Mindlessness (Personal Essay) by sleepingirl

Mindlessness (Personal Essay) by sleepingirl

Mindlessness: The holy grail. The final frontier. The thing that ostensibly seems so simple and guaranteed from being hypnotized, and yet… it ain’t.

Not to start with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek “get off my lawn,” but when I was new to hypnosis, the online environment was a very different place. (When I was TRULY new, I was quite young and listening to hypnosis files. But when I was appropriately old enough and venturing into the online adult spaces, the sentiment still stands.) Nowadays, one of the very first things you encounter in terms of education is the idea that mindlessness and blankness are both not easy to achieve and not necessary for a subject to experience. This wasn’t the case, in my experience, 10-15 years ago.

I want to start off here by giving a little bit of respect to the disappointment that I think is almost a rite of passage for hypnofetishists. I am sure there are some people who are blissfully blank the very first time they are hypnotized. Or people who don’t expect mindlessness, or people for whom mindlessness isn’t the thing they’ve been craving from the very first moments they developed an interest in hypnosis. But I think a lot of people are hypnotized for the first time and have to wrestle with a kind of sadness that what they desperately want isn’t immediately achievable.

That was certainly my experience. Files offered little-to-nothing to me, and even when I started playing with real people online -- even though I was having a lot of success at responding to hypnosis -- I certainly wasn’t feeling truly blank.

This essay will explore my development with mindlessness over the following 13 years: enjoying hypnosis with a very “thinky” brain to experiencing some form of blankness with almost every trance I’m in.

Making it work at first

Getting over the hurdle of disappointment wasn’t instantaneous, even though I was having pretty intense hypnotic experiences early on. I questioned a lot that I was somehow faking my responses, especially because of just how conscious and analytical I felt. It was wild to me how in the moment I could feel compulsions, suggested pleasure, transformations, and still be so present, ever-questioning.

However, I was (and am) nothing if not driven to get what I want. I intuited very early on that if I kept practicing, the quality of my internal experience would change. I had to work off of the assumption that I WAS being hypnotized. After all, I was exhibiting classic signs of hypnosis, and I even knew that “feeling like you’re playing along” was common. I really tried to take a kind of “hypnotist” approach in the way I talked to myself about it -- what would a hypnotist say to me if I was describing my experience?

I also tried a few “tricks” to see if I could get closer to blankness.

I was aware of an idea from a class that it’s easier to get someone to focus on one thing than it is to completely blank them out. So I experimented a lot while I was hypnotized: trying to just focus on what my body was feeling, on the hypnotist’s words, on some kind of focal point, etc. I also tried things like “verbally” thinking mantras or one easy thought.

Success was mixed. In retrospect, I was aggressively checking in with myself so compulsively, and getting distracted and feeling like I was failing to focus if I started noticing things outside of the focal point I chose. A lot of that comes down to how new I was to trance and not really understanding it well. I know now that if I focus on something and something else enters as a new focus, that is a function of trance experience (of course it is, it makes sense). So pushing against that wasn’t helping me much.

Still, the fact that it wasn’t clicking brought a new kind of disappointment -- “I AM working on this, so why am I not seeing any progress?”

The answer was that I wasn’t going about it in the right way.

Learning to love my thoughts

The more experience I got, the more familiar I became with trance and the little nuances of it. I have talked so extensively about how I feel that learning those personal nuances is the key to really going deeper. At the same time, a couple of other things helped: 1) Becoming slightly desensitized to the experience of trance (not every single experience was so otherworldly I couldn’t focus), 2) Becoming more relaxed/confident that I would continue to get opportunities to be hypnotized (as I got established in community and kept making friends/play partners).

I was so familiar with trance at this point that I felt able to self trance whenever I wanted, even if I wasn’t good at it yet. I knew how it felt and what my body did, so going into trance was just no longer a hurdle. At that time, I felt that anyone could hypnotize me, if only because I could essentially put myself into trance while they did.

I still wanted blankness, but I figured that if it wasn’t going to be immediately available to me, I might as well take advantage of my thoughts and do what I felt was fun: analyzing technique. I had always been a real nerd about hypnosis, but I really enjoyed letting my brain pick apart what someone was doing to me, especially when I sort of gave myself permission to do that.

This kind of “researcher” role helped me a lot and expanded out to me analyzing what my body/mind were doing in tandem -- in a backwards way, it was intensifying my focus on a) the externally hypnotic things like the words being said, and b) my internal hypnotic responses. Ostensibly, that’s exactly what you want. My thoughts became a more fun, comfortable place to be when I was in trance.

I won’t say this was perfect. A lot of times, this helped me, but there were definitely times where I found myself doing more judging and evaluating in a non-productive way. It’s the cliche of subjects worrying that if they know more about hypnosis, the magic will be lost or they’ll spend too much time judging the hypnotist. That definitely happened for me sometimes. I got a lot more discerning -- I kind of stopped listening to any file I came across or volunteering to be tranced by anyone, because I didn’t like going in and then realizing I was judging subpar technique.

As an aside, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be picky or selective about who you play with. In fact, I think it’s healthy. And frankly -- why was I spending so much time listening to files or being hypnotized by people who were leaving me to do most of the work?

Trance processing

This relationship with my thoughts in trance opened up more than just analysis. It sort of allowed for a chain reaction: because I was comfortable with my thoughts, I was going deeper, and I was more interested in them -- and for all of those reasons, the quality of my thoughts started to change.

I caught my analysis getting more “dreamy” -- not really like dreams, but more abstract, more “wow.” Sometimes I was feeling like my thoughts were just generating images or words related to what was happening in trance. Sometimes it was feelings and emotions. A lot of it felt like I wasn’t really driving my thoughts anymore; I was observing more.

Some of this is certainly due to me developing my relationship with MrDream -- someone with whom I was developing more long-term and consistent hypnosis with than anyone I had previously (and who is a very skilled hypnotist). I had real permission to just explore trance in a way that made things very accessible -- and there was a big emotional connection with a ton of trust.

I felt my brain write poetry or play songs sometimes. I eagerly awaited the next thing that my brain would produce. On some level, I was dissociating from my thoughts BECAUSE I was curious, because I was accepting that some things would arrive unconsciously. Not all the time, not for long periods of time, but often enough that I completely fell in love with what I felt was my “trance processing.”

Self trance

As this developed, I felt like more than ever I was coming into my own as both a hypnotist and subject. Armed with everything I had, I wanted to strengthen my connection with these trancey thoughts (and more).

I had a very hard time reaching that sort of dissociative depth on my own. I experimented with a lot of different techniques -- especially through a spiritual lens. I have talked before about my experiences using a pendulum in the style of divination -- how I was able to reach amnesiac states using one -- and it was effective in this regard as well. I would ask a lot of questions over and over until it felt like answers weren’t coming from me consciously anymore. The ideomotor response was great for this, it turns out.

Something really clicked for me though when I went to my first Quaker meeting, which I’ve also talked about at length. A simple hour of introspective silence led me to depths where I was feeling very dissociated from my thoughts.

It started to make sense: If I “turn up” my thoughts, if I think hard and fast as I did with both a pendulum and in silence, it makes unconscious stuff really kick up in the way that I want. I can’t keep up consciously and eventually dissociate from parts of myself that are thinking. I don’t like being prescriptive but as a person with ADHD, that felt like it made a lot more sense than trying to do the opposite and quiet down my thoughts, which is like pushing against a rock.

I got better and better at this over several months and it came with some intense benefits both inside and outside of trance. Things became more and more accessible to me, especially this quality of dissociated trance processing. I was also just able to believe things more freely -- or maybe more accurately I wasn’t immediately doubting things. This was especially great in a spiritual setting, but in trance I was responding to suggestions so quickly and with very little questioning.

Blankness

Something changed. I felt like after all of this experience and regular trancing, I was able to focus in hypnosis in a way that was taking me really deep, really fast. And to my surprise, when MrDream was introducing the word “blank” as part of hypnotic patter, I was responding really strongly.

