When a person who is hypnotized connects to a past life experience, are they connecting, in fact, to their akashic records to see or feel what occurred during that past lifetime?

This indeed is what happens and is one of the miracles involved here. You do not come in with this built-in, like a file cabinet somewhere in the mind. It is an intuitive outreach to a repository that is energetic and universally accessible as well. This is a quite profound feature of the universe and serves many functions.