Hypnosis has been around since the dawn of time. We know that the Egyptians used a form of hypnosis but the earliest written texts dates back to Avicenna, who was an 8th Century Persian philosopher who documented the difference between hypnosis and sleep.

Franz Anton Mesmer is the name that people coin to hypnosis, in the form of Mesmerism, but Mesmer thought that by passing a magnet over the skin he could stop bleeding, but later found that a stick would do the same.

The 18th Century was a big time in the discovery of hypnosis with Mesmer and James Braid (who coined hypnosis as nervous sleep); James Esdaile who was a surgeon who operated on people in his “Mesmeric coma”; Ivan Petrovich Pavlov for his “classical conditioning” and Sigmund Freud for his early dappling with hypnosis before discovering psychoanalysis.

The 20th Century brought us the greats like Milton H Erickson, who hypnotised people whilst in a mild hypnotic state himself and Dave Elman, who as a showman created rapid techniques to induce a deep hypnotic state.

Walter Sichort was a children’s entertainer that discovered a deeper state of hypnosis and after his death, James Ramey repackaged into a commercial training course called Ultra Depth.

Hypnosis itself is a relaxing state of altered consciousness, where the conscious is distracted so the subconscious can be reprogrammed to hand patterns differently so a client can have the responses to an action changed so they either lose the pattern they have learnt and learn a new and better pattern or change the pattern to have a better outcome.

The deeper the state, the better the outcome can be. There is a technique that was trialled in Soviet Russia where a hypnotist took some clients into a regressed child state and asked the superconscious mind to give that “child” the gift of musical talents and when the client awoke, they could play a musical instrument perfectly that they previously were unable to play.