Scaremongering news stories aside, the dark side of hypnosis is often called “underground” or “black ops” hypnosis. Or sometimes it’s given a completely different name, such as “speed seduction”.

Whatever it’s called, you can be sure it exists.

If you practice hypnosis on people, you should always be ethical. Partly for the sake of the people you’re hypnotizing and partly for your own sake. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use some of the “darker” elements of hypnosis on other people. Just be certain you’re totally ethical about them.

Quite often, “dark” hypnosis is used when your subject isn’t placed into a hypnotic trance before you start using hypnotic techniques on them. From your subject’s point of view, you’re just having a normal conversation with them. From your point of view, you’re putting a number of not-so-subtle commands into the conversation that your subject will likely follow.

One easy “dark hypnosis” trick is to get your subject to imagine something. Because as soon as they’re asked to imagine, their conscious barriers melt away. After all, imagination is the stuff of fairy tales and they’re totally innocent, aren’t they?

You may even see your subject’s eyes start to glaze over or notice their mind has wandered. These are both good signs that you’ve put them into a waking trance. Any command you embed in your sentences from that point forward will drop near enough straight into their subconscious. So be careful what you say!

Confusion is another great way of getting someone into a hypnotic trance quickly and easily. Maybe your high school math teacher was secretly hypnotizing you with all those equations? Whilst someone’s mind is confused, it’s trying to resolve the confusion. So, again, hypnotic commands can be embedded in your conversation and will drop through to the person’s subconscious.

One good thing about dark hypnosis is that it can’t be used to subvert people completely. Despite what you may have read in some of the weirder parts of the press, hypnosis can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Sure, it may reveal things about you that you weren’t totally aware of, but that’s another story.

As with all techniques, it pays to investigate them so that they are less likely to be used against you. You can find out more about the darker side of hypnosis here.