Mass Hallucination and the Dream of Waking Life

How collective forms of self-hypnosis are normalized

Crop of AI-generated image by Çiğdem Onur from Pixabay

A man walks up to a young woman on a beach and asks if she’d like to be hypnotized for fun. She gives her consent, so he puts his hand on her shoulder and asks her to focus on his other palm as he goes into a rhythmic verbal patter, a series of instructions to calm her until she’s so relaxed that her head dips down and he supports her weight to keep her standing.

While she’s in that state of deep relaxation, he inputs a command, telling her that when he snaps his fingers, she’ll forget her name. On his command she exits the relaxed state, the two chat a bit, and he suddenly asks her her name. She’s stunned and embarrassed to admit that she’s forgotten.

Back and forth the pair go as the young hypnotist snaps his fingers, relaxing and commanding her to perform stranger and stranger acts, and she carries them out like clockwork, making a fool of herself in front of dozens of bemused onlookers. For example, he tells her that he’ll be invisible when she awakens. And when he snaps his fingers, she acts as though he’d vanished. He picks up a water bottle and she collapses and declares that it’s floating in midair.

This summarizes what you can see for yourself in many videos on a young hypnotist’s YouTube channel. Here’s one of hypnotism on a beach and here’s another.

Now, the first reaction you might have is that there’s no such thing as hypnosis, so the videos must be staged. Or perhaps hypnosis is real but it’s only a placebo effect or a form of playful role enactment. The truth, however, is more disturbing.

Second nature and attentional focus

The first shock should be that we know hypnosis is real, after all, because we’ve all been hypnotized and didn’t realize it. We think hypnosis occurs only on a magician’s stage or on a psychiatrist’s couch. But see if the following scenario sounds familiar.

You’re at a department store, and a salesperson strikes up a conversation with you. After spending minutes talking with the salesperson about yourself and the products, you realize that she’s been pressuring you to buy something all along. She’s one of those pushy salespeople using her manipulative techniques on you. Yet even after you’ve recognized what’s happening, you loathe to admit that the pressure’s working!

You’d feel awkward and impolite to just say “no” and walk away without buying anything after she’s spent all that time helping and seemingly befriending you. Thus, you buy some of the products in part to please the salesperson or avoid a conflict.

This has happened to me and I expect some version of it has happened to everyone. This is how con artists perpetrate their frauds. You hand over your money not just because you believe the lie, but because you’ve formed a personal bond with the fraudster, and he or she manipulates you by playing on your deepest hopes and anxieties.

Or take the example of driving a car. We don’t ordinarily think there’s anything hypnotic about that. But notice that the driver doesn’t focus her attention on the car as an object but wears the car almost as an extension of her body, using the vehicle as an instrument so that driving is “second nature” to her.

What that phrase “second nature” means, in this case, is that the driver has mentally bonded with the car the way she might bond with a dental appliance. At first, the metal bar behind her lower front teeth feels alien to her being, as she prods it gingerly with her tongue. But eventually, she gets used to the appliance and treats it as just another part of her mouth. It’s the same with the car and with all the tools we master. We extend our mind or our self-image to encompass our tools, our favorite environments, or our hobbies or skills with which we personally or professionally identify.

And hypnosis begins with a similar shift of attention or a lowering of inhibitions. Drinking alcohol to excess has the same effect as being relaxed under hypnosis. You’re no longer hyperalert or wary, so you’re open to suggestions. Perhaps while sober you’re afraid of crowds, but when drunk you’re happy to sing at a karaoke bar.

Self-hypnosis and the madness of social normality

We’re much easier to manipulate when we’re drunk than when we’re sober — or so we’d like to think. But notice that another aspect of hypnosis is the suggestion that leads to what looks like improvisation. In acting class, actors take turns improvising, going with the flow, and always saying “yes” to whatever their partner suggests, as it were. The trick is to treat everything that’s collectively being imagined as though it were real. Thus, your acting partner might pretend to be a policeman, in which case you fill out the scene by acting as a bank robber.

If you watch the hypnotized people in those videos or on a magician’s stage, you’ll see that the subjects seem to be having fun as though they were in an acting class, improvising with their instructor. Some subjects look like they’re having more fun than others, which means some are more “open” to being hypnotized.

The hypnotic state, then, isn’t a case of pure mind control. It’s not as though the hypnotist vacates the subject’s mind and downloads his personality into her like in a science fiction movie. Instead, despite our inhibitions, we evidently want to be silly, to play like children or actors, and even to serve a master. We may not have these unconscious desires or expectations to the same degree, and some people may have more formidable inhibitions than others, but this readiness makes for our potential to be hypnotized.

If hypnosis in the strict, conventional sense is a matter of relaxing your inhibitions so that you can express your unconscious desire to play or to obey commands, the question is whether something similar happens even in our ordinary waking moments. I’ve already suggested that quasi-hypnosis is indeed commonplace.

When driving a car, you don’t feel the danger of hurtling down the highway with hundreds of other speeding cars because you assume the drivers have all trained their bodies to operate the vehicles safely and unconsciously, freeing up their conscious minds to focus on other matters. We hypnotize ourselves to act as though driving a car were perfectly safe. Even knowing that car accidents are among the leading causes of death, we train our minds to ignore the risks.

