How long can one be kept in a hypnotic trance?
Could a person be kept in a deep trance and instructed to relive moments in their life but with the mind set that they hold now, not the mind set they had when they experienced those moments?
In other words, is it remotely possibe to experience “time travel” using advanced hypnosis techniques?
Although I could find nothing using Google, I remember many years ago that the idea of putting space travelers asleep (hpynosis, drugs, ??) in order to travel to distant stars was being considered. Trouble is I do not believe this would be considered time travel. 
pkbites, have you met BZ00000? :rolleyes:
The bottom line, pkbites, is that what you’re describing is no more “time travel” than watching a rerun on television, or remembering what you did yesterday, or speculating on what you’ll do tomorrow.
I am now reading a book to help me better understand time travel, as of yet I have found no way to do this.
Which of the following books would you say the one you’re reading is most like?
A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
Scientists Suck and I Know What I’m Talking About, by Psycho McCrackpot, DDS
A Collection of 20,000 Short Stories about Hyperspace, by Issac Asimov
Er, not to sound flippant, but if a book gives you the impression that you will figure out how to travel through time by reading it, then it’s probably the exact wrong kind of text to do this.
BZ00000 is reading Einstein’s Theory of Relativity on the recommendation of Scotth.
Actually, the point of the book is so that he will see why his questions regarding time travel were so utterly rediculous.
The other point was so that BZ would have the background to understand the answers given concerning said topic.
The closest would be a Brief History of Time, but still not very close. This book covers not only relativity, but all the physics required to grasp it. Actually, relativity is only the last couple of chapters of a nearly 400 page book. A Brief History of Time is very much a popularization with essentially nothing for the reader to sink their teeth into. The book BZ is reading is certainly not that, and will require a real effort on the part of the reader to get though it. Of course, what you get out of something is often closely related to what you put in to it.
OK, to get back to the OP…
I think what pkbites is thinking of is closer to lucid dreaming than it is actual time travel. What he is suggesting, I think, is the possiblity of reliving an event through hypnosis. However, instead of the exact same events happening, you could retain your free will and act differently than you did the first time.
This is entirely possible, but it isn’t going to be as cool as it might sound at first. The hypnotist can give you a setting (a beach, your old high school hallway, the football field where you dropped the winning pass, whatever) and even allow you to relive the events that happened to you the first time. However, if he gives you the free will to act differently than you did the first time, you might as well be dreaming. Every departure from the actual events will be dictated by your own mind or suggested by the hypnotherapist. You yourself dictate how all the players act, and thus it is no different from lucid dreaming.
If you are going to do this, you might as well go whole-hog and have the hypnotist put you someplace really cool: Ancient Rome, the deck of the Millenium Falcon, the Playboy mansion, etc.
Since you’re just making it up anyway, there are no limits. You can do anything in dreams - or under hypnosis.
But it still isn’t time travel, obviously. A better analogy would be the holodeck from the Star Trek series. You can go anywhere and do anything, but it’s you who is the ultimate author of the scenario. You are the only player in that world that has free will. Shoot, the other characters will have your will. The world itself will be just a dream.
Beeblebrox, I don’t read it that way at all. I perceive the OP as asking whether one can do the usual hypnotic regression, but without the customary age regression. In other words, can a hypnotized patient remember repressed events while perceiving them from an adult’s point of view, rather than a child’s?
Of course, that assumes that you believe in hypnotic regression in the first place.