Trance-Migrations: Stories of India, Tales of Hypnosis

HYPNOSIS

IN[TRO]DUCTION

Reading, Listening, and Hypnosis

The good subject [or listener] accepts the hypnotist’s [or reader’s] words as true statements; he perceives and conceives reality as the operator [or writer] defines it.

THEODOR XENOPHON BARBER, HYPNOSIS: A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH (1969)

Now Rann the Kite brings home the night, that Mang the Bat sets free, so long ago she softly read to me. The herds, I heard her words, are shut in byre and hut, for loosed till dawn are we. Rhythmic phrases read in bed soothed senses, heavied eyelids, made me yawn and blink, yawn, yawn again, and, as eyes closed, my bedroom was slowly, slowly trance-formed into a lair somewhere in a moonlit Indian jungle. The bed was earth, a flannel blanket the fur of nestling cubs warming Mowgli as a hypnotic flutter of words configured a family of wolves. He came naked, by night, the wolf-mother whispered, alone and very hungry; yet he was not afraid!

Language lullabied me deeper and deeper into lush and languid epiphanies. Listening to bedtime stories read by my mother was initiation into the sublime transports of literature.

Soon, however, I was expected to be able to read to myself. Learning to do so in the first grade was a daunting, arduous, and frustrating task. Struggling to master the ways in which twenty-six letters, variantly capital or small, roman or cursive, of an alphabet we had been trained to recognize by strenuous drill could form sounds in our minds, which in turn could be construed as words arranged and punctuated in such a way that we, by scrutinizing clusters of black ciphers on the page of a book, could decode the knowledge that Spot was the name of a dog. Once upon a time reading stories about Dick and Jane at play was, as perhaps you remember, hard work.

I imagine that our teacher must have appreciated the struggle, because after each tedious lesson she’d invite us to lay our books aside and rest our heads on arms crossed on little desks that in those days still had inkwells. And then she’d grant us the comfort of listening, welcome rest from the laborious exercise of reading. By the shores of Gitche Gumee, she began, by the shining Big-Sea-Water, stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Eyelids became heavy, heavier and heavier, soon to close, as we, floating adrift in the gently rippling currents of her melodic voice, were entranced by words that enabled us to hear the whispering of the pine trees, the lapping of the waters, sounds of music, words of wonder, and to see the Indian boy going forth into the forest straightway, all alone walked Hiawatha.

The inevitable harsh ringing of a mechanized bell would suddenly disrupt reverie, bringing me out of a shadowy wigwam wherein the daughter of the Moon taught Hiawatha of the stars that shine in heaven, how the beavers built their lodges, and why the rabbit was so timid, and back into a stark classroom.

Once upon a time, listening to stories was easy enchantment, gentle transport, and sweet dream. In retrospect I wonder if perhaps, deep down, I then feared that once I was able to read on my own, women might no longer read to me.

The pleasure of listening to a story is a regressive one, personally a return to childhood and collectively a retrogression to a time before Gutenberg and widespread literacy when stories were, by most people most often, heard rather than read.

For me the pleasure has also been a digressive one, experienced in an Indian excursus, an exploration of an extraordinarily bountiful tradition of enchanting narratives in India—erotic, heroic, religious, comic—all meant to be recited again and again by itinerant bards, human vessels of fluid fables, to be heard again and again in delight by people highly adept at listening. The pleasure of reading them is in imagining what it must be like to hear them.

With a conviction that the experience of listening to a story can be quite literally a hypnotic one, and that the relationship between a reader and listener is analogous to that between a hypnotist and subject, I have, with the intent of exploring the psychological dynamics and esthetic implications of that analogy, written eight tales to be read aloud to a willing listener about hypnosis and its erotic, religious, and political dimensions. The stories are about hypnosis inasmuch as hypnosis is, by its very nature, about the power of stories.

This book is an experiment in a sort of Pavlovian project to test my hypothesis that a story, by being heard in a certain context and particular way, in a state at least akin to hypnotic trance, can become more believably real than the same tale as it was mutely written and is silently read. What is heard, I would suggest, has the potential to be more absorbing and luminous, more vividly imagined, viscerally experienced, and unquestionably believed than what is read.

