On Writing and Hypnosis

A Possible Experiment

We spent an afternoon making each other faint.

Me and three or four teenage friends.

Here’s how we did it (perhaps you already know).

We’d hyperventilate for half a minute, short fast breaths, then someone — suddenly from behind — would grab us round the waist and force the last air out of our lungs.

For a second we’d lose consciousness.

It was a silly, risky thing to mess around with.

We were at one of our houses, the parents out.

After the fainting, we tried hypnosis, which I’d read about in a book borrowed from the library and kept hidden from my parents.

I knew the theory and wanted to see if it worked.

It worked.

I spoke softly, had my friend imagine he was sinking through the floor, and then further and further down into the restful earth. And I slowly counted down from ten to one. And at the end, he wasn’t faking — he was fairly deeply under.

I remember we were respectful. We asked him some questions about what he could see. I think we may have been trying past life regression.

Before he woke up, I gave him a word to take him back to the same knockout level of trance.

I counted back from one to ten, and he was back in the room. He said he couldn’t remember anything. Then I tested the word, and it worked. Bing - he was out again.

Then I brought him back.

Someone tried to hypnotise me, but I recall being very resistant. I don’t think I ever went completely under.

For some reason, we lost interest after this one go. We’d proved it worked.

I returned the book to the library.

Although I was more than a bit arrogant, I didn’t believe myself immune to suggestion. In fact, I remained very curious about what I might discover, if I were to be very deeply hypnotized.

However, I didn’t want anyone else — not even a professional hypnotist — to learn whatever awful adolescent secrets I might come out with.

That remained the case.

I never smoked, so never needed hypnotherapy to help me quit.

But over the years since, I’ve become a little obsessed with the idea of an experiment I will probably never take part in.

My idea is to find out how much of a finished work of fiction exists in the writer’s mind at the first moment they think of it — or as soon as possible after.

Let’s say that there are ideal conditions —

I’m working at home, and something strikes me as a possibility for a story. I note down a few words — a title or perhaps an opening sentence.

After this, and nothing else, I call the hypnotist — who happens to live next door — and they come straight round.

They know what’s to happen, because we’ve planned it.

I sit in a comfortable armchair, and they put me deeply under — counting down from ten to on — sinking me into the centre of the earth — whatever works, and I’m sure it would.

They then ask me to dictate the whole of the story I have not yet written — the story that, as far as anyone knows, is only as a couple of notes.

But does it already pre-exist? Is it really in my head, finished, word perfect, just waiting for me to go through the drafting process, which is really an excavation?

I’ve heard some writers talk about what they do exactly as if they were archaeologists conducting a dig and unearthing a perfect Roman mosaic floor.

The picture is there, not a tile missing, all that’s necessary to reveal it is to remove the dead earth.

The novelist Graham Swift, author of Waterland and Last Orders, used this exact metaphor at a reading I attended in Oxford.

I think this is bullshit, and I’d hope the Paused Writing Hypno-Experiment — if done enough times on enough writers — would prove it so.

My hunch is that, at the point of an idea’s coming into existence, only a very little of it remains subconscious, and that remains scrappy and un-brought-together.

Rather than a completed story, it’s the potential shape of the space where a story might be.

If it’s a mosaic, some of it exists in scattered tiles of bright red and blue but most of it is still raw materials — clay that needs digging, admixing, shaping, firing, painting, glazing, refiring.

If a writer, such as Graham Swift, needs to tell themselves that they’re merely a late arriving archaeologist, rather than an entirely present labourer, potter, artist and floor tiler — if they find believing their whole novel is already under there a necessary self-deception, I have no problem with that.

What works works.

But it does seem to take pretty much all the art out of art.

The danger with this experiment, and the reason I’ve avoided trying to arrange it, by moving in next door to a hypnotist, is that the observation might change the outcome.

I was always superstitious about messing with my brain — one of the reasons I resisted being hypnotised by my friends that afternoon, and generally avoided drugs in the following years.

If there was a good story to be written, however that happened, I wanted to write it, not thwart it with snooping.

Ideally, with the next-door hypnotist, I would have the idea for a reasonably good story, but not one I minded losing — if shining bright sunlight on it made it instantly fade.

I’m not sure the experiment would be genuine with only a half-hearted commitment from the writer.

And so, along with those other thoughts of writing a story live, in public, online, streaming every moment, and of drafting a whole novella in 24 hours, and of being MRI-scanned as I wrote a poem, the Interrupted Writing Hypno-Experiment is likely to remain unperformed.

By me, at least.

Volunteers? Hypnotists?

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash