Cold Reading Summary (C8): Blurring Reality

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Blurring realities is when you nest many stories within each other. 

It is used a lot in conversational hypnosis and can be used for cold reading also.

Nesting stories happens when a character in your story starts telling a story. For example, in a movie this might occur as a flashback or as when a parent reads a child a bedtime story.

But when used in our context, the nesting doesn’t stop there. You can go 3 or 4 stories deep with the character in your character’s story telling another story.

You usually don’t want to go more than four stories deep as it will get too confusing. 

When you can refer back to one thing within multiple nested stories - such as a product you are trying to sell: this technique becomes very powerful.

The next time you do a journaling session think about a common scenario where you have to make a decision, like choosing from a menu. Now introduce a common conflict, such as the waitress coming over and everyone is ordering but you haven’t decided yet. Write down what you are thinking as this happens. 

For example, you might feel the pressure to order, you might think the waitress is cute and that makes deciding even harder for whatever reason. Or you might have wanted one thing but then you heard what your friend was ordering and decided that was better, or that someone ordered the same thing you wanted to switch your order, etc.

Now the next time you are out with a friend and it seems they are having trouble deciding what to order, you can echo back to them in detail what you were feeling and thinking with “you” statements (I know what you’re thinking, blah, blah, blah), and chances are you are going to nail at least some of the same things since we pretty much all experience the same things in similar situations.

You will be nesting your experience into theirs.

Do this journaling exercise for as many different situations as you can. Go somewhere public, look at someone, put yourselves in their shoes and write out what they are feeling and thinking. Does this sound like a familiar exercise? Because it is the exact same thing you did with fear.

This exercise can also be done in reverse. Whenever you have an experience, any common experience (not being able to sit down while working, getting lost while driving, being late for an appointment, etc.) go home and journal what you were actually thinking and feeling.

This is why journaling like this is so important. The more experiences you can describe in detail, the more opportunities there will be in life for you to tell people what they’re thinking and feeling in detail and with great accuracy - and that’s essentially what cold reading is.

Read the next chapter here.

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