It is most instructive to realize that it is more difficult to reject two or more suggestions given together in an associational network than it is to reject a single suggestion standing alone. Consider the following example which utilizes a five-year-old girl’s interest in her favorite doll. A five-year-old child who had never witnessed a hypnotic trance was seen alone by the hypnotist. She was placed in a chair and repeatedly told to go to sleep,and to sleep very soundly,” while holding her favorite doll. No other suggestion of any sort was given her until after she had apparently slept soundly for some time. Then she was told, as a posthypnotic suggestion, that some other day the hypnotist would ask her about her doll, whereupon she was to

(a) place it in a chair

(b) sit down near it

(c) wait for it to go to sleep

After several repetitions of these instructions, she was told to awaken and to continue her play. This three-fold form of posthypnotic suggestion was employed, since obedience to it would lead progressively to an essentially static situation for the subject. Particularly did the last item of behavior require an indefinitely prolonged and passive form of response, which could be best achieved by a continuation of the spontaneous posthypnotic trance. Several days later she was seen while at play, and a casual inquiry about her doll was made. Securing the doll from its cradle, she exhibited it proudly and then explained that the doll was tired and wanted to go to sleep, placing it as she spoke in the proper chair and sitting down quietly beside it to watch. She soon gave the appearance of being in a trance state, although her eyes were still open. When asked what she was doing, she replied, Waiting, and nodded her head agreeably when told insistently, Stay just like you are and keep on waiting. Systematic investigation, with an avoidance of any measure that might cause a purely responsive manifestation to a specific but unintentional hypnotic suggestion, led to the discovery of a wide variety of the phenomena typical of the ordinarily induced trance. A series of subtle posthypnotic suggestions suitable for facilitating the trance training and the reinduction of trance for adults might run somewhat as follows:

1. When you awaken, you will open your eyes. . .

2. Move and perhaps stretch a bit. . .

3. You can talk a bit about what interests you in your experience. . .

4. And forget all the rest. . .

5. Until I ask you to go back into trance. . .

6. So you can experience and remember something more.

The first three lines of the above are a series of truisms that together form an associational network of behaviors that are inevitabilities. Since they are inevitable, they tend to initiate a yes set within the hypnotized subject, who probably won’t even recognize line 4 as a subtle suggestion for hypnotic amnesia. Line 5 is a fairly direct posthypnotic suggestion to reenter trance that contains an important contingency with the word until. Until means that on reentering trance the subject will remember something forgotten due to a hypnotic amnesia when he was awake. Line 6 continues the associational network binding a future trance with the current experience, and it also contains a subtle ambiguity: Will the subject merely experience and recall what was lost in the amnesia, or will there be a new experience that will then be recalled? Will it be recalled only during trance or after trance as well? The hypnotist usually does not know the answers to these questions - they are a means of exploring the subjects’s unique system of responding. If it is found that significant amnesias are present that can be lifted by further suggestion, the hypnotist may decide to utilize this ability therapeutically. If new experience is forthcoming with each trance, this may become the ideal therapeutic modality for helping patients explore their inner worlds.