by cardigan » August 18th, 2005, 12:35 pm
The simple methods that you mention - a handshake or a swinging watch are always accompanied by induction or deepening - mostly done vocally. The handshake method is a physical variation of the confusion technique - as far as I've heard. You stimulate several points of the hand, fingers etc. almost at once - giving them an overload of stimuli. This takes them by surprise. At this stage they readily accept the "sleep"-command. Quite a lot of the quick inductions, that are used on stage involve taking the subject by surprise, and then saying sleep at the right time.
The coolest form of hypnosis, IMHO, is the Milton Erickson or NLP method, where you use different language patterns in a seemingly innocent conversation. Ericksson would tell his subjects an innocent anecdote, and at some point the subject would be in trance - taken completely by surprise.
P.S.: I'm not an NLP practitioner myself, but would like to be! :wink: