Dr. Dylan MorganM.A.(Oxon.), D.Phil.(Oxon.), MNCP, MNCH Leeds Hypnotherapist

Tel. (0113) 2306333. Leeds Complementary Therapy Centre, 249a Otley Rd. LS16 5LQ. Multimap

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Hypnosis for Beginners

Second Edition, 2007

- Dylan Morgan

THIS ALSO AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK for those who prefer a traditional book that they can read anywhere. You can find it via your bookseller or Booksort.com or myself.

This is an enlarged version of the well-received first edition, nearly twice the length (73,000 words). Perhaps the most sought-after new material is a chapter on self-hypnosis. The first edition is still available here.

NOTE: The contents of each chapter are summarised in the Chapter Headings.

INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK, as the title suggests, is aimed at beginners and people who do not believe in things without good evidence. (I am one myself.) The best evidence is something that you can check yourself. This book gives a large number of things that you can do, starting from scratch, and also helps you to make sense of what you will find.

It is perhaps ideally suited to students on a course in hypnotherapy who have an active interest in using hypnosis later in helping people.

It will be of great interest to students of psychology as it will teach them a lot about the way that people's minds and bodies work from a slightly more practical angle than is common in textbooks.

It should interest anyone who is motivated to have a more-than-average understanding of people - themselves and others - and of the ways they can be affected.

It will also interest those who wish to use some of that knowledge to help themselves through self-hypnosis.

It might also be of value to those who are already using hypnosis because it has a fresh approach to the whole subject. There are many hundreds of books that will tell you what to do. This book is pretty much alone in giving an understanding of what you are doing

It is quite practical, with many suggestions for things that you can do. (Though any particular reader is likely only to attempt a proportion of them.)

But there are a number of things that you will not find in the book. It is not a history of hypnosis or hypnotism: the best source for that is probably Alan Gauld's book The History of Hypnotism. It does not teach hypnotherapy (clinical hypnosis) - though it is a very useful grounding in basic techniques. If it is at all possible, you should attend a proper school, of which there are many these days (in the UK at least), to learn hypnotherapy. But for a deep understanding of hypnotherapy I have written the more theoretical Principles of Hypnotherapy (Eildon Press 1996). It is not a primer in stage hypnosis. I am uneasy about the use of hypnosis on stage, where it seems to me that it is used to make people behave in a less-than-human way. It is not simply a rehash of earlier books on hypnosis.

It is a fresh approach which offers insights that you will not get elsewhere.

The book is based on a few simple principles. One is that hypnosis does not exist in some little isolated world of its own, somehow detached from all other human behaviour and experience. Stage hypnotists have a vested interest in making it appear so, for it then makes their performances more wonderful. But an unfortunate side-effect is that it cuts hypnosis off from millions of normal people. I hope to reach others who, like myself, have a healthy scepticism of things that stand far away from their normal experience and which do not have a clear explanation.

You will therefore find that at very many points in the book I link hypnotic phenomena to our daily experience of related things. I would hope that the reader who starts this book with an openly sceptical attitude to the whole subject will end it thinking, "Well, I can now see what it is all about. It is not that different from things I have met in life. I can now see that it is just a matter of taking some of those things and working with them skillfully. Wish I had the time to learn the skills."

My next principle is that I do not want you to take anything I or anyone else says on trust. I want you, as far as possible, to check things out for yourself. To my mind the fact that this is possible makes hypnosis a wonderful field of interest. If I am learning almost any other subject I have to accept the facts and opinions given me by other people 99.9% of the time. In this field you do not need any expensive equipment to check things out for yourself. You do not need to spend hours in the library mugging up on what all the authorities have said down the centuries. All you need are some people - friends or family or colleagues or fellow-students - who will give you some of their time and you can find things out for yourself. Since other people are nearly always the most interesting other objects in the universe, as well as being pretty common, you will find yourself doing the most fascinating of things.

Because of this emphasis on finding things out for yourself this book is filled with ideas of things to try, each taking between a few minutes and perhaps half an hour. Some of them you can do by yourself - your brain is just as good as anyone else's for this purpose - others, of their nature, need a second person. In some cases you can, with a little ingenuity, be both people by using a tape recorder. You can at one time record in your own voice the part of one person and later play it back to yourself in the part of the second person. But on the whole most of the book will be more interesting if shared with at least one other person.

Those readers who are using this book as part of course on hypnosis will have the advantage of large numbers of interested fellow-students to work with. They will very easily be able to verify conclusions of mine regarding the wide variation in responses from different people.

The third principle around which the book is constructed is the only element that I am taking from established science. It is that the brain and nervous system are organised into complex subsystems. One system deals with movement, one with vision, one with sexual activity and so on. Each system commonly has subsystems. Thus the part of the brain that deals with sensations from the body has separate areas to deal with sensations from the tongue, sensations from the hands, and so on.

I regard this general principle as non-controversial, though I have not, of course, been able myself to check all the century or so of research which has gone into arriving at this conclusion. But I find that if I start with this simple idea then it makes it possible to structure all that I find in hypnosis in a very natural and satisfactory way. You will find out if it also does this for you.

It might seem natural to start this book with a definition of hypnosis, but I think it is better to leave it until the final chapter. By then the reader should have acquired a good idea of what the definition means.

tophypno1.co.uk

Chapter 1. Simple Connections.

Summary: We explore some basic facts about the way in which the brain and body work. Specifically the reader is encouraged to discover by actual experience how words and images can activate other systems in the brain which relate to feelings, muscles, senses, sense of balance, etc.. These are compared with "tests of hypnotisability" and "hypnotic inductions". They are also linked to our common experience of learning a variety of other things.

ENTERTAINMENT hypnotists love to make hypnosis look dark and mysterious and complicated. They love to pretend that they have special powers that no-one else possesses.

I love to make things bright and clear and open, and I do not claim any special powers.

Throughout the book, starting a few paragraphs ahead, I am going to ask you to try out various things and to think about them. These things are simple and everyday, and will turn out to be not at all mysterious, and yet they are a foundation on which much of hypnosis is built. We understand new things best by relating them to familiar things. We understand complicated things by relating them to simpler things. This chapter contains simple and relatively familiar things. In later chapters the understanding of this chapter will lead on to a deeper understanding of hypnosis.

We also learn best by doing. So this book is full of things to do. If some of them seem to you to be rather elementary things, it is worth remembering that on most courses that teach worthwhile things you have to start with some very elementary things.A mathematics course may start with simple addition. A dressmaking class may start with just a series of simple stitches. A football course may start with some simple fitness exercises and so on. But if you master these elementary skills then you are in a position to do very much more complex and worthwhile things.

Words can trigger pictures in your mind.

This must seem a pretty obvious fact. You need only think of reading a novel, and remember the pictures that come to mind as you do so, to confirm it to yourself. But it is still worth doing a little exercise on it, as follows.

First just think to yourself, "I am on holiday." STOP NOW. Did you see a picture of it in your mind? People vary, but it is unlikely, in the very short time I allowed you, that you saw anything very clearly.

Now allow yourself more TIME. Think, "I am on holiday." Pause for quite a few seconds to give the thought time to flower. "It is my favourite kind of place." (Pause.) "The weather is just how I like it." (Pause.) "I am wearing my favourite clothes." (Pause.) "I am doing my very favourite thing." (Pause.) "I am on holiday!"

In each case, and throughout the book, the word "Pause" is used to indicate a period of some two to five seconds.

In all probability that extra time was repaid by a very much more vivid picture or pictures in the mind. But it is best, especially if you are a student of hypnosis, to get someone else to do the same thing, perhaps with you saying the words: "Picture yourself on holiday." (Pause.) "It is your favourite kind of weather." (Pause.) etc.. Afterwards ask them about what they saw.

In this way you will discover for yourself the fact that people can have quite different degrees of clarity of picture, and the pictures themselves can be quite different. I, for example, usually manage only very washed out images, at best, but you will probably find that I am the exception rather than the rule.

The conclusions I would expect you to be able to agree with, after some experience, are the following simple ones.

1) Words can lead to pictures in the mind.
2) It takes a little time for them to arise.
3) The time taken and their nature varies from person to person.

The next exercise explores the extent to which words can directly affect muscles without going via the usual volitional process of willing an action.

Hold your arms straight ahead of you with the palms facing each other and a couple of centimeters apart. Look at the gap and say "Close... Close... Close..." repeatedly at a comfortable speed.

A typical result is that over a period of a minute or so the hands do move together until they touch. They will do this without any sense in you that you have willed it. There is no effort at all. To check this, try it on other people (for students it is essential that you do). In that case you can speak the words as you both watch the hands.

In this way you will discover that there is again a range of responses. An average closure time is a couple of minutes. In some people it will happen in seconds. In others nothing seems to happen before you run out of patience, or their arms get exhausted. Occasionally someone will resist and there will develop a trembling in the arms as one set of muscles acts to pull the hands together and another acts to separate them. Another, much rarer, response is for the hands to move apart! (Which I usually interpret as a deep-seated compulsion to resist any external influence.) But in each case you or your friends should find a strange feeling of things happening which are not willed.

The conclusions I would expect you to be able to agree with are the following simple ones.
1) Words can lead directly to muscular action.
2) It takes a little time for this to happen.
3) The time taken and the nature of the response varies from person to person and somewhat on who is talking.

As a third example you might see how words can lead to activation of the sense of touch. In particular they can make an itch arise.

All you do is to repeat to yourself, "There is something itchy on my nose." (Pause.) "There is something itchy on my nose." (Pause.) Repeat this for up to a couple of minutes. It is valuable to try the same thing with other people, with either the other person or you saying the words.

