Self-hypnosis

It is now 3:56 am. Twenty minutes ago I finished a book on self-hypnosis, and then I put down the book and tried to hypnotize myself, and I was fully hypnotized in about one minute. I find a number of things surprising about this experience: first, how easy it is to accomplish; second, how strong your will feels when you are hypnotized: there is this dull conviction that you can do anything you tell yourself to do. Before I succeeded, I was having neurotic doubts about things like, "What if I tell myself that I cannot lift my right arm and then it becomes paralyzed permanently?" Such thoughts fall under the general category of self-sabotage, and I, for one, think them all the time. Usually they involve vicinal fourteen year-old girls. I'll be eating dinner for instance, and I'll start to worry about not looking at the fourteen year-old girl who is sitting at the table across from me, and about the fact that I, myself, and the entire restaurant, would think that I am a pedophile if I were to start looking at the fourteen year-old girl, and then, low and behold, before I know it, I have spent my whole meal staring at the fourteen year-old girl. But even in such extreme instances, the problem is not that I am a pedophile. It is that I find it difficult to resist self-torture-- that is, I will take almost any opportunity to torture myself. Apparently, I do this not because it is rewarding, but because I cannot keep myself from doing so. I wasn't aware of how true this was until what is now about 30 minutes ago. This fact became obvious as soon as I was hypnotized because this feature of my personality completely dissolved, right in front of my eyes, so to speak. The inner strength that I felt was beyond words: I simply can't describe it. Of course, now I am sitting here thinking, "I wonder if I am jinxing myself by writing this entry; I wonder if I won't be able to hypnotize myself anymore," which is not unlike the thought I had right before I went under, "What if I tell myself to kill somebody while I'm under? Will I have my incapacity available as a defense afterwards?" These thoughts, they are all in the same vein. I have always thought that they were both entertaining and germane to the human condition, but it seems to me now that they are neither of these things. Instead, they are self-limiting, and in fact, many people probably don't ever subject themselves to such thoughts. I have a number of interesting observations from my first hypnosis experience. The book said that the hypnotized subject feels a pervasive sense of lightness or heaviness; for me, it was lightness-- that was how I knew that I had gone under; it was how I knew, for instance, that I would not be able to lift my right arm when I told myself that I wouldn't be able to lift it. Also, my penis became fully erect within 5 seconds of full hypnosis. I wonder if that will happen every time, or if that was a unique occurrence. The erection seemed to be a part of the general bodily ethereality. But the hallmark of the experience, the thing that I find most compelling, is the inner strength that I felt, the strength of will. It was a feeling of complete assurance. The complete absence of self-doubt. Even when my conscious mind tried to insert thoughts like, "Maybe I won't be able to sit up in bed when I want to be able to," my subconscious mind somehow managed to stifle them. It was as if somebody else were trying to voice them from without a hermetically sealed window, so that I could read their lips and watch them gesticulate, but couldn't hear their words. The realization that such patently inimical thoughts are fundamental to my personality was not a little surprising, although I certainly shouldn't have been surprised if I had thought about it. Now I am wondering, first, whether I can hypnotize these thoughts away, and more unbelievably, I am also wondering whether or not I want to be rid of them. Maybe I don't want to lose my neuroses. I can't imagine why not, but the thought has crossed my mind, so I figured that I might as well relate it in due course. At any rate, I am not quite sure where to put this experience. I am pretty sure that I don't yet have a proper place for it. One thing that I have learned tonight is that our identities are grotesquely self-limiting. For better or worse, we are in the habit of giving our conscious mind free reign over the decision as to which thoughts and beliefs and perceptions are allowed us. I suspect, in fact, that the feeling of strength and composure that I was feeling was essentially a freeing of myself from the tyranny of my conscious mind-- that is, from my identity. My goal had been a simple one: to hypnotize myself into falling asleep, but after I was hypnotized, I didn't feel anything like myself, and I didn't want to fall asleep because I didn't want to lose myself for the entire time that I would be asleep, a concern which seems to me, even in hindsight, to be squarely reasonable. After all, I am not used to losing my identity during my sleep. I don't know what would come of that. I could imagine that such a condition would lend itself to some pretty unusual dreams. What a feeling, to have misplaced one's identity, as if it were a cellphone or a set of keys! In closing, I haven't reread what I have written yet, but I know that it is unparagraphed, and I would imagine that it is relatively incoherent and that my hypothetical reader is by now feeling more than a little incredulous. I will do nothing to try to dispel that incredulity. Just imagine for yourself how unbelievable it would feel to be inside of your body but outside of yourself. To date, this is the most inexplicable experience of my life. I am trying to find a way to describe it, but I don't know that I can. The sensation was that my head had evaporated. I suppose that your identity is associated with your head, and especially when you get to feeling small, you are feeling small within your head. Well, imagine that your mind is somehow able to break through these constraints. That is the physical sensation that I had, which isn't to say that there is a mind/body dualism problem going on here. There isn't, or at least I don't think that there is. What is going on is the realization that wrapped up in your conceptual head is your identity, and that, if you can rid yourself of these encumbrances, you can bring yourself to a place where there is possibility beyond what are your normal expectations. Perhaps the point to make is that we have conditioned ourselves to underestimate our own potential. It is apparently true that we have some innate physical abilities that we have grown accustomed to not using. Whether they were trained into disuse or whether they were never properly developed, I don't know.