You pull up outside your house, turn off the engine, reach for your keys, and freeze. How did I get here? The last thing you remember is the roundabout by the gas station. After that, nothing. Twenty minutes of driving, gone like a sock in the dryer.
You stopped at the red lights, though. You let someone merge, swung around a garbage truck and signaled where you were supposed to. Nobody honked. You just weren’t entirely there for it.
Your mind was busy winning an argument with a coworker and planning dinner. The driving was left to your body and some quiet, reliable part of you.
That was a trance. Probably not your first one today, either.
Highway Hypnosis
The experience in the car has an official name: highway hypnosis. Psychologist G. W. Williams of Rutgers University coined it in 1963 in an article for a scholarly journal of clinical and experimental hypnosis. He described drivers who handle complex maneuvers safely in a state resembling naturally occurring hypnosis and afterward remember nothing of the trip.
He wasn’t the first to notice. A text from 1921 already mentions “road hypnotism,” a trance brought on by staring at one spot on the road, and in 1929 Walter Miles published a study called Sleeping with the Eyes Open.
Before anyone gets ideas: your body coping with part of a drive on its own doesn’t make it a good idea. Never listen to a guided trance while driving or doing anything else that needs your full attention.
Where Else It Happens
Milton Erickson, one of the most influential hypnotherapists of the 20th century, is often credited with the idea that trance is an everyday experience. You won’t find it in one tidy quote, but his students built a whole way of working on it.
Once you start looking, it’s all over your day:
- You get absorbed in a book, look up, and it’s dark outside.
- You cry at a film over someone who never existed.
- You stare out of a train window with no idea what you were thinking about.
- Your body nods along in a meeting while your mind is at the beach.
- You’re in the shower and can’t remember if you’ve washed your hair. So you wash it again, to be safe.
Your brain can’t hold sharp focus all day, so it takes little breaks.
Erickson’s student Stephen Gilligan names what the moments share: absorption, openness and flow, when things seem to happen on their own. Your attention spreads out instead of narrowing the way it does over a tax return, and your body loosens.
Psychologists even measure how easily it happens. The Tellegen Absorption Scale, from the 1970s, asks how often you get lost in music, a sunset or your own imagination. People vary a lot. Some sink into a film within seconds; others hear every cough in the cinema. Almost nobody scores zero.
Who’s Driving
Here’s the simplest description of trance I know, and it comes from the car: your conscious mind isn’t doing the driving. The part of you that plans, calculates, judges and comments on everything lets go of the wheel for a while.
Letting go of the wheel doesn’t mean getting out of the car. You hear what’s going on around you and you know where you are. You can open your eyes, stretch and go make tea whenever you like. It just doesn’t feel necessary.
Why would you let go on purpose? Because a road opens that’s usually closed. The conscious mind is smart but narrow and can only juggle a few things at once. The unconscious holds far more: experience, skills, the body, how to drive a car without thinking about it. When the conscious mind steps back a little, the two can work together.
Films like to paint the unconscious as a dark basement full of monsters. I’d drop that picture. It’s closer to the reliable part of you that got you home this morning. It does have one quirk: it doesn’t respond well to force. You can’t push yourself into a trance, any more than you can force yourself to fall asleep. You can make room for it and let it come.
Chickens on Stage
If “hypnosis” makes you think of a pendulum and a volunteer clucking on stage, you’re in good company. Three worries come up again and again.
“Hypnosis is just a stage act.“ Psychologist Graham Wagstaff and other proponents of sociocognitive theories explain stage hypnosis soberly: people on stage mostly do what the role expects of them. They work out what they’re supposed to perform, genuinely try to experience it, and act out the rest where that fails. Many say afterward that it felt more like playing a part than like deep trance. It makes a good show, and it feeds the odd idea that one person can have another in their power. Honestly, I think stage hypnosis has done more to put people off trance than anything else.
“In a trance, I’ll lose control.“ Older ideas about hypnosis really were about power: one person produces the trance, the other obeys. Today’s approaches work with you. A trance you play for yourself isn’t run by a stranger. The voice suggests a direction, and you decide whether to follow it. If you don’t like where a passage is heading, you let it go by.
“Someone will make me do something I don’t want to do.“ On this the expert sources agree remarkably well: hypnosis doesn’t take over your will. People turn down suggestions that go against their values, ethics or safety.
You Already Know How
There’s nothing foreign to learn here. You go into trance every day, in the car, over a book, in the shower. So far it has happened by accident. A conscious trance is the same state, except you pick the time, the place and where your attention goes.
A guided trance might take you to slower breathing, to rest, or to the idea you spent all afternoon trying to concentrate your way into. Nobody can promise that, and nothing has to happen.
If you feel a bit silly for the first few minutes, lying there with a voice in your headphones, that’s fine. Your conscious mind is holding the wheel a little longer, checking that everything is safe.