Last night I was working on some notes for what will eventually be the “Pre-Talk” that goes up on my website, Hypnosis4Writers. Some of those ideas were still bouncing around in my head this morning as I was driving to work, but it must have gotten jumbled with some other musings I was having on the forthcoming How to Speak Klingon: Essential Phrases for the Intergalactic Traveler from Chronicle Books.
The end result had me motoring along through morning traffic talking to myself about hypnosis, in Klingon!
It was mostly the standard things I’d say before doing an induction, things likewhat hypnosis is and what it isn’t. How you can view the process as building a bridge between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, how hypnosis is not sleep, and how you can’t be made to reveal your darkest secrets under hypnosis (unless of course you want to).
The word for hypnotize is vong, and a hypnotist (one who hypnotizes) is vongwI’.
yab is the word for mind and vul means to be unconscious. In Klingon, stative verbs (that is, verbs which describe a state of being) can in most cases follow a noun to modify it, much like an adjective would in English. Thus yab vul would be understood as the unconscious mind. Klingon also has the suffix -Ha’ which in many cases compares to the English prefix un-, so the conscious mind would be yab vulHa’.
vongwI’ jIH. yablIj ‘oDmeH qavong. yIjot. peghmeylIj Da’angbe’.
I am a hyphotist. In order to mediate with your unconscious mind, I will hypnotize you. Be calm. You will not reveal your secrets.
Because vul isn’t a word I tend to use much (in fact, the only time I can recall having spoken it outloud was when it cropped up one day in my year of posting daily Klingon podcasts (see DaHjaj Hol) so it took me a while to even recall that the language had such a word. Prior to that I was trying out phrases like vemtaHbogh yab and QongtaHbogh yab which would be the waking mind and the sleeping mind, respectively. I like those well enough, but it’s nice to have the word for unconscious handy too. Variety and all that.
Anyway, that’s all the time I have to share these Hypno/Klingon musings with you at the moment, but I thought you might be interested. I mainly wanted to post this so I had a record and reference, in case I forget all about it. I have the suspicion that I might be doing some sort of panel or presentation about all of this next January when I’m one of the GoHs at Illogicon. And who knows, maybe Mary Robinette will work up a puppet show to accompany the whole thing? Now that would be awesome (Dunqu’)
Tags: Conventions, Hypnosis, Klingon
