Trance Indicators & Signs of Trance

Trance state behaviours include:

• An increase in suggestibility & responsiveness
• Increased tolerance to pain
• Hallucinations
• Immobility
• Blinking stops
• Ability to change body temperature
• Ability to build muscle using the imagination
• Ability to alter blood pressure
• Ability to change mood
• Ability to make behaviours instinctive
• Altering immune system activity
• Accelerated healing
• Amnesia

Before learning how to induce a trance in yourself and others it is important to know what to look out for. If you don’t know what to look for to tell when someone is in a trance you wouldn’t know when they are hypnotised. The ability to help people into an optimum learning state, which is the same state as a hypnotic trance is one of the most important abilities that you can learn.

When you know what to look out for you can begin to utilise what you see as being an indicator that the person is entering (or is in) a trance.

Trance indicators

• catalepsy
• different voice quality
• shorter sentences and words
• relaxed muscles
• less body movement
• economy of body movement
• smoother features
• lack of startle reflex
• takes things literally
• slow or no swallowing reflex
• slow or no blinking (often just as someone is entering trance their eyes make some rapid blinks)
• slower pulse
• slower respiration
• pupils change
• head nodding side to side
• facial symmetry
• breathing from stomach
• less facial colour
• eyes roll back
• eyes flutter
• instant hypnotic phenomena

Not all of these indicators happen all of the time. Sometimes some people may show some indicators but not others or there may be a delay before some responses. This delay can often happen with hypnotic phenomena or tasks that clients are asked to carry out. This happens because often internal time distortion occurs sometimes on an unconscious level that can make the time it takes for a client to carry out a behaviour seem quicker to the client than it appears to the therapist.