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Story-listening trance, transportation, or flow states can occur when listening to oral stories. At the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, students participating in a weekly storytelling program described this story listening experience as “relaxing, heavenly, other worldly, the best.” These students experienced a state of flow, losing sight of time and space, and became oblivious to their surroundings. The authors examine how and why repeated oral story listening facilitates a state of flow. Such experience helps scaffold, in the educational sense, development of both metacognition and theory of mind. John Dewey called this collateral learning, since it causes a self-sustaining desire to recreate the experience, with potential to increase student motivation.

Multigenerational storytelling and mentalisation are built on each other and these in turn are part of a multigenerational self. In this chapter, I also consider the ways in which therapy already works with generational issues as well as looking at some of the ways in which it inhibits it. I look at how adopting a multigenerational perspective may alter the culture of therapy, how it is practised and how training occurs, especially in the area of assessments and in ways of thinking about the therapeutic relationship and supervision. I discuss cyclical patterns in memory and how these may act as a map or guide in therapeutic work. Finally, I explore the idea of developing a multigenerational sensibility to find a balance between working with multigenerational trauma and internal/developmental issues. I develop the connection between trance, working beyond words and more familiar psychodynamic concepts such as reverie and free association that can lead to holding and storytelling which are important aspects of multigenerational work.

The Moche of north coastal Peru existed from approximately 200–900 as a series of culturally affiliated but politically divided areas. Their art is often quite naturalistic, representing a wide number of subjects. It does not, however, have a great deal of imagery relating directly to entheogenic plants. While there are definitely classes of artistic expression that refer to the experience of trance and spiritual transformation that is often the result of entheogen use explicit representation of entheogenic plants is rare. One type of representation that does seem to depict an entheogen is that of figures, called achumeras, depicted in ceramic vessels holding pieces of Echinopsis pachanoi, the San Pedro cactus. These women appear to occupy a space in society that considers them of medium status and of minimal gender, allowing these figures to comment not only on entheogen use among the Moche, but the complex role of gender and status in when and how the entheogen was used, how the plant itself was represented, and the representation of useful plants (as food and as spiritual catalyst) in Moche art.

This chapter brings the book to a close but not an ending. As a culture we are being awoken to collective grief, the ecological crisis and the Earth’s lament. To not succumb to the fear and despair that inevitably accompanies awakening, we can instead, restore the visionary function of art and trance to culture. Through dreaming into lines of matrixial time we can step onto paths of beauty, love, fearlessness and mystery in the borderspace(s) of “Dreamtime.” The collaborative art and performance entitled Women ‘Enduring Freedom’ with Barbara Bickel, Mary Blaze and Celeste Snowber are an example of remembrance, crossing lines of matrixial time. A process to close ritual is shared at the end of the chapter.

This chapter looks at the appearance of mass psychogenic illness throughout history and how it changes to reflect the prevailing fears of each age. Outbreaks of demonic possession in medieval European nunneries mirrored the fear of witches and demons. Secular outbreaks of twitching, shaking, and trance states in rigid school settings in Germany, France and Switzerland became common during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to the new educational philosophy of mental discipline which generated student frustration and anxiety with the introduction of tedious writing drills and a curriculum dominated by rote memorization. The most common contemporary trigger involves the detection of a mysterious order that is believed to pose an immediate health threat. A key component of outbreaks is plausibility. The historical backdrop of the episode was pivotal including the long history of harassment and surveillance of American diplomats by Cuban agents. Within this hostile, foreign work environment, embassy staff began to redefine the mundane sounds of mating insects and vague illness symptoms, as being caused by nefarious agents from Cuba or their allies.

An analysis is made of historical experimental films in order to determine if alternative models and techniques of narration are in use that may inform current and future creators of interactive digital narratives (IDN). An overview of experimental film leads to five case studies chosen as being of most relevance to narrative: these discuss works by Deren, Greenaway, Frampton, Markopoulos and Rybczynski. All these works predate the establishment of digital and interactive technology. Characteristics of verticality and repetition, spiral structures, ‘interlexia’ transitions, voice-over disjunction, trance narratives, multiscreen and multilayering, and the use of equations and set theory to determine the form of the film, are shown to be of potential interest to IDN.

This and the remaining two chapters deal with transformation as it occurs to humans in the Second Order of Existence, in the contexts, respectively, of ritual, ludic dancing and hunting. Chapter 5 considers humans—of both genders and generations, men and women, girls and boys—in ritual and liminal moments during the trance dance and initiation rite, when, who and what they are undergoes alteration and transition and through it different forms and degrees of transformation. Once again, we meet the lion—the trance dancer’s primary animal avatar, as well as the ubiquitous, myth- and meat-laden eland, at the centre of initiation rites of both girls and boys, the transformed-into animal for both—as well as, in the case of the girls, attendants at the rite, through the kinaesthetic effects of the pan-San eland dance.

This is one of the cases that mentions the non-medical curers who treated patients in villages though history. Here Xu mentions two types: diviners who used the Book of Changes and spirit mediums. These groups of healers took different approaches to disorders. The diviners based their therapy on divining the cause and outcome of the disorder. The second group was local popular priests. Wu was a derogatory term that literati applied to them and others whom they did not bother to distinguish from them. In the lower Yangzi region, wu were usually spirit mediums who cured while in trance. Their therapy also used methods borrowed from Daoists, Buddhists, and physicians. Xu also mentions that ‘someone else’ applied a sweating treatment, which – since there was no doctor in the village – means that someone applied mainstream medical therapy. That, of course, complicates the health care picture even more.

