Trance-like State Quotes

Sleep - death without dying - living, but not life.

My mind is often half-sleeping, like in a daydream.

When you've sung the same song a million or a hundred thousand times, there are always moments when you drift off and go into automatic.

Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.

The goal with a show is to push forward the passion in a visual and sonic way. It all comes out in a trance-like way, fast and pulsating. Then people can go home and think about the lyrics later.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

I have an occasionally recurring stutter, but not when in character on stage in a play. Odd. James Earl Jones has the same pattern; he stutters in everyday life but not when acting. Preparation requires an actor's concentration to make the words belong to another person, which is its own sort of trance.

When I play, I very quickly put myself into a light hypnotic trance and compose while playing, drawing directly from the emotions.

One of the things I like about performing on the stage is that it is a kind of meditative experience. Time does stand still. You have no concept or feeling of the passing of two or three hours' time. It's all kind of one present moment, which is a kind of a description of meditation.

Chanting was very deep for me. It was as if I remembered it. It was like a real surrender.

It sometimes happens that you come out of a scene, and you don't even know what happened. It's like you're in the zone.

A lot of storytelling... you're a bit hypnotized by it, and things just come out in certain ways, and you look at it and try to gather it.

When I write, I wear earplugs. I don't want to be self-conscious. I don't want to be thinking about the fact that I'm thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It's one element of hypnosis.

Normally, most writers don't say, 'I'm going into a mild hypnotic trance.' Typically, they don't know how they do it. Most people, when they have a good experience writing, they're well placed in that state, which is also sometimes called a 'flow state.' If you don't have trouble, you don't have to think about it.

I just love the hypnosis of a single bass drum.

After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked.

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

When I was a teenager, working towards dropping out of high school to starting to tour with bands, I'd drive around in my VW Bug every morning before school, very stoned listening over and over to Zeppelin. This song got to me because it just seemed mystical. There is something about those Celtic tunings that almost sounds Eastern. Somehow it would sweep me up into my own little trance-like state, like Sting with those shamans in the Amazon. But all I had was a bong and a Led Zeppelin cassette.

House music is like going to church - it touches you. There's something really magical about it that pulls you in, and you just want to keep learning more about it.

I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.

We come from New Orleans, so everything is emotional - for, once the music takes over, and we start blowing, we go into a different zone that takes over our whole body.

Revery, which is thought in its nebulous state, borders closely upon the land of sleep, by which it is bounded as by a natural frontier.

And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams Are where thy dark eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams-- In what ethereal dances, By what eternal streams!

The inspiration for our vocal harmonies was sort of Appalachian. It's sort of at weird intervals, and it almost has an Appalachian kind of feel to it. The harmonies were really spontaneous. And the way we jammed, we would just get into a trance.

I become exaggerated, and loud, and obnoxious, and full of the spirit of improvisation. That's one of the weird things about performing, I think that any performer will say the same thing when you're on stage in front of a crowd there's a certain moment when you kind of click into a trance-like state and you just kind of go with it. I love getting into that mode. It's transcendental.