Sensory Suggestions

Hallucination is very hard and is considered to be a higher level trance phenomena. So start small with Simple Visual Hallucination, Elementary Auditory Hallucination, Phantosmia [smells that are not actually there] or small general tactile hallucinations.

Build up slowly and gently and give your subject time to learn how to do this. Remember rapport is key, so take the time to create it.

The key when setting up your hallucination is to choose your details carefully. Every detail you add to the description is another part for the brain to create and maintain. Thus it is better to remain vague, especially at first, and to let the subject shape the details of the experience themselves. To give an example it is better to say:

“You will see a cute elephant”

than to say

“You will see a cute elephant in a pink hat and a yellow bow tie”

but when starting out it might be even better to say:

“You will see a cute animal”

Because that allows the mind to create whatever it finds easiest to project and maintain.

It is much better to work with a hallucination in a focused manner for short periods than to work on it with other suggestions. Working with multiple suggestions, especially those that would force the subject to look away from and then back to the hallucination will make it much harder to maintain as the mind as to rebuild it ever time the subject looks back. It also forces the mind to keep track of the object being there.

Thus it is best to focus everything on the hallucination for a bit and then once it is over do the other suggestions.

Also end it firmly. Doing so builds a lot more rapport as it create a big “wow that worked” moment and feels more impressive than it gradually fading away. Also it lets subjects know they did well, as many might see the natural fading away as them failing to maintain it.

“This is an exercise you should try on a moderately cloudy day, when the sky above you is filled with a delightful mixture of large, bold clouds and tiny little clouds. Simply look upwards, and think to yourself ‘the white is the sky, and the blue bits are the real clouds’, until the sky is inverted, and you see the blue parts as the true clouds, as opposed to being openings in the sky. Try and hold this state of mind for longer than thirty seconds. Once you can invert the daylight sky for longer than a minute, try the same with the night sky and the stars.”

This perception exercise is an Occlumency exercise shamelessly stolen from The Universe Is An Optimisation Problem.

“Sit in a dimly lit room, and try to imagine a box at the very corner of your vision. Imagine the shape of the box, the material it’s made out of, and anything written on the box. Now, once you believe you have convinced yourself that the box could be there, try to ‘see’ the box. Once you are able to do this, either adjust your external settings by turning the lights up or adjust things internally by moving the box closer into your field of vision. Try to get the box right in the middle of your field of vision. It’s fine if the box is translucent, so long as you understand that the box is there.”

This is an exercise that is intended to improve the subject’s skill towards hypnotic “Positive Hallucinations” in which you perceive an object that is not there. In different levels of hypnotic depth, if the conditions are right, subjects are often able to do this completely naturally via a hypnotist’s adept description of the hallucination in question. Doing this yourself, however, is a great way to gain an initial grasp of your own visual Hypno-Hallucinogenic abilities and improve them over time.

“’Pay attention to that alley over there. A gorilla in a clown suit is going to come out of it in a second.’ If I said that to you, and the ape subsequently appeared, you would (rightly) conclude that I’d helped you see the beast by focusing your attention on the right place at the right time. Suppose, though, that I’d said to look at the alley after the gorilla rushed by. And then you realized, hey, I saw a gorilla over there! That would be weird right? But it’s what people do all the time!“(2) Knowing this, certain subjects have taken to seeing certain objects by blinking rapidly and shifting their heads slightly with every blink, as if trying to follow a rapidly moving object.

Envisioning the object and following it around while blinking rapidly can often create enough reasonable doubt for your mind to initiate a Postcue, especially while under hypnosis. Over time, while within a trance, the blinking may become less rapid as the object gains more permanence within your field of vision.

Certain popular hypnotic hallucinations such as envisioning rapidly moving fairies or thrown tennis balls can function very effectively on this principle. I have known these two specific suggestions to be very popular hypnotic hallucinations for obvious reasons.

I tried something new: I suggested to one woman that she’d see a pop-up window opening on her screen, and she’d be unable to close it. It would play a video of a talking dog advertising dog shampoo. It worked well. In fact, it worked well with everyone I tried it with. They couldn’t believe in a person magically appearing in the room with them, but they had no trouble at all believing in something appearing on their screen—​there’s nothing magical about pop-ups.

