“To my surprise, for every defining characteristic of a trance mentioned by one authority, another authority would use the opposite characteristic”

Charles T Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (HarperCollins 1990)

Trance is an altered state of consciousness - one that differs from normal waking consciousness and from sleep. It resembles the hypnagogic state (the transition between waking and sleeping) and the hypnopompic state (coming out of sleep to wakefulness).

It’s an easier state to enter than to define. One school believes that there is no such thing as hypnosis; another, that we are in different levels of trance all the time.

Trance is a naturally occurring state - it happens when driving, when watching TV or working on a computer, in a lift - and, of course, in classrooms and seminars.

• Have you ever driven down the freeway and dreamed your way past your exit? Did you find you couldn't remember what you were doing for the previous twenty miles? Amnesia is supposed to be a sign of deep trance - yet it happens to most of us every day.
• Have you ever been on your way out, couldn't find your keys, and spent the next fifteen minutes turning your room upside down looking for them? And then you find them on the table in plain view? Your eyes must have gone over the keys twenty times - and yet you didn't see them. When you don’t see something that is there, it's called a negative hallucination. It's supposed to be a sign of deep trance. Yet most of us are familiar with it.
• Have you ever looked down to discover a little cut around your fingernail that's bleeding - yet you don't feel it and have no idea when it happened? Anaesthesia is supposed to be a sign of trance - yet it happens all the time.

You are in trance every day - Ernest Rossi’s work on 'Ultradian Rhythms' suggests that trance happens naturally every 90-120 minutes (Ernest Rossi, The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing - Norton 1993). Ever just spaced out? That's trance.

When you’re in a trance you are more in control - you have better communication with your unconscious, so you can control the functions of your body, handle stress better, access memories you had forgotten...when you choose to go into a trance, you can control the suggestions you are receiving. It’s a good idea to ask your unconscious mind only to accept suggestions which are positive and beneficial.

All hypnosis is self-hypnosis - you always retain your free will (unless you decide not to, and people don’t need hypnosis to do that). No-one hypnotises anyone else; anyone helping you to go into a trance is just that - a helper.

You are a great hypnotic subject! The more you understand and believe this, the more success you will have. Since we are all in and out of trances through the day, it follows that everyone can go into a trance. The question is, do you recognise the trance when you’re in it?

Hypnosis was previously known as ‘animal magnetism’, then ‘Mesmerism’. The word ‘hypnosis’, originally coined by James Braid in the 19th Century, comes from hypnos, the Greek word for sleep. Hypnosis was at one time thought to be a variety of sleep; hence the use of phrases like “you are getting sleepy” by traditional hypnotists.

Towards the end of his career, the great hypnotherapist Milton Erickson preferred the term ‘trance’ to ‘hypnosis’. Calling these altered states ‘trance’ helps to remove the confusion with sleep, and also helps to distance the use of the trance state, with its tremendous potential benefits, from the excesses of stage hypnotists.