WHAT THIS HYPNOTIST DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT HYPNOSIS
Mind Control Hypnosis – Dantalion Jones
Oh, dear reader – oh, deary, deary me. This isn’t the absolute worst book I’ve ever read on hypnosis – that award goes to the completely terrible Comply With Me – but I think this is most certainly a close second. Dantalion Jones, or David Barron to his hypnotherapy clients, wants you to buy this book because he knows what “all the other hypnotists don’t want you to know about hypnosis” and he is so eager to spill.
Before we get to the content, I have to say that I’m more than a little intrigued about the use of this pen name. I can completely understand the choice to separate his hypnotherapy clinic from his, let’s say questionable, mind control book empire. And it didn’t take much Googling to work out that Jones is an alias of Barron. But the other thing I found is just a bit puzzling… If you search for ‘dantalion jones david barron’ (as I just did), the first hit that comes back is a two-star book on Amazon jointly written by both of them. By himself and his alias. Erm. Reader? What are we to make of this?
I thought at first I must be mistaken and maybe Jones isn’t Barron’s alias, but then the second link is his YouTube channel – David Barron aka Dantalion Jones – proudly stating, “This is the YouTube page for Dantalion Jones, author of many strange books on mind control.” And the third link is his LinkedIn profile, which clearly informs us, “Dantalion Jones is the pen name for Master Hypnotist, David Barron.” Interestingly, Dantalion Jones has his own LinkedIn profile as well!
So why co-write a book with your own pen name? I have absolutely no idea. Maybe it’s an elaborate plot to discredit David Barron and/or Dantalion Jones? Maybe it’s a different Barron and Jones? Maybe it’s like (spoiler alert) Fight Club or Mr Robot? I just don’t really know.
What I do know, however, is that this self-published effort was “formatted using Open Office” as it states that on the copyright page. Maybe he threw out his Mac and Pages for this freeware word processor because Pages continuously – in attempts to be helpful – replaced Dantalion with Dandelion at every opportunity?
But what of the content, I hear you cry? What – literally, what?! – is it that all the other hypnotists don’t want you to know? Maybe it’s that Dantalion/David hardly cites any references, instead preferring the dogmatic approach of Telling You How It Is, and assuming that you’ll just swallow all this guff because Dantalion (David) is some kind of authority. Hilariously, and with no sense of irony, he tells us on page seven that “it is hard to find anyone who can speak about hypnosis with any degree of thorough understanding.”
And I guess that is the point of this blog post; to remind everyone that it is actually possible to find people who can speak about hypnosis. They’re mostly called academics, and the remainder are people with such a love of the subject that they’ve mined academia, history, popular contexts, and more in a bid to try to navigate this field, and to improve their understanding beyond the level seemingly required to write a self-published book on the topic.
Talking of self-publishing, this book constantly reminded me of the fictional author, Garth Marenghi, who famously had “written more books than he had read”. Dantalion talks up his knowledge of hypnosis and mind control with more references to his own (self-published) books than to any others.
Jones is at pains to tell us that hypnosis is mind control and mind control is hypnosis, and that his own definition of hypnosis is “the exact following of suggestions in order to create a meaningful experience”. If he’d have stopped there, maybe this blog post wouldn’t exist. (Although, in fairness, writing “Mind Control” on the front of the book when the body of academic hypnosis research suggests it is not, would probably have been rewarded with a blog post just for that calamity.)
Beyond this, it trots out all the usual nonsense: about a hypnotic state or trance; that this state or trance is an everyday experience, but is also one required for people to take suggestions; that confusion makes people more responsive to suggestion; that drugs and alcohol make them less responsive (against all evidence from stage hypnosis shows and academic research); that rapid and shock inductions work because they cause attention to halt momentarily; and that therapy is all about overcoming the client’s will.
I won’t go into details, but he lays bare his approach to hypnotherapy that is as quaint and silly as it is probably pointless and ineffective. Oh, and among those scripts is one that suddenly takes a turn into suggested orgasms, bondage, and spanking. Maybe this is where Dantalion really wanted to go with ‘mind control’ and where David Barrow, hypnotherapist, didn’t want to go publicly?
In the lofty heights of Cosmic Pancakes! towers, we’re certainly not averse to the mixing of sex and hypnosis, but this feels more like an insight into Jones’/Barron’s own desires than as an instructional manual for wannabe hypnotists. Like, we all want to learn the secrets of mind control (especially those that no other hypnotist will tell us), but we don’t necessarily need to know this!
Sexy mind control is A Thing, and one his few early references was to a book on seduction with claims like “I had her in my bed in 16 minutes flat. And that’s a fact!” Not wanting to judge, but that sounds coercive, as opposed to consensual hypnokink.
As I said at the beginning, it’s a terrible book and one that should be in the bin, but I think I’ll keep it around as an example of just how bad these books can be.