So working from the idea that the block on hallucination is a matter of belief, rather than some people just not being capable of it, I tried something different with another woman. I suggested that her mirror was actually a computer screen, and then had her see things on the mirror. It worked really well. So I suggested to her that her glasses were magical, and that while she looked through her glasses, she could see the invisible. In a few minutes, I had her hallucinating that her girlfriend was there in the room with her—​but she could only see her through her glasses. And this was a woman who had never experienced visual hallucination before.

I’m pretty sure that everyone is capable of hypnotic hallucination. The main limitation is what they believe can be possible. Don’t focus on inducing the hallucination—​focus on inducing the belief.

One way to get better is practice, I was taught this simple exercise to help work on and improve visual hallucination.

Start by imagining a simple 2D shape in your minds eye. Give it a colour. And then find a blank piece of wall and focus and slowly try and “project” the shape on the blank bit of wall.

Once you get good at that, try making it into a 3D shape and project that, and then play around with changing the colour, shape, texture and weight of the object.

You can do this with any of the hallucination types, just pick something simple and work on having it happen and then after a time work on changing it and altering it.

Weaver set up the experiment by taping my mouth and handed me a pair of earplugs and a nasal strip (deviated septum issues). He walked me over to the bed, secured my wrists and ankles, placed a weighted blanket over my body, and blindfolded me. For the blindfold, we needed something white rather than dark. It was a bit challenging to find something suitable. We opted to use one of those disposable face masks with a white side. He also set up a Shepard tone audio track, which I did not realize until later. The stillness was comforting at first. However, the room’s brightness against the whiteness of the makeshift eye mask made me feel somewhat restless. Yet, what ended up being an hour felt like 30 minutes at most. At first, I started seeing yellow and orange splotches. It reminded me of the time I almost passed out one hot summer afternoon as a child. I was walking toward my teacher in a feverish daze, and I somehow knew it was her because of those yellow and orange splotches were her silhouette. However, there was no silhouette my vision could latch onto this time. I was only able to see whiteness, and the splotches remained formless.

In the middle of the experiment, Weaver entered the room to make sure I was awake. At this point, I was feeling slightly floaty. I was not focusing on my body in particular, nor did I feel the need to. My thoughts went from thinking about randomness to focusing on what I was seeing in the whiteness. He spoke to me, but I am not sure of the exact details. However, I knew he mentioned a red dragon of sorts. I imagined what it would be like to see the yellow and orange splotches take on that form. He exited the room, and I stayed in the stillness. The frequency of the Shepard tones became more apparent. Eventually, clearly formed indigo circles joined my vision. They were smaller than the splotches and clustered in a way that reminded me of irises. When I concentrated on the thought of flowers, the circles took on the form of those petals briefly. The indigo circles would also flicker like a flame sometimes. At one point, both the petals and stems formed and then reverted into indigo circles with only stems attached to them.

Weaver entered the room once more. He removed the tape and the restraints and spoke to me; I can’t remember the exact words since it was a while ago. There was a distinct suggestion to be unable to see him. When I opened my eyes, he was gone. I could hear him walking around the room. The creaking of the floor and the direction of his voice gave me a sense of where he was. Even when I scrambled for my glasses, he was still gone. He told me that I would only see his hands. They were cupped and held in front of me; disembodied and nearly inconceivable. He made flower arrangements in them. I mainly saw roses; and the colours would fade into other colours at his whim. The same dragon I struggled to imagine initially came to life as he spoke of it. It looked like a hybrid of Mushu and Shenron. He moved on to touching my arm and my face. This started throwing me off because I did not know when his touch would come. Sometimes his hands were there, and sometimes they were not. This part becomes a bit foggy; I think I became confused about something and froze. He made himself reappear at this point, which gave me a small sense of relief. He also suggested to see an aura around him. I saw what appeared to be a bright light behind him, but his body covered the “source” of light. One of the last suggestions I can recall was to feel a chain around my neck. I saw this thin gold chain that grazed around my neck. As he pulled on it, I felt the urge to slide my fingers under the chain to give my neck space. I could feel the thin chain across my fingers; and the strength and fragility of it all.