The fictional tales about hypnosis (For the Listener) are juxtaposed with eight nonfictional stories (For the Reader), which, like this introduction, are meant to be read silently by you. As the passive, silent reader of these words, you are, by continuing to read, agreeing to a relationship with me, the active, silent writer of these words—a relationship intended to provide you, as an active, voicing reader, with words to be read aloud to a passive, silent listener, who, in listening to those words, will be consenting to a relationship with you, which will, in turn, provide him or her with an opportunity to experience and understand the tales in this book differently, perhaps more vividly, than they are by either you, the reader, or me, the writer.

My tales for the listener, are meant to generate fluidly various meanings as determined by whatever relationship they establish between a writer (me), reader (you), and listener (him or her). Those meanings are to be sequentially modulated by our senses in their transmission from the mind of the writer by means of typing fingers into the mind of a reader, in through reading eyes and out through a speaking mouth into the mind of a listener through hearing ears.

These tales have been composed to be what hypnotherapists refer to as induction scripts. To the degree that a subject concentrates on the semantic suggestions of the hypnotist, an induction script stimulates a progressive detachment from all sensory input from the immediate environment other than the voice of the hypnotist. An effective script instigates a dissociation from the phenomenal world, an isolation of immediate cognitive and sensory functions, and a concentrated state of mind in which the subject allows hypnotic utterance to fabricate realities out of illusions. In the hypnotic state the subcortical structures of the brain cease to differentiate between verbally suggested experiences and actual ones. Hypnosis allows the imagination and memory of the subject, as stimulated by the hypnotist’s speech, to construct subjective scenarios in which illusions seem empirically real. Hypnosis blurs distinctions between fiction and nonfiction.

In reading these words you are constrained to hold this book in your hands, to turn its pages, to keep your eyes open, focused, and busily moving back and forth across this page. These conditions and distractions, slight as they may be, limit the dissociation from reality that hypnosis sponsors and that listening to my tales is intended to encourage. A listener can relax more than any reader. Eyes can rest, eyelids can close, and slowly, slowly, the listener’s attention can become more focused than yours, their concentration more intense and credulity more expansive. There’s nothing that demands to be heard other than your voice, nothing to be seen other than what my words suggest, nothing to be felt other than whatever feelings the tales evoke in your listener.

In our silence there is, right now, a distance and distinction between us, you the passive, present reader of these words and me the active, past, and absent writer. But your physical presence and the sound of your voice as you read the tales to a willing listener should allow for the sort of rapport that favors induction into a hypnotic state of consciousness in which you and I, as well as your listener and mine, become indistinguishable from one another.

While you, for whatever reason, have chosen to read this, I did not choose for you to do so. While you do not need me, I do need you. I cannot control whether you read on or decide to close this book and put it aside. Our relationship is literally in your hands. Your relationship with a consenting listener being, on the other hand, a mutually chosen, agreed upon, and sustained collaboration, should engender an intimacy that will serve hypnotic induction.

The vocabulary, rhetoric, and style of hypnotic induction scripts have dictated the language of the listener’s tales. They are trancescripts—thus there are rhythmic cadences, run-on sentences, euphonic constructions, incantatory monotonies, dissociative comments, counting forward and backward, anaphoric and epistrophic repetitions, punning for embedded suggestion ("go to the en-trance"), a reiteration of—and stress on—key words (heavy, relaxed, calm, deep, deeper, slowly, softly), combinations of ideomotor ("with every breath you take) and ideosensory suggestions (you can smell the incense), and frequent reassurances (yes, yes). The second person singular pronoun is used in a permissive and invitational present tense (you can, if you wish, allow yourself to imagine a pipal tree in a village in India) and in an encouraging future tense (you will be able to see a man sitting beneath it), as well as in an authoritarian and commanding imperative tense (imagine it, picture him, and listen").

In a psychoanalytic understanding of hypnosis as a process that reactivates or recapitulates the parent-child experience, the direct authoritarian and indirect permissive modes of induction are characterized as father hypnosis and mother hypnosis, respectively. I’ve alternated between these modes in the tales for the listener.

The fictions are meant to be performative, read slowly, gently, as when reading to a child, calmly in a soothing, sonorous voice, modulated in response to your listener’s responses, paced to deepen trance. The depth of hypnotic immersion can be evaluated by changes in the eyes (blinking, rolling, eyelids trembling, closing), movements of the head (rolling sideways, falling backward or forward, jaw loosening), breathing (slowing and deepening from diaphragmatic to rhythmic abdominal breathing), and by a limpness of the limbs.

While empirical hypnotic susceptibility scales indicate a very wide range in the degrees of the depth of trance that are reached by clinical subjects, in general those scales suggest that practically all mentally functional individuals are, so far as they are able and willing to relax, concentrate, play along, and imagine, susceptible to some degree of odylic persuasion. Most of us want to be enchanted. We know the potential pleasures of surrender and joys of illusion.

