HIGHER THAN THE SUN
Vivid Fantasy and Hallucinatory Abilities in the Life Histories of Excellent Hypnotic Subjects (“Somnambules”): Preliminary Report with Female Subjects – Sheryl C Wilson and Theodore X Barbers
This short, readable chapter (in Imagery Volume 2: Concepts, Results, and Applications, edited by Eric Klinger) by one of my favourite scientists (TX Barber was a contemporary of Sarbin and Wagstaff, and a great influence on Spanos) might just change your mind about how hypnosis works. Written in 1981 when hypnosis research was rife, it reports on interviews with 19 “somnambulistic” participants about their everyday experiences going back to their childhoods. It would be another ten years before Primal Scream released ‘Higher Than The Sun’ (on the critically acclaimed Screamadelica album, pop fans), but it probably took Gillespie & Co that long to fully comprehend the paper.
The participants they chose for the study were not just “highs”, as in participants who are highly responsive to imaginative suggestions, but “super highs” (my term). Out of 900 participants tested for responsiveness, over a period of two and a half years, these were the 19 highest-scoring females. If we assume half of those tested (450) were female (nobody was recording nuanced gender data in the 1980s), then these 19 represent <5% of the population.
As a little aside, I often see people writing about “highs” and “lows” as being the top and bottom 5%, 10%, 15%, or even 20% of the responsiveness scores. But, actually, they are usually simply the top and bottom M% [‘M’ is just a marker for a number between 0 and 100; Ed] of responders from a particular set, and that M% is commonly 10%. So, if you have N participants and you sort them by score, the top N/10 participants are the highs, the bottom N/10 participants are the lows, and the remainder are the moderates. On a different day borderline cases will fall into different categories simply because the make up of the group will be different, and people respond slightly differently each time they are tested.
Regardless, if the top 10% are the “highs”, and these 19 represented the top 4.2% of the female population, then I think we can call them “super highs”. Hypnotise 25 people and you’ve likely hypnotised someone with similar abilities (the question being, did you notice?). Wilson and Barber regarded them as “fantasy addicts” and their data indicates that these participants became imaginatively involved in six, or all of the seven, areas that Professor Josephine Hilgard (eminent hypnosis researcher in her own right, and also wife of neodissociation theorist, Ernest Hilgard) identified as characterising highly responsive participants.
The most interesting finding is that these people can ““hallucinate” at will. Their fantasy is “hallucinatory” in all sensory modalities; they “see,” “hear,” “smell,” “touch,” and fully experience what they fantasize. Their fantasy appears to be as vivid as reality; and they appear to experience what they fantasize in the same way that they experience reality” (quotation marks in original). As children, 16 believed their dolls and stuffed animals were alive; 17 believed in fairies, leprechauns, and other magical beings, and they still believed to some degree as adults.
Again, as children during imaginative play, they would become so absorbed in their fantasised roles that they would fail to separate them from reality. This ties in exceptionally well to Sarbin & Coe’s suggestion that hypnosis participants adopt the role of “being hypnotised”, and that the best at this do it so well that they forget that they are playing a role. Sarbin & Coe likened this behaviour to method actors becoming so absorbed in their acting roles that they forget their real selves.
As adults, the vast majority reported that they fantasise at least half of their waking hours, with 11 saying they fantasised 90% of the time. They are able to interact with the world and other people without interrupting their own fantasies in their heads, and they “view imagining-fantasizing as a necessary and integral part of their lives.” Fourteen could orgasm solely from sexual fantasies, and they all reported that “their fantasies have an automatic, involuntary quality”. Wilson and Barber suggested that this is because they are so adept and practiced at fantasising that they could so without apparent effort or intention.
And to the realness of their fantasies, 11 become ill if they watched fictional violence, 14 reported that imagined heat and cold was the same as real heat or cold, all were excellent at controlling bodily processes (such as heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature) via biofeedback (and some could do so without biofeedback), 11 had a phantom pregnancy including many of the associated physiological symptoms (stoppage of menstruation, breast changes, abdominal enlargement, morning sickness, cravings, and fetal movements), and 15 had illnesses directly related to their thoughts.
It is worth reading the paper for the full revelations and highlights of their case histories. The thing I think it should make clear to all, is that no hypnotic inductions or hypnotic contexts were required in order for them to “hallucinate as real as real”. And if we assume that they can hallucinate at will, then we should also assume that they could produce most other hypnotic phenomena also at will, and also without an induction or hypnotic context (we could debate this point but a) hypnotic scales appear to back this up, and b) they could just use their powers of hallucination to generate the hypnotic phenomena demanded; eg, imagine not being able to retrieve memories, or imagine not having control over your own limbs).
So, if these people don’t need an induction, are they in a hypnotic state while they do this? I think it would be hard to argue for an altered state of consciousness seeing how they so easily go into and out of fantasising. If they’re not in a hypnotic state, and they are clearly already responsive to suggestions, then it would be hard to conclude that a hypnotic state would be required for these participants to hallucinate. And if that’s true, then we might assume this is possibly the case for all participants who can hallucinate within a hypnotic context (otherwise we have to pathologise the super highs and create artificial distinctions between them and everyone else that might not really exist; ie, it might be a continuum, not a step-change).
The trance proponents might argue that, while no induction is necessary, these people entered a hypnotic trance spontaneously in order to hallucinate. I’m sure the case studies would refute that suggestion (none appeared to report so) but also, given the above, this kind of argument starts to look pretty weak. Why do we need to postulate a trance in order to hallucinate? Why don’t we start from the perspective that people can hallucinate and then try to see what else is going on, instead of inserting trance (like some early mesmerist) by default? If an induction isn’t needed to enter trance, and one can enter trance seemingly at will, and seemingly when modifying their own reality, then trance seems to be something between an assumed (hallucinated?) feeling, and an ill-defined component of phenomenological control. Without evidence for the trance, I really wonder why people assume it so readily!?
It’s a joyful and engaging chapter that looks at (what we would otherwise call) “hypnotic” experiences, from a place far away from hypnosis, hypnotists, and hypnotic contexts. Over 40 years ago, the sociocognitive theorists assumed that hypnosis was mostly a ritual around a cognitive capability (or social interaction), and this chapter shows us that a cognitive capability can be amazingly effective without any of the ritual. When lay-hypnotists say that mainstream psychology knows very little about hypnosis, remind them that most of their rituals only exist because they are ignorant of this chapter and similar works!