The most likely result is for an itch to be reported and perhaps scratched within that time, but again you should find considerable variation. The time taken will vary from seconds to longer than the time allowed. Some people will find an irresistible urge to scratch because the feeling is so intense. For others it will be quite mild. Oddly enough in some people the itch may arise somewhere other than the nose. But as a result of these experiences I expect that you will be able to agree with the simple observations:

1) Words can lead directly to a sensory impression.
2) It takes a little time for this to happen.
3) The time taken and their nature varies from person to person and there is some variation depending on who is saying the words.

In the above three examples we have started with words. Now we move on to see the effect of mental pictures. Here is a way of seeing if a picture can lead directly to a muscular action. Let your hand rest freely and comfortably on a surface such as table, chair-arm or your leg. Imagine a ribbon tied to the end of your index finger. Picture the other end of the ribbon being held by someone you like, whose hand is about a metre above yours. They are trying gently to lift your finger without you feeling the ribbon at all. Keep the picture in your mind for a few minutes, closing your eyes if it helps you to picture things.

A typical response is for nothing to happen for a while, and then the finger starts to twitch slightly and then slowly to lift up into the air. (This type of response is sometimes called "finger levitation" in books on hypnosis.)

Students especially should try this out on other people in various ways. You can ask them to go through the exercise as I have suggested that you have done. Or you can be the "friend" lifting the finger by means of an imaginary ribbon which you are holding. In that case they place less of a strain on their imagination. They will be able to see you, and your hand lifted as if you are holding the ribbon. It is only the ribbon that they will need to imagine. You can expect to find that the time taken varies, and the nature of the movement can also vary from very jerky to very smooth. In some cases there may be a sideways movement rather than a vertical one. At the end of a series of such trials you can decide if you agree that:

1) Mental pictures can lead directly to muscular activity.
2) It takes a little time for this to happen.
3) The time taken and the nature varies from person to person.

Now how about seeing if pictures can give rise to feelings? When you consider the billions of dollars made by a film industry whose main purpose is to create images that will arouse emotions of a variety of kinds, it should not be very surprising to you that this can happen. But it is as well to try something on the following lines to explore the ways in which internally generated mental images can do the same thing.

The simple approach is to picture a person or situation that normally arouse strong feelings in you. The person could perhaps be someone that you hate or love or fear. The situation could perhaps be one that you find erotic or embarrassing or exciting or frightening. In any case after you have decided on ONE (do not jump about) keep the picture or pictures of your chosen topic in front of your mind for a minute or two. As usual, students should also get a number of other people to do the same exercise.

The normal reaction is for a quickening of the breath and an increase in heart rate and adrenaline production. These are part of the body's normal response to any moderate to strong emotion. In addition there will be the particular sensations associated with the particular emotion that you have chosen. These are harder to describe but are usually unmistakable. For example fear and excitement produce pretty much the same physical responses - heart, breathing, adrenaline - but one is accompanied by a strong feeling of unpleasantness while the other is very pleasant.

You are likely to find that different people respond in a range of different ways. In some there is only a very slight effect. In others it can be quite dramatic and rapid. The scenes chosen will of course also be very different.

At the end of this you should have been able to confirm for yourself what I will call the Standard Finding in future since the pattern should by now be clear:

1) The effect does happen.
2) It takes a little time for this to happen. (From a second or two up to many minutes in this as in most cases.).
3) The time taken and the detailed nature of the effect varies from person to person.

Now we might try the effect of a picture on a sense: perhaps asking if a mental image can affect the sense of balance. The following is one possible way. Think of a situation in which you are rocking or swinging, such as in a small boat, a hammock, a swing, a rocking chair, a rocking horse or so on. Sit comfortably upright with closed eyes and picture the chosen situation for a few minutes. Notice any sensations of movement. You can try a similar thing on others. You should not be surprised by now to find people responding differently. Some will not only feel themselves moving but you will also see their bodies move. At the other extreme some will report nothing. Again check to see if your experiences confirm the pattern of the Standard Finding:

1) Mental pictures can stimulate activity in the sense of balance.
2) It takes a little time for this to happen.
3) The time taken and the nature of the response varies from person to person.

At this stage the pattern revealed by all these experiments should be quite clear. It amounts simply to this. Activity in one part of the brain (verbal or visual in the examples we have done) can lead to activity in other parts (in the above examples: visual, emotional, nerves connected to muscles, nerves connected to the senses). The speed and nature of the connection varies from person to person.

As a final explicit example here I would like you to explore the following connection. It leads from the kinaesthetic sense (a sense of position and movement - of arm in this case) to the involuntary activation of some arm muscles.

Simply get your friend to close his or her eyes. (So that they cannot see what is happening, and so vision is not directly involved.) Then without saying anything (so that words are not involved), simply lift up one arm slowly and lightly by the wrist until it is being held in one position in space. You then gently move it up and down very slightly and lightly around that position, so that the arm is given quite strong sense that it somehow "should" be in that position.

You should find that over a minute or so the arm starts to feel lighter and lighter as its own muscles take over the job of keeping it floating in the air. Eventually you should be able to leave it there and it should remain there with no effort or complaint from your friend for some considerable time.

Check for yourself, as always, the usual Standard Finding: that the effect happens, takes time and varies from person to person.

I hope that you do try these things out with other people. We nearly all make the unquestioned assumption that since we are all human beings our inner, invisible workings are basically identical. You should find, as I have, that there is in fact a great deal of variety, more of which should be revealed as you progress through the book.

If you would like to experiment with other connections then you will find other suggestions at the end of the chapter.

What has all this to do with hypnosis?

My first reason for looking at such things is that these phenomena, and many other like them, are presented in many other books on hypnosis as examples of fundamental "hypnotic phenomena".

Take for example the involuntary rising of a finger. This is often presented as something that is happening as a result of a "hypnotised subject" obeying the suggestions of the "hypnotist". The other examples I have given can also be presented in that light.

This chapter should show that these simple phenomena do not, in fact, require anything very much out of the ordinary. They can be achieved in many people with no special powers or skills, no "hypnotic induction", no special techniques. The main requirement is patience!

My reason for looking at the phenomena in the simple way above, with no "inductions" or any of the other trappings of hypnosis, is to be able to base the whole science on simple and observable phenomena. I believe that this makes for clarity of thought. (My initial training was in the physical and not the psychological sciences.)

I have said that these phenomena and things like them appear in older books on hypnosis. They do so in one of two main guises. These are as parts of an "Induction Procedure" or as "Tests of Hypnotisability".

I will discuss these different ways of looking at them and then compare them with the way I tend to look at them. You may then come to your own conclusions.

It can be helpful to know that in the past there were two schools of thought about hypnotic phenomena which were labeled "State Theory" and "Trait Theory". Those who belonged to the State school maintained that hypnosis was a "state" that people could be "put into". I suppose that they thought of it as being like a "state of sleep" or a "state of fear" or a "state of being in love" or a "state of subservience". This approach naturally encourages you to think of what the hypnotist has to do in order to put someone into that state. And each hypnotist or hypnotherapist had his (or, very rarely, her) own procedure, which consisted of stringing together a number of steps, each of which was an item of the kind mentioned above, or of a slightly different class that we will meet in the next chapter.

A hypnotist might start by using words to act directly on the muscles of clasped hands to make them lock together. He might follow this up by getting someone to stand vertically and then act on the sense of balance to make them feel that they were falling, while simultaneously using words to activate all the muscles of the body to make it rigid. He would then catch them and lower them, rigid, to the floor. Further steps were taken of a similar kind. The cumulative effect would be to create and enhance the idea in the mind of the "subject" that they would do whatever he said. This then made it possible for the hypnotist to suggest increasingly amusing responses. (It is perhaps worth noticing that he would never, however, have the power that the army Sergeant achieves with months of training: HE can use one word to get a man to walk forward into a hail of death-dealing bullets!)

You will find more on Induction Procedures later in the book, especially in Chapter 5.

Opposed to the State theorists were the Trait theorists who said that far from it being the case that power lay in the hypnotist, all that was happening was that a natural capacity or trait in the subject was involved. On this view, hypnotisability is something like introversion, or IQ, or musical ability: it is something innate in the individual, and can be measured by various tests.

As far as I know the first of these tests were developed at Stanford University from around 1960. What did they consist of? Well, very much the same sort of thing that we have seen above, together with items that will appear in later chapters. A typical Test would consist of a short sequence of items of this kind, and a scoring method such as: "Score +1 if the hands move significantly together within 2 minutes. Score +1 if the subject scratches face within 1 minute. Score +1 if there is significant arm catalepsy (rigidity) as assessed by the difficulty experimenter has in bending it."

People who collected a high score on such a test were regarded as being very hypnotisable. Those with a low score were regarded as being poorly hypnotisable. If you are interested in more detail you can find an example of such a test given in some of the more academic books such as Hilgard & Hilgard Hypnosis in the Relief of Pain, Kaufmann, (1975)

However, those tests were made to look more like hypnosis because there was a standard introductory "induction" before they were made. When, later in the book, I have discussed inductions, I will be encouraging you to compare the results of suggestions before and after an induction. If you come to the conclusion that nothing that you say to or do with your "subject" in the preliminary stages makes any difference to their response to the little experiments then you will probably tend to agree with the Trait Theorists: you are dealing with an innate property of their minds and bodies. If, on the other hand, you find that your initial induction or preparation of the subject makes quite dramatic differences to their later responses then you will be more inclined to side with the State Theorists.

