I am going to speak about trance in this article and how it is useful in daily life, personal development and in therapy. But first let’s discuss two misunderstandings about trance, specifically how trance differs from stage hypnosis and mind control, as oddly, that will begin to illuminate how trance is useful in daily life, personal development, and therapy.
Just to start, what is trance? Is it mystical, is it an “altered state”, is it abnormal? The Webster Dictionary defines it as “a state of profound absorption”. That sounds a lot like saying I have a “viral infectious disease of the upper respiratory tract that primarily affects my nose”, rather than the more simple everyday common description, “I have a cold.” So let’s use the simple description for trance, which, simply stated, is day-dream. Just by substituting the common everyday word of day-dreaming for trance all at once it becomes clear that:
- Day-dreaming is a normal human function,
- Day-dreaming is a state of inward contemplation, and
- Day-dreaming is not mind control or stage hypnosis.
I think most of us would agree that day-dreaming is a normal healthy activity that somehow helps us. I think that most of us would also generally say the same about day-dreaming’s nighttime partner which is simply called dreaming. Certainly if we don’t get our sleep and night dream, we can become unsettled and fuzzyheaded, so just as clearly there seems something healthy about sleep and night dreams. Now this is probably true even though some dreams might be scary, and even terrifying. I think we would also say that day-dreaming and night-dreaming are personal experiences that are hard to precisely describe. Which brings us back to the original question now framed seemingly similarly, however significantly differently.
So now rather than ask “What is Trance?”, we ask instead “What is Day-Dreaming?” we all just nod knowingly, responding that “it’s hard to describe, however we all know what it is”. Some will say when they day-dream they are unaware of the world around them, some will say they are deeply absorbed in some internal consideration, some might say they are in a daze. Some who are deeply absorbed may even have visions. A well-known vision is that of August Kekulé. Kekulé was an organic chemist in the late 1800’s who was fascinated with chemical structures and who had spent years wondering about the structure of Benzene. Then one day as Kekulé was riding the upper deck of an omnibus in London he had a vision of a serpent eating its own tail. In a flash, Kekulé realized that the organic structure of benzene was a six-carbon atom ring!!!!
Kekulé’s Day-Dream!
There is a similar story that Einstein had a flash of insight while daydreaming as he watched the milk swirl in his coffee that led to his famous solution for the photoelectric effect.
From those reports of Kekulé’s and Einstein’s experiences we can deduce that day-dreaming (another way of saying trance) allowed them to make at least two of science’s major discoveries. And those reports also get us to wondering just how can we get similar benefits in our own lives for our own personal development. How can we come up with helpful ideas? A very short 46-page book by James Webb Young, an advertising executive, titled “A Technique for Producing Ideas” provides a simple 5 step process for doing just that.
- Step 1, gather all the information you can about your topic of interest.
- Step 2, intensely review, even get obsessive over all the information you gathered.
- Step 3, step away from the problem, go on vacation, and empty your mind.
- Step 4, here Young says allow ideas to come to you naturally, which we know as day-dreaming. That was what Kekulé was doing on his famous bus ride and what Einstein was doing while watching his coffee.
So there it is, Day-dreaming. Trance is a mental process we might also call contemplation, where the mind reviews all the information it has on some situation and works to come up with a “solution”, some satisfying resolution or an “aha” moment!
So let’s take stock of where we are. We now can understand trance by using its common language name of day-dreaming. We can see it is a normal human way of thinking and that it is very useful or certainly was for Kekulé and Einstein. And Young’s short little book has a simple formula for achieving similar results in our own lives. We could stop here and be very happy, but let’s go on further and see if we can gain even more by using trance/day-dreaming for personal development and therapy.
At first glance these two, therapy and personal development sound different. After all, Webster defines therapy as treatment for physical and mental illness while personal development generally is understood as taking steps that will enhance the quality of one’s life. However, even though they seem unrelated, they are really just two sections along the spectrum of human life and vary more in degree rather than in substance. For example, I might say I am interested in the personal development of advancing from a beginner to an intermediate skier. That is, I have some of the basics down and my only limitation in my skiing is the need to learn some improved skills. Let’s say, however, that I injure myself skiing and so require physical therapy in which I need to improve my muscle responsiveness and strength. Now that’s a bigger limitation. So we can see from this simple illustration that an important similarity between personal development and therapy is that they both are about learning and an important difference is that the skills one is called upon to learn are more difficult in the personal development activity we call therapy.
Learning is the essence that both personal development and therapy share. And trance/day-dreaming can help us learn; that is, help us acquire a skill or know-how. As an aside, I have a 5-year-old granddaughter, whose mother speaks English, father speaks Italian, and babysitter speaks Spanish. Amazingly enough, my granddaughter, again only 5-years-old, can speak all three languages. Now I spent four years on French lessons and yet what I can say is limited to ‘bonjour’ and ‘oui.’ How is it that a five year old, who has also been busy learning to walk, socialize with other humans, navigate her way through nursery school and kindergarten can also easily learn three different languages while a smart, wise, (handsome) adult such as myself, after four years of intensive study has only four words! What does my little granddaughter have that I seem to lack?
Perhaps you have heard young children referred to as “sponges”, or as “open minds” or even “blank slates,” or that they are always just “taking it all in”. The Buddhists would call that a “beginner’s mind”. A child is just open to all experiences, she/he is not judgmental about what they are experiencing, they look at the world with eyes full of wonder, and they intently look, listen, and notice everything around them. In short, they are learning machines, sponges with open minds that allow them to learn at an enormously rapid rate. Wow, how cool! What then happens to us adults?
