3 Stupefying Hypnosis Stories that Will Make You Question Reality

The hypnosis stories that I can’t get out of my head…

Hypnosis Stories. Photo from Unsplash / Rhett Wesley

When we think of hypnosis stories, most of us conjure up images of a pendulum swinging back and forth (you are getting verrrry sleeeepy) or a person on stage who has been told to act like a chicken. In fact, as a college student my own husband once had a stage hypnotist convince him he was a dancing leprechaun. His friends swear there’s footage of this somewhere…

Personally I never took hypnosis seriously — or thought about it much at all — until I started researching reincarnation. I realized what a valuable tool it is both for healing childhood trauma (Dr. Brian Weiss talks about this in his book Through Time into Healing) and for recovering past life memories. Forensic hypnosis? I only recently learned that’s a thing and that there are famous criminal cases that employed hypnosis.

Check out our podcast episode about Outrageous Hypnosis Stories here!

I even had my own hypnotherapy session a couple of years ago and was lucky to connect with someone who was trained under Dolores Cannon herself. (Dolores was famous for books like Between Death and Life and The Convoluted Universe series. She relied almost exclusively on hypnosis stories for her material.) The experience was different from what I expected, but I have the session recorded. If you listen to it, there’s no denying the emotion I was feeling when I recalled these “memories.”

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HYPNOSIS STORIES THAT MAKE YOU SCRATCH YOUR HEAD

All of that said, these 3 hypnosis stories I’m going to share with you are next level. What’s fascinating about them is what they imply about reality itself. It feels as though they prove things like the soul/spirit and the astral place/heaven and telepathy/psychic abilities are all quite real. Or in the very least, they challenge us to be more open. Perhaps we don’t actually know half the shit we think we know about physical life and human capabilities.

These hypnosis stories can all be found in the book The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot and the author cites additional sources. The third hypnosis story was so mind-blowing to me that I sought out the original source. I wanted to read it myself and get the exact details on the situation. I’m still struggling to wrap my head around it!

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?!

I have honestly not stopped thinking about this first hypnosis story since the first time I read it. It’s actually what inspired our recent episode on the podcast What the F*ck Fights.

In his book, Talbot talks about something he personally witnessed in the 1970’s. His father had hired a professional hypnotist as a form of entertainment for a small party he was hosting. As most stage hypnotists will do, the man did a susceptibility test to determine which guest would be the best one to use as part of his performance. A man named Tom turned out to be the ideal subject.

Tom went into a deep trance. He made the other guests laugh when the hypnotist did playful stuff like convince him there was a giraffe in the room and that a potato could taste like an apple. But shit got real when Tom was told that his teenage daughter, also present at the party, was invisible to him.

Now, I really have no problem believing that a person’s mind could block something — or someone — out like that. Hell, even in everyday life I have witnessed my children stare directly at their shoes on the floor and be blind to them or my husband be at eye level with the leftovers in the fridge and “not see them.” But explain to me how our friend Tom could see through his daughter, a flesh and blood person…

THE INVISIBLE GIRL

I’ve read this hypnosis story several times now just to make sure I’m not misunderstanding what it says. According to Talbot, the hypnotist at his father’s party instructed Laura, the teenage daughter, to stand in front of him, placing her directly between himself and her father, Tom.

The hypnotist discreetly pulled an object out of his hand so no one there could see what it was just yet. Covering it with his hand, he put it against Laura’s lower back. He asked Tom what it was he was holding.

Tom proceeded to lean forward as though Laura wasn’t even there. Somehow he was able to see straight through her abdomen... Because not only did he correctly identify the object as a watch, he went on to read the inscription on it. The watch was passed around so the members of the small audience could each hold it and read it for themselves.

The hypnotist brought Tom back to his regular reality so that his daughter was visible to him again. But holy shit, how do you really come back from that without forever questioning everything about life?

It has occurred to me that perhaps this was indeed just a performance. Maybe the hypnotist pulled Tom aside and showed him the watch before the show began, asking him to play along. But according to Talbot, he spoke to Tom afterward. He was insistent that it was real, that his daughter was truly invisible to him.

I know that in the case of my husband’s personal hypnotism experience, he was just a random guy from the crowd that the entertainer deemed susceptible. There was no planned-in-advance routine. So was the hypnotist in Talbot’s story using straight up deception or was it all real? I dunno, man. I dunno.