Hypnotic practice has demonstrated that the susceptibility of the hypnosand is enhanced by the ritualization of the inductions. Your readings should likewise be ritualized, performed under the same conditions, in the same place, at about the same time of day or night.

It is conventional in hypnotic practice for the hypnotist to prepare the subject for hypnosis with a preinductional talk. The stories designated for the reader in this book are meant to provide orientational information which you may or may not, to whatever extent, depending on the interest or curiosity of your listener, chose to relate as a means of establishing a context and mood for each reading.

During hypnosis, a subject is learning how to be hypnotized and so does, with each subsequent induction over a period of time, become reliably and more rapidly relaxed, more able to actively imagine and effectively concentrate. There is an intensification of the rapport with the hypnotist, a greater susceptibility, vulnerability to suggestion, and willingness to surrender. Likewise, while hearing the fictional narratives in this book, the listener should be learning how to listen to them and should become progressively more conditioned to concentrate with exponentially greater focus on what is suggested by the reading. With each reading, disbelief should be more rapidly and substantially suspended.

The first inductional narrative to be read aloud, The Storyteller’s Tale, is not so much expected to sponsor deep trance as it is intended to prepare and condition the listener for incrementally more profound states of absorption to be induced during the reading of each subsequent trance-script. The second narrative, The Magician’s Tale, invokes what has been imagined during the first reading to encourage greater narrative immersion. The third reading, The Translator’s Tale, is modeled on the fractionational technique of induction, a procedure whereby trance is significantly deepened by a process of hypnotizing, dehypnotizing, rehypnotizing, dehypnotizing again, and again rehypnotizing the subject in a single session.

To the degree that your listener is willing to relax, trust us, play along, and concentrate on what is verbally suggested, he or she should be able gain access to a cognitive and sensory engrossment in which each of the ensuing tales becomes more and more intensely envisioned so that by the last narrative, The Mesmerist’s Tale, the listener might be able to imagine, at least momentarily, that the events in the story have actually been witnessed and that the characters are intimately known.

At that point, this book, as an external object containing white pages of paper imprinted with black letters that form words, sentences, and paragraphs, vanishes into thin air.

And it will reappear in your hands only when the story is over and the eyes of listener open to look at the real world once more.

Mayavati’s Spell

INDIA, STORIES, AND HYPNOSIS

The object of literature is to put to sleep the active or rather resistant powers of our personality, and thus to bring us into a state of perfect responsiveness, in which we realize the idea that is suggested to us and sympathize with the feeling that is expressed. In the processes of the literary arts we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measure spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis.

HENRI BERGSON, TIME AND FREE WILL (1889)

Part One

FOR THE READER

Two Stories to be Read Silently

India is the hallowed home of Hypnosis. Since time immemorial Hindu Yogis in India have practiced the secret science of Maya, what scholars, doctors, and psychologists in the modern West call Mesmerism, Animal Magnetism, or Hypnotism. Using the power of Maya the Adept can cause you to believe that imaginary things are real.

SADHU SATISH KUMAR, ORIENTAL HYPNOTISM (1958)

THE CHILD’S STORY

And now, if you dare, LOOK into the hypnotic eye!

You cannot look away! You cannot look away! You cannot look away!

THE GREAT DESMOND IN THE HYPNOTIC EYE (1960)

I was eight years old when my mother was hypnotized by a sinister Hindu yogi. Yes, she was entranced by him, entirely under his control, and made do things she would never have done in her normal waking state. My father wasn’t there to protect her and there was nothing I, a mere child, could do about it. I vividly remember his turban and flowing robes, his strange voice, gliding gait, and those eerie eyes that widened to capture her mind. I heard his suggestive whispers—Sleep Memsaab, sleep—and saw his hand moving over her face in circular hypnotic passes. Sleep, Memsaab.

It’s true. I heard it with my own ears and saw it with my own eyes as I watched The Unknown Terror, an episode of the series Ramar of the Jungle, on television one evening in 1953. Playing the part of a teak plantation owner in India, my mother, the actress Noreen Nash, was vulnerable to the suggestions of the Hindu hypnotist they called Catrack. When the dawn comes, he instructed her, You will take the rifle and go to the camp of the white Ramar. You will aim at his heart and fire.

