bullshit.

It's not magic, but it's something weird and exploitable. Animals can be hypnotized. Look it up on Youtube. Chickens are a popular target.

It seems like a great "play dead" mechanism that got carried over to us, and since we're more complicated, that can fuck our shit up a lot more.

Check out 'abreactions' sometime. I've had a couple of my own just doing self-hypnosis. I've had my eyelids pop open at stupid times, like when I meditate, or when I was in the shower using shampoo, or when I'm asleep, because apparently something inside me felt the need to check if they were still too heavy to open.

The weird thing is that you don't need to go into a full on hypnotic state to get what you want out of the session. The suggestion phase is already a kind of hypnosis. Just suggest to yourself some effect you want to go for, like motivation to finish your homework or for your mood to get better, and eventually it'll happen, and when you do it a few times and succeed, you can do it faster because you already know it's going to work.

Full on trance is kind of a weird thing. Think about all the times a day you might have a negative or self-destructive thought, some dark impulse of some kind; now do you want to let those things have possible suggestive power on their own? You can kind of work those things around to suggest a mutation of such impulses to more constructive things, and your inner shouts will get hippy dippy for a while, but the negativity can still creep up.

Plus, I've found that you have to keep reinforcing a trance, but it's never clear just how much it's going to take. The deepness of the trance is a kind of currency you pay for the suspension of disbelief of your suggestions. The farther the command seems like a stretch of truth, the more you will kind of "float up" to regular waking awareness.

Sometimes those impulsive thoughts try to break you out of the trance, as well. If you want to stay deep, or if you want someone else to stay deep, you have to suggest that these impulses will only send you/them further into a trance.

Outside noises and distractions are a motherfucker as well. Chirping birds, contractors across the street using a nail gun on a roofing project, assholes playing music loud as they drive through, any and all can snap someone out of it. You have to kind of prepare for this ahead of time. You can make those things reinforce the trance.

I wouldn't recommend being hypnotized by someone else unless you literally could trust them with your life. Don't let someone make you their zombie.