internal imagery is therefore much more effective in holding attention.

E: Some external thing has no real value to them, but the images they have within are of value. [...] They can be pleased and select any image they want.

--

Even out of context, this is a lovely little chunk of wisdom -- Erickson is saying, “Why make someone focus on some random external thing when they have a full vivid internal world?” He is also saying it is “easier,” as in perhaps the idea that people get caught up in their own heads more than they get caught up outside of themselves.

Interestingly, already here there is this implication of choice. “Permissiveness” is a classical Ericksonian concept -- that suggestions are given in a way that a subject feels they are “allowed to” follow or do something. A permissive suggestion may be something like, “At any time, you may close your eyes, whenever you feel like you want to.” Erickson is framing this internal wandering as permissive too -- it doesn’t seem to matter to him what the subject is imagining. Likely he believes that the subject choosing their own fantasy makes them more engaged in it -- they chose it!

• Focus On…

Now you can go anywhere you wish, and transport yourself to any situation. You can feel water, you may want to swim in it. (Pause) You can do anything you want.

E: This sounds like a great deal of freedom, but note I have given the suggestion to "transport" your consciousness to another situation. It can be any place you wish. It will probably be associated with water and you can do anything you want, but your consciousness need not be focused here in the therapy room.

--

The discerning reader who thought, reading the last excerpt, “But it can’t be RANDOM, right?” seems to be correct -- Erickson is engaging in some classic trickery. We find that another goal he has in inducing internal focus is to get the person focused AWAY from him and the therapy occurring. This creates a kind of covert hypnosis situation: with the client focused on something else, it’s easier for Erickson to do or say things that aren’t picked up on consciously.

He does also know that if he mentions water even in passing, it’s likely that his subject will have some sort of water-based fantasy. That’s important -- we need to be comfortable “guesstimating” what our partners are internally feeling at any given moment, and have some amount of confidence that what we mention in our patter will be processed as we expect it to be. Additionally, it makes sense that we’d want to provide SOME amount of structure -- total aimlessness of imagination is not ideal either.

• Dreaming

E: Sometimes patients will later say, "I wish you had let me stay in the water or the garden longer."

R: So being in an "inner garden" is a way you have of holding their conscious attention. You're having their conscious attention focused on an internal image just as watching a spot focuses their attention on an outer image. But being absorbed in an internal image is much more effective for focusing attention.

E: Much more effective!

--

This seems repetitious, but it tells us something really important -- Erickson was setting up his trances in such a way that his subjects knew they were “doing the right thing” by letting their minds wander. It was just the nature of trance with Erickson that you’d wander in fantasies -- he wasn’t worried about losing a subject’s attention at all. In fact, the idea that someone was lost in thought was proof to him that the subject IS in hypnosis.

• Dreaming as Characteristic of Trance

Many of the most characteristic features of trance experience such as reverie, dream, literalism, comfort, and the autonomous or spontaneous flow of mental experience and behavior are all facilitated by hypnotic forms such as not doing and not knowing, open-ended suggestions and suggestions covering all possibilities of response.

--

Indeed -- here it’s said explicitly that dreaming is part of trance. And this alludes to WHY Erickson and Rossi believed this: they felt that the way that Erickson specifically hypnotized people is what leads to the specific phenomena. This makes sense; people will experience hypnosis somewhat differently depending on the methods used to hypnotize them (for a basic example, a trance induced by relaxation will feel different than a trance induced by tension/excitement).

“Not doing and not knowing” are a set of techniques/ideas that Erickson relies on especially as part of teaching someone how to go into trance. Essentially, he wants to emphasize to a subject early on that hypnotic response is something they don’t have to exert effort into -- in fact, the act of a subject relaxing this need to “do” things is part of what will make them go into trance. The “knowing” piece of this is about the internal, the “keeping track” of everything, the expectations about what will happen.

All of this fits within Erickson’s model of trance: he believed it was a highly unconscious process, and so he wanted to create an environment where a subject relaxed their conscious functioning (such as the “need” to do and remember/know things), and then trance would naturally come after that. It makes sense that he would see dreaming or reverie (daydreaming) as a natural result of this as well; here, we’re starting to see some of his reasoning as to why he thinks hypnotic dreaming is important.

