Hypnosis and QHHT
Hypnosis is one of those subjects that has lived a curious double life: thoroughly validated by mainstream clinical psychology in its therapeutic applications, while simultaneously serving as a doorway into experiences that mainstream psychology is uncomfortable acknowledging.
The clinical side is well established: hypnosis works for chronic pain, anxiety, addiction, and trauma resolution. The exploratory side — past-life regression, contact experiences, what Dolores Cannon called the “between lives” state — is where things get genuinely interesting and genuinely contested.
My approach
I take the clinical evidence as established. On the exploratory side, I find the consistency of phenomenology across thousands of independent sessions striking, and the materialist explanation (confabulation, suggestion, expectation) plausible but incomplete. The honest position is that something interesting is happening in deep hypnotic states, the question of what exactly remains open, and the experiential reports deserve careful documentation rather than dismissal.
Recommended starting points
- Michael Newton, Journey of Souls (1994) — the foundational work on between-lives regression. Newton was a clinical hypnotherapist who developed the methodology over decades.
- Dolores Cannon, The Convoluted Universe series — Cannon’s QHHT case studies. Idiosyncratic, sometimes wild, but the body of work is enormous and the consistency across clients is the part that resists easy dismissal.
- Brian Weiss, Many Lives, Many Masters (1988) — the case that brought past-life regression into mainstream clinical conversation. A psychiatrist’s account of his own change of mind.
Branches
Working list of references
- (placeholder for an annotated list — books, training programs, practitioners, sample sessions)
Cross-references
- For the broader phenomenology of altered states, see States of consciousness.
- For the survival-research dimension that hypnotic regression touches, see Survival research.
Last updated: May 2026.