Entertainment hypnotists, a band not renowned for their interest in theory, act as if they came from both camps. In the earlier steps of their acts they typically use one item - usually one of forcing hands to stay clasped - to select from the audience those with whom they could expect the best results. Implicitly this is saying, "I can do little without a good subject." (Which is essentially true, but not something they would want to broadcast.)

Then, in the latter part of the performance, they proceed as if, "This is all my doing. I am putting you into a state of hypnosis through my power." (And it is true that they are using certain skills to get the subject to do things that would not normally be in their repertoire.)

What this shows, it seems to me, is simply the Standard Finding as applied to the suggestions of the Stage Hypnotist: He does achieve the effects, but it takes him time to build up to the more dramatic ones, and they can only be achieved easily in some people. If you watch carefully, you will also see that some of his subjects will do well on one of the tricks but not on another.

In recent decades the State vs. Trait argument seems to have died down, with neither side having won a victory. Most practising hypnotherapists would accept that there is some truth on both sides and get on with their main job of helping people.

The way I look at things is as follows. I start with the scientific fact that human brain, like human society, is very complex. (There are some twenty times as many neurons in the human brain as there are people on earth.) Furthermore it is divided into a variety of subsystems. Some cells in the brain are organised into a system that deals with vision, for example. Other cells are organised into a system that handles speech. Others, again, handle movements.

Now these subsystems are not totally independent of each other. They are interconnected. They can affect each other.

I then view the above experiments as simple examples of the general and non-controversial truth that one subsystem of the brain can affect others. For example activity in the verbal part can lead to activity in the visual part - words can activate pictures. They also show that people have their mental systems somewhat differently connected. And they show that the speed and the nature of the connections varies from person to person.

You do not have to see things in that way, but while reading this book you should know that this is how I view things.

I find that all of the steps of Induction Procedures create or use such connections between systems of the brain. I find that all of the Tests of Hypnotisability involve exploring how easily the connections between various systems can be created or utilised in a given person.

If you want to say that that it is a trait of a given person that a particular pair of subsystems interact in a particular way, then I would largely agree. I would, however, argue that since it is possible to learn to alter the nature of the connections, the trait cannot be regarded as fixed.

If, on the other hand, you want to call what happens when a particular collection of subsystems is active and interacting, with others inactive, "an hypnotic state" then I would not object. However, I would simply note that it has proved impossible to find ONE such collection, so that you have simply found one of many possible "hypnotic states". (For example, there are hypnotic "states" which involve a great deal of visual content, even to hallucinations; others that centre only on muscular responses in which there can be no pictures in the mind at all; and there are countless other possibilities.)

In practice I avoid the use of the word "state" myself because of this vagueness, preferring to be more precise and instead to describe what is happening in a particular person at a particular time by giving as detailed a list as possible of what systems are active and inactive, and how they are interconnected.

There IS, nevertheless, a family resemblance in what is going on in the minds of people who are regarded as being "hypnotised", characterised by the following facts. Most of the mental systems that deal with the outside world, other than listening to the hypnotist, are inactive. There is a greatly increased focus and attention to the words of the hypnotist. It commonly involves an increased activity in certain internal systems such as the visual imagination. There is a great reduction in mental resistance to suggestions made by the hypnotist. There is an increased rapport - an inclination or desire to cooperate with the hypnotist. All of these aspects will be dealt with in more detail in later chapters. If you do not quite understand them at this point, do not worry.

However, I regard that as a broad generalisation, not a precise definition. Within this broad generalisation you can have people with very different kinds of mental activity. Some may be aware of intense internal pictures, perhaps of the past, or of a part of their body (one client of mine saw himself walking through his soot-caked lungs), or of certain sensations, or of feelings, or of the absence of sensations, or of floating, or of nothing except my voice, or of scents, or of a dead relative, and so on.

The brain waves of such people will be significantly different; their experiences will be quite different; their internal chemistry will be quite different. There is too little that they have in common to make it very useful to use just the one word "hypnotised" to describe them.

Nevertheless, the generalisation that they all tend to have a very focussed or limited awareness or attention compared with normal, outward oriented functioning makes a useful step towards the matter of the next chapter. You may have already noticed, if you have performed the above experiments, something that a later chapter will deal with in more detail: that the phenomena arise most effectively if the mind is focussed; if there are no distracting thoughts; if there is nothing else distracting happening. In other words it is best if there is no other mental activity: if other mental and physical activity is switched down or off.

In the next chapter we will be exploring, in the same practical way, examples of this "switching down" to complete our survey of the elementary building blocks of the practice of hypnosis: the fact that changes in the activity in one subsystem can lead not only to an increase in the activity of another, but also to a decrease.

I also find that this way of thinking in terms of the connections between systems is invaluable when it comes to analysing and solving the human problems that fall in the domain of hypnotherapy.

A phobia, for example, can be understood as the existence, in a particular person, of a connection between the picture or idea of something feared and the emotional system of fear. If the idea becomes active in the mind then it activates the fear. Notice that, as in the above examples, we would not expect the link to be the same for everyone: people vary tremendously.

If we want to change this state of affairs it is best to start with a clear idea of what two parts of the mind are involved. Hypnotic techniques will then be used not, as we have been doing so far, to forge a link between those two systems, but to weaken or remove it.

At other times the hypnotherapist does forge new links between systems. For example, think of the way in which in some people it is possible using hypnotic techniques to help them to overcome an unwanted habit of smoking by connecting the thought or smell or taste of tobacco smoke with the activation of the nausea response. "The very sight or smell of a cigarette will make you sick." This can be made so clear and strong in some people that it is more than enough to ensure that they do stop smoking. It should be clear that the creation of such a connection is very similar in principle to the sort of thing that you have already explored in this chapter.

In line with the experiments described earlier you might perhaps say to a friend who smokes something like the following. "Experience as clearly as possible the most significant aspect of smoking to you." (For some it would be a picture, for others a taste or a smell, or the sense of holding one in fingers or mouth, or of the feeling in the throat, or lungs or body.) "Then just notice if this leads to a sensation of nausea." You then need only say enough to keep their minds on the possible association for a minute or two, rather like the itch.

Then, as in the other little things we have done, you will find some smokers experiencing a strong feeling of nausea, others a mild one and others none at all in the time. With the first class of people the experience can be strong enough to significantly reduce their desire to smoke even if they do not stop. Although we will later find ways of intensifying this sort of thing, you should by now see something of the value of starting with the simple approach of this chapter.

Of course in real life you would not even need to suggest an imaginary cigarette. You could just talk quietly to your friend as he or she is actually smoking. "What is it doing to you?" "You once said that the first one you ever smoked made you feel sick." (Pause.) "Do you remember?" (Pause and wait for some assent.) "Does this one make you feel like that at all?" (Pause.) "After all it is healthy to feel sick if you have swallowed poison." (Pause.) And so on...

I would predict that if you tried this without the assent of the friends they would get rather angry with you and shut you up! People naturally tend to defend their minds against changes - a matter we will be dealing more with in Chapter 8.

With their assent, however, you should discover again the Standard Finding: given enough time, quite a good percentage of people would find some degree of nausea developing in response to smoking.

This matter of using hypnotic techniques to make healthy or therapeutic changes in people will not be covered in much detail in this book . That is covered in The Principles of Hypnotherapy.

Speed of response and learning.

There is a very natural question that may well have arisen in your mind as a result of the experiments at the start of the chapter. Why is there usually such a slow response compared with the almost instantaneous reaction of my hand to the idea of moving it in the normal, conscious way?

The answer to this might help to throw light on the whole business of the interaction between different subsystems of the mind.

The answer, I believe, is quite simple. Nearly every new piece of learning is slow. When I was first learning, as a baby, to direct my hand, I do not suppose that hand action followed my intention at all quickly. It was certainly with less accuracy.

I doubt if anyone can remember that piece of learning, but perhaps you can remember learning to type. The thought of the letter 't' would not then produce an almost instantaneous movement of the index finger of the left hand to the middle of the top line of the letters on the qwertyboard. There would first be a message from the verbal part of the mind to the visual part, directing it to look for the letter 't'. That in turn would activate the eye muscles to track along the keyboard. When the eye had found the letter 't' the eye would stop and the next stage was started. A connection was activated in the brain from the visual system to what is called the motor strip - a collection of cells on the right hand side of the brain - which controls the left side of the body. These would start the left hand moving towards the letter. When the finger tip touched the key a message would be sent to another part of the brain, next to the motor strip, that responds to sensations of touch. This would then activate the motor strip in a new way. The linkage between the muscles of the index finger and the nerves that register pressure would cooperate to press it with a suitable sort of force. When resistance was felt, so that they key was known to be fully depressed, then the finger would be lifted.

The first time anyone does that, it that takes quite a long time. I have seen people hunting for a key for up to a minute! The pressure on the key may easily be far too hard or soft. I do not suppose that anyone is surprised by this initial slowness of inaccuracy.

Neither are we surprised at the remarkable power of the brain to simplify, with practice, this long chain of cause and effect in the nervous system. It happens in the acquisition of all skills. With time we get faster as the brain builds in more and more direct and rapid connections between an original stimulus and the required response.

An expert typist need only hear a word and his or her fingers will type the word out without any need to look at the keys at all. Pianists, snooker players, racing drivers, chess players - in fact I think any person with a skill in ANY department, will have spent many, many hours, slowly improving the connections between different subsystems of the brain in order to produce the most direct, accurate and rapid reactions.

