I was having a conversation with someone on Yahoo the other day, and a subject came up that reminded me of something I once did with Katie, and I thought to myself "that would make a great blog entry"... so here it is. I hope you enjoy.
Katie and I were talking one day about how much time we spend indulging in our
hypno-play... It was a lot. Whenever neither of us wasn't working (and often when we were supposed to be working!) we'd be having fun with hypnosis. It was pretty much all we did with our spare time. We wondered if we added up all the time Katie spent in trance or under the influence of some kind of suggestion over the course of the week, just how much time would it be? ... We never actually did work it out... we got distracted by talking about other things, 1 of them being what the world record was for the longest hypnotic trance... I seem to recall reading about how Peter Powers (who I remember from his 'naughty naughty
hypno show' on
tv, once had someone in a shop window for 8 days in a trance... and we wondered, if he could do that with someone who was a total stranger, what might be possible if the hypnotist and the subject knew each other intimately and had built up a deep rapport... surely the record could be much much longer? We thought so. We wondered if we tried, could we break that record?... we were curious, but we both agreed that though it might be possible, one of us would probably get bored before we got to 8 days! But we decided to give it a go and see how long we could manage.
Katie got nice and comfy on the sofa, and I started with a proper induction, no triggers, just a good old fashioned eye fixation and progressive relaxation induction. Katie was obviously well trained at going into trance by now, so it didn't take long at all to have her under and in a deep trance.
Now, for those of you who don't know... getting someone to stay in a trance for a long period of time, isn't as simple as you might think... you can't just leave them there and expect them to stay the way they are. A person wont just stay in a trance indefinitely. If left alone, sooner or later they will either start to come around and snap out of it... or else just get to relaxed and fall asleep, a natural sleep that is... and once they fall asleep, they wont respond to you any more. So to keep someone in a trance, they need regular and constant supervision and attention. Just a few words every now and then to keep them in that hypnotic state.
So I kept Katie there on the sofa. Obviously I had to make sure she got regular food, drink and toilet breaks, which for the first few times I took great care in continuing to talk to her and keep her in trance through out, but after the first few times I was confident she would be ok. My biggest concern was what would happen when I needed to sleep... I thought the best bet was to through out the day, make my gaps between talking to her, in the hopes that she'd get more and more used to staying in trance without my input, and thus I might be able to get a few hours sleep! I wasn't really sure if she would really stay in trance properly the whole time... but I thought I knew her well enough to be able to tell most of the time, and the rest I would just have to trust and wait until it was over to ask her about it properly.
We kept it up for quite a while actually, nearly 3 days whole days. But I will admit, by that point I was getting pretty bored... When I was single it wouldn't have been that unusual to have gone 3 day or more without talking to someone, I'd always managed to find ways to fill the time. But since being with Katie, we'd rarely been apart, so I'd gotten very used to having her around.. but although she was still physically there, mentally she was not really available for conversation! There was no chance I could make it to 8 days, I was going crazy with boredom, and resisiting the urge to mess with her while she was under was getting to much!
On the evening of the 3rd day, I was watching TV and hadn't given Katie any attention for a couple of hours. Her favourite program came on... and after about 10 mintutes I realised that her eyes were open and she was watching the TV... I asked her if she was awake and she blinked a bit, rubbed her eyes, and said "yes I think so, and laughed"
Although she had now come out of the trance, she was finding it quite difficult to
actually stay out of it... She said she still felt kind of groggy, much like she had the first time I'd hypnotized her. And as she continued to watch the TV she'd keep slipping back under again an her head would slowly slump back onto her chest. It would particularly happen during the ad breaks... which I would guess was down to the fact that you never really pay attention to the ads do you? you just kind of watch them passively and wait for the show to come back on, so in itself that's almost trance enducing. It's a well documented phenomenon that subjects still remain in a more suggestible state shortly after being brought out of trance... and since she'd been in trance for 3 days, I suppose that effect was amplified a bit. I suppose I'd liken it a bit to when you have spent to much time in bed and over slept... you find it hard to properly wake up and unless you force yourself to get up and do something, you will keep nodding off again every few minutes without even realising... That's what it seemed to be like for Katie... if I kept talking to her and kept her stimulated (her mind that is!) then she'd stay awake... but if I stopped for a few mins, or she went back to watching the tv, she'd keep slipping back under... her head would just flop down... then a couple of minutes later she'd snap out of it again... it was very cute to watch. Then I found out that if I spoke to her in my 'hypno voice' she'd slip under... i didn't need to say anything special... no trigger words or relaxation or anything like that... all I had to do was slooow my voice dooown a bit, and talk in that seductive way that I do when I'm performing an induction, and the simplest phrase such as "would you like a cup of teeeaaa Katie, I fancy a cup of teeeaa..." was enough make her eyes roll back into her head and slip into trance again...
This went on for about 3 hours for the rest of the evening, and I enjoyed watching her nodding off, and teasing her with my seductive voice... but gradually it wore off. We went to bed and by the time she woke up the next day, she was back to normal. She told me that she had no memory of the last 3 days, including most of the previous evening when she was supposedly awake. She was sure that she was in trance the whole time, and that was good enough for me.
So, we didn't exactly break the world record, but at least we'd satisfied our curiousity!