o Fantasizers have such lively imaginations that visual images can trigger physical sensations. They describe feeling hot and wanting a cool drink, for example, in response to seeing photos of the desert. They also shiver through the snowy scenes in Dr. Zhivago. Half of the female fantasizers in my study had experienced false pregnancy at some point in their lives, complete with physiological changes.
o Many fantasizers even reach orgasm through imagination alone. They do so by conjuring up scenarios both vivid and varied, involving partners of both sexes, circus animals, magical beings, and suggestively shaped inanimate objects, for starters. Furthermore, even when having real-life sex with real partners, fantasizers continue to use their imaginations: flesh-and-blood lovers utter imagined comments, dress in hallucinated attire, have movie stars' faces (and occasionally other body parts) superimposed, and are joined by additional, fantasized partners.
Hypnosis is a natural extension of all these whimsical experiences. Most fantasizers find being in a formal trance more vivid than other imagery in their daily lives, but similar. When I tell fantasizers they will not remember anything about hypnosis after exiting a trance, they sometimes do, anyway. None of them experienced amnesia when I did not explicitly suggest it. All awakened immediately alert after hypnosis. Not only did fantasizers go into a trance instantly as Barber and Wilson had noted, but they could come out of it instantly--most likely because there was not an extremely different state of consciousness to emerge from. Their most common reaction after hypnosis was a big smile.
Dissociaters
When I first read Wilson and Barber's study, I'd already hypnotized thousands of people in the course of hypnotherapy, research, and the training of several graduate students. Their "fantasizer" described many people I'd known who were highly hypnotizable. But I had also seen others who didn't fit this model. Some of the people I'd hypnotized couldn't remember ever having experienced such vivid imagery. Wilson and Barber used standard measures of response to hypnosis in selecting the most hypnotizable subjects, but they also included the unusual criterion of being able to enter a trance instantly. I wondered if this selected only one particular type of hypnotizable person.
When I interviewed highly hypnotizable people who could not go into trance instantly, I found a completely different subgroup, comprising a third of my subjects. Instead of remembering hypnosis for its vivid imagery, this group tended to have amnesia or to experience separate states of consciousness during hypnosis. I dubbed these people "dissociaters." They have the following traits in common:
o Many such subjects reported a history of child abuse. Although some remembered this directly, some had been told by others that they had been battered, and one suspected it was because of multiple childhood bone fractures of dubious origins. Other dissociaters who had not been abused had suffered childhood traumas such as prolonged, painful medical conditions and before the age of 10 experienced the deaths of their parents. Some dissociaters say that they have developed the ability to "not think about" unpleasant things--a skill that they grow to use more and more frequently and subconsciously. They seem to evolve this adaptive talent for coping to ease the pain and difficulty of their early lives.
o While fantasizers have excellent recall for daydreams, movies and stories that have captured their imagination, dissociaters are usually unable to recall them. They are often startled when called on unexpectedly by a teacher or a boss and often state that their mind has been "somewhere else," though they can't describe that place. They get intensely absorbed in books and films, losing track of time, but their memory of the stories is vague shortly thereafter.
o Somewhat like fantasizers, dissociaters report that images in their daily lives can produce physical sensations. Most of these sensations, however, are negative. One subject in my study developed a rash after he was told that a harmless vine was poison ivy. Some dissociaters avoid watching the television news because seeing others injured is so painful for them.
o Dissociaters do not recall being hypnotized as clearly and cheerfully as fantasizers. For example, when a dissociater in my study was asked whether she'd ever been hypnotized, she answered "maybe" and described watching a police show on television with her boyfriend in which a detective was hypnotizing a witness. He swung his watch and told the witness to go into a deep sleep. The dissociater remembered nothing else of the show until she woke 20 minutes later, during a scene in which the detective was waking his witness.
o Dissociaters don't have the same variety of sexual imagery that their fantasizer counterparts report. In fact, they are often disturbed by even mild sexual fantasies.
o Dissociaters in my study always had amnesia after hypnosis when I suggested it during their trances. Some lacked recall even when it was not suggested. Dissociaters woke up from hypnosis looking disoriented, asking what had happened. Just as they need a lengthy transition to go into trance, they take a bit of time to emerge from it.
