the simplest form of trance

"i thought it wasn't real!"
"it's real to the mind."

from Matrix, the movie

Hypnosis (as we know it) is a term derived from the greek hypnos which means (or meant at some point) simply sleep.

the term was coined some years ago (one and a half centuries, give or take a few) by some physician who was following the steps defined by a mr Mesmer.

but who cares about that?

i started thinking about this post while coming back from today's diving, as i noticed the following:
after a day of diving i find myself both relaxed and tired; this means that usually sometimes on the way back i fall asleep; today though, i didn't want to do it.

since i was still tired, i closed my eyes and started imagining; i don't remember at the moment what it was i was imagining ( and no, it wasn't sex you single-minded dolt :) ), but i do know i lost track of the real world;

as i came back some twenty minutes later i realized that i hadn't been asleep and i hadn't been really awake either; the music in the car had kept on running and i had kept on hearing it all along; i was conscious during that time, but not really awake ...

... and that is the simplest form of trance; call it self-hypnosis if you like.

it's not the first time i went through it either: i've done it before just to avoid getting bored ...

once in highschool i did this during a break for a few minutes and remembered a park i used to go in as a kid; when i 'came back' i could still smell the leaves from that park and could almost hear them;

this is a natural form of trance; there are LD techniques that use the same setup, asking one to wake up after six hours of sleep:

this way the body is still tired (since it needs eight hours of sleep) but the mind can remain awake (since the mind only requires six hours of rest).

this leads to the same situation: mind awake, body tired.

maybe i should play with this some more, see where it leads, should it lead to anything (though i'm not too keen of waking up after six hours of sleep just to play with my mind :( ).

if i get anywhere i probably won't be able to resist blogging about it.

see you around people!