Dolores Cannon: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices

Who Dolores Cannon was, how Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique sessions work, what her books claim, the criticism they attract, and a self-inquiry practice you can try.

Who was Dolores Cannon and what did she actually do?

Dolores Cannon (April 15, 1931 - October 18, 2014) was an American hypnotherapist, author, and publisher who spent roughly four decades recording what people said while under hypnosis and turning those transcripts into books. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, married Johnny Cannon in 1951, and spent about twenty years as a Navy wife raising four children. Hypnosis entered her life through her husband, who used it as an amateur. In the late 1960s the couple worked with a woman referred by a Navy doctor, and under hypnosis that woman began describing lives she said she had lived before. A serious car accident left Johnny Cannon disabled and the family settled in the Arkansas Ozarks, where Dolores Cannon returned to regression work in the late 1970s and never stopped. From the mid-1980s she also worked with people reporting contact with non-human intelligences. In 1992 she founded Ozark Mountain Publishing to put out her own books, and she later built a training organization around her method. She held no medical or psychology degree and described herself as self-taught. She died in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at 83, following an injury.

The shape of Dolores Cannon's career explains a lot about the shape of her books. She was not a clinician building a caseload, and she was not a researcher testing a hypothesis. She worked as an interviewer with a tape recorder, and the material came out in the order her clients produced it, which is why the books wander. Her own framing, repeated across her lectures, was that she was recovering and cataloging lost knowledge rather than proving anything, and that is the standard she was actually working to. She did not run controls, she did not attempt to verify the historical claims her clients made, and she rarely hedged what she published. She also built infrastructure that outlasted her: a publishing house that has since issued books by dozens of other authors, an annual conference in Arkansas, and a certification program for practitioners. Her daughter Julia Cannon took over leadership of both the publishing company and the training organization, and that institutional afterlife is much of why her name is still current more than a decade after her death.

Was Dolores Cannon a licensed therapist or doctor?

No. Dolores Cannon had no medical degree, no psychology degree, and no clinical license. She learned hypnosis informally in the 1960s and developed her method through her own practice rather than through supervised training. This matters when reading her claims about healing, and it is the first point skeptics raise. She was open about it and did not present herself as a scientist, but she also published health claims that a licensed clinician could not have made.

What is Ozark Mountain Publishing's connection to Dolores Cannon?

Ozark Mountain Publishing is the company Dolores Cannon founded in 1992 in Arkansas to publish her own books after commercial houses proved an awkward fit for the material. It went on to publish many other metaphysical authors and still operates under her daughter Julia Cannon. The practical consequence is that almost all Dolores Cannon books came out through a house she controlled, with no external editorial gatekeeping on the claims they contain.

What is QHHT and what happens in a session?

QHHT, short for Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique, is the method Dolores Cannon assembled from her own practice and later taught to others, and a session follows three phases that take most of a day. The first phase is a long interview, often two to four hours, in which the practitioner takes the client's life history and helps build a written list of questions. The second phase is the trance work. Cannon used visualization rather than a long formal induction, aiming for what she called the somnambulistic state, a depth she said people pass through naturally twice a day at the edges of sleep. The client is guided to a scene, asked to describe what is underfoot and what they are wearing, and moved through the events of that life to its end and the review afterward. The third phase is the part that distinguishes quantum healing hypnosis from ordinary past-life work: the practitioner addresses what Cannon named the Subconscious, asks the client's prepared questions, and requests healing. The client is then brought up and the practitioner plays back or discusses the recording, which the client keeps.

Two features of the QHHT format are easy to miss and do most of the work. The first is the length of the interview. By the time a client goes into trance they have spent hours describing their marriage, their symptoms, and their unfinished business to a stranger who has been listening closely. Whatever else the trance does, it happens inside a relationship already established at unusual depth, and that alone accounts for some of what clients report. The second is the question list. Being made to write down what you actually want to know, then rank it, is a clarifying exercise most people never perform. Practitioners trained in the method are taught not to lead, to use the client's own words when asking follow-ups, and to let the Subconscious select the scene rather than steering toward a particular life. How well that instruction survives contact with a practitioner who wants an interesting session is a fair question, and it is the crack through which suggestion enters.

How long does a QHHT session take?

A full QHHT session as Dolores Cannon taught it usually runs four to six hours from arrival to departure, with the interview taking the largest share and the trance work itself often lasting one to two hours. Practitioners are trained to book a single unhurried appointment rather than a series, so there is no standard follow-up schedule. Fees are set by individual practitioners and vary widely by country, since the training organization does not fix a price.

Is QHHT the same as ordinary past-life regression?

No. Ordinary past-life regression typically ends when the client has explored one or more previous lifetimes. QHHT adds the step Dolores Cannon considered the point of the exercise, in which the practitioner addresses the Subconscious directly, puts the client's questions to it, and asks for healing. The regression, in her framing, is the doorway rather than the destination.

Can everyone reach the depth QHHT requires?

Not reliably. Hypnotic responsiveness varies between people and is fairly stable over a lifetime, so some clients reach the depth Dolores Cannon aimed for within minutes while others stay lightly relaxed and analytical throughout. Practitioners have techniques for deepening, but a session can end with a client who saw very little, which is more common than promotional accounts of QHHT suggest.

What did Dolores Cannon mean by the Subconscious?

Dolores Cannon used the word Subconscious in a sense that has almost nothing to do with its meaning in psychology, and she said so. Her account was that when she first began addressing something beyond the client's ordinary awareness, that something identified itself as the subconscious, so she kept the label even though it invited confusion. What she described was a portion of a person's consciousness sitting above the conscious mind rather than below it, which she said knew everything about that person's history and purpose. She noted that other traditions call the same thing the Oversoul, the Higher Self, Christ Consciousness, or the universal mind. In her model the Subconscious does three jobs during a session. It selects which scene the client is shown, since it knows what is relevant and the conscious mind does not. It answers questions put to it through the client, who speaks while remaining in trance. And it performs what Cannon called instantaneous healing when it judges healing appropriate, which in her framing depends on whether the person genuinely wants to be well.

The conditional built into that last claim is the most consequential idea Dolores Cannon taught, and it deserves scrutiny rather than reverence. If healing occurs only when the Subconscious judges it appropriate, then no failure can count against the method. A client who recovers is evidence that quantum healing hypnosis works. A client who does not recover is told the illness was still teaching them something, or that a contract made before birth is still running. That structure is unfalsifiable by design, and it places responsibility for a failed outcome on the sick person. Cannon's practitioners generally deliver the idea gently and many clients find it consoling rather than accusing, but it is worth naming clearly, because the same logic protects the method from ever being wrong. Read charitably, the doctrine encodes a real clinical observation: people sometimes have investments in a symptom that no intervention will shift until the investment is examined. Read uncharitably, it guarantees a positive verdict for the practice regardless of what happens to the client.

Is Dolores Cannon's Subconscious the same as Freud's unconscious?

No, and Dolores Cannon explicitly distinguished the two. Freud's unconscious is a repository of repressed material sitting below awareness, formed by a person's own history. Cannon's Subconscious is described as sitting above the conscious mind, holding knowledge the individual never acquired, including information about other lifetimes and about the body's condition. The shared word is a historical accident of what came through in her early sessions, not a claim of equivalence.

Why does Dolores Cannon's model say some people are not healed?

In Dolores Cannon's framing the Subconscious withholds healing when the person does not truly want to be well, when the condition is still carrying a lesson, or when a prior agreement is still in force. This explanation is common in QHHT accounts of sessions that produced no physical change. It is also unfalsifiable and can leave a client feeling responsible for their own illness.

What do the Dolores Cannon books cover and where should you start?

The Dolores Cannon books divide into four groups, and knowing which group you are picking up prevents most disappointment. The first is the prophecy material: Conversations with Nostradamus, published in three volumes from 1989, in which clients under hypnosis were said to contact Nostradamus and explain his quatrains. The second is the historical and religious material, including Jesus and the Essenes (1992) and They Walked with Jesus (1994), built from clients who described lives in first-century Palestine, and A Soul Remembers Hiroshima (1993). The third is the death and afterlife material, chiefly Between Death and Life (1993), which stays closest to what a reader would recognize as regression therapy. The fourth is the cosmological material: Keepers of the Garden (1993), Legacy from the Stars (1996), The Custodians (1998), the five-volume Convoluted Universe series published between 2001 and 2015, and The Three Waves of Volunteers and the New Earth (2011). Five Lives Remembered (2009) collects her earliest cases. Horns of the Goddess appeared posthumously in 2023.

Every one of the Dolores Cannon books is built the same way, and readers either take to the format immediately or bounce off it. The bulk of each volume is verbatim session transcript, with Cannon's questions and the client's answers printed as dialogue, interrupted by her commentary about what she thought she was hearing. There is very little argument, almost no engagement with outside sources, and no attempt to check a claim against a historical record. That is the appeal for readers who want raw material rather than a thesis, and the obstacle for readers who want to know why they should believe any of it. The convoluted universe volumes carry an additional warning from Cannon herself, who framed the series as material that would not make sense to a reader who had not worked through the earlier books.

What is The Convoluted Universe series about?

The Convoluted Universe is a five-volume series of Dolores Cannon books, published between 2001 and 2015, collecting session material she considered too strange for her earlier titles. Topics include parallel realities, lives on other worlds, the nature of time, lost civilizations, and the mechanics of what she called the shift. The convoluted universe volumes are the least grounded of her books and the ones that most divide readers, which is roughly what Cannon intended.

What is Jesus and the Essenes based on?

Jesus and the Essenes, published by Dolores Cannon in 1992, is built on sessions with a client who under hypnosis described a life as a scribe among the Essene community at Qumran, offering an account of that community's teaching and of Jesus. The sole evidence is the client's hypnotic testimony, and the book's historical claims have no standing in Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship, which rests on manuscripts and archaeology.

What did Dolores Cannon teach about souls, volunteers, and the New Earth?

Dolores Cannon taught that human beings are souls having a long series of lives, that those lives are not necessarily sequential, and that Earth is currently going through a change in frequency that a large group of souls incarnated specifically to assist. That last claim is her best-known idea, set out in The Three Waves of Volunteers and the New Earth. She described an older wave who had little previous experience of physical life, found Earth harsh, and often struggled with depression; a middle wave whose work she said required no action beyond being present; and a younger wave born already carrying the new frequency and often mislabeled as disordered. Alongside this she taught that humanity was seeded by non-human intelligences, an argument she made in Keepers of the Garden, and that a person can hold lives running in parallel rather than in sequence. She also held that Earth was separating into two versions on different frequencies. None of this rests on evidence outside her session transcripts.

The volunteer idea works on readers for reasons that have little to do with whether it is true. It supplies a flattering account of not fitting in and converts lifelong alienation into a job description, which is a powerful package for people who have felt out of place since childhood. That explains why the three waves material spread far beyond Dolores Cannon's own readership into a general vocabulary of starseeds and missions. The cost is worth naming. A framework that reads your difficulty as evidence of cosmic significance can absorb depression, social anxiety, and grief without ever pointing you toward treatment. Cannon's third wave description, which recasts children diagnosed with attention and behavioral conditions as advanced souls, is the sharpest example, since acting on it means declining an assessment. The healthiest way to hold the volunteer story is as a myth that can be inhabited rather than a diagnosis that overrides other information about your life.

What did Dolores Cannon mean by the New Earth?

Dolores Cannon used New Earth for her claim that the planet is splitting into two versions vibrating at different frequencies, with individuals moving toward one or the other according to their own state. She placed the acceleration of this process in her own lifetime and connected it to the volunteers she said had incarnated to help. The claim is descriptive rather than testable, and Cannon set no date by which anyone could check it.

Did Dolores Cannon think past lives shown in sessions were literally real?

Dolores Cannon generally treated the lives her clients described as real, but her own method leaves room for something looser. Practitioners trained in QHHT are taught that the Subconscious selects what is most useful to show, which may be a lifetime, an unidentifiable setting, or an image carrying a message. That teaching allows a client to work with the material as meaningful without committing to it as history, which is the more defensible position.

How can you try a Dolores Cannon style practice this week?

You cannot run a QHHT session on yourself, because the method requires a second person to ask questions and keep you in trance, but the two most useful components adapt to solo practice. Start with the question list, which is what Dolores Cannon had every client prepare. Sit down with paper and write every question you would ask something that knew your whole life, without filtering. Aim for thirty, cut to ten, then rank those. Rewrite each one open rather than closed: not whether you should leave your job, but what the resistance in your chest every Sunday night is about. Include at least two questions about your body and one about a pattern that has repeated across relationships. Then use the hypnagogic window, the state Cannon said people pass through naturally at each edge of sleep. For seven nights, read your top question once, put the paper down, and let yourself drift while holding it loosely. Keep a notebook within reach and capture whatever is present when you surface, including fragments that seem irrelevant.

For a longer sitting once during the week, set aside forty minutes somewhere you will not be interrupted, lie down with a recorder running, and speak out loud throughout, which is the part most people skip and the part that matters. Relax deliberately from the feet upward, then imagine a descent, whether a staircase, a slope, or a path through fog, counting down from ten. At the bottom, step into a scene and use Cannon's own orienting questions aloud: what is under your feet, what are you wearing, is it day or night. Describe rather than evaluate. Move to something significant happening in that scene, then ask what it has to do with the life you are living now, and stay quiet long enough for an answer. Count yourself up from five when you are finished, and write for five minutes immediately, recording feeling as well as image. At the end of the week read everything back and mark only what repeated across separate sittings.

How do you write a good question list for a QHHT session?

Write far more questions than you need, then cut and rank, which is what Dolores Cannon asked clients to do. Phrase each one open rather than as a yes or no, since a closed question tends to get a one-word answer that helps nobody. Cover the body, a repeating relationship pattern, a fear with no obvious origin, and one broad question about what you most need to know.

What should you avoid when doing self-regression at home?

Do not use self-regression to approach known trauma, since there is no one present to bring you back if you become overwhelmed. Do not practice while driving or in water. Do not treat anything that surfaces as medical information or as grounds to change treatment. If you live with psychosis, a dissociative condition, or active suicidal thoughts, skip this practice entirely and speak to a clinician, because deep trance work in those conditions belongs in supervised settings.

What should you ask before booking with a QHHT practitioner?

Ask how many sessions the practitioner has completed, how long the appointment runs, whether the session is recorded and whether you keep the audio, and what they do if a client asks about a medical condition. Confirm their certification in the official directory maintained by the organization Dolores Cannon founded. A practitioner who promises a specific outcome, or who offers anything resembling a diagnosis, is going beyond what the training covers.

What criticism has Dolores Cannon's work faced?

The criticism of Dolores Cannon runs along four lines, and the strongest of them concerns memory. Hypnosis increases a person's confidence in what they recall without increasing accuracy, and hypnotically produced narratives are highly sensitive to what the questioner expects. Psychologist Nicholas Spanos and colleagues demonstrated this directly with past-life regression, showing that hypnotized volunteers generated previous identities whose details tracked the cues the experimenter had supplied and contained historical errors. Many United States courts restrict hypnotically refreshed testimony for the same reason. The second line concerns health claims. Material associated with quantum healing hypnosis has described instantaneous healing of serious conditions, including cancer, and there is no clinical evidence for any of it. The third concerns language: Robert Todd Carroll, writing in The Skeptic's Dictionary, criticized Cannon for lacking medical training and for attaching the word quantum to a method with no connection to quantum physics. The fourth concerns verification, since Cannon rarely tested a client's historical claims against a record.

Two further points belong in an honest account. The near-future events described in the Conversations with Nostradamus volumes, which included a chain of dramatic geopolitical and natural catastrophes, did not occur as described, and that is a failed prediction rather than a matter of interpretation. Separately, the certification structure invites the objection that the organization defining the technique also sells the training, owns the trademark, lists the practitioners, and publishes the books, with no independent body assessing any of it. Defenders of Dolores Cannon make a reasonable reply: she never presented herself as a scientist, she published transcripts rather than conclusions, and she was open about being self-taught. Some also argue that a session's therapeutic value does not depend on the material being literally true, which is defensible but not the position Cannon took, since she treated the content as real information about real lifetimes. The criticism has most force on the health claims, because a person who attributes a remission to a session may draw conclusions about medical treatment that carry real consequences.

Why do skeptics object to the word quantum in Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique?

Because nothing in the method involves quantum mechanics. Quantum healing hypnosis is an interview technique conducted in a trance state, and the physics term contributes no explanatory content while borrowing the authority of a hard science. Robert Todd Carroll raised this objection against Dolores Cannon directly. Its presence is a reasonable prompt to ask what mechanism is actually being proposed.

