Trancing - By Ness

Trancing
By Ness
A trance is more or less useful meditation. Now, I'm not saying that meditation is useless; that's far from the truth. However, meditation's benefits don't last long after you've stopped meditating. Your increased focus and attention and clear mind will often fade away rather quickly once you've stopped meditating. This is where trancing comes in handy.
Before we get too in-depth about trances, I'd like to issue a little warning. Trancing usually makes you, for lack of a better term, "out of it". You'll probably have a delayed reaction time and you may even resemble a zombie a little bit. That's good; that's what a trance is supposed to do to you. HOWEVER, you should never do something that requires a lot of focus, awareness and reflexes while trancing. Driving (and all machine operation) should be avoided while in a trance, as well as countless other things. The bottom line is: you should know what is off-limits when you're "out of it". Please don't do anything stupid. That being said, we can move on.
There are two major kinds of trances, each with its own advantage(s), based on the kind of psionic skill you will be using. There is no right or wrong trance for __________ skill, so all I can tell you is experiment. Maybe one kind of trance helps you with psiballs and the other kind helps you with telepathy. Maybe one kind of trance helps you with everything, or maybe one kind of trance just isn't for you and doesn't help you at all. See? You should experiment to find out what works.
Before you begin to actually trance, get comfortable. I don't recommend lying down to do this, but you can. I simply don't lie down when I trance because I lack self-control and I fall asleep. Also make sure you're wearing comfortable clothes, you're not hungry or thirsty, you don't need to use the bathroom, you're not hot or cold, etc.. You know. Get comfortable! Once you are, you can begin one of the trances.
The first kind of trance I'm going to talk about is my favorite. It's called a "blank mind" trance. This is achieved by keeping your mind focused on the smallest thing possible, thus making it almost blank, hence the name.
A very popular way to achieve a blank mind trance involves music. While the song is playing, focus on one sound. It can be a drum beat, a sound from the guitar, the bass, the keyboard... anything. Focus only on that sound. Try to ignore the other sounds. Know that they are there but they don't matter. Listen to your sound. Hear how it repeats. Hear it every time it happens and listen to the silence when it isn't. Keep this up as long as you want, but remember, the longer you focus on just your sound, the deeper your trance will be.
The second kind of trance is called an overload trance. This is achieved by starting with your mind focused on one thing but slowly and gradually increasing the number of things you are focused on, thus "overloading" your mind.
Music, again, is commonly used in this trance. Start with a sound, like last time. Repeat everything you did for the blank mind trance. Hear your sound, over and over. Hear it and only it. Hear it when it comes and miss it when it's gone. Once you've got that going, the tricky part begins.
While still focusing on your sound as much as you can, slowly start listening to another sound. If you were listening to a drum beat before, try listening to the bass now as well. Try to ease into this. There's no reason to rush into it, mess up and lose focus on both sounds. Go gently and only focus on as much as you can. If you're having trouble listening to two sounds completely, just relax and listen to your first sound completely and the second sound partially. It's okay to take baby steps.
That's about all as far as the "how to" part of this article goes, but I do have some tips for you.
The first tip is: music. I recommend techno. If you just absolutely cannot stand techno and you feel as if trancing isn't for you now, relax. I only RECOMMEND techno. It isn't required. I've tranced plenty of times with regular rock music. I've noticed, however, that techno has a ton of beats (duh, that's what techno is, right?). Well, all those beats will help you. You can focus on one and keep your focus there, or move on to focus on several beats.
In addition to techno, I also recommend .midi music. .Midi is a vocal-less format of music that is usually very small in file size. The best part of .midi music, though, is that you can usually find your favorite songs as .midi files. Some people love composing music and thus convert regular songs into .midi formats, then upload them to the Internet. If you search Google for free .midi music, you should be able to find a few places that will let you listen to or download their music. If you can't find any, here is the link to the site I use. It doesn't have much, but it's small selection just happens to include what I like, so it works for me.
http://freshmidis.uni.cc/index.php?ind=downloads
My last tip is about trance depth. Too shallow of a trance is bad, obviously. You won't be very well focused for the task at hand what little trance there is will wear off quickly. This is common sense, pretty much.
The weird thing is that too deep of a trance can be bad too. How? Well, the deeper you go into a trance, the more "out of it" you become. If you go too deep into a trance you'll probably stop caring about whatever you were attempting to do. You may also get too relaxed. You might feel tired or bored.
To sum it up, make sure you put enough effort in so that you'll be in a good, solid trance, but try not to slip too far into it and completely forget what you were trancing for in the first place. Don't worry, though. I've woken up from listening to a song several times and realized that I had forgotten what I was doing. It happens.
That concludes the trancing article. Have fun with it and good luck!