Every day we experience alterations of human awareness. It may happen several times per day that we may enter and leave various states of mind. What many of these states have in common is an augmented focused attention. These altered, attentive, or hypnotic-like experiences clearly occur in everyday life. Some examples are:
- Almost everyone commonly daydreams, when an individual can indulge in vivid imagery in such a concentrated way that his or her usual awareness of the surrounding world is suspended.
- Intense concentration on either work or play maximizes focal awareness so that the surrounding environment fall completely out of our awareness.
- When listening to something important or watching a very interesting movie many people go into that state of highly increased focal attention and discover afterward that they had been so absorbed to the experience that they required a moment to get reoriented back to their surrounding space-time reality.
All these events have in common a considerably increased focal attention along with losing awareness of the immediate surrounding. However, although the hypnotic state may occur naturally, a hypnotherapist can facilitate this process and induce a hypnotic state for therapeutic purposes.