Did any of the Dolores Cannon Nostradamus predictions come true?

The dramatic near-term events described in Dolores Cannon's three Conversations with Nostradamus volumes, first published from 1989, did not happen as set out. The books presented interpretations of quatrains as pointing to identifiable events in the years that followed, which makes them unusually checkable by the standards of prophecy literature, and they did not check out. Supporters argue timelines shifted; the plainer reading is that the predictions failed.

How does Dolores Cannon differ from Michael Newton and other regression teachers?

The closest adjacent figure to Dolores Cannon is Michael Newton, and the differences are instructive. Newton was a licensed counseling psychologist who used hypnosis to study what he called the life between lives, publishing Journey of Souls in 1994 and founding a training institute. His attention went to the interval after death, and he built a detailed map of it involving soul groups, guides, and a council. Cannon spent little effort systematizing the afterlife and much more on the dialogue with the Subconscious and the request for healing, and she took her material into territory Newton never entered, including extraterrestrial contact and parallel realities. Brian Weiss, the psychiatrist who wrote Many Lives, Many Masters in 1988, differs again: he treats regression as a clinical tool for phobias and grief, and largely avoids cosmology. Ian Stevenson, the University of Virginia psychiatrist who spent decades investigating young children's spontaneous past-life claims, refused hypnosis because of confabulation and chased verifiable details instead. Edgar Cayce inverts the arrangement entirely, since Cayce was the entranced subject giving readings rather than the questioner recording someone else.

Reading those four alongside Dolores Cannon shows where each one placed its bet. Stevenson bet on verification and produced the only body of work here that engages with evidentiary standards, at the cost of never saying much about mechanism. Weiss bet on clinical usefulness and set aside the question of whether the lives are real. Newton bet on systematization, which produced a coherent map at the risk that the coherence came from his own protocol shaping what subjects reported. Cannon bet on volume and openness, gathering an enormous quantity of testimony and refusing to filter out the strange parts, which is why her books contain both her most striking material and her least defensible. These are not interchangeable. Someone wanting a structured account of the between-lives state should read Newton, and someone wanting regression as therapy should look for a licensed clinician in the Weiss tradition. Cannon suits the reader who wants raw transcripts and the wider cosmology and is prepared to sort the material themselves.

Is QHHT the same as Michael Newton's Life Between Lives work?

No. Michael Newton's Life Between Lives method concentrates on the interval between incarnations and follows a structured protocol built around soul groups and guides, taught through his institute. Dolores Cannon's QHHT passes through a past life quickly to reach the Subconscious, then spends the session on the client's own questions and on requests for healing. Newton was a licensed psychologist; Cannon was self-taught.

How does Dolores Cannon compare with Edgar Cayce?

The arrangement is reversed. Edgar Cayce put himself into trance and delivered readings for others, so the information came through his own mouth as the entranced party. Dolores Cannon stayed conscious and interviewed clients who were in trance, recording what they said and publishing the transcripts. Both produced large bodies of material on health and lost civilizations, but Cannon's role was interviewer and archivist rather than source.

What are the limits of QHHT and who should avoid it?

QHHT is a single long appointment, not a course of care, and that limit is structural rather than incidental. Dolores Cannon designed the session to be complete in itself, which means there is no follow-up built in for a client who opens something difficult and then goes home. Anyone living with psychosis, a dissociative disorder, active suicidal thoughts, or unprocessed trauma should not book a QHHT session and should work with a licensed clinician instead, because deep trance work in those conditions can destabilize and the practitioner has no clinical training to manage it. People seeking contact with someone who has died should be careful too, since grief makes suggestion more powerful. Beyond safety, there are ordinary disappointments. Some clients never reach the depth the method needs and leave with very little. Some receive material so grand, involving missions and off-world origins, that they reorganize their lives around it. And nothing a session produces can be verified, so a client wanting to know whether their past life was real will not find out.

The most useful way to think about the limits is to separate what quantum healing hypnosis can plausibly do from what it is marketed as doing. Hypnosis has a genuine evidence base for pain, anxiety, irritable bowel symptoms, and habit change, so a long session of deep relaxation with someone who has listened to your life for three hours can reasonably shift distress, sleep, and how a symptom feels. That is not nothing, and it is also far less than curing disease. Treating a good session as medical information is where real harm enters. There is a subtler limit too: a session that hands you a ready-made explanation for your unhappiness, whether a past-life wound or a volunteer mission, can end the inquiry rather than deepen it, and the sense of resolution is not the same as change. The clients who get most from Dolores Cannon's method treat the recording as a text to work with over months rather than as a verdict delivered from above.

