Lewis Carroll, Stephen King, Toni Morrison use Trance, Self-Hypnosis, Altered State of Consciousness to Contact their Characters

In his Preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll explains that, when he writes, he is able to contact his characters by entering either 1. an “eerie” state “in which, while conscious of actual surroundings, he is also conscious of the presence” of his characters, or 2. “a form of trance, in which, while unconscious of actual surroundings” he is conscious of his characters.

Other fiction writers use other terms. Stephen King calls it “autohypnosis.” Toni Morrison has no particular term for it, but says that all writers have a ritual to alter their consciousness as their first step in getting ready to write. (Search “three things” to find the September 17, 2013 post in this blog, regarding King and Morrison.)

What are Carroll, King, Morrison, and other fiction writers doing? Why are they, by whatever name, using self-hypnosis to contact their characters? The explanation is on page 222 of Frank W. Putnam’s Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (New York, Guilford Press, 1989):

“The principal advantage of hypnosis in diagnosis is that it diminishes the host personality’s suppression of other [personalities] and thereby allows [other personalities] to emerge who might otherwise be unable to break through the host’s resistance.” [Search “host personality” in this blog for my post on Henry James and the concept of host personality.]

In other words, self-hypnosis is used to access characters in the same way that hypnosis is used to access alternate personalities, because characters are alternate personalities, and novelists have a literary form of multiple personality.