Hypnosis isn't just a psychological experience and nor is it just a physical experience. It's both.

Every day, or, I should say, every night, you travel into the deepest of hypnotic trances. A trance in which your surroundings, even your everyday world, is forgotten. A state of mind in which you can do anything, from flying through the air on a magic carpet to communicating with phantasmagorical creatures.

I'm talking about dreams, of course.

We all spend at least 25% of our sleep time dreaming, whether we recall those dreams later on or not. Time spent dreaming is known as Rem (the rapid eye movement) stage of sleep. We also call this stage 'paradoxical sleep', because your physiology and psychology are markedly different than in your non-dream sleep.

During REM sleep our attention is locked inward, onto the self-created realities of our deepest imagination.

And that's what hypnosis is all about.

How hypnosis works: The dream/REM connection

The deepest trance state you experience is when you are dreaming. You are completely immersed in a self-created imaginary reality with little or no awareness that it is not 'for real'.

Even though the word hypnosis comes from the Greek hypnos - the god of sleep - when we enter hypnosis, we are entering the REM state while awake. That's essentially what hypnosis is - accessing REM when not asleep.

Dreaming is an amazing demonstration of your brain's ability to simulate reality and a clear indicator of why hypnosis works. It is fairly common for a hypnotized subject to vividly experience an imagined reality - less so than in dreaming perhaps, but still in a state of complete absorption.

The rapid eye movement (REM) of dreaming is also often observed during hypnosis. This is the idea behind the traditional method of swinging of a watch in front of the subject's eyes to induce hypnosis - it causes side-to-side movement of the eyeballs, similar to REM.

Since dreaming is largely concerned with 'clearing' the brain of emotional arousal, it isn't hard to see how hypnosis can be good for helping people with emotional problems.

But there are still more similarities between induced hypnosis and the dream state.

When you're dreaming, your ability to move is inhibited for obvious reasons - acting out your dreams would be highly dangerous for you (and especially for your sleeping partner!). If you are dreaming of being Superman on a summer's night on a room with an open window, you seriously do not want to actually try to fly! Although in the dream, your imagination makes it feel incredibly real.

This phenomenon of inhibited major muscle movement, known as 'catalepsy', also occurs during hypnosis. So already we can see close parallels between dream sleep and hypnosis:

Narrowed attention

Activation of inner focus and the imagination

Stillness of the major muscles (catalepsy)

Side-to-side movement of the eyeballs (sometimes, but not always, observed during hypnotic trance).

Use what nature has given you!

When we hypnotize a subject, we can often use these natural features of the REM state to help them.

For example, we can suggest catalepsy during hypnosis, where parts of the body can become immobile or self supported for long periods without discomfort. In some subjects, catalepsy can be easily produced hypnotically and then used for pain control or even hypnotic anaesthesia whereby even major operations can be performed with only hypnosis as the anesthetic.

Really, hypnotic trance is a continuum. We can be really deeply hypnotized, or we can be in such a mild everyday trance that we wouldn't dream (no pun intended!) of calling it hypnotic. But for the skilled hypnotherapist, any level of trance can be harnessed to produce positive outcomes for the trance subject.