Depth (Article)

Depth by sleepingirl

Depth as a concept is inextricably linked to hypnosis -- the vast majority of us who play are interested in “deep” trances. Even people who take a completely non-state approach to hypnosis often play with concepts that we could think of as related; most would say that the level of intensity, buy-in, rapport, and related concepts do not stay static during a scene. But depth as a concept is so deviously nebulous that it would likely benefit us to explore more about what it can potentially mean.

Depth Isn't Real(?)

One of the very first things that people learn as they move beyond beginner-level hypnosis is that depth as a concept is, at least, not simplistic or linear. The idea that someone isn’t responding to hypnotic suggestions because they aren’t “deep enough” is quickly diffused. We often say things like “the concept of depth isn’t real,” or “depth is a metaphor.”

Yet depth is such a pervasive concept, so baked into our hypnotic patter and experience that the vast majority of us use it even without fully understanding what we mean when we say it. Even very experienced subjects, when having difficulty responding to a suggestion, will often fall back on this perceived lack of “something.” On the other hand, when someone is having an intense, responsive experience, they tend to express that as being “very deep.”

Depth is clearly important but we also understand that we can’t really pin down what it is. We know that it’s not some singular, objectively measurable attribute -- we know that it and the related concept of “suggestibility” are so thorny and abstract that we can’t effectively correlate the two. Instead of needing to concretely identify what depth is, it may help us to look at what depth may be.

What Could it Be?

In this section, we’ll look at some ideas for what the experience of depth can consist of. We need to understand that this word can mean different things to different people at different times -- the qualities that we may assign to it change completely depending on someone’s model of hypnosis, the way the hypnosis is actually done, and the experience of what is happening (both noticed and unnoticed).

• Sensation, Progression
  

Something we’ve talked about extensively is the idea that trance is a collection of abstract and concrete sensations. If depth is a sort of “measure” of trance (with a lot of caveats), we know that “deep” trance feels different or significant somehow. Any of those qualities of sensations might feel more intense -- or there might be ones that are new that signal to someone that they’ve gone deeper.

We can think about this in a few ways -- “deeper” trance might mean the capacity to notice more nuanced sensations, or to notice them with fewer mental filters. We don’t tend to think about the way that our body holds itself in equilibrium, so when we notice things like heaviness or physical sensations that we’re used to ignoring in our day to day lives, that can be part of an experience of depth. One example is how the body “conspires” to keep the head still and level -- a rule seen in animation that reflects a part of how we keep that equilibrium. In trance, a lot of people get wobbly necks and have trouble holding their head up, which tends to feel like a very trancey sensation. Of course all kinds of the things we think of as signs of trance can be indicative of “deep” trance.

Feeling any of these kinds of changes serves as a signal that something is happening -- something is different, so it’s not necessarily just the sensation itself but perhaps the progression of the sensation. Any given signal of trance -- fluttery eyelids, for example -- may feel like a sign of “lighter” trance at the beginning of a scene, or “deeper” trance if it manifests in the middle or peak of a scene. We might say that deep trance feels like any of the sensations that progress along the way -- without much of a way to prescribe individual meaning to them (“abc sign is light trance, xyz sign is deep trance”).

But in that case, how does a subject identify when they feel like they drop deep from the start? It may very well be that there are some sensations, maybe more abstract ones, that define depth for a person. After all, any of the other items in this section could be said to have sensations associated with them in some way -- the emotional and psychological ones, the nervous system activating in some way and causing some feeling.

• Rapport, Mind Reading
  

Rapport is notoriously difficult to describe and we usually settle for using comparisons -- “the feeling where you and another person are on the same page,” “the feeling where you are really focused on the other person,” “the feeling where you agree with the other person,” “the feeling where you trust the other person,” etc. Tons and tons of hypnosis education tries to focus on cultivating this -- everything from matching/mirroring, pacing, yes sets, nonverbal cues, cold/mind reading, and more. (These technique breakdowns are meant to assist -- nothing is a substitute for showing genuine interest in someone for the sake of getting to know them and letting them know in a safe way that they are seen, heard, and paid attention to. Often in our overlap with PUA and clinical therapy, this gets missed.)