What do we call this process? Learning!

If I ask someone to learn something new, whether it is the Russian vocabulary, or how to tie a particular knot, or how to dance a particular step, or how to recognise a certain scent, or cook a particular meal I would expect the following to be true:

1) They can learn to do it.
2) It takes some time for them to learn it.
3) The time and approach taken and the accuracy varies from person to person.

Do these three principles seem familiar? I think so. But then I would expect it. Hypnotic phenomena have to do with our nervous systems. They must therefore happen in accord with the principles which regulate the nervous system. And the above three rules seem pretty fundamental, whether we are aiming to produce the kind of learning that is taught in schools or by sports coaches or the kind of learning beloved of Stage Hypnotists and Sergeant Majors which is, "Your body must act on my words without question," or the kind of learning which is the province of hypnotherapy, which is learning to stop fearing something, or to change a habit, or to sleep again at night, or to stop blushing or to control bladder function and so on.

If you would like to test my answer by experiment, it is in principle quite simple. Take any of the exercises from the earlier part of this chapter. Repeat them every day or so for a few weeks - just as if you were teaching someone any other skill. If I am right then you should find that the responses in a willing "pupil" will get faster and more precise with repetition. (You will have as much problem with a reluctant "pupil" as any teacher.)

Take the hand closure experiment we started with. The connection in that case is between a response of the auditory system to a sound (your voice) and the muscular reaction. You should have found that the first time you try it, it will take an average of a minute of two for the closure to happen. But if you were to repeat it over and over again with a willing friend, then I expect you to find that the response will become faster and faster. In time you may both find that when you say "close" your friend's hands will close automatically, and quickly and without his or her conscious involvement.

Stage hypnotists like to get their "subjects" into a totally relaxed condition that looks rather like sleep in response to them saying, "sleep". If you watch carefully, you will find that they run the prospective subject through the process of being told "sleep" (often with a finger click as well) followed by an eye closure and a muscular limpness many times. Each time it tends to become faster and more pronounced.

However, a piano teacher will find the same broad result in trying to teach a pupil to press a certain key when she sounds a certain note on a tuning fork. Most pupils are a bit slow and uncertain to start with. With repetition they all get better and faster. Some pupils will need only one or two repetitions and then the connection is permanent. Others may need hundreds of repetitions, and even then be a bit hit and miss. Piano playing is trait-like in that some learn more easily than others. Playing the piano is state-like in that the player is functioning in a rather special, particular way.

The conclusion I have drawn from my years of work in hypnotherapy is that it is not a case apart. It involves the same principles that arise in other areas of learning. The reason it has been treated as a thing apart is, I believe, because the kind of connections between systems hypnosis deals with are off the beaten path, and so are often unexpected.

In stage hypnosis the unexpected is used to entertain the audience, and the seemingly "magical" nature of what is happening is exaggerated to impress. (But this is not a book about stage hypnosis.) In hypnotherapy the unexpected enables many problems to be solved which are often thought to be insoluble. (I have written another book on the application of hypnosis to such problems.)

Other simple experiments.

Finally in this chapter, if you want to try further experiments on the lines of those few examples at the start, here are some ideas. I start with the observation that for some people the following are easy connections. You can expect therefore to be able to reproduce examples of them in most people, though with more or less ease.

A musical sound can activate a picture. Many listeners to classical instrumental music can find that it naturally arouses images in their minds. So you should find that if you play some music and say, "When I play this music you will picture a place / a face / etc.." then it will happen with the usual Standard Finding.

A taste can activate a picture. For example a chance taste of a madelaine cake famously released a flood of pictorial memories for the writer Proust. So you could say, "When you slowly eat this biscuit some memory will return," and expect it to happen more or less vividly and quickly.

The name or picture of a food can give rise to a taste or smell. For example my daughter, when young, found that the sight of a food on TV enabled her to taste it. So you might say, "Now, I am going to talk about curries. After a while you will find that the hot taste on your tongue. You may even sweat!"

A number can link to a colour. Some people think of '3' as being green and so on. So you might say, "I am going to count. With your eyes closed I want you to see yourself chalking the numbers on a blackboard as I do so. But you have multicoloured chalks, so you can choose a different colour for each digit." After you have counted to ten you can ask what colours they chose.

A colour can activate a feeling. For example certain shades of yellow can make some people feel nauseous. So you might say, "With eyes closed I would like you to think of the most unpleasant yellow that you can think of, a sickening yellow. Just keep your mind on that horrible yellow." Again there is a fair chance that you will, in some people, be able to induce a physical reaction.

A feeling (e.g. of disgust) can activate the stomach muscles and lead to a feeling of nausea. So you might just say, "I want you to call to mind the feeling of disgust. All sort of things might have given you that sickening feeling. Call it to mind... etc.." Then in a few minutes ask if there has been an actual physical response.

A touch (as of an animals fur) can arouse an emotion of pleasure or of fear (in different people). So you might say, "Just imagine being in a dark room. All alone. Your hands are hanging down near the floor. Suddenly you feel something furry brushing past." Then ask if there was any emotional reaction. If there is no initial response you can continue to keep their minds on it for several minutes and see if it then evokes an emotion.

The total list is very long, depending on how finely we discriminate between the different mental systems. For example, vision can be subdivided broadly into perception of shape, of colour and of movement. Some people (painters?) will find it easier to trigger off a perception of colour than of speed while for others (racing drivers?) it will be the reverse.

But each of these divisions could be subdivided. For example the part of the visual system that deals with shapes can be subdivided into groups of cells that will respond to the shape of a dog, others that will respond to the shape of a cat, and so on and so on. There are people for whom that subsystem that responds to a dog will be linked to the system of fear while that system or division that responds to a cat will be linked to love.

There is therefore an enormous number of possible combinations of systems that you can experiment with: limited mainly by your imagination.

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Chapter 2. Switching Systems Off.

Summary: We explore various ways in which muscular relaxation can be induced. The main systems used to do this include the verbal, visual, emotional, musical and humorous. We end with a sample compound induction script.

In the previous chapter we looked at ways in which activity or connections in various parts of the brain could be switched on.

In this chapter we will be exploring this area of how to switch off a system. In particular we will look at reducing the activity of the muscular system and its related nervous system.

There is one very important fact about muscle tissue that is worth bearing in mind in this context. It has no direct Off switch! ANY electrical message, whether delivered via the nerves or via wires switches a muscle On: it makes it contract. There is no electrical signal that can direct a muscle to expand. That is the reason why, throughout the body, muscles occur in pairs. You have one muscle to curl a finger and another to straighten it. You have one muscle to bend the knee and another to straighten it. When you are walking your body runs through a sequence of first tensing one muscle of a pair and then the other. The one that is NOT being tensed gets stretched by the action of the other. Then the action is reversed.

Incidentally much chronic or long lasting muscular pain is a result of a pair of muscles being simultaneously active or tense. They are each pulling against the other, but nothing is moving. This can often be seen in "stressed" people, in which there are two mental systems also fighting against each other.

If you have clearly in mind this basic physiological fact that ALL electrical activity reaching the muscles causes them to contract then it will make clearer the basic notion that you cannot ORDER a system to switch off, but that if you stop it being activated then it will slowly subside into a resting or nearly inactive condition.

The first exercise in this chapter is something that might be familiar to you. It is a relaxation technique that is sometimes called "progressive relaxation". Something similar can be met in ante-natal clinics; stress-relief courses and so on. But it is also a common starting point for much hypnosis. The simple idea is that you pay very gentle attention to a particular muscle or muscle group and think "relax", NOT in a spirit of "For heaven sake, RELAX! I tell you RELAX!!" but rather of, "I am asking nothing of you now and so you can stop doing anything, you can relax." You are paying attention in the way a loving mother pays attention to her baby drowsing in the cot. Alternatively you can think of the word "sleep" rather than "relax". But if so, remember that it is not that YOU who is going to sleep but a group of muscles that is going to sleep.

(A very common misconception about hypnosis is that it feels like going totally asleep. Some people are disappointed if they do not feel that they have lost consciousness. I suspect that this idea comes basically from watching stage hypnosis in which at a click of the hypnotist's finger, perhaps even accompanied by the word "sleep", the subject instantly relaxes all muscles and therefore looks asleep. But if the subject is asked about the experience later, it is usually clear that they have not been asleep in any normal sense of the word. You will find an example later.)

You can proceed like this. Sit or lie comfortably. Let your mind rest on your right hand. Think "sleep" or "rest" or "relax" or some other word that you find particularly appropriate - in a slow calm way. Then repeat it with pauses, just as we have done for other things in Chapter 1. If you are working on yourself you will of course be continuously aware of progress. If you are working on another person it is helpful to ask gently every so often, "How is it going?" so that you know what progress is being made. You might murmur something encouraging if relaxation is increasing and something reassuring if there is little change yet.

Continue for a few minutes. At the end of that time you should find that your hand does indeed feel very relaxed, and far more relaxed than when you started. Again it is essential for students and useful for others to try the same thing with friends, both with them saying their chosen word and with you doing it for them.

I expect that you will again discover our Standard Finding: there IS relaxation, it takes time and it varies from person to person. And also that with repetition it gets more rapid and direct. There is no magic in this. It is simple and natural.

It can be an illuminating exercise to do something similar but with an urgent, commanding approach and tone. Use phrases like, "You must relax. Come on! Relax! Get a move on! Are you stupid or something! Relax!" I think that you will find that for most people the tension increases. Few people would ever take this line with someone else, of course. But it is surprising how many people take this attitude with themselves at times. Most insomniacs play a version of that game, "Come on! I must get to sleep. This is desperately important! Is there something wrong with me, or what! Sleep!!!"

