What does trance feel like?
(Please note that the following contains vivid descriptions of trance which can feel trancey for some people. There is also mention of water, falling, and space/void imagery)
Hypnotic trance is a mental state that can be induced by hypnosis. The concept itself is somewhat controversial. Here is a pretty good summary, if you’re interested. We personally have little doubt that trance exists as a phenomenon that can be experienced, and there is even some evidence that it can be measured neurologically (here is a review in a 8.33 impact factor journal. It’s behind a paywall, but you can have a look at the abstract if you want to).
People sometimes feel like they are difficult to hypnotize because they have specific expectations about what trance should feel like, and trance doesn’t match those expectations for them. You can learn more about this, for example, by attending Sex Obsessed Lesbian‘s excellent class Setting your Subject Up for Success.
But what does trance feel like? We set up a survey to find out. We got 31 responses so far, presumably all from the erotic hypnosis community. Here is what they said:
It depends!
9 responses tell us that it changes all the time. One person said “'I’m always discovering new things about what I feel in trance.”, for example. Here are some set & setting components respondents said the sensation of trance depends on:
The trance partner (3 responses)
The position of the tee “Different depending on whether I'm seated or lying down” (1 response)
What is suggested by the tist. “The trance itself can end up shifting into entirely different types of feelings, depending on what suggestions I'm being given.” (2 responses)
For one respondent, “[t]rance and the way it feels is very dynamic to me. It can vary and change a lot moment to moment”
Mood and setting where also mentioned twice: “Trance is highly subjective, depending on the partner, circumstances, how I'm doing, etc.” and “it depends on my mood, the tist, the setting of the session”
Not what they expected
It does sound like a lot of people were surprised and maybe a little underwhelmed by trance feelings. Five people mentioned something along these lines:
“I don't pass all the "tests" but still feel like I'm in trance”
“[N]ot entirely "empty" or "blank" like I often see it described”
“Trance is a tricky beast because I can be in it before I notice I am, and noticing and acknowledging it tips the whole thing over into a full, immersive experience”
“[It doesn’t feel] like much, if I'm being honest. The first time I was hypnotized I thought I was just playing along until afterwards, when the top started using the triggers she'd implanted and they worked.”
“[S]ometimes no feeling at all where I question if I'm in trance”
These might be the most important results here, especially if we suspect expectations are a reason why people feel like they are not good at going into trance. We have some evidence here that trance is very variable, and often doesn’t match expectations. Whatever your trance feels like, it is definitely valid! But, still, what does it feel like for others? Here are some more concrete answers.
The above word cloud is a depiction of the most frequently occurring words amongst respondents. The larger the word, the more frequently it was used to describe trance.
Thought changes
The most common answer had to do with some sort of thought changes, which was present in 18 of the answers. The most common thought change was a shift in focus (13 answers). People feel more focused on the hypnotist and their words, and less focused on other sensations:
“[I] always feel like my hypnotist's words become much more prominent in my mind, and everything else kind of drifts away. it's still there, i just don't care about it.”, “time doesn't have much meaning, just the words I listen to”
“My focus of attention has shrunk down to a very narrow, close, and slow field where everything outside of it, including the passage of time, is fuzzy and indistinct.”
“My head is silent apart from focusing on the words”
“All kinds of things can be happening around me, but I don't notice”.
Outside of focus shift, nine people noted a quieting of the mind:
“my brain shuts up”
“quiet and fuzzy. I'm distant, not thinking fully - thoughts occur but they pass just as quickly.”
“directly in front of my eyes, though, are a pair of whiteboards, and all of my miscellaneous thoughts automatically get written there and then erased, windshield-wiper style, to keep my mind more or less blank.”
“slower thoughts”.
Here are a couple more interesting quotes about thought changes:
“Following without effort”
“Like the words spoken are narrating my own thoughts and echoing inside me.”
“Inner experiences more real than sensory input.”
People also noted spontaneous amnesia and derealization.
