Dr. Milton Erickson conducted a number of experiments in his career where he was able to use hypnosis to project the subject into a patient-created fantasized future with a positive therapeutic outcome. Usually, the future would be a common realistically achievable goal, such as having a good time at a friend’s wedding or getting a promotion. It’s amazing how often the future would manifest almost precisely as the patient would visualize it—in great detail. Was Erickson simply helping the patient to choose a valid timeline they were unable to choose on their own without his assistance? What can Creator tell us?

You are on the right track here in seeing this as an intuitive exploration of the future. The use of hypnosis facilitated tuning into the memory bank within the reach of the upper subconscious mind. Many times dream material, if it is of practical importance to the individual, will register on them emotionally, and this will create an energetic priority to retain a memory. This is most commonly done via cellular consciousness, and that is reachable through the upper subconscious in hypnotic trance. So posed with the task of a hypnosis session to think about a future beneficial turn of events that would provide a positive experience for that subject, they have things in memory that are based on exploration of future timelines they can draw on, and for many it is easier to go into the memory and pull up something already there than to imagine possibilities that are total abstractions. Because these are future events and known to be so by at least part of the mind creating positive feelings about them, this gives those particular memories a kind of importance and higher visibility. So in the exercise the subject is asked to take on, to conjure up a realistic, positive, future therapeutic outcome, their subconscious will look to what is on file for examples, and because those future events foreseen will have been tagged as something good that is coming, it fills the bill perfectly to pull out such an event and float it into conscious awareness. The fact that it subsequently comes true in being experienced seems almost magical, but prophecy is a relatively straightforward process. There is always a mechanistic explanation of the kind we are describing for you, to show that it is not a rare event but just rarely explored as a possibility to have such a perception, and that is why this hypnotist, in his research, was able to reproduce this prophetic envisioning with a relatively high frequency of success in ordinary people.