Note that although we have focussed attention on the hand, what has primarily stopped happening in the former experiment is the activity in the nerves leading towards the muscles of the hand. And this has resulted in a drop in the activity of the muscles themselves because they have stopped receiving "contract" messages.

Once you have demonstrated for yourself the ability to switch off all right-hand related activity you can proceed to some other group of muscles such as those in the left hand and repeat the process, with yourself and with others. And you will not be surprised by the Standard Finding: that these muscles too will slowly get less and less tense. The nerves leading to them - technically called efferent nerves - become less and less active. You may also notice the now familiar variations between people. In some, for example, the process is accompanied by a series of small twitches. In others there may be feelings of heaviness or of lightness or of warmth or cold or of tingling and so on which accompany the process.

Beyond that you can continue to pay attention successively to all other major muscle groups, relaxing each in turn in the same way. As far as I know there is no magic about what order you do this in. Some people like to move in a broadly upwards direction: start with the feet, then calves, then thighs, then lower body, then back, then chest, then shoulders, then upper arms, then lower arms, then hands, then neck, then face and then scalp. Others will reverse it. But I have often jumped about with just the same effect. In some cases I will ask how things are progressing and if any particular group of muscles feels tense. That group will then get more attention, and I will come back to it repeatedly in between relaxing other, easier groups.

Neither does there seem to be some magical pattern of words which are automatically better than any other for a given person. But if you have experienced hypnotherapy or progressive relaxation you will generally have found that far more complex patterns of words are used than I have presented above. We might find something like, "And as you relax, every nerve, every muscle, every organ is entering a state of bliss, of total peace." Or they might be like, "You are sinking deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper into a state of total relaxation, total peace. And as you relax you will feel SO secure, SO safe, SO contented, that you will feel able to relax deeper and deeper." What is the function of such sentences?

I would like you to observe that what is really happening here is that words are being used to arouse certain feelings: feelings of peace, safely, contentment and so on. This is a perfectly good procedure. We have seen in Chapter 1 that words can activate feelings. IF the feelings activated have the effect of reducing activity in the nerves leading to the muscles then this will naturally speed the relaxation up.

For students particularly it is very useful to be aware of what you are trying to do with a particular person. By all means use emotional, poetic language, but do so knowing that you are using it for a specific purpose.

Another kind of approach that you will find mixed in with some relaxation procedures is something like this. "Picture yourself lying on golden sands." (Pause.) "The sun is shining warmly and you feel totally relaxed." (Pause.) "You are on holiday and all tension is going from your body." And so on.

It should be fairly clear that what is happening here is an attempt to activate certain pictures in the mind: pictures of being on holiday, in this case. IF it is the case that those pictures are associated with being relaxed then this can be worth doing. We are then activating pictures to inactivate the muscles, in a way similar (but opposite) to what has been done in Chapter 1.

However, students, in particular, should note exactly what they are trying to do. In particular you should be asking yourself, "Do I KNOW that these pictures lead to relaxation?" This can actually be very important! There are some people who HATE lying on the beach in the sun. A suggested picture of this situation will then activate a great desire to move away. Muscular tension will result because one part of the mind will be saying in effect "Get up and out of here" and starts to contract the muscles that will get the body up, while another is saying, "No, you are supposed to stay here," and will be starting to tense opposing muscles to keep the body in place. A set of such opposing muscular tensions is a classic symptom of stress, as observed above. So for some people you may find that a process that you will find in many standard text books is producing entirely the wrong results. I hope that you can now understand why.

(One of the biggest problems and frustrations of my early career was the way in which standard procedures, recommended by the books, would often not work. Why not? The books were no help. The only advice I could get anywhere was, "Try another approach." It was no use asking, "Why did it not work?" There was no theory or framework to give an answer. The simple expedient of asking the clients what was going on in their heads was not current. I hope that you will find the approach in this book enormously more helpful. It should give you a much firmer grounding of understanding of how things work.)

You could explore the three avenues I have mentioned so far - using direct words, feelings or pictures - for yourself.

I will suppose that you have first tried the direct path from words to muscular system as described above. Ideally you should try the two other approaches on other days. If you were to run them one after another then you will start the second on a person who is already uncommonly relaxed from the first, and so you will not be comparing like with like.

On the second day you might try to use words purely to arouse certain pictures which are associated with relaxation. The broad pattern is the same whether you are trying things on yourself or on others. First of all we need to know a situation that you or they find relaxing. This might be anything. Common scenes include the beach, a cozy fireside, a woodland dell, a garden, a childhood bedroom, sitting with a pet, lolling in a bath and lying in bed, but it could be anything. I had one client whose idea of total relaxation was disco dancing!

Then you arouse these pictures in your mind or the other's mind, perhaps by gently repeating certain key words. But since we are interested in how much effect the pictures alone are having on the relaxation, try to avoid words such as "relaxed", "calm", "sleep" and so on that might have a direct effect.

You might, for example, proceed almost totally by questions.

You. "And what is your cat's name?"
Friend. "Dinger."
Y. "Is that he or she?"
F. "He."
Y. "Does he like being stroked?"
F. "No, he is very standoffish, but my last cat, Samantha, was very friendly."
Y. "Can you remember stroking Samantha?"
F. "Yes."
Y. "Where would you be?"
F. "Sitting on the rug in front of the fire."
Y. "Can you picture that clearly?"
F. (Pause.) "Yes."
Y. "What colour is Samantha?"
F. "Black and white."
Y. "What is the rug like?"
F. "It is a deep wool. Mottled reds and oranges."
Y. "How is Samantha sitting?"
F. "Beside me. Stretched out straight. She is purring."

You see the pattern: every question is getting the mind focussed on the picture of the relaxing setting. You are using no words yourself that suggest relaxation. Your aim is to get your friend's mind firmly fixed on the pictures of a relaxing scene and then to discover how much effect they have in relaxing the actual muscles.

An intermediate method is to use some questions like the above and some statements which use something of what you have learned. Such statements might be the following. "Just see how Samantha moves her head as you stroke her." "Look around at the room." "See your hand moving across Samantha's fur."

Continue for about the same length of time that you used for the direct relaxation by means of simple words and directed attention. Feel free, if you are working with another person, to ask for progress reports - "How are you feeling?" - so that you know how things are going. Finally, at the end, ask for some measure of how relaxed the person feels. Most people can give a pretty reliable answer to, "How relaxed are you on a scale of 1 to 10? 10 is totally relaxed."

Then see if any clear pattern emerges for a given individual. You may discover that one of the approaches tends to give the better result for one person and the other for another. For, as always, people vary, and we have no way of knowing without trying.

Here is another example of the visual approach using more statements and fewer questions.

Y. "You have told me that you find the idea of a fireside relaxing. So just close your eyes and start to picture it. See the flames. Is the fire wood or coal?"
F. "Wood" (This is only one possible answer, of course. If another is given then the details of what follows will also change.)

Y. "See the wood crackling. See the glowing of the wood. And perhaps you can now also see the fireplace." (Pause.) "And any ornaments on it." (Pause.) "Tell me about what you see."

F. "It is an old-fashioned fireplace. There is a clock. And candlesticks. And some brass things. The mantle is wood."

Y. "That sounds very nice. I wonder if there are candles in the candlesticks, and what is the lighting like in the room? Look around and see."
F. "There are some candles above the fire. Nothing else."
Y. "And how are you sitting?"
F. "I am curled up in a chair in front of the fire."

Y. "Look at the chair. Is it old or new?"

F. "It is old and very soft. There is a cat on it with me."
Y. "That is fine. So just go on for as long as you like, just sitting curled up with the cat. Watching the flames." (Pause.) "The fire." (Pause) "The clock" (pause.) "The candles' flames." (Pause) "For as long as you like."

The client may continue to enjoy the scene for a long time - I have known one to remain so for up to an hour, and then be reluctant to stop!

The purpose of the above is very clear. It is designed to arouse in the mind a very clear picture of being in a certain place. In the context of this chapter the place is chosen because it is associated with relaxation for the given person. But in this case we have avoided any words which directly suggest emotions, or sensations, or muscular tone in an attempt to explore the effect of images alone, as far as that is possible. At the end you can ask, "And how relaxed are your muscles now?" to find the extent to which the images reduced muscular activity.

In the context of hypnosis the word SCRIPT is used for something like the above. However it is worth emphasising that in what I have presented, the scene is precisely tailored to the tastes of the client by means of the question and answer format. This tends to make it far more effective than if the client is merely placed in a setting that the hypnotist finds relaxing, for obvious reasons. As a simple example the hypnotist might like cats and introduce one into the script but the subject have a phobia about them. One person might like small cosy rooms and another find them claustrophobic and so on.

On another day you might try an approach in which you attempt purely to activate appropriate emotions and see how effective they are in reducing muscle tone.

The approach, at it simplest, is to sit or lie with eyes closed, and with an intention not to dwell on any pictures that come to mind. (Since the effect of pictures has been established on the previous day.) You will be repeating to yourself, "I feel wonderful." (Pause.) "I feel calm." (Pause.) "I feel happy." "My happiest feelings are coming back to me," and repeat ad lib. The idea is to see if you can work solely on arousing the feelings and then see how effective they are for you in switching off muscle tone. And of course students should attempt the same on a number of other people. As a model to start with you might try something on these lines.