Rapport is both an ingredient in deep trance as well as a byproduct of it; trances feel deeper when there is deeper rapport and deep trance creates the kind of intimacy we associate with rapport in the first place. Rapport isn’t always about trust, or the feeling of mind reading, or the feeling of agreement -- but it often is or goes along with those things.

Mind reading specifically is worth mentioning; as we’ve said before, it’s a very intense and fast way to build this. On the flipside as well, deep trance can often feel to the subject like the hypnotist is anticipating what’s going to happen and what they’re thinking. Mind reading carries with it a sense of effortlessness -- the subject feels like they don’t need to try as hard to communicate what they’re experiencing, which means that they can respond more freely. This can lead to or come from a sense of “depth” and is worth thinking about in its own right.

• Engagement, Focus
  

Related to these ideas of rapport are those of engagement and focus. Focus is a key component of hypnosis, and someone who’s feeling deep in trance generally feels more focused in some way -- whether that’s on the voice of the hypnotist, on their own internal experience, or on a sort of abstract “lack” of focus as we may see in some techniques.

Perceived lack of focus can be one of the bigger struggles for people who report not feeling very “deep.” Being distracted either externally or internally can certainly hinder the experience, especially when it comes alongside the frustration it’s often associated with. Creating focus, as many of us are intimately aware, is not usually just as simple as saying, “Focus on my voice.”

Something that is “engaging” means it’s easier to focus on. It may be interesting, or intense, or just attention-grabbing, and the connotation is that there’s consistency to that state. Generally, all hypnosis should be done in such a way that it’s exciting and fascinating, but this can also mean using techniques that cause some confusion or make a person ask questions internally about what’s happening -- curiosity, for example, is engaging.

Deep hypnosis tends to have these qualities. Some posit that hyperfocus is a kind of objective quality of deep trance, and some non-state theorists might say that focus and engagement are part of what people call “trance” in general, or part of hypnotic response.

• Specific “Hypnotic” Mental Qualities
  

It is true that deep trance manifests for subjects sometimes as certain qualities like blankmindedness, and it is also true that this expectation can hinder a person from feeling or believing that they are deep in trance at all. Whether it is blankness, suspension of disbelief, a quieting of the inner monologue, a feeling of control, being deeply focused on certain things and ignoring others, or any other abstract kind of psychological response -- deep trance can certainly make things happen that we are not used to as part of our “waking” experience.

For many subjects, growth happens when they let go of the expectation that hypnosis is going to create certain specific psychological results. They feel like they go deeper, and paradoxically may move towards experiencing those results as they practice. This may happen as they learn to notice more nuance about their process.

We could say that these kinds of responses can happen as an effect of deep trance, but are dependent on the environment cultivated in the hypnosis itself and the psychological environment of the subject. It stands to reason that trances given differently will manifest differently, and also that someone who is too preoccupied with what will happen as a pass/fail will have a hard time with it.

Is there something specific about “deep” trance that creates these results, or intense engagement? The answer could be yes, considering that either trance or the non-state equivalent of being intensely engaged in something logically might change the way that we think and process. There also might be something to the idea that many of these “hypnotic” responses happen in our day-to-day lives, but once they’re put in the context of hypnosis, they take on a different kind of meaning.

• Recognition, Belief
  

Relatedly, depth for many is a “know it when you feel it” experience. That first part is really important; the key subjective part of going deeper is believing that it’s happening. That is generally contingent on a few things:

• Being able to notice something is happening
• Being confident that it is real
• Not being bogged-down by mismatched expectations or compulsive doubt

We can think about this in terms of traditional “convincers” as well. Usually, convincers depend on someone responding to a suggestion in a pretty concrete way that is definitively outside the realm of their “usual” reality. Someone who is cataleptic and feels like they can’t move, for example. Generally a convincer will contain some aspect of feeling like a suggestion is a) happening without conscious intervention, and b) irresistible in some way. Interestingly, both of these qualities are things that we in the hypnokink community try to communicate are NOT necessary qualities of trance.

