Taves (1999) well-referenced book on trance charts the experience of Anglo-American Protestants and those who left the Protestant movement beginning with the transatlantic awakening in the early 18th century and ending with the rise of the psychology of religion and the birth of Pentecostalism in the early 20th century. This book focuses on a class of seemingly involuntary acts alternately explained in religious and secular terminology. These involuntary experiences include uncontrolled bodily movements (fits, bodily exercises, falling as dead, catalepsy, convulsions); spontaneous vocalizations (crying out, shouting, speaking in tongues); unusual sensory experiences (trances, visions, voices, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences); and alterations of consciousness and/or memory (dreams, somnium, somnambulism, mesmeric trance, mediumistic trance, hypnotism, possession, alternating personality) (Taves, 1999: 3).
Current practice
Today hypnotherapists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, sports psychologists and NLP practitioners, amongst others, use various forms of trances.
Neuro-linguistic programming (or NLP) is a further development of Milton Erickson's hypnotherapy, for which, however, he did not provide an orthodox methodology. Erickson would put his patients in trance with short stories. While keeping the ego of his patients occupied, he would target his healing messages straight at their unconscious mind, which he believed to have considerable self-healing powers. In this way he healed himself of the paralysis that affected him when young and to which he did finally succumb later in life.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article Trance, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