Y. "Now just close your eyes and tell me how you feel - and by this I mean things like stressed or contented, anxious or calm and so on. This time we will not be bothering about physical sensations. Just focus on any feeling that would stop you from being relaxed. So how would you describe your present feelings in that light?"
F. "Nervous. Worried."
Y. "OK. Now we are just going to emphasise the opposites to those. What would you say the opposite to 'nervous' is? Calm? Contented? Anything else?"
F. Calm would be fine."
Y. "Right. We will just keep your mind on the simple idea of being calm then." (Pause.) "Calmer and calmer." (Pause.) "Calmer and calmer" (Pause.) "Don't hurry or worry. Just keep the idea of calmness pure and simple grow." (Pause.) "Calmer and calmer." (And continue on these lines for a few minutes or more.) "Now how do you feel?"
F. "Calmer."
Y. "But you could be calmer still?"
F. "Yes, a bit, I think."
Y. "We can come back to that then. But first are there any other feelings?"
F. "I am still worried."
Y. "What would be the opposite to that?"
F. (Pause) "Confident?"
Y. "Right. Then we will emphasise a feeling of confidence for a while. There is no need to force it, or even to believe it. As you will have seen with some of the earlier exercises, there need be no effort involved. Just focus on the feeling of confidence." (Pause.) "Just feeling more and more confident." (Pause.) "A pure feeling of confidence just washing away the feeling of worry." (Pause.) "Confidence." (And again this can be continued for a few minutes, slowly, with no hurry.)

This type of process, which will be slightly different for each person (because they may choose different words), can obviously be continued until we find that in response to questions about feelings the answer is in all ways conducive to relaxation.

You will then be able to form an idea of the extent, with a give person, this simple procedure leads first of all to feelings which commonly accompany relaxation and secondly how well they act to induce relaxation.

As a result of the three different approaches you will then have an idea of the relative value and consequences of three basic approaches: direct on the muscular system, via the imaginative system or via the emotional system.

If you are doing this work on yourself then you will thereby have developed some potentially very useful self-knowledge.

If you are a student of hypnotherapy you will have already have learned something of great importance: some of the reasons WHY certain things appear in inductions, and therefore a far greater ability to create inductions for yourself which will be far more tailor-made to a given client.

The other valuable habit that should arise out of this groundwork is that of asking the clients what they are thinking / feeling. This is something that I will return to many times. For reasons which probably stem from the old authoritarian - "you will do what I say" - ideas of hypnosis, older books tend to assume that the hypnotist is doing all the talking and the client should NOT be encouraged to say anything. There are times when, for particular reasons, this might be true, but for a far greater part of the time the value of knowing what is happening is enormously more important. In the above exercises, in which we are making no pretence that anyone is "hypnotised" and so it is fine to comment freely on what is happening, the habit of questioning and listening should develop more easily.

Once your mind starts to move in this way, of looking at the systems that you are deliberately activating to get the required switched-off response in the muscular system, you should feel motivated to explore other avenues. Here are some suggestions.

We have used the verbal system, but what about the musical subsystem of the auditory system of the brain? For many people the activation of this system by a particular kind of music leads to a relaxing effect. Note that the music might well not be a gentle flute. There are people who find a heavy drumbeat relaxing.

And what about the olfactory system - smell? For some people the activation of this system by certain smells can lead to relaxation: a fact used in aromatherapy.

And what about the sensory system? The touch of a human hand can in some people lead to relaxation. Aromatherapy again seems to make use of this connection, as do some other physical therapies. But why not generalise this? Just holding a hand can, at times, produce this effect. Are there some particular alternative touches - such as pet fur, or the touch of a furry toy - which would, in a particular person, lead to a relaxation of the muscular system?

And what about that somewhat higher system of mirth? I have sometimes had the most wonderful relaxing effect on people by activating a very strong sense of amusement leading to laughter.

And what about the sensation of rocking? Or of being in water? And ... see if anything else comes to mind.

"BUT" you might be saying, "I cannot provide all those things!" Do you expect me to provide a hundred kinds of music; to train in aromatherapy and fill my room with its scents, to have a rocking chair, furry toys and so on all to hand?"

And the answer is, "You can always conjure them up! IF they are significant triggers of relaxation in a person then there is a very good chance indeed that you can activate the appropriate system by the techniques we learned in Chapter 1. If someone responds to the touch of a pet, for example, then there is every chance that you can evoke the response via words or pictures, and you should have seen that rocking can be evoked with no expense other than a few minutes of time. Many people can hear a favourite piece of music in their minds, and so on."

That is the wonderful economy of hypnotic techniques. They need no High Tech or expensive equipment, and yet are wonderfully precise: we can pinpoint very particular parts of a person's mind and body and affect them in a way that NO surgeon, NO drugs can begin to match. The techniques of hypnotherapy are natural, powerful, precise, gentle and capable of being developed far further than they have to date once their true nature is understood.

Here are some more sample scripts which focus on activating one particular subsystem of the brain with a view to using it as a means of relaxing everything else.

Y. "I would like you to think about a piece of music that you have found very peaceful and relaxing."
F. "Perhaps The Magic Flute?" (If the answer is anything like "I can't" or "I don't have much time for music" then it is probably not worth bothering with this exercise. As I keep on emphasising, people's minds are very different. Some are well-stocked with music and some are nearly empty. You work with what is there, and do NOT suppose that everyone is identical.)
Y. "Fine. Now just spend a few minutes starting to call that music to mind. I do not want my voice to disturb with it, and so perhaps you could very gently move a finger in time with the music when you can hear it. Just tell me when you are starting to hear it."
F. "It is starting now."
Y. "Good. Just listen." (Pause.) "Just listen." (Pause.) Repeat this phrase softly every ten seconds or so, but always keeping time with the music so as not to jar - you can tell the time from the finger movement, of course."

After a few minutes you can interrupt."

Y. "Very good. How clear was the music? And how do you feel? Has the music helped you to relax?"
F. "It was a bit faint to start with but got clearer. Yes, I DO feel more relaxed."

On the other hand you might find that, in a particular person, one or other or both of the music and relaxation was weak.

Here is another fragment of script, working on the sense of humour.

Y. "I would like you, with closed eyes, to start to remember amusing things. For example, do you have a favourite comedian? "
F. "Yes. Charlie Chaplain."
Y. "You must have seen one of his old silent movies. I wonder if you can remember one or two scenes from his best films?"

In cases where this works you then simply wait until one or two scenes are recalled, usually with smiles or laughter. You need only give a little verbal encouragement. Then after a few minutes you can ask about relaxation. "There is nothing like laughter to relieve tensions, is there? How relaxed do you feel now?"

You might try the two approaches above on a few people to gain some experience of how they work, and should find the usual Standard Finding. If you have the time and inclination, you might then work out for yourself how you might try out other approaches outlined above: scents, sensations of rocking in a swing? or boat?, touch - of fur? water? hand? and so on.

At this stage you may be thinking that this is all far too complicated. Why is there not some one simple way of doing hypnosis? There are two ways of answering this. The first is to say that you can try to use one simple approach on everyone to relax them. Some hypnotists and hypnotherapists do just that. They have their fixed scripts and they fit people to their scripts. At times this works beautifully. But at other times it fails totally. It is a bit like going to buy clothes in a shop with a limited range of sizes and styles. Some people will be lucky in both. But others may find nothing that either fits or suits them at all.

The second way of replying is that when you are faced with a particular person, you will not be using everything that you have learned, only a part, which simplifies things. Some quite simple questions will serve to give you a very good idea of what approaches are likely to be most effective and you can then improvise a script based on what you have heard.

For example, suppose someone loves boats and music, hates animals and has no sense of smell or humour then you can at once eliminate any references to scents or smells from your relaxation script but might go a long way with activating a sense of the rocking of a boat and some favourite music. Likewise if someone is mad about flowers, but has little imagination or interest in much else then you would naturally start a script on the lines of thinking simply of sitting in a summer's garden after spending happy hours working there, drinking in their colour and scent and sinking into a bee-drowsy dream. This will tend to produce the desired response in the subject.

So, in short, the approach that you are learning here gives you flexibility; it enables you to personalise your approach and it helps you to understand what you are doing when you use a given script.

The scripts that we have used above can be called simple scripts because they focus tightly on using one specific system to produce a required change. By contrast most scripts that you will find in other books are compound or complex scripts, which is to say that they aim to produce a specific change by using a variety of different systems.

As a final exercise I would like you to read the following compound script which is designed to relax. Being compound it is more like those you will find elsewhere. Each paragraph is based primarily on one particular system, but I will in each case introduce three words or phrases that could activate other systems. You should not find it too hard to identify, for each paragraph, the dominant system being worked on, and also the three exceptions. The answers, as I see them, can be found at the end of the chapter.

1. Primary mode: simple verbal suggestion of relaxation. Now you are going to discover that you can relax. (Pause.) All you need to do is to listen to me and you will relax. (Pause.) Listen to my voice, it is relaxing. (Pause.) My voice will gradually make you more and more relaxed and peaceful. (Pause.) Your muscles will respond without you having to do anything. (Pause.) Just listen to my relaxing voice. (Pause.) You will feel quite happy. (Pause.) More and more relaxed and calm. (Pause.) It will be better than being on holiday in the most luxurious resort. (Pause.) Because you will be totally relaxed and at peace. (Pause.) All tension will go. (Pause.) Your muscles will relax and be at rest. (Pause.) And your skin will relax until it is as smooth as silk. (Pause.) Relaxed, restful and at peace.

