Hypnosis The Great Pretender & Scriptnosis – Hypnosis Painting By Numbers

Hypnosis the Great Pretender

Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that our leg won’t move, or pretend that our arm is rigged or that our hand is floating toward our face or that our eyelids are locked.

Hypnosis is the use, application and manipulation of our capacity to pretend, to imagine, to create reality. That manipulation is caused by directing the imagination.

That’s it really, it’s all pretending. It’s all imagination.

Hardly surprising really when most of the way we perceive and respond to the world is pure pretence, sorry, imagination, sorry subconsciously. A phobia isn’t triggered by what is happening, neither is a panic attack or an anxiety state which are all the same body wearing a different coat. The phobic reaction is triggered by what we believe, what we imagine to come next.

Okay so in the hypnotic world simple procedures like pretending are wrapped up in all sorts of ‘models’ and dogma. Metaphor is just pretending one thing is another. Hallucination, I don’t believe it helps to say negative or positive as they are the same coin looked at from different sides. All hallucination is Pretending with a capital ‘P’ and big exclamation at the end! It is still just make believe.

Meta Models, Embedded Belief Systems, or my favourite Emotional Patterns, are all just other ways of describing an imagined reality, or rather pretending.

On my Hypnotist radio show last Sunday, in the chat room was a guy for whom hypnosis was difficult so he just played along, imagined, pretended he was hypnotised. Then a remarkable thing happened, the hypnosis became ‘real’. At least he believed it was real, and that’s what makes most of our stuff real, that belief. Which of course is just another word for pretending.

I like the way my good friend Reg Blackwood from New Zealand puts it.

“Hypnosis happens when you focus so well and imagine something so vividly that it becomes real to you.”

In that quote the hypnosis could be transposed with the word belief and ‘imagine’ could just as easily become pretend.

The thing with the subconscious or the Mind is that unlike the Brain – which has to work by logic being a physically limited machine, albeit a biological one – the Mind like stuff simple.

When I’m using my preferred induction, a slight variation on Elman’s eye closure, I’ve noticed that saying, “Pretend your eyes are closed,” Get’s a much faster and higher success than just saying imagine.

So a hypnotised person is without doubt the greatest of all pretenders whether that be pretending they’re Rudolf Nureyev or someone who doesn’t smoke. If they are doing it intently and focused enough then for them that pretending becomes their reality.

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Scriptnosis, Hypnosis Painting by Numbers

Hypnosis is an art. If it were a science then I am sure it would be taught in medical schools and universities.

The ‘research’ on the subject over the years would have brought about a definitive ‘truth’ as to how and why it works and you would be able to walk out on stage, do the script for it, and hypnotise the whole audience.

A dream of every stage hypnotist would be to bang them all under, wake them up a couple of hours later and tell them what a wonderful show they had just watched.

The truth is that like any art the result relies entirely on the skill of the artist in manipulating the medium to create the desired result. It also means that it requires a certain natural aptitude to apply it successfully and to create great works.

Anyone can paint. Even Chimpanzees can hold a brush and spatter some oil, acrylic or pigment suffused water on to a canvas or piece of paper. It isn’t hard to grasp the basics but does being able to do something mean you are doing it well?

I suppose you can say that hypnosis is different in as much as the medium you are manipulating has got its own ‘mind’ and can choose how it wants to go. If you are just scribbling by giving some advice down the pub sure. But that is just subconscious graffiti.

A true master would want to prepare, plan, and then when the basics are in place to allow the medium to flow whilst deciding where that flow should go. The true artist is then free to follow both their own preparation and more importantly to follow the ebb and flow of the feedback from their imagination and what that is causing in their emotions.

Most great paintings under xray show several different versions and ideas being applied on the way to the final result.

That’s something you won’t find in cold science. The flexibility to create on the fly.

Hypnosis is an art, it requires, at least in my book, a huge degree of flexibility and creativity and if you use a script written by someone who neither knows you or the person you are dealing with.

Then what you will end up with is nothing more than a Scriptnotist, not a Hypnotist.

And let’s face it, you won’t see a painting by numbers hanging in the Louvré.

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The Hypnotist Radio show

This week we interview Hugh Lennon the only Hypnotist we know to turn a dog into a swinging watch!

Hugh’s long stage career of nearly half a century started with lunch – with a lion!

From there it’s gone all over the world and he tells us he’s only ever used a single induction, although Hypnodog has tried out several dozen!

On the rest of the show….

Celebrity co-host Reg Blackwood will be presenting the weekly Reg’s Rant, I will be answering the BIG question and running the live “Sleep with Strangers” phone in which will win someone a signed copy of my new book, “How to Make Friends With Yourself and Influence People” available from Amazon, and the lovely Jane will be moderating the chat room on

Please add this show to your favourites and rate us! On Blogtalk Radio and on iTunes Podcasts …
Go On… You Know You Want To!