Trance.
You're be driving along a motorway, becoming more and more deeply absorbed in the act of driving as you go. Watching who is in front, who is behind. Who you are overtaking and who is overtaking you, who is indicating, who is moving to the right or to the left, checking your speed and distance, automatically it seems fitting in with other vehicles and all the while becoming more and more one with the traffic, the car and the road ... and ...
...then you realize you have driven right past your exit! Embarrassing isn't it?
Truck drivers call this road hypnosis. And they are right. And if this has ever happened to you, then you have experienced a hypnotic trance.
You enter a trance every time you focus of your attention, and even more so when you become totally absorbed in an activity or a subject.
A hypnotic trance is a state of consciousness. But whatever some people will have us believe, it is not an "alternate" state of consciousness, if by that we mean some special kind of awareness, unrelated to day to day experience. Far from it. Hypnosis and trance are commonplace. They are an essential part of our functioning and all of us experience these at least to some degree every day.
Hypnotic trance is intimately related to dreaming and daydreaming and is the way by which we absorb the influences of our environment, form from them plans of future action and patterns of behavior that enhance our coping skills. Like dreaming, it is possible for a person in hypnosis to experience an imagined scenario as if it were profoundly real. It is also possible (as with road hypnosis or hypnotic pain control) for a person in a hypnotic trance to fail to experience something that is actually happening. Like daydreaming, hypnosis gives a person space to form new ideas and expectations about the future out of the experiences, real or imagined, of the present and the past. Quite literately, in hypnosis you can make your dreams come true.