It makes sense -- it is a little more difficult to convince someone that they are responding to hypnosis when they don’t get the difference pointed out to them between hypnosis and playing along. This also connects to the issue where people who don’t respond to a suggestion the way they expect to feel that they aren’t “deep.” We say it all the time, but hypnosis can have subtleties to it at first that only get obvious with good teaching and time.

This does give us a little bit of a roadmap of how we might build “convincing” hypnotic experiences that align with that subtlety and don’t give a sort of mistaken impression about what hypnosis really feels like. The idea of a convincer is to teach -- so when giving suggestions, we can follow with the three ideas we outlined above and create depth that is convincing.

For example, the opposite of doubt isn’t confidence -- it’s usually curiosity. Curiosity can lead to someone paying attention in a way that allows them to notice the nuance of a “rush” of depth. Noticing something new and different can lead to confidence about its place as a real part of someone’s experience.

There are all sorts of tricks and techniques to get someone to believe something -- perhaps a good topic for a future article. For now, here are some ideas:

• Bring them into a different frame of reference about what’s happening
• Make them doubt their doubt, or doubt what they think they know (fun gaslighting)
• Reduce their intelligence or mental capacity (everything is new and interesting)
• Wake them up (or switch gears) in a semi-jarring way so that they can feel the contrast

• Suggestibility
  

So, the big question: does deep trance correlate with some sort of increased “suggestibility?”

We’ve talked about the concept of suggestibility before and its limitations -- here’s some things we “know” about this:

• A person’s response to hypnosis can’t be graded on a linear scale, or attributed to some sort of singular aspect/value/quality
• People can have profound responses outside of “deep” trance (or any trance)
• It is not reliable to say that one “type” of suggestion is objectively easier or harder than another
• Response to suggestion depends mostly on how the suggestion is framed, given, progressed towards, how much it makes sense, etc

On the other hand, we can posit about what this experience might be. Suggestibility might include things like:

• Faster response/preconscious responses
• Feeling more intense responses
• Responding with less/no effort on the part of the subject
• Responding to suggestions given with less “help” or “skill” on the part of the hypnotist
• Faster belief in responses/suspension of disbelief

It matters A LOT to not reduce these concepts to a single word, most of the time. All of these (and any others) are individual and can clearly be worked upon individually -- disconnected from the idea of depth.

However -- does a subject who is experiencing these things tend to feel like they are “deep” in hypnosis? The answer tends to be yes, and it is usually comparative: “faster than…” “more intense than…” implying some sort of progression in the trance experience, either compared to their early scenes or as a scene goes on.

Objective? Subjective?

All of this being said, the tricky question of whether depth is a more objective or subjective phenomenon remains.

The answer is both -- but still, not in ways that we can really quantify. For the purpose of achieving “deep trance,” the subjective lens is extremely important. The individual’s perceived experience carries through a lot of the actual objective effects.

But it’s also true that someone can be “deep” in a hypnotic experience and not capable of fully recognizing it. They might be responding in ways characteristic to depth as we and they understand it, and not subjectively feeling it. If someone is deep in hypnosis and they don’t realize it, does that depth matter? (If a tree falls in a forest…)

The answer is of course “yes” -- the qualities of response that they’re having are objective. This also is an open door to covert play, and play where someone gets to discover the intensity of depth when it’s pointed out to them.

Depth describes a range of experiences, responses, and qualities: subjective, objective, abstract, and concrete. If you eschew the entire premise of depth -- or trance -- hypnosis still functions well and those aspects remain in existence. It is actually when you try to define depth and trance that you run into inconsistencies.

A model that purports trance as bypassing consciousness limits what trance and depth are. A model that calls trance a “pattern” makes you squeeze the experiential aspects of trance into a thing called “patterns.” Erickson says that the moment someone responds to a suggestion, they’re in trance -- but that creates its own complications about what suggestions are and how to define response and trance itself. Does all of this mean that trance isn’t a real, describable phenomenon? Some say yes, others say no. The folks who say no tend to feel like someday, we’ll get to better and better definitions.

As we progress in hypnosis, it’s exceedingly important that we honor the experiential aspects, and the aspects that are measurable to us -- the qualities that are either subjective or objective. We need to learn how to see the value in understanding a lot of different models and definitions depending on their worth to us at different times -- and when push comes to shove, we do trance according to the experience; we make suggestions that make sense.