Related: 3 Incredible True Stories that Suggest Reality Is Stranger than Fiction

HYPNOSIS STORIES THAT INVOLVE EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION

This next hypnosis story is an excerpt taken directly from Talbot’s book, The Holographic Universe:

The ability of hypnotized individuals to “tap” into the senses of other people has been reported by other investigators. The British physicist Sir William Barrett found evidence of the phenomenon in a series of experiments with a young girl. After hypnotizing the girl he told her that she would taste everything he tasted. “Standing behind the girl, whose eyes I had securely bandaged, I took up some salt and put it in my mouth; instantly she sputtered and exclaimed, ‘What for are you putting salt in my mouth?’ Then I tried sugar; she said ‘That’s better’; asked what it was like, she said ‘Sweet.” Then mustard, pepper, ginger, et cetera were tried; each was named and apparently tasted by the girl when I put them in my own mouth.”

In his book Experiments in Distant Influence the Soviet physiologist Leonid Vasiliev cites a German study conducted in the 1950s that produced similar findings. In that study, the hypnotized subject not only tasted what the hypnotist tasted, but blinked when a light was flashed in the hypnotist’s eyes, sneezed when he hypnotist took a whiff of ammonia, heard the ticking of a watch held to the hypnotist’s ear, and experienced pain when the hypnotist pricked himself with a needle — all done in a manner that safeguarded against her obtaining the information through normal sensory cues.

MUTUAL HYPNOSIS

Okay, now for the hypnosis story that really messed with me. I’ll do my best to explain it as I understand it, though I encourage you to read it for yourself. As mentioned, you can check it out in Talbot’s book, or you can read it directly from Charles T. Tart. It's from a book called Altered States of Consciousness but it was like $500 when searched it up. Instead, I was able to find this online and read just the section that pertains to this situation.

(He actually has a lot of books that are affordable, but I haven't personally read any of them yet.)

Once upon a time, Subject A — Anne — and Subject B — Bill — were taught to hypnotize each other at the same time to see what would happen. This was done on 3 different occasions and well-documented. Each experience was recorded. You can read the specifics in the link I provided, so I won’t bog down this post with too many of the details, but trust me, a very scientific approach was taken.

Tart was part of the process as an observer and a guide. First Bill hypnotized Anne and then, while in trance, she was told to hypnotize Bill. Then Bill hypnotized Anne to go deeper into trance and so on, back and forth until they were both pretty deep. Prior to this, they’d been trained to literally label and convey the depth of their trances. At one point, Bill was at a level 53 or more — a depth so profound it is practically unheard of. Usually it tops out at 50 and most people never go that far.

Read: How Reincarnation Works - The Nonreligious Version

A WHOLE NEW WORLD…

Anne and Bill started experiencing the exact same hallucinated reality. (Or possibly, they went to the same astral plane?) They were able to describe things like swimming in a body of water that was full of glowing crystals and that was bubbly and tasted like champagne. At the same time, they seemed to have no physical body in this realm. While they might see each other’s faces, they felt more like vapors.

Here’s a quote from Anne: “I had a most unusual physical sensation of my body disintegrating — with great chunks falling off like thick bark on a tree. I was momentarily threatened, almost resisted, reassured myself, and soon this feeling passed, after which my body was gone, and I felt like a soul or a big ball of mind.”

Anne also describes a moment when Bill told her to hold his hand so he could lead her somewhere. She had to pause and intentionally conjure up a hand so that she could reach for him.

TELEPATHY

Perhaps most intriguing of all is that Bill and Anne began using telepathy. Or in the very least, some sort of paranormal communication was going on, whatever you want to call it. They would be so sluggish, so deep in trance, that Tart found it hard to get them to speak. He wanted them to answer his questions, to inform him of what they were experiencing. Often he didn’t get the info until afterward, where they each described the same thing.

Sometimes Tart would instruct one of them to tell the other something and they wouldn’t respond. When he would nudge them again, they’d get irritated insisting they had already told the other person — just not with the spoken word.

And they didn’t even describe it as sending each other mental messages. It was more like they were these bodiless beings, and they would sometimes merge with each other as a form of communication. This sensation, in fact, this loss of individuality, is one of the things that frightened them. It discouraged them from pursuing the studies any further.

Of course, maybe all of this was just imagined experience. But… since they were not verbally communicating, how was it they were experiencing the same thing… without describing it to each other or influencing each as it was happening?

All I know is mutual hypnosis is wild, y’all.

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3 Stupefying Hypnosis Stories that Will Make You Question Reality

The hypnosis stories that I can’t get out of my head…