Woman: I kept feeling that there's an incompleteness here; I've got to fill it in. They were talking about mixing paint and looking at the view and how beautifully the picture was progressing.

And that's not what you were doing?

Well, I had to get from mixing the paint to having a brush in my hand and painting before I could stand back and look at the picture. OK. So it wasn't a natural transition for you. It was kind of like "You're standing on the beach, and you feel the warmth of the sun on your body, and you look back at the beach and notice how far you've swum."

'Now what I hope you come to understand in the next three days is that many of the answers to questions about what leads somebody into an altered state have just been described. The difficulty that people have going into hypnosis is not a genetic one. It's not that some people just can't. In fact, everyone does it all the time. The difficulty is that no one really notices. Hypnosis is a very natural process, and hypnosis is only a word that describes the tools that you use to systematically take someone into an altered state of consciousness. People go into altered states all the time. Perhaps at lunch you can get in an elevator and ride up to the top of this hotel with some people whom you don't know, and watch what happens to them. People don't get into an elevator and act the way they do normally. They kind of go "on hold" and watch the floors go by. In fact, if the door opens before they're ready to get out, very often they'll wake up and start out. How many of you have walked out of an elevator on the wrong floor? There's a universality to that experience. Finding things that are universal in people's experience is the key to both inducing hypnosis and using it for whatever you want to accomplish.

Another important thing is making a natural sequence.