Well, as adults we are more experienced, wiser, and more careful of the dangers of the world around us. Perhaps we feel we are smarter, more discerning, or that we are critical thinkers. We are all that, however we are also less open, more defensive, and more resistant to new experiences and new learnings. We get emotional about learning; we don’t want to look foolish and certainly don’t want to be viewed as a fool. We also edit what comes to us based upon our past learnings. The Irish have an old saying “once bitten, twice shy”. It means that our past learnings can become an obstacle to new learnings. In a sense, learning can be more difficult for adults because to learn something new might also require unlearning something old. Hence the phrase “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.
So what are we to do? Well fortunately we have our old friend day-dreaming, or trance! Day-dreaming, or going into a trance, can help us set aside long held beliefs and have an open mind towards new possibilities. To illustrate, say you and your friend have some extra time and decide to entertain yourselves by going to see a movie. You get your tickets, go into the theater, settle into your seats and chat briefly before the lights dim and the screen comes alive with perhaps a romantic story, a drama, or a sci-fi movie. As you begin to watch the movie you also begin to forget that you are in a movie hall, that your friend is sitting next to you and you may even forget that you have a body! You may get so absorbed into the movie that as that car careens around the corner you tilt your body in response. At that moment the movie seems to you to be a real experience. It’s just so vivid and you are just so absorbed that it seems to be really happening. In fact, after the movie ends, your friend and you might discuss the people in the movie as though they are real people, who are really having experiences. You might discuss their choices, their actions, where they took helpful steps, where they stumbled, and what you might have done in their situation.
Now I notice the same absorption in my granddaughter’s play. She can have an entire conversation going on between all her Polly Pocket figurines. When I look at her, she seems to be in a different world, she seems so absorbed, like you were at the movie, that her play figures almost seem real to her! It leads me to wonder whether she is able, just with her imagination, to get into a similar state of mind that you were in during that movie, which in a way was similar to a waking dream. Is there some way we can also get into that state just with our imagination? And BINGO, what comes up is our old friend Trance!
What would happen if we could imagine an experience so vividly, so completely, that we could not tell it was a dream, could we use that as a rapid learning experience? Say, for example, to learn our skiing lesson we could visualize being on the slope while actually resting comfortably in a lounge chair. All our senses are alive, we see the trail ahead, we feel the texture of the snow through our feet, and we hear the wind whistling past our ears. We lean slightly left causing our skis to carve a perfect turn. We shift to our right causing a carved turn back towards the center of the trail. We miss a bump, stumble, and recover. We are skiing in our imagination. Sounds fantastic, sign me up.
Nikola Tesla, in his autobiography, speaks of how his parents gave him daily lessons to train his mind. He said he was able to imagine and design his inventions entirely in his mind’s eye, where he even was able to test the workability of his designs before building them in reality. Statements he made then were considered so visionary as to border on lunacy, now are taken for granted. To illustrate, over a century ago, he visualized that:
When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
Today we would simply shrug that off with “yeah, the internet and cell phones, what’s the big deal.” The point is that through our imagination, through trance, each one of us is capable of the same possibilities, the same visions, the same rapid learning. Yes, it takes some training, some practice and some discipline, but it works. Bianca Andreescu, the 19-year-old Canadian who started off in 2019 ranked 152nd and ended by winning the US Open, used visualizations to see herself winning the tournament. After her victory she exclaimed, “It really works!!” And that is one way Trance can be useful in personal development!
A significant difference between personal development and therapy is the severity of the problem, challenge, or the learning task. For example, what if our friend is so terrified of again injuring himself skiing, he has developed a severe phobia against even looking at a skiing magazine? The moment he even thinks of skiing his mind is flooded with visions of horror, pain, and even death. What then? That as they say could be a “tough nut to crack,” an “unsolvable knot to undo,” or an impossible situation. True, it is more difficult to solve, however that is mostly because there are fewer people who can both envision a solution to our friend’s problem and can implement that solution. There are a lot of people that have the skills needed to help us learn how to go from a beginner to an intermediate skier, but for this the crowd thins. Additionally, there are more pitfalls on the way to ferreting out those that can really help. We may be diverted by ne’er do wells that turn out to be either incompetent or charlatans. Our friend may be poked, prodded, or drugged without any change to the better and with perhaps even the creation of more problems. Hopefully, before she/he gives up all hope, she/he will stumble into someone like Milton H Erickson, arguably the foremost therapeutic clinician of the last century, who can truly help.
This article is too short to provide a detailed description of Dr. Erickson’s use of trance or his approach to therapy. For those with a deeper interest read Uncommon Therapy by Jay Haley or get a copy of my book, Understanding Ericksonian Hypnotherapy.
For now, and to reduce the thousands of words that have been written on Erickson’s methods, strategies, and approaches to just five words, I offer you this simple dictum: Experience is the best teacher. What this rather pithy statement is offering, is that we learn best and fastest from experience, whether it is an actual experience such as falling while learning our balance skiing or it is a dreamlike trance experience where in our imagination, we imagine so clearly, so realistically, that we are skiing down the mountain, turning, jumping, stopping and so learn that under certain contexts, its ok to reach out, to trust, to try, to live. That we can be ok, that we don’t need to be fearful of every bump in the path or every person we run into, that we have the abilities and resources to choose well and live competently. Therapy at its essence is just this replacement of a bad or limiting idea with a good idea or more encompassing understanding.
So dive in, the water is fine! Find yourself a comfortable safe place and go into a trance to see what you can dream up for yourself. If you want help, find someone trained in the art of hypnosis. I suggest someone who is a part of the Ericksonian legacy. The really important thing is your motivation for change and the realization that no one person ever really knows their true capabilities till they act. So if you want help, reach out to me or someone else also trained in the art of Ericksonian Hypnosis!