Hypnosis has been one of my main interests for the past few years, so i kind of know the "correct" answer(s) to the question, but i was curious to see what was the general public's view on this subject.

I want to read the genuine thoughts from people with little exposure to hypnosis.
So please no googling, i'm interested in your personal opinion on what hypnosis is and how it works.

Thank you

Practising hypnosis, like planning for world domination and ninja training, is an occupation favoured by the sad kid who sat in the corner at school, sucked at sport, underachieved and who nobody liked.

But on a more serious note, I don't believe that hypnosis exists. At least certainly not in the traditional controlling sense, though I will conceded that attempting to influence the subconscious may be of some benefit.

Still, I don't believe that the subconscious is in any major way independent of the conscious. I'm more inclined to believe that people are not saying what they really feel or think because they are in denial, and the general state of their mind is a bit off. A bit like a system that is misrepresenting the fact that its internal state is in a mess and it's about to explode. I also believe that talking about the conscious and subconscious is much too simple a model in the first place.

Just because someone thinks that they think something doesn't mean that their concious mind actually thinks it. It's more likely that their reasoning about what they think is flawed. They could simply not be intelligent enough to reason about their own conscious thoughts. I don't see why the mythical "subconscious" even needs to come into this equation.

"But surely what someone thinks they think is their conscious mind?" I hear you shout. Yeah maybe. I don't claim to have thought this through, I'm just doing my usual thing and trying to offend people.

Well, all I know about hypnosis is from movies and I doubt it really exists. At least in the ways depicted there - that is you tell someone to be sleepy and then give them some commands and they have to follow it no matter what (and aren't even aware of that themselves). Including impossible things like remembering some small detail from an event many years ago which they had already forgotten.

I don't know how hypnosis is supposed to work, but I generally don't believe it's much more than a placebo effect. However, if you could somehow control a person's dreams, I suppose you might be able to do something interesting...

Just this morning my alarm clock was going off in my dream and I couldn't get it to shut off. I was trying everything, and getting very angry.

Five minutes later in the real world, I woke up and shut off my iPod's alarm.

I used to have a hypnosis mp3 to put you in a trance.
It was kinda like a lucid dream.
In fact, I think it was just a lucid dream but wake induced.

All I know about hypnosis is from the movies. I suspect it is like subliminal advertising though. Arthur, when you were hypnotized, were you aware of what you were doing, or did someone show you a video, or tell you what you did? I heard you don't remember anything from being hypnotized.

I don't believe it's real, I think that hypnotists are liars (I'm looking at you, 23!), and I think that "victims" are gullible sheeple wanting so much to fit in that they aren't willing to spoil the fun. In other words, I think it's a mind game to exploit the weak minded among us for personal gain.

Then what am I here for?! We should agree to a schedule or something.

Yeah, I trust everything on TV.

The lack of coherence in your post offended me.

A hypnotist once put me under a spell and told me hypnosis wasn't real, so I don't believe in it.

My personal favorite is Dr. Milton Erickson, if you can find books by him. I learned enough from him (not accounting for Psychology classes, hypnotherapy training, and even technical NLP classes), since most of his books are simply transcripts of him talking. If you can get the audio segments for it as well, those really help, since you can hear how he paces his words either to the classroom or to the test subjects who agreed to let him record their sessions.

Hypnosis is nothing like TV depicts, so you can get that out immediately. NLP (Neuro linguistic programming) is a way to gently suggest to someone certain points that you want to get across. You want to study up on this a lot, since you can inadvertently make suggestions that either result in "fake" memories, or give you the opposite effect of what you were aiming for.

That being said, even if you are only semi-interested in pursuing hypnosis (or hypnotherapy), you will learn a lot about it. I've been hypnotizing people for entertainment since I was around 15, and for therapy (stop smoking, less desire to eat for help with weight loss, general relaxation techniques) since I was 18. You get pretty comfortable about instinctively knowing who is more or less susceptible to hypnotic suggestibility, but that's more of an aside.

Now, are you looking more for the "ha-ha" hypnosis that a stage hypnotist performs, or more of the medical/therapeutic aspects of it?

So what happens if two hypnotists go after each other? Will they ever wake up?

Wow, someone else here knows who Milton Erickson is. I'm a Dave Elman man myself ...

Fun stats about therapies from some study by American Health Magazine:

• Psychoanalysis: 38% improvement after 600 sessions

• Behavioral Therapy: 72% improvement after 22 sessions

• Hypnotherapy: 93% success after 6 sessions

So, yeah. Totally not a real thing. BTW, I'm formally trained in therapy, but my real focus is on street/impromptu hypnosis.

My best successful post-hypnotic suggestion so far was on my buddy's wife; anytime you waved your hand in front of her face and told her to do/think something, she would a) accept the thought as her own, b) have amnesia for you saying it, c) repeat it back and d) go do it. So ... essentially, made her susceptible to Jedi mind tricks. I didn't do that until I'd been doing simple phenomenon for like an hour and a half so she was super-deep, but it worked awesome; she was basically our servant for the evening and had no recollection anything was amiss the next day. My buddy wanted me to leave it in there but I'm not that mean.

The people stupid enough to not believe in hypnosis probably do.

And I bet you're not the only one to think that. I also did some therapy stuff with her that had longer-lasting implications, and I know what signs to look for that signal legitimate altered states, so I had lots of evidence it was legitimate. But honestly, if people want to go on thinking it's all made up, or thinking that your own personal idea of what it is reflects reality, makes my work all the easier. Yes, yes, it's not real, nothing we do affects you, go about your business, citizen ...

Could you make my social phobia and "core beliefs" go away? I would appreciate that very much.