I want to take some time to identify exactly what is happening subjectively in this experience: when I’m being hypnotized, at a certain point usually early on in the trance, my focus on the words “clicks” into place. It is something that I have some control over. It feels almost the same as when you are looking in a room or at a picture and you suddenly focus your eyes on one element, except it’s happening with my ears. Like I’m able to fill my ears and head with the sound, or direct them.

I’m not sure I’d call this “hyperfocus,” because my experience of hyperfocus is usually longer-term when I am doing a project and I lose track of time or other things. I don’t think I really lose awareness, BUT my internal process is very, very tied up in the hypnosis itself. It does feel much quieter. It does feel like there are fewer distractions. And maybe hyperfocus is the right word or concept.

From there, suggested or spontaneous blankness just happens. Because my head already feels pretty quiet, sometimes I just have the experience that there are no thoughts. I still hear, feel, and see. But my processing of my senses is incredibly muted and my internal monologue can be silent.

I think often this is about the quality of the internal thoughts themselves. I think a lot of this is more that I am not noticing my thoughts. I look inside and there is silence -- I feel as though I am not making judgments about what is happening to me, not thinking about what is next or what just happened.

However, I’ve had conversations while feeling like I’m not thinking -- and while they may not exactly be intellectual, I’m clearly processing somehow to be able to talk and respond. This leads me to feel like this blankness is about the subjective experience of the monologue or process.

Effects

You cannot imagine the grimace on my face as I type this: this “blankness” makes me “very suggestible.” It turns out that if you feel like you are not judging or thinking, you respond faster and without a filter. I want to be very clear that this is not “true hypnosis” or some nonsense, and I have easily had this kind of “hypersuggestible” experience without the blankness. But it is very hot and worth mentioning. Suggestibility isn’t real or measurable, but the subjective experience matters, and changes to your processing will affect… the way that you process suggestions.

Some of this mindlessness leads to feeling very dissociated -- especially in the cases where I am talking or doing things. It is a strange kind of dissociation where I am almost a passenger or watching, but I have none of the real observation of the passenger role. This dissociation can manifest in feeling dissociated from parts of my mind, as though “unconscious” things surface that I am not aware of until they happen. This is kind of a strange distinction to make -- of course something unconscious becomes conscious at the point that I become aware of it. But it makes me wonder: what is the difference between anticipating something in a semi/quasi-conscious way (as I think we tend to do in trance) versus not consciously anticipating it at all? Is the internal monologue that important? Or is my experience of mindlessness something else?

I don’t want to be prescriptive or claim this is objectively true but I could posit about the various “parts” of my awareness, especially the ones that get changed in mindlessness. A few ideas based on what I’ve talked about:

• Inner monologue
• Observation
• Anticipation
• Judgment/comparison
• Memory creation

I want to stress again that not all of these things simply disappear -- maybe not all at once, maybe not in a “total” way, etc. But this does make me think about what mindlessness really is, which is maybe a very simple question and the answers lead to easier ways to achieve it. If you work with someone to reduce some or all of these aspects of “conscious thought” (or more that I haven’t identified), likely at the very least it will lead to an intense experience if not the subjective one of blankness.

What happened? What’s next?

All of this put together led to me being able to feel blankness in trance. You could say, “well, maybe it just happened over time,” but the truth is that I am a product of all of these experiences and practices. Is this a direct formula? No, but I am sure there are bits and pieces of these experiences that would help someone “get there.”

I am certainly in my “everyone should self trance” era and I plan to write a lot more on the topic (including a “subject skills” book that will heavily feature self trance). I want to experiment with self hypnosis more to see if I can create this blank feeling alone, or perhaps how close I can get or what aspects I can replicate.

My trancing over the years has only gotten more intense, and I wonder a lot about what is to come. It often feels like I will plateau and then something happens that radically changes my experience. So… What comes after this mindlessness? More of it, more intensity, more frequency? More aspects of consciousness reducing or transforming? I’m curious, excited, and eager to know for myself.