Hypnosis, it turns out, is nothing but a state of relaxation too palpable to be deserving of a name other than regular consciousness. And it is very hard to be even slightly relaxed unless one is in full possession of one’s autonomy. To know true peace, one needs to be able to lay one’s hand atop one’s free will and know that it is there, like the jangle and poke of car keys beneath the soft gabardine of one’s trousers. A hypnotist cannot make you do anything you don’t want to; she can merely propose activities for your unusually open mind to weigh the merits of. Were the woman in the next seat to tell me, for instance, that I should (a) assassinate World Leader X next July 12 and that (b) I will have no memory of her telling me to do so, even under hypnosis I would have no problem telling her that (b) is not an option and that (a) is either not going to happen or is going to require a cash payment in the low nine figures, depending on which world leader we’re talking about.
For all the blather about binaural beats and neurolinguistic programming, the 21st-century hypnosis currently rescuing our starlets from the demons of their own nature is nothing but good old-fashioned 20th-century self-affirmation set to a New Age score of trip-hop backing tracks and whale belches. Today’s hypnosis is last year’s focused meditation is the previous year’s creative visualization, and so on, all the way back to Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952.
Which is not to disparage techniques currently nestled under the banner of hypnosis. On the contrary. The power to change oneself by telling oneself how one would like to be different may not have been discovered yesterday. But it was only yesterday—relatively speaking—that we emerged from a century dominated by the idea that self-change was largely impossible.
For a hundred years, thanks to Freud, we crept about convinced that in the deeper parts of our brain lay only horror, hence our fear of hypnosis. We were convinced that any part of the brain not directly accessible to the conscious mind was an unspeakable archive of murderous fantasies and grisly recollections of our parents stepping out of the shower. The last thing we were about to do was shut down our conscious mind and let some stranger poke around back there in the dark recesses, especially not some eccentric woman on a night flight to Ohio.
But you know what? There’s nothing back there, nothing terrible anyway. Having led me down an imaginary staircase to the depths of my soul, my accidental hypnotist has me open a door and step through into what she tells me is the core of my being, the chamber of my most private thoughts and feelings.
And it turns out to be an exact replica of the extremely dark downstairs cocktail lounge of the old Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan. No monsters, no naked parents, just a bunch of mismatched faux-Regency furniture upholstered in velvet you could strike a match on. I can come back here anytime, she tells me. At times of stress or deprivation, I can come back here, order a giant whiskey, have a seat, and ride it out.
With that, the plane banked down into Cincinnati, and my hypnotist hastily had me lock the door to my secret room, slip the key into an imaginary pocket, and hustle back up the imaginary stairs. She counted off the uppermost five, clapped her hands, and I was back, massively refreshed, sensory organs cleaned and peeled, and newly open to the idea that after a century of Freudian angst, it may be time for the mercilessly introspective human animal to put its feet up, cue the whale song, and finally—finally—relax.
