Vast Country Frequently Asked Questions

OK, so I want to thank all my listeners for their feedback on the first few Vast Country inductions.  I guess I have not done the best job of explaining the system, how it works, who would benefit from it and how it relates to other available hypnotic models so I thought I would do a little of that here now.

Basic Questions 

Who Is This System For?

Though pretty much any subject can use whatever system of hypnosis that appeals to them, Vast Country works best for a certain sort of person.  Vast Country is not the right system for you if you like concrete ideas and have a weak imagination or find it difficult to visualize things in your head.  If you are not willing to put a lot of work into tending and controlling your hypnotic life, you would probably do better to choose direct suggestion and just live with however your subconscious interprets ideas.

However, If you are the sort of person who likes to live in his head and imagine epic adventures in your mind you will probably be one of the subjects that finds the adventurous nature of Vast Country very compelling, perhaps even addictive. If you're a fan of ancient epics, science-fiction, or Harry Potter, you will probably find the archetypal side of Vast Country familiar and compelling.

What Can I Do With Vast Country?

The hypnotic model is wide open, the better you get at working the system the more power and control you gain.  "The only limit is the limit of your imagination, and if you reach that limit your mind imagines outward, as far as the mind can see." to quote the first Vast Country induction I ever wrote.

There is no basic bias toward any kind of hypnotic work in this system, the model could achieve practically any goal from losing weight, to changing one's gender image, to making yourself a mental guide to help you reach a goal, to becoming the perfect sex slave.  -- If you can have an idea, you can choose to modify and cultivate that idea through the Vast Country process.

Of course, there is also a totally non-hypnotic way to enjoy the inductions: if you choose not to trance you can also enjoy the inductions as works of literature, getting out of them exactly as much as you would get out of any other work of literature.  (This would be extremely counterproductive if your goal is hypnotic achievement for yourself; but it is a fine way for Hypnotists to study the system without being affected by it.)

How Do I Achieve My (or My Subject's) Goals?

OK, so now we get down to brass tacks.  The Vast Country is a process of repeated inductions; it's not the sort of hypnosis where you just plant the same idea over and over again.  Instead it's much more like a self-help process where you develop ideas slowly and over time.

Mental geography of the Vast Country

First: you establish the mental geography in your mind by doing a series of inductions like Cabin In the Woods and Garden of the Mind.  This places the structure of the whole system in your mind so that you can use it to manipulate the ideas created in the rest of the process.

Second: you go on a quest through the "backcountry of the mind" to seek out, find, and channel ideas down your stream of consciousness into your mind. This builds obsession in the subject, and creates a collection of notions that can be stored to be drawn upon later in the process.  It also makes natural ideas of the type you want spread themselves throughout your mind, giving you more material to draw from and a natural inclination to come back to the subject over and over again.  Some quests happen in other locations like the Lake of Memory or inside the cabin, but the basic questing process is basically the same no matter where the adventure happens.


Third: you go down into the alchemy lab in the cabin in the woods, and extract and combine aspects of the ideas you have found to make experimental hybrids, that you can try out in the safety of trance without having to deal with any real-world risk.

Fourth: When you are sure you have formulated the idea in a way you like, you plant it in the Garden of the Mind and tend it for a while, watching the way it naturally grows, weeding out bad ideas, and pruning back any aspects of the basically good idea that are not compatible with your goals while encouraging the growth of other parts of the idea that are compatible.

Fifth: once the idea begins to flourish, it starts to send out shoots down the stream of consciousness and into your conscious life.  Then real changes start happening in the world.  If you like that effect, you can tend your mind garden in such a way as to make that idea flourish even more; if you find the effect to be something other than what you wanted, you can prune it into a more suitable shape or weed it out entirely before it messes things up.

Sixth: once you are pleased with how a suggestion works, you cast a spell to make the idea permanent and impossible to remove by conventional Vast Country means.  By this point, you have achieved your subject's goal, so the natural tendency is to exit here; though many people have more than one hypnotic goal and may choose to repeat the process with other goals or use the inductions as a sort of imaginative recreation with no real hypnotic end.