How Does It Mean?

Understanding the components and qualities of what depth might be inform us on how to create it. Is it a matter of creating deep trance in order to get to these qualities? Or is it a matter of creating these qualities in order to induce deep trance?

It is both -- probably. All of these responses (and more) can manifest spontaneously for someone as a scene progresses; as they go “deeper.” You can also of course help out and lead someone to them in order to create a more profound trance.

Most of the time, you can’t just say to someone “OK, you’re feeling the deep trance sensations, you’re feeling like I can read your mind, you’re feeling hyperfocused, you’re feeling blank, now you believe you’re in deep trance and you’re hypersuggestible.” In the same way that we understand the purpose of an “induction” is to induce trance in a way that makes sense and works, deepening trance follows the same principles of needing to be based in something tangible, achievable, and understandable.

There is also no need to rush and try to get all of these qualities to show up at once. Spending time on one of them -- in fact, even just a piece of one of them, like working specifically on someone responding with less effort -- is very worthwhile and likely to create the kind of intense experience you’re looking for. Getting to dig into just one small place opens someone up for experiencing other similar qualities of depth.

Making suggestions to induce these effects is the same as making any other kinds of suggestions: think about what the whole mental and physical experience is of the effect, and identify some ways to lead someone there through logic, metaphor, sensation, etc. For example, if you wanted to focus on intensifying the feeling of rapport, you could do all sorts of things, like:

• Making suggestions using topics that are interesting to your partner
• Talking about how in an intimate situation like this, it’s easy to gain a sense of trust and familiarity with each other (at the right “speed”)
• Pacing/mind reading them
• Listening and asking questions intently
• Using a metaphor or telling a sort of story about how two people can slip into rapport without even noticing it
• Describing/suggesting the sensations of rapport and relating them to what they might already be feeling
• “Explaining” to them that rapport happens naturally, giving them “permission” to feel it

Fucko Boingo Depth

Throughout this article, we’ve made mention of the idea that a lot of this can happen “spontaneously.” We should dedicate some time to this -- the concept that something about hypnosis in and of itself just makes weird stuff happen, especially very involved hypnosis. Thus far, we’ve talked a lot about sort of expectable phenomena, and how they might define parts of the experience of depth.

But something to think about is what happens when you push depth further, and you don’t rigidly put boundaries on it. There’s plenty of talk in the hypnosis world about the so-called “Esdaille state” -- a purported “deepest trance” that supposedly comes with specific qualities (spontaneous anesthesia, inability to respond to suggestions, etc). You’re encouraged to cast doubt on this idea that such a thing exists -- at least so rigidly or concretely.

However, if you and your partner work towards really profound depth, and especially if you do so in such a way where your partner feels free to respond in any capacity, you might encounter some strange -- and indeed, spontaneous -- things. Anesthesia, hallucinations, amnesia, difficulty responding, intense catalepsy, shaking, dissociation/derealization, intense emotional responses, all manner of “weird” subjective feelings (like feeling a full body orgasmic feeling, seeing the divine, brain processing nonsense) -- all sorts of very interesting and intense stuff.

This can be extremely exciting, and of course at times could be surprising or even frightening. “Abreaction” is a very loaded term in the hypnokink community but suffice to say, this may be intense in a good or bad way depending on the circumstances. It is a topic that is difficult to broach with someone who is new, partially because they don’t have any context for it, and partially because you don’t want to sit there listing out dozens of things that might randomly happen, some of which might be unsettling or intense and most of which are irrelevant. Most of the time, if you aren’t creating the right environment, things like this won’t be happening anyways.

A good way to approach hypnosis generally is exploratory and with curiosity, and it is good to sit down with someone and talk about how unexpected things can happen, and that’s just the reality of hypnosis. Someone going in with an ethos of being interested in their own responses instead of being scared of them is going to have a better time. And of course, setting up situations where your partner can stay grounded if they need to is always a good idea.

All of that being said, it can be intensely powerful when two experienced partners embark into the real depths of trance together simply to see what happens. The human mind is very powerful, and hypnosis can make this real magic come to life.