Change in body sensations
These were second most common type of feeling reported (13 answers). Of these, the most common was a feeling of pressure or heaviness. For example:
“a feeling of weight in the chest that creates calm like sleep or a weighted blanket”
“it's usually heavy in some way”
Often, that heaviness was associated with a lack of movement:
“like i'm too heavy to move but if i could i'd float away”
“I feel heavy and know I CAN move (since I roll over in the night and can push blankets off in the middle of the night) I just don't want to move because of the way I feel”
On the contrary, some felt a lightness (sometimes at the same time as heaviness, such as the quote above):
“heady, dizzy, floaty and untethered”
People also felt some change in their breathing, or the way they perceive it:
“every breath feels significant”
“it could include [...] a change to my breath”
“I had the awesome feeling of euphoria and would barely breathe (I'd kind of hold my breath and do a light shallow breathing thing).”
Other body sensations included “a slight buzzing sound, like being under water”, “a twitching at the top of your eyelids”, “[a shift] centered around my eyes/vision”, “[a loss of] all feeling in my arms and legs”, “[a] light numbness in my fingers and toes”, and “imbalance”
Relaxation
People reported a lot of feelings around relaxation (11 answers):
“it's like letting my muscles relax into a warm bath”
“A safe place, like a warm home you can take your shoes off and relax in after a long day “
“[the] mental equivalent of being in a fuzzy blanket”
Movement metaphors
These were present in 11 answers describing trance feelings. (They are also popular with hypnotists when they give an induction).
“Drifting, everything flattening and smoothing out, spreading apart, dissolving”
“your mind and body feels like it's descending a high-speed elevator”
“it's like feeling the back of my brain fall/roll”
“It feels like I'm both suspended floating and falling head over tails, like just before you fall asleep”
“it feels like I'm trying to rock-climb the craggy rock walls of a pit I've fallen into (never mind how I've never rock-climbed even a little bit in my life), making some progress as I inhale, then losing my grip on the exhale and catching myself after I've fallen further than I was at the start of the previous inhale, until I finally can't pull myself up and I let go to plummet the rest of the way down.”
The void
Nine people mentioned an emptiness, a feeling of void, maybe akin to ego death in some cases.
“Grey space, outside time”
“Sometimes I go so deep that I disconnect from my body and can't feel arousal or other sensations”
“it's the kind of silent like a heavy snowfall, there isn't anything to echo around. My world is falling and the tist. “
Arousal and euphoria
Maybe because a portion of the people who answered this survey are hypnofetishists, five of them mentioned arousal or euphoria.
“Sometimes I feel so relieved that I am being hypnotized that I cry”
“The feeling is intimate, artistic, and ultimately more sensual than simple physical sex. It's like a sensual dance of giving, taking, guiding, being guided, and it can be incredibly arousing and satisfying on both physical and deeply emotional levels.”
“the blanket gives way to pockets of this rollercoaster euphoria”
“Emotionally, there is a soaring excitement, a moment of ‘Oh my God, it's happening,’ that in some ways really marks my entrance into trance”
Other
Here are a few interesting answers that don’t fit the previous categories:
“It feels like all the best parts of sleep deprivation, without the sleep deprivation.”
“Sometimes I feel like I am in love”
“Sometimes, if I was put under by eye fixation on a crystal, it might feel like I've curled up inside the crystal like it's a shell, watching the sparkles as they reflect and refract the starlight around me.”
“Sometimes, there's not really any of that, and I drop while being made to roll my eyes, which leads me to feel, once I'm under, like I'm looking up toward the top of the inside of my skull.”
Common metaphors
A few metaphors came back often. That is the case of water (4 answers) (“a warm bath”, “sinking to the bottom of the ocean”, “being under water”), blankets (3 answers) (“wrapped in a blanket and yet completely free”, “weight in the chest that creates calm like sleep or a weighted blanket”, “being in a fuzzy blanket”), and space (2 answers) (“Grey space, outside time”, “in space, drifting among the stars in a way that still feels a bit like falling”)
The role of inductions in creating the feelings of trance
One big unanswered question here is how much our culture around hypnosis influences the feelings of trance. Are those metaphors common because hypnotists use them a lot too? Are the feelings of trance the product of explicit suggestions, and if so, how much?
What do you think? This is only what 31 people felt about the trance experience, and as you can see from the above, it’s a little (okay, a lot!) different for everyone! The survey seems to demonstrate what lots in the community have said anecdotally for some time now — the only way to know what trance is like for you is to give it a try. And then tell us below, if you want!
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