• Reliance on “Unconscious”

Most hypnotic phenomena can be experienced by relaxing to the point where we simply give up our habitual patterns of control and self-direction. This is the opposite of the usual situation of everyday life, where we make concentrated efforts to remember. In trance we are congratulated for forgetting (hypnotic amnesia). In normal living we are enjoined to pay attention; in trance we are applauded for allowing the mind to wander (reverie, hypnotic dreaming).

--

This serves to reinforce what we discussed above: Erickson sees “awakeness” as being conscious, and “hypnosis” as being unconscious. But there’s something pretty interesting here in the last sentence -- paying attention is for awake people, and daydreaming is for entranced people.

This is, in my opinion, the most explicit split from our modern “theology” of hypnosis. The most important part of hypnosis is focus and attention, isn’t it? Doesn’t Erickson even talk about paying attention?

Erickson seems to make a distinction between the way we pay attention when awake versus in trance. Even based on our modern definition, I might say that those two things feel subjectively different. I would also hazard a guess that Erickson is partially talking about the EFFORT necessary to pay attention to something while in normal life. But it really does seem like Erickson is saying that when you relax all of your efforts, your mind will naturally wander, and that is hypnosis.

It seems like Erickson is not that interested in being the sort of focal point capital-H “Hypnotist” that we tend to see in modern culture. There’s not a lot of “focus on my words” or “let my voice guide you.” Even in arguably his most famous quote, “My voice will go with you,” the full quote downplays him as a participant: “And my voice will change into that of your parents, your neighbors, your friends, your schoolmates, your playmates, your teachers.”

• Why?

How boring to deal with manipulation and control when we can be facilitating new possibilities of human nature undreamed of by either therapist or patient. Like dream, reverie, and creative states of imagination, trance can be a period for free development. The art of the modern hypnotherapist is in opening up the possibility of this development by helping each individual outgrow his own learned limitations.

--

This is Rossi waxing poetic about Erickson’s philosophy to therapy, and it serves to tell us about why he’s interested in encouraging hypnotic dreaming. Erickson saw trance as therapeutic in its own right: a hypnotized patient, given the right resources, would often solve their own problem. But not through self-analysis or talk therapy -- their mind, while highly unconsciously active in trance, would do the majority of the work.

Personally, I think Erickson sells himself a bit short when he talks like this. I see this language as reactionary: until this point in time, hypnosis (and perhaps other therapies) were seen very much as an unequal “operator/patient” relationship. The therapist seemed to hold all the cards of knowledge and do all the work of fixing problems. To Erickson, a new approach where the patient was given a lot of power and control seemed to work better, so this was embedded in his philosophy. But there’s no denying that Erickson himself was a manipulator of a high caliber, and that his particular brand of hypnosis facilitated a lot of change -- it’s not JUST that a client can daydream their problems away.

Nevertheless, I think this is from a time period where truly exploring “unconscious” mental processing is a bit of a new territory in hypnosis, and obviously very effective and exciting. Certainly telling a patient that they can let their mind do whatever it wants to do -- naturally, and unconsciously -- was and still is VERY different than we expect.

And there is something really important here: Erickson valued that there are things inside each individual person that CAN’T be seen without some unconscious exploration. He really believed that each client had a problem that they knew better than anyone else -- so it stands to reason that they’d have the best solution, even if it was somehow hidden inside a dream or other unconscious thought.

What Does This Mean for Us?

Erickson and Rossi are only really interested in writing about hypnosis for therapy specifically -- for them, hypnosis IS therapeutic. But we are pointedly not acting as therapists with our partners. So what can we get from this, if Erickson sees dreaming as one of the therapeutic qualities of trance?

Of course, this perspective on hypnosis is a total mindset shift. It’s very telling that Erickson was able to have so much success with this type of hypnosis because that’s the way hypnosis WAS to him at the time. And it’s not like he sat there giving pretalks about his definition of hypnosis. He just did what aligned with his beliefs about it, and sprinkled some of this explanation into his patter; he used hypnotizing someone as a way to tell them what to expect.

This worked for him because of the way hypnosis was in the public consciousness back then -- and how he pretty much “debunked” people’s expectations of it just by the way that he behaved SO much differently from the image of the “Hypnotist.” For us, things are a little different here too: Almost anyone that we’re hypnotizing as part of kink will almost certainly have some kinds of deeply-held ideas about what hypnosis is -- maybe even from us!