Society aids us in that self-hypnosis by pressuring us to learn how to drive. You need a car to obtain certain jobs or just to fit into the middle-class lifestyle portrayed in mass entertainment.

Social normality as mass hallucination

The deeper question raised by hypnosis is what the opposite, non-hypnotic state would be. Is it possible to feel or to think without effectively being in a foolish state of hypnosis? Is anyone completely sane and sober so that she hasn’t adjusted her attention out of self-interest or to further some parochial bias? Don’t we manipulate our minds all the time to avoid dwelling on certain fears, arbitrarily focusing on what we want to be true instead of reconciling ourselves to the facts as they really are? Do we ever even perceive those facts or does our brain automatically process information to make our waking life a kind of useful hallucination?

We can think of a continuum of mental states, at one end of which is drunkenness or hypnosis in the narrow sense of the magic trick. In the middle is the technically sober mind that may still be pressured by a pushy salesman or a clever advertisement to buy a pair of jeans she doesn’t really need. This sober mind may also convince herself that driving, smoking, or voting Republican is perfectly sane and safe.

Or perhaps she thinks there’s nothing strange about professing to believe that a man named Moses parted the Red Sea by waving a magic wand, or that Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified by the Roman Empire. Or maybe she’s content with her consumer lifestyle even though she knows that by participating in that modern progress she’s helping to destroy the planet’s ability to sustain life. Perhaps this average consumer knows but ignores, too, that all the thousands of animals she’s eaten over the years were effectively tortured by industrial farms before they were slaughtered.

We focus on what we want the world to be like, as optimists or pessimists or as ideologues or personality types. Just as we mentally merge with our tools, we mind-meld with institutions when we play out our social functions. We fulfill the expected roles when we’re “on the job.” We thus substitute our personal hallucinations for collective ones. If you work at Amazon you defer to Amazon’s mythic self-image, or if you’re an American or an Italian standing in line to vote, you feel proud and reassured by the national mythos. (Notice that YouTube hypnotists perform mass hypnotism shows too, such as this one.)

In each case, there’s a subjective, idiosyncratic, or conventional mental projection or filtering of information that defines normal human social interactions.

To be normal, awake, sober, and sane isn’t to be free of hypnosis; on the contrary, those norms are the applications of some mental suggestions that seem more useful than others. We can pretend we’re all invisible or that we’ve forgotten our names, but that would lead to chaos and collective failure. The more useful presumptions are that our names are worth remembering because our personhood is valuable, or that reality itself is constrained by the mere human modes of perception so that being visible to human eyes is worth presupposing as a standard of metaphysical propriety.

Normal folks are collectively rather than individually hypnotized. That’s what it means to speak of normal human behaviour.

The fear of transhuman sobriety

What, then, might lie at the other end of the spectrum? What would non-hypnotic perception or thinking be like? Assuming someone understands the world by reducing the content to what the person can handle, given his or her mental apparatus, every act of understanding must be foolish, gratuitous, and comparable to hypnosis or hallucination.

Even scientific objectivity is enmeshed with the human mammalian interest in controlling the environment with what the historian Jacques Barzun aptly calls “techne” (rather than technology). These techniques render us godlike in our artificial, humanized habitats that replace the wilderness.

Still, we can experience a purer type of objectivity, a mental state that isn’t parochial for being all too human, all too American, modern, religious, political, or even all too you.

The non-hypnotic mental state is that of being at our most realistic, such as when we recognize that all useful, conventional thinking is somehow biased or gratuitously motivated. Or we’d be free of hypnotism if we recognized that being socially normal is the collective configuration of our attention and background expectations so that we adapt to what a situation dictates, adopting its opportunities and avoiding its pitfalls.

The truly sober mentality comes across as an inkling of what it might be like to be a transhuman who sees through our charades the way a human adult condescends to a child.

Put differently, this mentality is the way the universe at large would think of our existential situation if the universe had a mind. Or this enlightened state of mind is the religious experience of ecstasy, awe, and horror that transcends the ordinary experience that inclines us to play along to keep the peace. As humans occupying such and such civilized environments and roles, we prefer to follow the scripts we’re given.

Yet an evident by-product of our reason, imagination, and autonomy is that we can think our way past all our automated routines, to realize that our treasured scripts mean nothing to the universe at large. Our habits and preconceptions are of no concern to nature. Nature doesn’t speak our languages or think or feel like a human mammal.

Anthropocentrism in all its ideological forms is a childish, archaic conceit. From a countercultural, enlightened, proto-transhuman vantage point, our religious and political vanities are as foolish as following a hypnotist’s random orders onstage in front of a laughing audience.

We’re insignificant to the universe because nothing matters to nature. The most sober thought, then, transmits that negative recognition to the human mind frame. When translated into Humanese, as it were, the shock of our irrelevance and of the cosmic absurdity of all our endeavors becomes a sense of despair or terror or a sublime appreciation of the cosmic comedy.

At any rate, this transcendent mentality is found at the existential level of analysis. And compared to that cleansing recognition, all our waking routines are hypnotic displays of play-acting. Just because we express our presumptions and prejudices on the street corner or at our desks rather than on a hypnotist’s stage doesn’t mean we’re not in the habit of fooling ourselves for a dubious greater good.