I watched as my mother, wearing a pith helmet, bush jacket, and jodhpur pants, rose from her cot, loaded her rifle, and then trudged in a somnambulistic trance, wooden and emotionless, through the jungle to Ramar’s tent. Since my mother, as far as I knew her at home, had no experience with firearms, I was not surprised that she missed her target. She dropped the rifle and disappeared back into the jungle.

Later on in the show, once again hypnotically entranced, she was led by Catrack to the edge of a cliff where the yogi declared, We are in great danger, Memsaab. The only way to escape is to jump off this cliff. Just as my mother was about to leap to her death, Ramar arrived on the scene and fired his rifle into the air. The loud bang of the gunshot awakened her in the nick of time and caused Catrack to flee. Thanks to Ramar, my mother survived her adventures in India.

The seeds of my curiosity about hypnotism and an indelible association of it with an exotic, at once alluring and foreboding, India were sown in front of a television. At about the same time I saw my mother hypnotized and made to do terrible things by a yogi, I watched another nefarious Hindu hypnotist, Swami Talpar, played by Boris Karloff in Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, try to take control of the feeble mind of Lou Costello. Both India and hypnosis were dangerous.

But then another old movie, Chandu the Magician, assured me that just as Indian hypnotism could be used for evil, so too it was a power that could be employed to overcome wickedness and serve the good of mankind. The film opened somewhere in India at night with a full moon casting eerie shadows on an ancient heathen temple as the American adventurer Frank Chandler bowed down before a dark-skinned, long-bearded Hindu priest in a white dhoti and matching turban. The Hindu swami addressed his acolyte in a deep echoic voice: In the years that thou hast dwelt among us, thou hast conquered the Atma of the spirit and, as one of the sacred company of the Yogi, thou hast been given the name Chandu. Thou hast attained thy reward by being endowed with the ancient Oriental magical power that the doctors of thy race call hypnotism. Thou shalt look into the eyes of men and they shall be as straw in thy hand. Thou shalt cause them to see what is not there even unto a gathering of twelve by twelve. To few, indeed, of thy race have the secrets of the Yogi been revealed. The world needs thee now. Go forth in strength and conquer the evil that threatens mankind.

That India was the home of hypnotism was further confirmed by listening to my mother read Kipling to me at bedtime. We had moved on from The Jungle Book, read to me when I was about the same age as Mowgli, to Kim. And I imagined the hero of that story and I were the same age, as well. Kim flung himself wholeheartedly upon the next turn of the wheel, my mother began. He would be a Sahib again for a while…. and soon I’d yawn, blink, blink, and yawn again, feel the heaviness of my eyelids, heavier and heavier, more and more relaxed. I’d roll over, eyes closing, and soon be able to imagine that her voice might be Kim’s: I think that Lurgan Sahib wishes to make me afraid, she’d say he said. And I am sure that that devil’s brat below the table wishes to see me afraid. This place is like a Wonder House.

I’d picture the interior of Lurgan’s shop as vividly as if I were there and could see what Kim saw, focusing my attention on each of the objects, suggested one by one: Turquoise and raw amber necklaces. Curiously packed incense-sticks in jars crusted over with raw garnets, devil-masks and a wall full of peacock-blue draperies … gilt figures of Buddha … tarnished silver belts … arms of all sorts and kinds … and a thousand other oddments.

When, as commanded, Kim pitched the porous clay water jug that was on the table there to Lurgan, I saw it falling short and crashing into bits and pieces.

My mother reached over and lightly placed her hand on the back of my neck as Lurgan, in his attempt to hypnotize Kim, laid one hand gently on the nape of his neck, stroked it twice or thrice, and whispered: ‘Look! It shall come to life again, piece by piece. First the big piece shall join itself to two others on the right and the left. Look!’ To save his life, Kim could not have turned his head. The light touch held him as in a vice, and his blood tingled pleasantly through him. There was one large piece of the jar where there had been three, and above them the shadowy outline of the entire vessel.

Look! It is coming into shape, my mother whispered and Look! It is coming into shape, echoed Lurgan Sahib. Yes, it was coming into shape, all the shards of clay magically reforming the previously unbroken jug. I could see it. The words my mother read aloud to me were as hypnotic as the words uttered by Lurgan.

My childhood fascination with hypnosis was sustained by a school assignment to read Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, several of them—The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar, Mesmeric Revelation, and A Tale of the Ragged Mountains—being about mesmerism, and the final story reaffirming an association of hypnosis with India. The main character goes into a trance in Virginia in which he has a vivid vision of Benares, a city to which he has never been, indicating that he had lived in India in a previous lifetime.

