Mmmmhm. That resistance melts and you just know that every word is dripping into the ear.

Or watching their facial muscles slacken even when you're just moving closer to them.

...as long as you know and respect that you haven't found ✨the thing ✨ itself.

And I think that's fucking magical and hot AF. I'm stirring the cauldron, but my partners can never really tell me with any certainty or clarity what's actually at the bottom of the pot.

Like the proverbial blind men, we're trying to describe an elephant by touching just a part of it. It's never the thing itself. But that's what makes hypnotic metaphor so useful. If you FAFO, eventually you'll stumble across something that's Close Enough that you can leverage it...

...there's a place where the trance hits something that exists below language. That weird, hazy world of purely mental constructs--the things that we spend lifetimes of poetry and therapy trying to put into words.

Correct.

I am the one who tugs

Feel the strings? Oh, I bet you really could, couldn't you?

... 🤔

So, it's fun. It's hot. It's possible. And it just might make your partner (or yourself!) better able to hold on to that wonderful flow state that is hypno. Give it a try. I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

You can also play around with it in fractionation. Most folks will "emerge" from trance still in this hazy, suggestible state. Slip an easy suggestion you know they can achieve in and all of a sudden they've got proof that suggestion still hits with their eyes open.

Those can also be layered in as suggestions during the trance itself, especially helping folks believe that their trances are less fragile than they think they are. It's often useful to give them something like a self-trance trigger they can use to anchor themselves, even just a certain breathing.

So, one fun way to help achieve this is in the pre-talk--just literally saying that it's possible. Talking about the little eyes-open trances we have every day (driving familiar roads, getting lost in a book, daydreaming, etc.)

Still, I find that a lot of subjects say they can't trance with their eyes open. Anyone who's been following my threads can probably guess my opinion about what "can't" means in hypno--not "I will never do this" (as too many assume), but "I haven't found the right muscle for this yet."

It also blurs the line between entranced and "awake" in a way that can be immensely fun--it creates the possibility that they're always in trance, which can be fun to vamp on during a session (or as a tease between, if the dynamic allows for it).

So: What's hot about eyes-open trance? Well, it's a bit of a convincer that trance is less fragile than a lot of folks think--that there's all sorts of ways to "be in trance" and that you can stay in a trance even in situations that seem like you shouldn't.