Comparisons to Other Systems

Why Vast Country is Different from Direct Suggestion?

Vast Country grew out of my dissatisfaction with traditional hypnotic models.  Though many people do well with traditional induction hypnosis, there is a strong tendency for the subconscious to reinterpret the content of hypnotic suggestions in ways that neither the hypnotist nor the subject want.  There is a non-zero danger in traditional hypnosis of winding up with a strong fixed idea that becomes stuck in the subject's head and turns a minor misspeaking by the hypnotist (or a minor mishearing by the subject) into a major suggestion that takes over the user's hypnotic life.

Vast Country addresses this problem by making the hypnotic process more tangible and the suggestions more manipulable by the  person doing the hypnosis.  Instead of directly implanting an unqualified suggestion and letting the user's subconscious do whatever it does with it, Vast Country creates a system of mental geography and ways of using that geography that allow for the detailed and controlled discovery, formulation, and development of a wide variety of hypnotic ideas. This minimizes the risk of hypnotic accident by giving the hypnotist and subject ways to correct errors, to tame ideas that overgrow and become obsessive in directions other than intended, or to enhance and make flourish ideas that have been slow to take through direct suggestion.


Direct suggestion is also highly subject to the age-old problem of hypnotic resistance.  When a subject encounters an idea directly, there is a significant possibility that their conscious mind will intervene and resist the induction.  Because Vast Country is an indirect and imagination based system, there is much less direct assertion than in traditional models, which means that there is far less incentive for the conscious mind to resist what seems more like a story than a set of suggestions.  Instead, the subject learns to take a position of suspension of disbelief, parallel to what we experience whenever we consume narrative; allowing suggestions to be slipped in as plot points or magic tricks in the story.

Why Vast Country instead of "Your Mind is A Computer"?

Besides direct suggestion, the other major model of hypnosis that I see a lot in our culture is the paradigm of comparing hypnotic programming to computer programming.  I will not deny that this model is highly apt for some people and certain types of hypnotic work.  Most modern people are familiar with computers, so notions like "install program, update software" are easily understood.  Mind-as-computer has many natural analogies relevant to hypnosis: storing in memory, deleting files, running programs, dealing with security features, etc. that allow basic hypnotic functions without a lot of extra explanation.

Unfortunately, Mind-as-computer is also subject to a number of basic misunderstandings of the mind that make it a rather flawed representation of the subconscious.  Firstly, the subconscious simply isn't a dumb terminal that runs programs: it interprets, it resists, adds and subtracts nuances that have nothing to do with the programmer's intent.  If it was a computer, it would be the absolute worst computer ever designed, as the programs would never run as the programmer intended.

Secondly, the view of the mind as a computer is necessarily mechanistic.  If you choose this system of conceptualizing your hypnotic life, you have to drain the vitality out of your subconscious life and deal with something that functions as a dead machine: not a very nice thing to do to the source of all of your fantasies and imagination.

 Vast Country, instead, is a more organic metaphor: your inner space is a world full of imagination and fantasy, that has natural properties of its own and an ecology of ideas that includes both those ideas that grew naturally and those that you have deliberately tended.  You stake out a place in this mental world and learn to live in harmony with the natural world of your subconscious, drawing from its intrinsic productivity and learning to shape the things that grow there naturally into the things you want them to be.  This means that the inductions can be adventurous and epic in a way that makes them addictive for the end user; and magically archetypal in a way that makes them much more appealing to the subconscious.

This system of analogies can still address all of the basic functions needed for hypnosis: control of the subject's attention, the ability to plant and modify ideas, store and retrieve memories, etc.  The main difference is that instead of being dressed up as mechanistic processes in a mental machine, they are recast as adventures through a mental landscape paired with a mental process of "mind gardening" that allows for the continuing modification and tending of the ideas you have planted.