Not only are Poe’s stories about hypnosis, I grandly proclaimed in a book report I wrote in the seventh grade, They are also written in a language that is very hypnotic, especially if they are read out loud. Little did I suspect that that homework assignment would be prolusory to a book written more than half a century later.

When subsequently in the eighth grade I was required to prepare a project for the school science fair, I was determined to do mine on hypnosis as the only science, other than reproductive biology, in which I had much interest. The science teacher warned that it was a dangerous subject: Hypnotism is widely used in schools in the Soviet Union to brainwash children so that they believe that Communism is good and that they must do whatever their dictator, Nikita Khrushchev, commands.

Despite its abuse behind the Iron Curtain, I was determined to learn as much as I could about hypnosis. And so I ordered a book, Home Study Way to Hypnotic Practice, that I had seen advertised in a copy of Twitter magazine, a naughty-for-the-times pulp publication that I had discovered hidden in my uncle’s garage.

The ad promised that a mastery of hypnotism would enable me to control the minds of others, particularly the minds, and indeed the hearts, if not some other parts, of girls: ‘Look here’—Snap! Instantly her eyes close. She seems to be asleep but she isn’t. She’s in a hypnotic trance. A trance you put her into by saying secret words and snapping your fingers. Now she’s ready—ready and waiting to do as you command. She’ll follow your orders without question or hesitation. You’ll have her believing anything you suggest and doing whatever you want her to do. You’ll be in control of her emotions: love, hate, laughter, tears, happy, sad. She’ll be as putty in your hands.

The winsome smiling girl with closed eyes in the advertisement reminded me of a classmate named Vickie Goldman, whose burgeoning breasts were often on my mind. I was naturally intrigued by the idea that by means of hypnotism those breasts might become as putty in my hands.

It was disappointing to discover in reading that book that a mastery of hypnotic techniques was much more complicated and tedious to learn than the ad for it had promised, and even more disheartening to learn that, in order to be hypnotized, Vickie would have to trust me and want to be hypnotized by me.

Another ad, in another copy of Twitter snatched from my uncle’s collection of girlie magazines, however, suggested that, by means of various apparatuses, I would be able to take control of her mind without her consent. All I’d have to do is say, Look at this, or Listen to this.

So, for the sake of having both a science project and as much control over Vickie Goldman’s emotions and behavior as Catrack had had over my mother’s, even as much power over her as Khrushchev had over children in the Soviet Union, I ordered the products advertised by the Hypnotic Aids and Supply Company: the Electronic Hypnotism Machine, the Electronic Metronome, the folding, pocket-sized Mechanical Hypnotist, and the 78-rpm Hypnotic Record. Because I was spending more than ten dollars on these devices, I also received the Amazing Hypno-Coin at no extra charge. My mother was willing to pay for these devices since I needed them for my science project.

I also purchased the book Oriental Hypnotism, written in Calcutta India with the cooperation of Sadhu Satish Kumar, because the yogi pictured in the ad reminded me of the one who had hypnotized my mother in Ramar of the Jungle. The text revealed that, by means of hypnosis, the power of Maya, Hindu yogis are able to charm serpents, control women, and win the favor of men. Self-hypnosis gives the Hindus their amazing ability to lie down on beds of nails. And it is by means of mass hypnosis that their magicians have for thousands of years performed the legendary Indian Rope Trick. I was familiar with the rope trick from seeing Chandu use his hypnotic power to cause a gathering of twelve by twelve to imagine they were seeing it performed.

My science project exhibit, HYPNOTISM EAST AND WEST IN THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE BY LEE SIEGEL, GRADE 8, featured a poster board mounted over a table upon which waved my Hypnotic Metronome and spun both the Hypnotic Spiral Disc of my Electronic Hypnotism Machine and side one of my Hypnotic Record. Over the eerie drone of Oriental music there was a monotonously rhythmic deep voice: As you listen to these words your muscles will begin to relax, to become more and more relaxed, yes, very relaxed, and your eyelids will become heavy, yes, heavier and heavier, very, very heavy, very relaxed. Deeper and deeper, relaxed. The words relaxed, heavy, and deeper were repeated over and over and then there was counting backward, then imagining going down, deeper and deeper, in an elevator, more counting backward, and finally, at the end of the record, right after three, two, one, came the crucial the hypnotic suggestion: "The next voice you hear will have complete control over your