cream river ... my mom was in the kitchen ... making huge mugs ... of scalding hot tea ... and as the heat brought a great comfort ... and as the wind picked up ... and as the cottage gradually warmed ... filling the air with the smell of coal oil ... it began to feel cozy ... I mean really cozy ... and safe ...
Hypnosis is an Internal Experience ... Those few paragraphs are a fairly accurate description of the numerous times we braved the elements and crossed the Trent river in the winter . They are a composite , not a single experience . What you read was a mixture of components , put together from a dozen crossings . But if you read that story slowly and carefully , it gave you an internal experience . You probably would have had some sense of what it was like , based on your own previous memories of similar things , like being somewhere cold and isolated , and wanting to get warm again .
Naturally , because I ’ m not inside your brain , I have no understanding of what you felt like , or exactly what you imagined . The experience was entirely original to you and generated internally in response to the magical power of words .
And realise that no-one who read those paragraphs will have had the same experience . And nobody who read it will have experienced what my actual river crossing and cottage visit was really like . That ’ s because it ’ s all hypnotic . And it ’ s hypnosis created through the words of a conversation . And by hypnotic , I mean it ’ s the creation of an imaginary experience that is completely different from the outside “ real ” world . Note again , that this was accomplished entirely through language . The rich verbal descriptions caused you to access similar things that you could relate to , from your own memories .
Suppose instead that I had written this ... My parents and I used to cross the Trent River in the wintertime , and pull a toboggan full of supplies to our cottage . It took an hour for us to warm up . Not the same experience , right ?
It ’ s not very interesting , because there ’ s nothing noteworthy or detailed to hang the story on . There ’ s nothing captivating to draw you in , and create a hypnotic experience unique to you . On the other hand , the more detailed example used a lot of interesting descriptors . It was designed to draw your attention inward , and that ’ s where hypnosis takes place .