I would recommend "The Trilby Connection" by Antony Jacquin (coupled with his book "reality is plastic") to start in hypnosis as entertainement. It is fairly well explained and focuses on close-up meaning that you can start practicing it now without needing a stage. Once you are confortable with that, you can start researching stage hypnosis.
Hypnosis for pure mentalism is different (when you are not explicitely telling people that you are using hypnosis). This is where you might want to complement your mastery of the basics with some NLP books such as the one given by an other commenter (or Steven Heller's "Monsters and Magical Sticks"). Note that a lot of NLP is not evidence based but you are fine if you keep with the founder's work on hypnosis.
(fun fact, I got started in hypnosis with some hypnotherapy books)
Thanks. I'm really looking forward reading the book, as well as having an excuse to break out the DVD player again. (As a sidenote, one of the unexpected nice parts of COVID lockdowns being over is the ability to have alone time to watch videos of special interest on something other than a personal device as other people leave the house.)
It's interesting to hear that NLP isn't evidence based. That's a blast from the past. I had a friend in college who was very into NLP, and I could never tell if it was realistic or not. It sounded BS-y, but also plausible as anything else with with hypnosis. We played around with whatever source he had dug up, but I could easily believe our lack of results was because of the source or our (at the time) very distracted lives. I can see how some of the same techniques for hypnosis may work without being obvious to the subject.
Did you ever do any hypnotherapy or was that just the source of knowledge you had?
I'm curious, why do this for entertainment rather than therapy?
I know about and practiced some NLP and hypnosis, but mostly to get over some personal problems. (Bandler himself cured me of depression.) Once that was done, I kinda lost interest. But there's a nagging doubt, shouldn't I be trying to help people with this? Or at least try to spread the word?
It seems to me that the self-referential use and development of the mind is more of an Information Revolution than the transistor/logic based technological revolution, eh?
> I'm curious, why do this for entertainment rather than therapy?
That's a good question.
I love the entertainment aspect of mentalism, I do it because it is entertaining and intriguing. As I believe that therapy has no place into an entertainment context, I do not mix it with mentalism. Some people disagree and will mix and match but I believe that the risk for harming the person by triggering something bad is too high in this context (therapy should not be done in public for entertainment, when you have time constraints and should focus on the audience's experience, I believe it should be done at the subject's rhythm and in a safe space).
However, I have taken the time to study both counseling and the therapeutic aspect of hypnosis, I have used them privately as one-off quick fix to small things and I often think that, in another life, I might have pursued this path further.
So I guess that the answer is: because I am primarily an entertainer, not a therapist.
Hypnosis for pure mentalism is different (when you are not explicitely telling people that you are using hypnosis). This is where you might want to complement your mastery of the basics with some NLP books such as the one given by an other commenter (or Steven Heller's "Monsters and Magical Sticks"). Note that a lot of NLP is not evidence based but you are fine if you keep with the founder's work on hypnosis.
(fun fact, I got started in hypnosis with some hypnotherapy books)