All of this being said, we can learn a lesson here that hypnosis is maybe much more than the “box” we put it in. How we do it, and even what it is, is partially dependent simply on culture and how we define it. The only reason we don’t do hypnosis like this, where we send people off into dreams, is because this is a part of culture that we forgot or moved on from.

Hypnosis’s most basic definition is “utilizing a person’s thoughts/brain to do stuff to itself.” Anything else is flavor.

“Modern” Dreaming?

Perhaps we want to bring this into our kinky play. How would we go about doing it? What choices or improvements would we make? Let’s organize some of the core ideas we learned through this text, and see what we can do with them:

Internal, self-directed focus is the best kind of fixation Daydreaming is a natural quality of trance Increasing unconscious activity helps trance get more “trancey” People know themselves best, even unconsciously, and it’s best to utilize what’s there inside a person’s head

These are some useful and fun ideas to play with in almost any context in hypnosis. The biggest obstacle is how to introduce them to someone who has a very rigid idea of what hypnosis is. For example, if someone has an expectation that their mind isn’t supposed to wander, or that they have to focus very intently on you as the hypnotist.

It’s actually a great exercise for a subject to learn how to become flexible in their understanding of hypnosis, and this is something you can say explicitly and work with them on. Being open to experimentation and experiencing different kinds of trances makes someone a better subject in general -- they’ll develop more curiosity as opposed to hardened expectations, and will accept their responses as interesting. This is an angle you can take as you explain in pretalk or mid-trance.

Daydreaming is a potent metaphor, and it’s something that most people have a lot of context with. You can use dreaming or daydreaming as a metaphor to induce trance: hypnotizing someone by telling them that they’re falling into a magical sleep and that their brain is starting to let go and do autonomous, fuzzy things, just like a dream. You can tell them that their focus is starting to fray around the edges and that unlike awakeness, and maybe unlike other trances they’ve had, this is about relaxing control over their focus and seeing what happens next. Starting your trance induction with metaphors about sleep, dreaming, or mind wandering will give them the context of what they’re “supposed” to do.

As Erickson did, you as the hypnotist can learn to be comfortable letting someone play in their own head in a semi-directed manner. This can be hard for us, when we feel like we need to know or control or account for anything that is happening inside our subject’s head. But we can view our role as a little bit different -- as the whisper in someone’s ear that plants the seeds of ideas, instead of as dictating the whole orchestration. “I don’t have to know what you are fantasizing about” is an incredibly Ericksonian suggestion -- we can learn to trust that our partners’ brains are motivated to engage in interesting ways, when given the right environment/framing.

We don’t need (or want, really) to just hypnotize someone, tell them to dream, and then leave them there while we sit by and watch. Here are some ways to utilize hypnotic daydreaming:

• Amnesia/covert

Erickson loved using internal fixations like this to misdirect attention away from what he was doing. Being lost in thought or dreams is an incredible context for hypnotic amnesia. People naturally forget dreams (or as Erickson suggests, they “don’t need to remember” them), and being very focused on confusing mental images/abstractions will naturally make what’s being said feel “slippery.” You can get someone’s mind to wander while you ramble on suggestions that they don’t have to consciously focus on. This works best if you don’t tell them what to forget -- it’s easier to get a blanket “fuzzy memory” than “highlight” a specific thing to forget.

• Brainwashing

Having someone feel like they are autonomously dreaming about fantasies that are actually brainwashing them is very hot. Dreams and guided scenarios are a time that you can explore ideas that can’t really happen in real life, but we all know what it’s like to wake up from a dream that was fantastical but still stuck with us and makes us feel things in the morning. For example, you can guide someone to have daydreams about their own deep bimbofication fantasies -- even without directly guiding WHAT they are fantasizing about, they’re going to focus on the things they want most, the things that get them hottest. It will end up changing them indirectly, and you can even suggest that they are being changed from the inside of them -- you’re using their inner desires to brainwash them.

• “Better subject” training

Learning how to love “hypnotic dreaming” or “trance processing” can really help someone who feels like they are hyperanalytical, or otherwise feels like they are failing when they lose focus during a trance. The more they feel like they have different ways to let their brain behave during trance -- such as getting lost in thought -- the more they are going to have positive trance experiences. Instead of fretting when their mind wanders, their brain can learn that a) it doesn’t HURT the trance, b) it can be a SIGN of trance, and c) how to wander/daydream “productively” in trance.