Beginner Suggestions

Playing with balance is surprisingly easy. You can make your partner lean to one side or feel like they’re on a boat. Be careful and be safe, especially since there is a risk of making your partner dizzy or even nauseous.

Interoceptive suggestions are sensations of the body. This covers a wide variety of sensations. You can suggest that they feel sunshine on their skin, or they are getting a massage, or they can feel anticipation like butterflies in their stomach, or even like they have to yawn. These sensations are immediately recognizable to everyone.

The most common interoceptive suggestion is relaxation. Relaxation is packaged into most hypnotic inductions, but you can mix in some agency suggestions to convince your partner that they are hypnotized: tell them that you’re going to count down from 10 to 1, and they’ll relax completely as you count down; they can fight against the feeling of relaxation but they will be unable to resist.

One popular suggestion is have people "freeze" and have them be unaware of the passage of time when they "unfreeze" later. The way to test this is to have them count from one to ten, freeze them in the middle, and ask them how long it took to count.

This is a flexible suggestion, as it has a number of possible variations. You can move them into different positions, move yourself and appear to teleport from place to place, or use it for cheap card tricks by swapping out or looking at their cards.

One emotion is trance: Entrancement. The induction itself should take care of this. This emotion is useful in itself because experiences associated with that feeling can result in emotional transfer. Any prop that you use, such as spirals, pocket watchs, or pendulums, can bring back that emotion.

Surprise is a shock. It provides an out-of-body experience to your partner where all of the focus is on the object of the emotion. This is a "hit you all at once" emotion where there’s no gradual build up.

This is commonly paired with a mental suggestion. Common stage hypnosis tropes are believing your favorite celebrity has entered the room, or you’ve just won the lottery.

Some desires are mild: Interest, Admiration, Aesthetic appreciation. These emotions are more measured than the shocks. You can start to elicit the emotion at a low level, describe the internal sensations associated with it and the details and thoughts associated with the target, then build that emotion gradually.

Interest and aesthetic appreciation are undervalued as flexible suggestions, as they foster play and don’t have to be serious. Your partner can be an artist interested in the kinetic art possibilities of menthos and diet coke, or harbour a deep aesthetic appreciation for extremely regrettable tattoos.

Craving is a stronger desire for a circumstance. It may be a particular food, a cigarette, a hug, or for a particular situation like seeing relatives or an end to a migraine. Craving is usually deep and comes from a sustained lack. This can make for a fun suggestion if you know your partner enjoys something and has not had it in a while: you can build up a craving for cheesecake and then hold it out as a reward for following suggestions.

Romance or limerance causes people to be obsessively fixated on another person, with an eye to having the object of their affections notice and reciprocate. If you and your partner are in an established relationship, this can be an enjoyable honeymoon. You can give your partner amnesia, set up a perfect first date, and watch them fall in love all over again.

Sexual desire causes people to want sex. It may be focused on a particular person, or it may be unfocused and anyone will do. Surprisingly, sexual desire, kinks, and fetishes are all different and may be disconnected from sex itself; Dr Devon Price stands out as a hypnosis fetishist with little interest in vanilla sex.

Suggestions involving sexual desire can be powerful, but can also derail the session. There’s also a risk of using language in suggestions that may not reflect your partners experience. If your partner has a kink and you don’t, they will need to hear sexual desire expressed in the language of kink.

Some emotions are highs: Amusement, Excitement, Adoration, Awe, Joy. These emotions have an effect on the body that goes beyond conscious control.

Amused people will laugh or struggle to contain their laughter, which in itself is funny. You can give suggestions around amusement to anything; tell your partner a giggle loop and watch them progressively try to stifle their laughter.

Excited people have high physiological arousal and can’t sit still. You can build up excitement in your partner and hype them up to run around the house. Excitement is also a thought inhibitor; if your partner is usually restrained or skeptical, getting them excited can give you more room to slip suggestions in.

Adoration, Awe, and Joy are trancendent peak emotions that involve some dissocation. Similar to surprise, they are "out of self" sensations where all of the focus is on the object. You can give suggestions to your partner to relive a happy memory or imagine a prospective future and elicit the emotions as a backdrop.

Have your partner forget being given a suggestion, or forget being hypnotized altogether.

Tell your partner to forget a number between 1 and 10. Have them count on their fingers.

Have your partner forget their name or your name. Have them remember their name as something else, and then show them their original name.

It’s an open argument if the sense of agency is a true sensory channel or an ascribed belief. However, the reduction in the sense of agency is part of the fascination of hypnosis, and is usually the first things people do. Agency can be sprinkled in with any other suggestion, and is very fun to play with.

You can also play with sense of ownership and have people feel outside their bodies or give them the idea that a rubber hand belongs to them.

ideomotor ("unconscious movement") suggestions involve movement of the body or inability (aka catalepsy) to move the body. These are suggestions to make the arm stiff, feel an arm get lighter and lift by itself, or have feet stick in place. Hypnotic suggestions affect perception, so technically suggestions can’t directly involve motor control: they are typically a combination of agency suggestions and belief suggestions.

If you tell someone that their arm is as hard as an iron bar and can’t bend, their belief is what stops their arm bending. You’ve told them to actively believe that their arm can’t bend. They may know that they can physically bend their arm, but they can’t bend their arm and maintain that belief.

Other common beginner ideomotor suggestions are to freeze, flop, or engage in repetitive activities such as clapping or windmilling the hands.

Marnathas has a useful tip to get started on ideomotor suggestions: when starting with a suggestion, begin with a single piece and then add to it. For example, you might start by freezing someone in place. After you’ve established a freeze suggestion, you can combine it with other suggestions to create puppets, jedi mind tricks, or freeze buttons. There can be various ways of building up complex suggestions and building versatility into simple suggestions.

Suggestions involving mental perceptions often involve playing a role. The best way to approach this is as a game with an open-ended premise that lets your partner involve their creative side. Similar to improv or games like Game Changer, these kinds of suggestions serve as a platform that enable new behavior.

For example, suggesting to your partner that they are a cat that can talk enables more behavior than suggesting that they cluck like a chicken, because there is more opportunity to express themselves. You can involve a laser pointer and have them chase it, and they can tell you exactly what they’re going to sit on and demand scritches.

Activity suggestions will add or change the relationship of objects to the hypnotee, such as suggesting that an onion is an apple, or that hands are feet for walking on and feet are hands for holding things.

Activity perceptions are often easier than sensory perceptions. Your partner may not be able to see a dinosaur in the room, but may be able to believe that there’s a dinosaur in the room if they are hiding from it. Likewise, convincing people that a shoe is a phone is a common trope in stage hypnosis, because the purpose of a phone isn’t what it looks like.