Etzel Cardeņa, Ph.D.
Lund University, Sweden
Throughout its history, mesmerism and its later development as hypnosis have been related to reputed psiphenomena and to various alterations of consciousness. Although most of the older literature would not stand up to current methodological strictures, there are some reports that are still baffling and both the consistency of the reports and more recent meta-analytic work suggest that we should investigate the psi-hypnosis relationship more programmatically. With respect to alterations of consciousness within the hypnotic context, most previous work has had the confound of specific suggestions. In this paper I review the literature on hypnotic phenomenology, point out its limitations, and present recently published data that supports specific alterations associated with experienced depth: mostly relaxation during a resting baseline, mild to moderate changes in sensations and body image during light/medium hypnosis, and radical alterations of body image (e.g., floating, sinking), and dreamlike and transcendental (e. g,, merging with a light) during deep and very deep hypnosis. Many of these phenomena have also been observed during other altered states such as OBEs and NDEs, which have been of great interest to the parapsychology field.