2. Primary mode: activation of visual system with imagery of relaxing scene. Next I would like you to imagine yourself lying in a boat which is drifting peacefully on a river. (Pause.) You are lying on soft cushions. (Pause.) The sky is blue with perhaps a few small white clouds. (Pause.) Someone else is taking care of the steering. (Pause.) On either side you can see green fields with a few bushes (Pause.) And perhaps a few cows or sheep. (Pause.) You are able to relax completely as you drift along. (Pause.) There are some rushes waving gently beside the water's edge. (Pause.) And you will feel the boat is rocking gently with them. (Pause.) A little ahead there are a few ducks drifting along as well. (Pause.) And you might just see a few lazy trout deep in the river.

3. Primary mode: senses of touch. You can trail your hand in the cool water. (Pause.) The water caresses your skin. (Pause.) It slides like silk giving a wonderful cool, clean feeling. (Pause.) You can see the little ripples your hand makes as it trails alongside. (Pause.) And the touch of the water is matched by a gentle caress of a breeze on your brow. (Pause.) The whole day is so relaxing. (Pause.) The very sunshine warms you deeply. (Pause.) You can feel the warmth sinking into your whole body. (Pause.) And the rocking of the boat lulls you into a deeper and deeper peace. (Pause.) You can hear the gentle lapping of the waves on the side of the boat. (Pause.) And feel their gentle touch on your hand (Pause.)

4. Primary mode: activate emotions associated with peace and relaxation. The boat is now drifting under the branches of overhanging trees. (Pause.) And they are giving you a deep sense of inner peace. (Pause.) The trees and river together make you feel safe and cared for. (Pause.) Feelings of love of nature are growing deep within you. (Pause.) There is a growing peace. A growing happiness. (Pause.) The trees are murmuring of peace. (Pause.) You can feel the water washing away all stains, all pains. (Pause.) You can feel an inner peace, and inner joy. (Pause.) With every minute feelings of greater and greater inner goodness, peace, love and joy are filling you. (Pause.) You are reaching the Deep Centre of all Good Feelings.

My father-in-law, Stanley Yates, who was a hypnotherapist before me, used a script rather like the above for nearly all his clients. He also had the advantage of one of those deep, warm, brown and velvet voices that enhanced the effect of all he said. And he seemed to get very good results with many clients by using this one approach to start each session. If you are a beginner there is a lot to be said for working with a few compound scripts like this as a foundation. Because we have touched most of the bases - we have used four of the most likely systems to encourage the switching off of the muscular system - we are almost certain to have achieved our end. But as you become more experienced and professional you should acquire more flexibility and the ability to tune your approach more precisely to each client. (There could be the occasional person who has a fear of water, suffers from hay-fever in the country, has a strong dislike of the word "peace" or just feels very uncomfortable with closed eyes in public!)

A simple way to speed up relaxation.

In the above we have seen various direct ways of producing a relaxed, switched off state. If you are dealing with a very anxious or nervous person then there is a good chance that these ways will not work.

It is therefore often an excellent idea to prepare the ground by means of a simple and obvious step first.

To see why it works you need only recall that the times when it is most easy to let your muscles relax is when they are demanding it: after exhausting exercise. So you can try out the following on yourself or a friend.

Start by sitting comfortably then raise your legs and arms to a horizontal position and hold them there for as long as you can.

After a while you should notice that the breathing will increase to cope with the demands the muscles are making, and the heart rate will also rise. The muscles start to feel tired, then more tired, and then perhaps to shake, and finally they are let go and the legs or arms are let fall. The exercise can be continued until both sets of limbs fall.

Then, with no further effort or suggestion or action, the limbs will automatically become very relaxed simply from fatigue.

If you then use any of the above schemes to enhance relaxation you should find that they will work much more quickly and effectively.

Of course there is nothing magical about the exercise I have suggested. Any exercise will have a similar effect. I have chosen it for convenience and because it uses the major muscle groups. A full work out would be even better, but is, of course, harder to arrange.

In this chapter we have laid a foundation for useful starting points in hypnosis: how to induce complete muscular relaxation. In a later chapter we will see why this is often important. In brief it is because this change generally leads to the inactivation of another important internal mental system: that of resistance to suggestion.

You will have explored the process of inactivating the muscular system via the verbal, visual, emotional, musical, humorous systems, and perhaps some others. Consequently you should be aware of the fact that using the systems approach you will be able to tailor your approach to each particular person. Anyone who has merely read the chapter without exploring the ideas in practice should have begun to see rather clearly the way in which hypnotic procedures are very firmly grounded in simple and even everyday experiences.

For a final exercise in this chapter it is worth sitting down and taking a theme of your own and writing down a compound script that you feel comfortable with. Then try it out on a few other people and ask for their comments and responses.

Analysis of the compound script above.

1. Primarily this paragraph is verbal. We are using just simple words such as "relaxed", "peace", and "rest". The departures from this are a) the use of the word "happy" which is more clearly designed to activate an emotion b) "holiday in the most luxurious resort" which is likely to conjure up an image or memory and c) "smooth as silk" which could arouse the tactile system.

2. Primarily this paragraph aims at activating strong visual images of the boat journey. The main exceptions are the words a) "lying on soft cushions" which are more likely to arouse a sensation than a picture b) "relax completely" is a verbal rather than visual cue, c) "feel the boat rocking" evokes a sensory rather than a visual response.

3. This primarily aims at activating the sense of touch, loosely including sensations of heat and motion. If you decided (correctly) that sensations of touch, temperature and orientation (rocking) are really different, though similar, systems, then award yourself extra points! The main exceptional phrases are a) "see the ripples" which is likely to arouse the visual system, b) "day is so relaxing" is purely verbal c) "hear the gentle lapping" should arouse the auditory system.

4. This paragraph is aimed at evoking a certain class of feelings. The sentences that stand out are a) the scene of the boat drifting under branches, which is visual, b) the word "murmuring" suggests an auditory stimulus and c) "feel the water washing..." may arouse the sensory system rather than the emotional one directly.

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Chapter 3. The Visual Imagination.

We explore the visual imagination, which is enormously rich and varied. This is a tool much used in hypnosis and so it is valuable to explore its natural processes in many people, including yourself.

You may agree that one of the main functions you have when helping another to explore his or her imagination is in helping to maintain focus, primarily by asking questions.

The question of what kind of meaning such an exploration gives is left open. There are a wide variety of interpretation schemes which you will find: I simply urge you to keep at least TWO such possibilities in mind so that you are less likely to jump to unjustifiable conclusions. Sometimes the asking of questions will help to resolve a conflict between two interpretations.

The material you find is seldom strange by the standard of dreams. This chapter can also be seen as enabling waking dreams.

In this chapter I will be asking you to explore another aspect of the way in which the mind works. This aspect is one that is of value and importance in many aspects of hypnotherapy and psychotherapy. It is the amazing richness of the visual imagination in most people.

As in the previous chapters we will be exploring what can happen "cold" - without any inductions or anything that looks like "hypnosis".

All I will be asking you to do is to work with a number of people on the lines that will be indicated. If anything unusual happens I suggest that it is merely unusual to you: something that you have not explored before.

The starting point in all cases is simply, "Sit (or lie) comfortably and close your eyes."

There are a number of approaches that can then be taken. To give you an idea of what we are aiming at, I will give an example of the sort of thing that can happen: but each person is different and the example is not one that will be repeated exactly by anyone.

Y. "I want you just to imagine that you are walking along some path. It could be anywhere, real or imaginary. All I want you to do is slowly to become aware of your feet and a small amount of path around them. Just let me know when the picture becomes clearish."
F. (After about half a minute.) "I am on a sandy beach. Nothing on my feet. My feet are small."
Y. "Fine. Is there anyone else around?"
F. (Pause.) "No, not near anyway."
Y. "Tell me more about the beach."
F. "Enormous. Flat and open. The sea is out."
Y. "And how do you feel?"
F. "Alone."
Y. "How old are you?
F. "About 10."
Y. "Any idea why you are here alone?"
F. (Pause.) "No."
Y. "Why not walk to where you feel like going?"
F. "OK."
Y. "So, which way are you going?"
F. "There is a cave over there."
Y. "That sounds good. Tell me when you get there, unless something stops you."
F. (After a delay but less of a delay than it would take in real time to walk to the cave.) "I am at the cave now."
Y. "Have you been there before?"
F. "I am not sure."
Y. "Do you want to go in?"
F. "Yes, I think so."
Y. "What can you see?"
F. "A fire."
Y. "Is there anyone there?"
F. "Yes. An old woman."
Y. "Do you like her?"
F. "Yes."
Y. "Is she saying anything to you?"
F. "She wants me to sit by her."
Y. "That's fine. Why not sit by here and I will be quiet for a bit to leave you two together. Just tell me afterwards what happened."

(There might be a pause for five minutes or so, then your friend opens her eyes and talks freely.)

F. "That was fascinating. At first I felt very uncertain in the cave. It was rather dark. But then I had a deep sense of peace. I came to see that the old woman was my grandmother. She died when I was in my early teens. But I used to love going to stay with her. She did not say much to me in the cave - it changed after a bit to being her house and I just had some cakes that she made me. But it felt very good."

That is an example, not taken from a particular client, but with broad features which are typical of many. Now I want to see what this might teach us.

Question 1. What is YOUR role in that?