This chapter investigates the rise of mesmerism and spiritualism in Britain, and the attractions that both movements held for authors and admirers of Romantic poetry. The relationship between mesmeric trance states and poetic creativity will be discussed in relation to the writings of J.C. Colquhoun, Elizabeth Barrett, Harriet Martineau, and Chauncey Hare Townshend, all of whom associated the powers of mesmerism with those of the imagination. It compares their pro-mesmeric writings to those of Browning, arguing that his hostility towards both mesmerism and spiritualism was connected to his scepticism regarding visionary poetry, and explores the roles played by mesmerism and poetic inspiration in Barrett’s and Browning’s courtship correspondence. The differing ways in which Barrett and Browning responded to mesmerism and spiritualism serve to illustrate the ways in which beliefs about these subjects were deeply entangled with contemporary controversies over the nature of poetic genius.

Although Christianity has no official tradition of sacred dance, trance dance has been a powerful part of religious practice for certain Christians. Close examination of primary source documents from two periods of religious change and revival – thirteenth and fourteenth-centuries Europe and early nineteenth-century America – reveals that Christians used trance dance to experience and share their faith and to gain spiritual authority. Trance dancers were often outside the traditional structures of power: women and itinerant foreigners in medieval Europe, and women and African-Americans in antebellum America. This research addresses the meanings trance dances had for performers and observers and suggests that trancing increased participants’ senses of joy, empowerment, and community – aspects of the quality of life that modern Americans still seek through trancing in contexts as widely varied as rave culture and Pentecostal worship.

This chapter argues that Blake’s ‘visions’ are best understood as visual and auditory hallucinations with neural correlates. He examines Milton A Poem (1804–1811), arguing that it is structured around a trance or Altered Consciousness State (ACS) figured in the poem as Blake’s collapse in his Felpham garden. Similar trances, accompanied by experiences of entoptic imagery, are widely pictured in the rock shelter paintings of /Xam (San) hunter-gatherer bush people of southern Africa, a society rich with allusions to the animal world. Common neural circuitry across Homo sapiens produced common entoptic imagery. With identical neural correlates for the percepts they experienced during their ‘visions’, even the obscurest imagery of Blake’s ‘Lark [who] is Los’s Messenger’ can be related to ACS experiences.

In this chapter, we examine the “spiritualized” ecstasies which transform the secular into the mystical, the ecstasies of sexuality, drugs, and music. By doing such actions in the right manner, they turn from being sins to virtuous acts. Thus, sexuality, formerly understood as hedonism, is now tantric practice, the body’s way to God. Sexual ecstasy becomes religious ecstasy, for God dwells in the body. Drugs are sacraments, with peyote and ayahuasca used as entheogens. Rock and roll, the music and dance which was called the “devil’s music,” brings group harmony and ecstatic joy to thousands of people at raves and festivals. We shall look at tantra and romance novels, Santo Daime and Ayahuasca, trance dance and neo-shamanism, as ways of bringing ecstasy back to the body.

This chapter argues that so-called “dissociative disorders” in psychology are akin, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson thought, to altered mental states invoked by Balinese dancers in their cultural rituals. The evocation of a “trance” by the hypnotic practices of “dance” yielded a “schizophrenic” consciousness that heeded the wider social-ecological network constituting and sustaining Balinese lifeways. Here, the creation of new states of mind is studied together with the linkages between Balinese ritual and, for example, child rearing, in which patterns of aggression—what Bateson called “schismogenesis”—were constrained by complementary social and psychological responses to symmetrical behavioral sequences leading toward “climax.” Further, the expansion of psychological states that ritual entailed in Bali complements Balinese religion, which in turn, in our final film studied, regulates a temple water system on the island and provides a template for the arts. Human-ecological “wisdom” may be derived, Bateson argued, and “conscious purpose” curtailed, by contemplative artistry. The relationship between digital and analogical coding in the arts, play, and evolution is finally explored, as Balinese patterns of culture become, in Bateson’s work in film and photography, not only the discipline of “visual ethnography,” but also metaphoric guidelines for mental ecology.

Hayek ‘sometimes’ wished he ‘could return to psychology, I have so many ideas in that field.’ He must have reflected about the sociopathic, or aristocratic, trance in which he held his ‘secondhand dealers in opinions’—and how easily they were deceived. Hayek emphasized to his Mont Pelerin Society the ‘moral inheritance which is an explanation of the dominance of the western world, a moral inheritance which consists essentially in the belief in property, honesty and the family.’ He sought to preserve his own dominance through a rules-based ‘dictatorial democracy’ (a concept he may have plagiarized from Chairman Mao): it would take a ‘very long period’ for Mises’ ‘knout’ and ‘prison camp’ to ‘clean’ the United States. In addition to abandoning his family and stealing from tax-exempt educational charities to maintain his aristocratic lifestyle, Hayek—a tax-evading multi-millionaire—refused to pay his secretary (1977–1992), Charlotte Cubitt, because he ‘didn’t have the means.’