When planning a series of hypnotic suggestions, first write them down. Then you can pick them apart more easily for their actual significance. You can rearrange the wording to see the advantage of placing one phrase or one clause first and the other one second; you try to analyze your suggestion for the purpose of placing a pause in any particular location to emphasize a specific word so that one word stands out.

Years ago I’d write out about 40 pages of suggestions that I would condense down to 20 pages and then down to 10. Then I’d carefully reformulate and make good use of every word and phrase so I’d finally condense it down to about five pages. Everyone who is serious about learning hypnotic suggestion needs to go through that process to become truly aware of just what they are really saying.

I am not the least bit shy about hesitating, pausing, or even deliberately stuttering on words. I may mispronounce a potent word because that is the word I want the subjects to hear. I want that word to echo in their own minds correctly. If I mispronounce it slightly, they mentally correct it, but they are the ones that are saying it; they have joined with me in saying that word, and when they join me in saying it, they are making the suggestion to themselves. The subjects should participate. They are not placid, indifferent people when in trance. They should be participating much more than you because you are only offering them a wealth of suggestions, knowing that at best they’re going to select this one here, that one there, and still another one over there to act upon.

I see too many people use hypnosis in an attempt to get a subject to act on all the hypnotic suggestions given when, of course, the subject isn’t going to. I’ve watched a student work with the hand levitation technique and laboriously try to get the little finger up, the third finger, the little finger, the index finger, then the thumb, the palm, and then the rest. The student was so busy with the hands that he forgot the subject. You should keep totally aware of your subject all the time. Hallucinatory hand levitation is a very effective way of developing an immediate somnambulistic trance; some subjects will not actually move their hand, but they will hallucinate the hand levitation. If you are waiting for that hand to move, you’re just not going to see it. Yet as you watch the fixed expression of the face and the retarded blinking of the eyelids, the breathing, the pulse rate, the condition of the neck muscles, and so on, you realize your subject is already in a trance state.

Very often when I see the subject has already gone into a trance state while I’m still beginning the hand levitation suggestions, I say, “And you can continue as you are, doing it even better while I make some more hypnotic suggestions about your hands-not that they are important, what you are doing is more important.” And so I continue and let subjects deepen their own trances because what they are doing is more important, and they can continue. I continue my hand levitation suggestions, knowing that they are useless and serving no purpose except to give the subjects opportunity to deepen their own trance experiences.