I suggest that primarily it is to help your friend to keep her mind focussed on the images. If you try to do it yourself you will find that your mind can slip away for a number of reasons. One is that there is little to stop your mind wandering back into everyday preoccupations. Another is boredom: there would not be enough interest in the beach scene in itself to hold your interest. Another is a slight emotional resistance: you might not have liked the initial "alone" feeling, and it would have tempted you away immediately. Another might be sleep: the scenes have a certain dreamlike quality and this in itself, if you are rather tired, can lead you to drop off. Finally you might find the scene very interesting but that can activate a rather analytic or critical part of the mind which can then drown the more fluid part of the mind that is creating the pictures.

By being there with your friend you are providing a gentle guidance to prevent their attention wandering off the rather narrow pathway between the above obstacles and pitfalls.

If you wish to check my conclusion, then by all means ask your friend to sit in the same chair for the same length of time with her eyes closed, and you will sit in the same place reading a book. My prediction is that under those circumstances her mind will wander into more everyday channels. Will I be right?

Question 2. How do you keep her (his) mind on the images?

In the above example attention was retained almost entirely by asking questions. On the whole they are non-directive ones. There is little or no attempt to force the friend's mind into certain channels. You might compare this with the authoritative approach that can be associated with some forms of hypnosis - particularly in "entertainment". Directive suggestions will be explored in the next chapter.

Question 3. Is there any significance or meaning in what the friend saw?

It does not take much imagination to discover certain possibilities about the friend. But with an eye to the use of such things in therapy I would emphasise that there is a big difference between a possibility and a certainty and it will be necessary to check the possibilities out.

Here are just a few possibilities that some people might see in the above short account.

a1) The opening scene suggests that she feels alone in life.

a2) But it could be that she once felt alone in life.

a3) It could just be that she has recently read or seen something on these lines.

a4) It could be that she is reliving something that happened in a "past life". It is a past-life regression.

a5) It could be that she has become telepathically aware of an experience that someone else (dead or alive) is having or has had.

a6) The whole thing is meaningless - random "noise" in the electrical machine that is the brain.

b1) The presence of the grandmother suggests that she misses a certain kind of love in her life at present.

b2) But it could be that she is happy now but an early loss of her grandmother needs healing still.

b3) It could be that the grandmother represents some other person in her life.

c1) The grandmother may be simply created by memory.

c2) She might be created by desire and be little like the real one.

c3) It might be that the friend is in actual communication with the spirit of her dead grandmother.

c4) The grandmother is a Spirit Guide in the tradition of the Shamans.

d1) The cave might be a real one from her past.

d2) It might be a symbol representing the womb.

d3) It might represent the grave her real grandmother is in.

d4) It may symbolise her subconscious mind.

You may well feel that some of these explanations are far fetched. But you might as well get used to the fact that there are people in the field who will find all these meanings and others in the visualisations. Some may claim a deep ability to interpret the content on the assumption that many items are symbolic of hidden problems or attitudes. Others may proudly claim special abilities to enable past-life regression, or a shamanic ability to put someone in spirit contact with a dead person. But I would like you to discover that the kind of experience described above can be obtained in many people with no more effort than that outlined above. But as always, it will be in accord with our Standard Finding: it takes time and varies a lot from person to person. It is also likely slowly to get better with practice.

I have listed the alternatives above for a special reason. It has to do with an essential of clear thinking if you ever start trying to analyse the results of such explorations. It is to get into the habit of always having in mind at least two different interpretations of everything. This will stop you jumping to conclusions. Jumping to conclusions is one of the besetting weaknesses of the human mind. We all prefer certainty to uncertainly. It is therefore natural to want to seize on the first possible idea and make that True. We then tend to fit our observations to our idea, and not sanely adjust our ideas to the observations.

If the visualisations provided by a certain person are open to different interpretations then it can at times be possible to ask questions which will distinguish between them. For example, your friend can later be asked if the beach was one from memory or an invented one. If the former then any interpretations in terms of past lives or entering into someone else's experience can be thrown away.

Some of our uncertainties can be resolved simply by asking questions in that normal way. Others can be resolved by asking more detailed questions of the friend while she is visualising. But at times you may find that there remains no way of clearly distinguishing between two possibilities and at other times both can be true.

This is not a place to go further into such matters. All I would like you to discover is that the phenomena are quite accessible. They are almost as frequent and far more accessible than dreams. You should find, indeed, that they have a great family similarity with dreams. There is the same lack of reality testing. All sorts of unusual things can happen without causing surprise. There is a mix of usual and unusual, of past and present.

Indeed if your friend told someone else about her experience above, with no reference to you or the conditions under which it was obtained, then it would certainly be taken as a dream.

It is not surprising if we dream about people who have died. We may commonly dream about landscapes that are partly familiar and partly not. It is quite natural in a dream to find a scene changing from a cave to a house without having to walk from one to the other.

So, as yet another way of looking at things, you might like to see what has happened as simply giving your friend an opportunity to have a waking dream: a dream that she is more conscious of than is usual. The dreaming system of her mind is active, but without the experience of sleep. What have been relaxed are conscious control and some reality testing. But there is still conscious awareness of you, and perhaps of other sounds in the room and sensations in the body.

Seen in this way the phenomenon is just another example of the way in which hypnotic techniques deal with the switching on and off various subsystems of the mind. This is my preferred way of viewing it. It does not answer questions such as, "What is happening in dreams?" "Is a dream a window on the subconscious?" "Is dreaming no more than mental housekeeping?" All the above interpretations can be applied to sleeping or waking dreams. But it does give a simple way of viewing this kind of "hypnotic" phenomenon in a way consistent with the way I have treated others. It involves a switching off - of conscious control and reality testing - and a switching on or focussing - of the dreaming system.

The most useful thing that you can do now is to go away and try out this form of exploration as many times as you can, and with as many people. If you are a student on a course then it can be useful to make a record of what you find.

Here are just a few extra pointers of ways to get things going in the first place. (Starting is usually the hardest thing.) Do not expect to get exactly the responses I give - these are only examples drawn from a mixture of clients that I have known over the years.

Example 1. Starting from whatever is visible with closed eyes.

Y. "With your eyes closed you may see simply a colour. Black, grey or pink. Everyone is different. Just keep your eyes fixed on this and after a while you will see changes. What can you see?"
F. "Mainly grey, with blotches."
Y. "Just keep watching. After a while you will find that you can see something through that mistiness."
F. (After a while.) "There was a cheese sandwich flying by!"
Y. "Fine. Keep watching. Something else will happen soon."
F. "There are swirling colours now."
Y. "You can enjoy them. Tell me if anything new comes."
F. (After a minute or so.) "There are some trees. And nearby there is a big house."
Y. "Have you been here before?"
F. "No."
Y. "Which would you like to explore first?"
F. "The house."
Y. "OK. Tell me about it."
F. "Large. Old. Oak door. Steps up to it."

By this stage the process is well under way and you may have a happy half hour or so exploring a house that neither of you has ever seen before.

Of course we have no control over the first thing to appear. The main thing is to build on whatever happens.

Example 2. Starting with a house.

I have found that houses quite often feature and so you might try starting at the point where we left the previous example.

Y. "I want you to let your mind roam over houses. They can be old or new. They can be big or small; castles or cottages. Ones you have seen and ones you have never seen. After a while one will seem somehow more interesting than the rest. I want you to tell me once that happens."
F. (After a minute or so.) "I am in front of a large house."
Y. "Is the front door open?"
F. "Yes."
Y. "How about going in and exploring?"
F. "OK."
Y. "What can you see?"
F. "There is a large hall. Pictures on the wall. A large staircase. Y. "Are there any signs of people?"
F. "Someone lives here. I can't see anyone."

And then you allow him or her slowly to explore the place room by room. I tend to leave no more than about half a minute between questions to keep myself in the picture and prevent my client's mind from wandering. But that is a guide. I have no reason to suppose that more or less would make things less effective. With a client well into a scene I have at times left things for five minutes or more, as indicated at the end of the first example.

Example 3. Starting with a blank TV or film screen.

Y "I want you to picture as well as you can a blank screen: TV or video or cinema. Tell me when you can."
F. (Pause.) "Fine."
Y. "Is it TV or what?"
F. "Yes. TV."
Y. "OK. Now imagining that it has just been switched on, wait and see what programme will appear."
F. "It's Friends."
Y. "Great. tell me what is happening."
F. "Well, it is the one where ....."

After allowing them to enter into that programme for a while, you later introduce the following line:

Y. "Now how about changing channels? There may be one which features YOU in it."
F. (After a pause.) "Yes, here it is. I am a soldier."
Y. "Who is with you?"
F. "Um."
Y. "Can you see anyone?"
F. "Only bodies. Dead."
Y. "Do you know them?"

And the exploration can continue from there.

Example 4. Starting with an actual memory.

Y. "I want you to remember something - anything - from your past."
F. "OK. I can remember a day on holiday a few years ago. I was sailing."
Y. "Were you alone?"
F. "No, with some friends."
Y. "How was it?"
F. "There was a storm. We nearly drowned."
Y. (After getting some description of the time.) "Now if it had been a story, things would have been even more dramatic. I wonder if you can imagine it as a story, or a film. There may be other people with you. The boat could be different. And so on."
F. "OK. It is a whaler. "
Y. "Right. Picture that and then tell me what happened next."
F. "I can see the harpoonist ..."

Example 6. Starting with a recent dream.

Y. "Did you dream last night?"
F. "Yes."
Y. "What was the dream?"
F. "Um. It was something to do with the war. Oh, yes. I was an officer."
Y. "Don't use any effort but just let the pictures back into your mind slowly. What is your uniform like?"
F. "Black."
Y. "And where are you?"
F. "In my office."
Y. "By yourself?"
F. "Yes."
Y. "What are you doing?"