Can a QHHT session go wrong?

Yes. A client can surface distressing material with no clinical support available afterward, since Dolores Cannon designed QHHT as a standalone appointment rather than ongoing care. A client can also accept a hypnotically generated narrative about their family or their health as fact, which occasionally damages relationships or delays treatment. Neither outcome is common, but the certification does not equip a practitioner to handle a psychological emergency.

What does QHHT not do?

QHHT does not diagnose, does not replace medical or psychological treatment, and produces nothing that can be independently verified. A session with a practitioner trained in Dolores Cannon's method will not tell you whether the life you described actually happened, and no part of the process is designed to check. Anyone who wants evidence rather than experience is in the wrong place.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is QHHT in plain language?

QHHT, or Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique, is the regression method Dolores Cannon developed over decades of private practice. A trained practitioner interviews the client for hours, guides them into deep trance by visualization, walks them through scenes they report as past lives, then addresses what Cannon called the Subconscious, putting the client's prepared questions to it and requesting healing. The session is recorded and the client keeps the audio. It is a single long appointment rather than a course of therapy, and it is not a licensed medical treatment.

What did Dolores Cannon mean by the Three Waves of Volunteers?

Dolores Cannon used the phrase Three Waves of Volunteers for her claim, set out in her 2011 book of that name, that large numbers of souls with little prior experience of Earth agreed to incarnate here to help the planet through a shift in vibration. She sorted them by age group: an older wave who often felt alienated and struggled to stay, a middle wave she described as quiet transmitters, and a younger wave born with the new frequency already active. The idea comes from client testimony under hypnosis, not from research, and Cannon offered no test that could disconfirm it.

Which Dolores Cannon book should someone read first?

Start with Between Death and Life or Five Lives Remembered if you want to see how Dolores Cannon actually worked, since both stay close to the sessions and to ordinary human material. Read The Three Waves of Volunteers and the New Earth if you came for the cosmology. Save the Convoluted Universe series for later: Cannon framed those volumes as material for readers already prepared for it, and a newcomer who opens them first meets parallel realities and off-world civilizations before meeting her method.

Can QHHT cure illness?

There is no clinical evidence that QHHT cures illness, and Dolores Cannon's claim that the Subconscious performs instantaneous healings has never been tested in a controlled trial. Hypnosis does have a real evidence base for pain management, irritable bowel symptoms, anxiety, and habit change, so a session can plausibly affect distress and symptom perception. That is much narrower than curing cancer or diabetes. QHHT practitioners are certified by a private company and are not licensed to diagnose or prescribe.

Is there scientific evidence for past-life regression?

No. Past-life regression of the kind Dolores Cannon practiced has no accepted scientific support, and the experimental literature runs against it. Psychologist Nicholas Spanos and colleagues showed that hypnotized volunteers readily produced past-life identities whose content tracked the expectations the experimenter had planted, often with historical errors. Hypnosis raises confidence in a memory without raising its accuracy, which is why many United States courts restrict hypnotically refreshed testimony. What a QHHT session produces is best treated as material generated by the client's own mind.

How do you find a certified QHHT practitioner?

Certified practitioners are listed in the directory maintained by the organization Dolores Cannon founded, which owns the QHHT trademark and runs the training courses. Before booking, ask how long the appointment runs, whether the practitioner records the session and gives you the audio, how many sessions they have completed, and how they respond when a client asks about a medical condition. A practitioner who offers a diagnosis or advises you about medication is exceeding what the certificate covers.

Do you have to believe in reincarnation for QHHT to work?

No, and Dolores Cannon did not require clients to arrive believing anything in particular. Practitioners trained in her method are taught that the Subconscious chooses what to show, which may be a lifetime, an unidentifiable scene, or an image that carries a message rather than a history. A skeptical client can treat the whole session as guided imagery and still get something out of the questions. The prerequisite that matters more is willingness to talk out loud while deeply relaxed, which some people find harder than they expect.