"Writing is a hypnotic activity."

GalleyCat posted an interesting item yesterday about how hypnotist Maggie Dubris helps writers overcome writer’s block. You can find it here.

I thought it was interesting, partly because I’m a writer who has been blocked a time or two, and partly because, years ago, my dad had a book on self-hypnosis which seemed to impress him. Dad was smarter than the average bear, so I put a lot of stock in what he thought. He was an aerospace engineer, very logical, analytical, but during World War II, before anybody’d heard of aerospace, he was just a guy in the Navy.

I can tell by some of the letters he wrote to Mom back then (which I didn’t discover until long after both his Navy days and his aerospace days) that Dad had done some self-investigating and wanted to do more. He wrote of hypnosis as if he felt it might be the key to unlocking some hidden potential in him. That surprised me. When I was old enough to understand what he did, I thought of Dad as Mr. Guidance and Control – focused entirely on the task of escaping Earth’s atmosphere rather than peering deeply inward. He had let such pursuits go by the wayside, I guess, as his engineering career took off. And certainly the greatest pioneering adventure of the 1960’s held his attention pretty firmly. (Well – there was I Love Lucy, but who didn’t take a break from life for that one.)

I pilfered the self-hypnosis book from Dad when I was a teenager. (That was the kind of reading material Dad had instead of Playboy.) I tried it, got a kick out of it, but moved it to the back burner when the demands of the outside world started to pile up. (Like father, like son.)

Maybe I’ll give it another shot. I wouldn’t mind having access to some hidden writing potential.