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suggestions, and you can easily see through his ways of getting you to do something; on the other hand you think to yourself: ‘I might as well go along with it for the sake of the experiment.’ So the feeling is ‘Shall I or shan't I?’, and this feeling persists throughout. Clever therapists use this state of slight confusion, which we could call ‘parallel awareness’, to seed powerful therapeutic ideas into the subconscious, while the conscious is preoccupied with the confusion. In a different context – he was at a spiritist séance – the Irish poet W.B. Yeats described the feeling perfectly. He found that his hands and shoulders were twitching: ‘I could easily have stopped them,’ he later wrote, ‘but I had never heard of such a thing and was curious.’
    From the outside, the behaviour of a hypnotized person may be no different from that of a person in a normal state. From the inside, though, interesting things are going on. The most usual feelings are: relaxation; diminished awareness of outer events and increased immersion in an inner world; a general feeling that one's psychic processes have somehow been extended, despite a narrowing of focus; boredom (a decrease in associative activity), leading to increased vividness or forcefulness or interest of certain systems of ideas, particularly those introduced by the hypnotist; relative immobilization and fixation on a single sensory experience (e.g. the rhythm of the hypnotist's voice, which may become depersonalized from the hypnotist herself ); time-distortion and partial amnesia, so that a half hour passes like five seconds; a dream-like effortless flux of experience; a dream-like illogicality (‘trance logic’), so that anomalous situations are taken for granted. If you were to ask someone in a deep trance what she was thinking, she might well answer: ‘Nothing.’ In fact, she is listening, waiting for the next suggestion from the hypnotist.
Who Can Be Hypnotized?
    The American hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to say that if someone was not hypnotized, that was a failure of the hypnotist, because everyone is susceptible. Who can resist the infectious enthusiasm of a crowd? Who is not stirred by martial music? Try watching a gripping thriller on TV and not tensing up and sitting on the edge of your seat. We like to conform and to be accepted by others. We don't like internal or external conflict. All these are pressures that make us suggestible. Hypnosis is defined by some as a state of heightened suggestibility. Even if this is inadequate as a full definition, it is certainly true that heightened suggestibility is a vital component. Since we are all suggestible, we are all susceptible to hypnosis.
    But we are not all susceptible to the same degree. In the Introduction, I said that there were three key components of hypnosis: absorption (or focal attention), dissociation and suggestibility. ‘Highs’ – highly hypnotizable people – are simply those who are good at all three of these things. The first faculty, the ability to be absorbed or imaginatively involved in tasks, is interesting. It means – and this is important – that hypnotizable people are those who are good at deploying their attention. We can all be put into a light trance, but in about 10 per cent of cases it would take so many repeated attempts to do so that it is just not worth the effort, and so we can say that for all practical purposes about 10 per cent of the population are unhypnotizable. About 30 per cent can readily enter a light trance; about 35 per cent can go into a medium trance; and about 25 per cent can go into a deep trance (though others place this figure as low as 5 per cent).
    Academics make use of ‘susceptibility scales’, multi-question tests to assess hypnotizability by both objective and subjective standards. I know of eighteen of these scales (the Stanford Hypnotic