Unfortunately David, your view is representative of many people who have not experienced hypnosis. You are never controlled. You are always aware of what is being said. You can get up and walk away any time you choose. All that is happening is your consciousness is guided to stuff in your brain that you would not normally access. I don’t claim to understand it. I can assure you most people describe it as a pleasant experience and in no way feel thretned.
I was once employed by Alcan (Aluminium Company of Canada) to do some work in West Africa. On a day off, I bumped into the CEO on a sandy beach where we sat cooking fish we had caught. I mention this because this person was thousands of levels above my pay grade and on a normal day I would not even have access to his office block. In other words, he had no reason to impress a humble surveyor like me.
His story was that he paid his way through further education by offering hypnosis to anyone who asked. His speciality was helping with exam nerves. One day a man came along and asked if he would be able to help with his daughter’s terrible stammer. Something that is quite easy to deal with.
The daughter was very uneducated. She had always lived in California but had never even left her county. Anyway she took to hypnosis very well and he regressed her to a time before she stammered to show her the cause. During this process she started describing events she had experienced in previous lives. She was so convincing that, with her father’s permission and her consent he started making tape recordings of the lives she described. She described 6 lives in total but the one that we came to concentrate on was called Catherine of Dundee.
This life was so detailed that Dick Young (the aforementioned CEO) was able to do some checks and actually locate the place she said she lived. In fact, he got so involved that he took a trip to Scotland and found the house she described and started checking records of the people and events she had described.
For example, she said she had a boyfriend called McTavish who wore a certain tartan which she described so accurately that Dick was able to make a sketch of it. On his visit to Scotland he went to the tartan shop in Edinburgh and asked to see the McTavish tartan. Unfortunately, it was nothing like the one he had sketched. He showed the man his sketch and asked if he recognised that tartan which he did not.
Disappointed, Dick started to leave when the man in the shop told him that if he was serious about locating a tartan he should go and see a certain professor at Heriot Watt University which he did. Here he was shown the same tartan as in the shop. When he produced his sketch and asked the prof if he recognised it he said that he did and it as really interesting because that used to be the McTavish tartan up until a certain date (corresponding to Catherine’s story) but it was changed to the current version for family reasons.
Dick was impressed that such an obscure fact could be described by such an uneducated girl with zero experience of travel. However, several other facts she described were demonstrably wrong. So he was currently in the process of sorting the wheat from the chaff and intended to write a book on the subject and this is where I came into the story.
I lived in Scotland at the time and offered to help checking out more facts from any records that existed. Catherine’s story was that she was the daughter of a wealthy family and lived in a big house which she described in detail and where she was educated a where she travelled to etc. Many of the things she described could not possibly be true so Dick decide to confront her with these discrepancies.
Under hypnosis, she broke down and confessed she had been lying. She confessed she was not the daughter of the wealthy house owner but only the daughter of the house keeper there and was really just a servant in the house. She told Dick (while still under hypnosis) that if she had told him the truth he would not be interested in her.
From that point things started to click into place and I remember one incident very clearly. I had found an old plan of the house and it had what was obviously a very distinctive tower at the back. This was where she said she dumped the rubbish. She insisted it was not a tower but a place where they used to keep the horses. This made no sense because of its circular shape and location and the fact that there were stables shown elsewhere. After a lot of digging I found that the circular shape was not a tower as I thought but a mill where a horse walked round in circles turning a mill wheel to make flour but in Catherine’s time it had fallen into disuse.
Shortly after that Dick stopped answering my mail. He was much older than me and I guessed perhaps he must have passed on. I don’t think he ever published Catherine’s story but I still have a drawer full of research downstairs in my garage.
When the chance came to find out more about hypnosis I jumped at it although I still have more questions than answers.
